iRO classic

Campitor: Okay lets stay on topic here,

What should be done to improve the server and draw players to return/join, play, and WoE?

So far what I have taken from the thread is as follows:
1. Biolabs Spawn: Currently the issue is that the map quickly develops an uneven spawn on the map. This leads to issues where areas of the map are nearly impossible to fight in, while others are empty of monsters.

2. Account Bound Gear: This may need to be revisited and some thought put into the way it is handled if you have suggestions beyond just "Unbind everything forever." please feel free to chime in. The Goal is always to encourage players to play the game and limit the ability of other players to strip defunct accounts.

3. More of the old content: This I am unsure at what exactly is being sought. What updates in particular are you looking for? What maps or areas?

4. Encouraging Party Play: What would cause you to form parties and level and hunt

Off topic and guild drama removed


I have 2 friends who wanted to try this server out, but it seems they got bored because the server isn't newbie friendly. they say pservers are much more welcoming because iRO classic's population is just 700-800 on non WoE days and it's like half of the 800 people are just bots, then 90% the remaining half are either vendors/dualed alts/afk people in town, and the remaining 10% = people who lvl/farm MVPs with their own cliques/guildies.

GMs pls. do something to increase the population.

On this server there's no one to party with. no one to Pvp with. Only PVP we have is the crappy BG system we got with random teams.. and btw this is full of afk/dualed alts too. I only see a few ppl actually fight in BG and they try to make it more enjoyable than just "farming" , but ppl they are against usually just dont care and are just there for badges, not actual fights.

Go to Payon/east or west pront/alde baran. You see the same people everytime. No new faces.

Sometimes i put up a chat to level my monk, no one wants to party. Heck, no one even wants to sell HS anymore..

No one looking for parties, people just using mercs to get themselves to 60 or 70ish, then they buy AL3 leech til 99. miserable server.

Then we only have maybe 5 or 6 WoE active guilds and I'm p sure these guilds can't even get to full 56/56 attendance most(if not all) of the time. some of them can't even attend both WoEs (FE and SE)... No new guilds and more and more guilds are quitting. By the end of the year maybe we would just have 1-2 guilds farming WoE castle loots.

GMs. Please do events to promote the server, whatever ... it seems like this server hasn't gotten the attention it needs anymore a few months after you launched it. It got neglected by the people responsible for it that's why people are losing interest in playing it. It was a really nice idea. it was really promising until you decided to stop caring for it. Guys we need more people to play this game if u want it to last long enough .. it is barely a year old and it's dying at a really fast rate. do something if u want this server to live at least until you patch ash vacuum/New world.

Edited by Campitor, 18 May 2013 - 06:16 AM.

I hope that answers 100% of your doubts and questions.

^ That game doesn't even deserve to carry the name "Ragnarok" in its title, it should be renamed into "Generic 3D-MMORPG with what-looks-cool-to-the-kids badly copypasta'd names/monsters/towns".

The GMs of late seems to have decided that RO is not worth investing time into and have decided to promote RO2 instead. I wonder when they will realize that RO1 is their cash cow and that they have to stop and feed it once in a while

I do wish they'd see sense but that's a pipe dream.

Edited by Hrishi, 17 May 2013 - 05:00 AM.

Merge servers... oh wait.

This is one of those topics where I have so much to say, and not enough time to type it before suffering from carpal tunnel.

However, I did try to raise this topic before directly with Heimdallr. My experience is that I watched a 56 person guild drop to under 30 people within a month. Heimdallr stated "time of year".

I've been a guildleader for a long time, I'm aware of the "time of year" effect. This wasn't it at all.

The problem isn't with the game. RO itself is not a bad game. Client issues aside and overlooking some endearing "features", RO is a pretty good game. It has a great ability to get people playing through social interaction. This all sounds very complicated, but it's not.

People like people.
Be that "competition" or just playing with friends, people like to interact.

Classic has, overall, done it's best to limit that as much as possible.

Account binding gear for example. In an ideal world, this account binding gear means each player works for their own gear/characters. They won't lose it when they come back, since they can't have their accounts stripped by their friends and have to re-earn everything. They quit... all their stuff is still there... they play again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMYK91KmQ6g

What we actually ended up with, was people "making accounts" for other players to play for WoE, happy to invest into equipment that couldn't be taken.
This meant those players did not have to invest any time into the game or play, stripping a great deal of the social aspect of Ragnarok Online straight out of the server.

Leveling your character is part of the game!

If you compound this with poor choices such as Dragonlabs, you get a disaster. Let me tell you about dragonlabs. Before they put in the abyss lake 3 turn in, we were running guild parties down there almost daily. Everyone was motivated and leveling their chars. It was pretty awesome.
And then... they put in the turn in. Suddenly this became a huge fest of "ZOMG MUST LEVEL TO KEEP UP" and very quickly, most people 99ed their things (at the hands of 2 or 3 people in the group might I add) and suddenly, we had no need for parties anymore. Interest in logging in outside of WoE dropped faster than Wile. E. Coyote strapped to an anvil. New players / players who missed the event couldn't get parties and everyone nodded and went their own ways, either to other games or to a knight with a kafra shop combat knife.



How many games require meta gear from open world bosses, with a terrible loot system, really?

I have stated this a million and ten times, but obviously, the account binding of equipment is a large turn off. How many times must we explain as players of the game that this is not World of Borecraft and that the account binding just hurts not only the market but player interaction too? Stifle-ing the upgrade section of the market was a terrible thing to do. People buy upgrades because they don't have the guts to do it themselves. Now that there's no "hand-me-downs", the eunuchs of the upgrade world are simply waiting for the MVP campers to gather an excess and drop their prices. If I went to camp valk, I think I'd be hard pressed to find a market to sell the loot to, hence why I don't do it. And this makes sense. Think about it. 2ez camped it pretty hard to begin with and probably have their needs met. Once Nostalgic have bought them up, who could a guild comping the current valk campers (sentinel) even sell to? The WoE guilds are pretty small, that I would estimate the Valk gear market to become saturated in less than 3 months.

Hence.... there's no point putting in the effort.
Unbind them, let people break them. More will leave the database in this way than any other.

Time equals money equals buying direct power in game

Well, what about the kafra shop?
Lets ignore for a second the rental gears. They're not overly horrible anyway. They're kinda crappy, very useful and it's not like there was a huge market for rudra bows anyway! I have an objection to the rental earring as that does something that in game gear cannot. (surely not many people thought of that!)
the issue I take with the kafra shop is the precedence being set by gears such as the skull cap. A -renewal- gear that has somehow jumped servers. It was implemented at a terrible time! save that crap for later when we have all the pre-re gear already. And when reinventing renewal gear to pre-re gear, try to remember that adding flat matk turns into matk % on pre-re. We don't need 100% more matk being added by weapons. I'd recommend keeping renewal gear OUT until such a date that it's additional content that is needed.

The problem starts at the top

Little "oopsies" have a big impact on a game that is treading water. I have heard often enough things such as "Yeah, I'm busy with school work and I could log on and I could play RO and level my char for an hour, but ________ problem with it makes me want to play a game that is run by competent staff".

This is a cruel statement. To say that Oda/Heim/Campitor don't work hard to run this game is very much untrue. But how much awareness do they actually have when it comes to the impact of a "dun goofed" maint? WoE isn't enjoyable when you can't memo the map. Levelling isn't fun when you've just invested 460million zeny into equips to level in a place people have been decrying as the problem with the server for months. How many dungeons have been put in that we've been able to fly wing / teleport in first time? Nothing is consistent and that makes the game a lot less fun.

Friday night is clubbing night

I do wonder how aware the staff are of the current situations. Lets look at WoE 2 as a perfect example of the server's state of health. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the time (as am I, but that isn't actually relevant to what I'm going to be covering here.) - but we've had no real comment from the staff as to anybody's feedback about WoE 2. I'm going to break this down.

For the past few weeks, there have been approximately 3 guilds of any real size taking part in WoE 2.
2ez - an amalgamation of Show no Love and Trying Too Hard ~40
Valhalla - has recently been taking in Aura to merge.~35
Classic - Do they take mergers? I do not know.
Valkyrie has been pretty tiny, even on their own admission, if someone from Valkyrie reads this, please give me a figure, I'm estimating 9-12?

Last week nostalgic appeared, they had at least 2 guilds merged into them, I do not know if this is something that will be maintained.

If you account for all of those guilds, you get a total of 5. This is not healthy.

For WoE 1, you can add Sentinel. Perhaps sharks and maybe jologs (they seem to be an upcoming thing!), for an extra 15 castles, we gain maybe 3 guilds! Some good fights can happen, but there's no motivation really for these fights.

The answer isn't to close castles. No. That may sounds like the obvious thing to do, but overall it would be more harmful. This isn't about the size of the fighting area at all or handing out free loot to guilds, this is actually more a problem of asking yourself "why are guilds not motivated to compete?" I can tell you, but that does not belong anywhere near this forum.

How much is a player worth?

I was recently given the impression that if a player is ruining the game for a group, via ill-manner, that the group who are turned off from playing as much as they normally would are seen as less valuable because they are seen as players who will not stick with the game. The philosophy of "if we deal with problematic players, then we lose that player" may sound ideal from a business sense, but for every one player that causes five to quit, is that really worth it? How many players has classic lost due to GM inaction or incompetence? I understand that often enough players actually request inaction because they don't trust the producer when it comes to new content, but that shouldn't apply to governing the game.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Finally, speaking of deviating from the game, there are things that people found most enjoyable in the past that have been struck from the record with no future word. For what it's worth, renewal punished high risk leveling, whereas classic rewarded it. If you spent the time to earn the equipments or had the skill, you could reap the reward (I'm not talking about configuring 18 bots to thunderstorm mobs in magma here, tho that is a skill in its own right) - I'm talking about our dearest Kathyrine who defends the stairs from the evil adventurers. Even "fixing" that ain't so bad, but when you screw up the rest of the map in the process? That's when the staff should sit on their hands. Biolabs now has the ability to respawn everything in the head, instead of evenly across the map. This makes PARTIES suck.
Also, why are there jokers in CTUG?

I am a master of TaeKwon Do
TKMs aren't uberpowerful. They're a good zeny sink. People aren't partying now, they're just leeching their stuff off PRIESTS using TU. So who cares if they leech off a TKM instead? I mean does it matter WHAT they leech off?

Oh well would you look at that, without even delving into battlegrounds and cheaters, I've been typing this post for waaaaaaaaaay too long. Have fun with my essay and if you like what I had to say, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Xellie
RO veteran for more than a decade.

Edited by Xellie, 17 May 2013 - 08:00 AM.

would more guilds compete for woe 2 castles if the day/time for woe 2 was changed? (why yes they would)

i guarantee the extensive boredom and lack of need for supplies for woe 2 / econing of woe 2 castles today mainly because of the day/time at which woe 2 starts

som ppl hav work and cant attned at such carapy schedule

Yes, 3 more guilds would compete! Whoop de doo!

edit: forgot poland

Edited by Xellie, 17 May 2013 - 09:05 AM.

Classic - Do they take mergers? I do not know.

Yup we do - but even then woe2 is like 30-40 people on... Outside of woe we have 1-3!!

Fix Classic! (the server)

Only halfway down. But I actually applaud this.

This is one of those topics where I have so much to say, and not enough time to type it before suffering from carpal tunnel.

However, I did try to raise this topic before directly with Heimdallr. My experience is that I watched a 56 person guild drop to under 30 people within a month. Heimdallr stated "time of year".

I've been a guildleader for a long time, I'm aware of the "time of year" effect. This wasn't it at all.

The problem isn't with the game. RO itself is not a bad game. Client issues aside and overlooking some endearing "features", RO is a pretty good game. It has a great ability to get people playing through social interaction. This all sounds very complicated, but it's not.

People like people.
Be that "competition" or just playing with friends, people like to interact.

Classic has, overall, done it's best to limit that as much as possible.

Account binding gear for example. In an ideal world, this account binding gear means each player works for their own gear/characters. They won't lose it when they come back, since they can't have their accounts stripped by their friends and have to re-earn everything. They quit... all their stuff is still there... they play again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMYK91KmQ6g

What we actually ended up with, was people "making accounts" for other players to play for WoE, happy to invest into equipment that couldn't be taken.
This meant those players did not have to invest any time into the game or play, stripping a great deal of the social aspect of Ragnarok Online straight out of the server.

Leveling your character is part of the game!

If you compound this with poor choices such as Dragonlabs, you get a disaster. Let me tell you about dragonlabs. Before they put in the abyss lake 3 turn in, we were running guild parties down there almost daily. Everyone was motivated and leveling their chars. It was pretty awesome.
And then... they put in the turn in. Suddenly this became a huge fest of "ZOMG MUST LEVEL TO KEEP UP" and very quickly, most people 99ed their things (at the hands of 2 or 3 people in the group might I add) and suddenly, we had no need for parties anymore. Interest in logging in outside of WoE dropped faster than Wile. E. Coyote strapped to an anvil. New players / players who missed the event couldn't get parties and everyone nodded and went their own ways, either to other games or to a knight with a kafra shop combat knife.



How many games require meta gear from open world bosses, with a terrible loot system, really?

I have stated this a million and ten times, but obviously, the account binding of equipment is a large turn off. How many times must we explain as players of the game that this is not World of Borecraft and that the account binding just hurts not only the market but player interaction too? Stifle-ing the upgrade section of the market was a terrible thing to do. People buy upgrades because they don't have the guts to do it themselves. Now that there's no "hand-me-downs", the eunuchs of the upgrade world are simply waiting for the MVP campers to gather an excess and drop their prices. If I went to camp valk, I think I'd be hard pressed to find a market to sell the loot to, hence why I don't do it. And this makes sense. Think about it. 2ez camped it pretty hard to begin with and probably have their needs met. Once Nostalgic have bought them up, who could a guild comping the current valk campers (sentinel) even sell to? The WoE guilds are pretty small, that I would estimate the Valk gear market to become saturated in less than 3 months.

Hence.... there's no point putting in the effort.
Unbind them, let people break them. More will leave the database in this way than any other.

Time equals money equals buying direct power in game

Well, what about the kafra shop?
Lets ignore for a second the rental gears. They're not overly horrible anyway. They're kinda crappy, very useful and it's not like there was a huge market for rudra bows anyway! I have an objection to the rental earring as that does something that in game gear cannot. (surely not many people thought of that!)
the issue I take with the kafra shop is the precedence being set by gears such as the skull cap. A -renewal- gear that has somehow jumped servers. It was implemented at a terrible time! save that crap for later when we have all the pre-re gear already. And when reinventing renewal gear to pre-re gear, try to remember that adding flat matk turns into matk % on pre-re. We don't need 100% more matk being added by weapons. I'd recommend keeping renewal gear OUT until such a date that it's additional content that is needed.

The problem starts at the top

Little "oopsies" have a big impact on a game that is treading water. I have heard often enough things such as "Yeah, I'm busy with school work and I could log on and I could play RO and level my char for an hour, but ________ problem with it makes me want to play a game that is run by competent staff".

This is a cruel statement. To say that Oda/Heim/Campitor don't work hard to run this game is very much untrue. But how much awareness do they actually have when it comes to the impact of a "dun goofed" maint? WoE isn't enjoyable when you can't memo the map. Levelling isn't fun when you've just invested 460million zeny into equips to level in a place people have been decrying as the problem with the server for months. How many dungeons have been put in that we've been able to fly wing / teleport in first time? Nothing is consistent and that makes the game a lot less fun.

Friday night is clubbing night

I do wonder how aware the staff are of the current situations. Lets look at WoE 2 as a perfect example of the server's state of health. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the time (as am I, but that isn't actually relevant to what I'm going to be covering here.) - but we've had no real comment from the staff as to anybody's feedback about WoE 2. I'm going to break this down.

For the past few weeks, there have been approximately 3 guilds of any real size taking part in WoE 2.
2ez - an amalgamation of Show no Love and Trying Too Hard ~40
Valhalla - has recently been taking in Aura to merge.~35
Classic - Do they take mergers? I do not know.
Valkyrie has been pretty tiny, even on their own admission, if someone from Valkyrie reads this, please give me a figure, I'm estimating 9-12?

Last week nostalgic appeared, they had at least 2 guilds merged into them, I do not know if this is something that will be maintained.

If you account for all of those guilds, you get a total of 5. This is not healthy.

For WoE 1, you can add Sentinel. Perhaps sharks and maybe jologs (they seem to be an upcoming thing!), for an extra 15 castles, we gain maybe 3 guilds! Some good fights can happen, but there's no motivation really for these fights.

The answer isn't to close castles. No. That may sounds like the obvious thing to do, but overall it would be more harmful. This isn't about the size of the fighting area at all or handing out free loot to guilds, this is actually more a problem of asking yourself "why are guilds not motivated to compete?" I can tell you, but that does not belong anywhere near this forum.

How much is a player worth?

I was recently given the impression that if a player is ruining the game for a group, via ill-manner, that the group who are turned off from playing as much as they normally would are seen as less valuable because they are seen as players who will not stick with the game. The philosophy of "if we deal with problematic players, then we lose that player" may sound ideal from a business sense, but for every one player that causes five to quit, is that really worth it? How many players has classic lost due to GM inaction or incompetence? I understand that often enough players actually request inaction because they don't trust the producer when it comes to new content, but that shouldn't apply to governing the game.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Finally, speaking of deviating from the game, there are things that people found most enjoyable in the past that have been struck from the record with no future word. For what it's worth, renewal punished high risk leveling, whereas classic rewarded it. If you spent the time to earn the equipments or had the skill, you could reap the reward (I'm not talking about configuring 18 bots to thunderstorm mobs in magma here, tho that is a skill in its own right) - I'm talking about our dearest Kathyrine who defends the stairs from the evil adventurers. Even "fixing" that ain't so bad, but when you screw up the rest of the map in the process? That's when the staff should sit on their hands. Biolabs now has the ability to respawn everything in the head, instead of evenly across the map. This makes PARTIES suck.
Also, why are there jokers in CTUG?

I am a master of TaeKwon Do
TKMs aren't uberpowerful. They're a good zeny sink. People aren't partying now, they're just leeching their stuff off PRIESTS using TU. So who cares if they leech off a TKM instead? I mean does it matter WHAT they leech off?

Oh well would you look at that, without even delving into battlegrounds and cheaters, I've been typing this post for waaaaaaaaaay too long. Have fun with my essay and if you like what I had to say, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Xellie
RO veteran for more than a decade.

true story

valk has 7 to 8 ppl on fridays anymore then that is dual clients +1 as this is the truth there is no party play system besides the random thanatos tower run your core player group age if u did a actual census would be 20-30 anyone in that age group is out on dates or with friends for your sake you better pull something amazing outta ur during the anniversary i dont see the server lasting.

on a side note what ever happened to the statement that bots would be better handled theres lvl 99 bots running around on every map some are even trans get your act together this is the game that keeps your job & company afloat unless am reading your financial reports wrong

Here is the thing about classic:


people wanted it, claimed they wanted the "old school" ro.......so the gm team gave the community a classic server

then the majority of said people started to complain that there was no "new" content........well no kidding, it's classic

classic will never be as big as people want it to be, because it is nothing more than a server for a brief nostalgic feel........

and this boy's and girls is why the classic server was, and still is nothing.



Da' Penguin

ugh no penguin we wanted a stable pre-re server before this came out lets face it if you wanted pre-re you would have to look into the pserver area and they have comparable if not better rates but super low population no god items and would last maybe 5-16 months if your lucky before closing or ddos attacks. why you say do pservers have such appeal simply put there is party play content it doesent take me a year plus to 99/70 a char i dont need to own every class in the game to do something cuz you prollu know someone who is active and plays. as in here i know a dozen accounts of players who used to play but left cuz there is no where to party to finish there chars. we asked for a full 13.3 pre-re server not us starting on episode 5. and if you need more proof look at insur besides the 2 month investigation into suspected cheating there is simply nothing to do for there 50 players on a everyday basis.

ugh no penguin we wanted a stable pre-re server before this came out lets face it if you wanted pre-re you would have to look into the pserver area and they have comparable if not better rates but super low population no god items and would last maybe 5-16 months if your lucky before closing or ddos attacks. why you say do pservers have such appeal simply put there is party play content it doesent take me a year plus to 99/70 a char i dont need to own every class in the game to do something cuz you prollu know someone who is active and plays. as in here i know a dozen accounts of players who used to play but left cuz there is no where to party to finish there chars. we asked for a full 13.3 pre-re server not us starting on episode 5. and if you need more proof look at insur besides the 2 month investigation into suspected cheating there is simply nothing to do for there 50 players on a everyday basis.

The fact is that all it took was a few core insur people getting banned to make no one want to log in. Like 75% of the guilds players were playing characters that someone else basically leveled for them. They'd just show up for WoE. Heck the account a lot of them played were just generic guild accounts made/geared by someone else. When no one asks you to show up you just don't bother.

i liked how my post was removed very crafty there you >>>>

O it was cuz of mentioning other servers nevermind. Real mod

Edited by Viri, 17 May 2013 - 10:39 AM.

i liked how my post was removed very crafty there you >>>>

Please stop posting about those servers which shall not be named.

I don't mind criticism but pointing users towards those servers is not the way to go.

well plain and simple we were hoping for a full ready to go 13.3 server with all the bells and whistles since we didint like the renewal mechanics or classes and loved party play. opening ocas to get a gr/dr or other mini boss card making personal god items in time. farming orleans gloves in thors etc.

to Campitor no offense taken as long as the staff realizes the players have choice and we would like to see this grow as big as the original server. from 03

I'm even ok with updates being drawn out a bit, it keeps things fresh, but they need to be in a "sensicle" order.

I was super exited about this Classic Server, I joined iRO around the time when renewal came, so i didn't enjoy pre-renewal that much. But when they started adding costume changes, everything started to look a lot like renewal, so... i did the same thing i do on Chaos, only log in for WoE. Now i don't log into classic at all.

Edited by SergioSSA1LER, 17 May 2013 - 11:01 AM.

Here is the thing about classic:


people wanted it, claimed they wanted the "old school" ro.......so the gm team gave the community a classic server

then the majority of said people started to complain that there was no "new" content........well no kidding, it's classic

classic will never be as big as people want it to be, because it is nothing more than a server for a brief nostalgic feel........

and this boy's and girls is why the classic server was, and still is nothing.



Da' Penguin

Actually, we still don't have old school RO, the GMs said they were going to give us a classic server, and then gave us AishipRO. No one has complained about there being no "new" content, people have complained about there being none of the OLD content. Things have slowly been moving in the right direction in the last month or so, but unfortunately things are moving too slowly to really make people interested in playing, and there is still too much custom stuff that has a huge negative impact on the server, some of which xellie's post already addressed.

If I covered everything, imagine how big that monolith of text would have gotten X_X

If it dies it dies. The GMs up.