Future Direction of Ragnarok

i dont see a plan for keeping new (not returning) players. most of what i've read are meant to keep the current old timers playing.

iro is better off with all brand new players than the current population of ro veterans (aka whiners, botters, scammers, etc..)

The party revamp won't get people to party unless you guys really follow through with the more risk more reward model. Why would anyone want to party another person if it's still way less than soloing? It's so easy to solo now that no one will want to do a 2 man party with a 20% boost let alone a 12 man party.

It's also not viable for everyone to do such large parties because of level difference and population. Turn ins only work because of the large level range and soloing becomes ineffective due to exp being turned off. You can't forget about simple two man parties among friends with just an ab and a killer. Sometimes I don't want to party so many people.

+1

My main concern wth the party system is exp. Like stated above, i would rather solo then party because its probably 2x faster. I would like to party with friends, but the exp is a major turn off. As it stands right now, i'll stick to soloing!

Edited by Braska, 28 April 2011 - 09:41 PM.

All of these sound great, but please don't forget to fix old bugged skills like instructon change, bowling bash and cooldown.

I had only arrived on the RO seen in middle 09 and I realize the game existing since 2001 every major update had similar impact to the Renewal changes and people stuck it out and were willing to see enjoyment in the game still. I am willing to stick it out as well and I look forward to 13.3.

Gooder is a word..

There is a lot we need to do outside the game as well to bring players in and to help you get your friends in. One of the charming things in RO was "choice" level wherever, stat and skill how you want use cards and elements for advantage; all those things influenced your success. Renewal sought to show off more of the world by goading you to explore elsewhere, but that also eliminates choice, and game physics changes also impacted other choices too.

Regarding the party update, renewal took away the 25% "tap" bonus which is why parties with 10% bonus in renewal were worth much less than the old 0% bonus of pre-renewal. Tap bonus was interesting, but party bonus is much easier to implement so that is what we are going for currently, to get that party to be a more viable option.

For the new players, the post on the eden group is extremely good feedback, good enough that it is easy to see exactly what you mean and give us a plan of attack on fixing that. Early levels shouldn't feel inconvenienced by the girth of the world, the girth should be enjoyed by older characters as they seek out exploration not with grinding. So we can't ignore the girth but we can make it simpler for new users to take in.

If our changes here goes well I hope kRO can implement what we implement too, and eventually to all other ROs too.

Both will get updated so we have a "kills per level" system that players can go faster than by taking on bigger challenges.

So the future is to modify the exp system to reward high kill counts rather than challenging enemies?
I would suspect that all monsters will have the same base exp, only the player and monster level difference affects - for example:
monster level - player level: exp gained
+30: 10000
+29: 9900
+28: 9800
+27: 9700
...
+15: 8500
...
+10: 8000
...
+4: 7400
+3: 7300
+2: 7200
+1: 7100
+0: 7000
-1: 6900
-2: 6800
-3: 6700
-4: 6600
-5: 6500
...
-20: 5000
...
-30: 4000
...
-67: 300
-68: 200
-69: 100
-70: 0
-71: 0
...

Edited by mooMOOmoo, 28 April 2011 - 06:17 PM.

Gooder is a word..

Iiiiiissss not!



lol I just like to argue!

do-gooder is a word THOUGH.

Oh yes i completly agree with the nostalgia from back in Beta starting off as a nobody and just walking around beating on Drops cuz it was funny, and lets face it cute. I believe we should bring that time back literally.

For Example: You guys spend hours upon days upon months for the seamless, correct implemenations of new updates. Instead of trying to be super 'peeps' (not to say your not) how about giving your team(s) 2 maintanences to employ and correct unforeseen bugs, spellings, etc. So close down the world, and lock those Ymir / Valk / Ygg servers for maintanence.

"But wait we can't do that then people will leave RO entirely!"

Not true, instead while your developing the servers for the new update, force the users into the Sakray server and bring back the olden days.

For Example II: set a level cap of 70 and only 2-1 classes, keep the maps limited as well. Keep WoE, however eliminate the gaurdians, make it a free for all, make Emperiums a purchasable item but make it so expensive that it requires 20-30 people to help attain it. Secondly since no one will be able to make it past 70 or some arbitray easy to achieve level, it will no longer be a competition of gears but of skill and team work.

For those that do not want to do WoE great; since for them, all the servers will be together and will allow conversations between people that may never have occured. Since everyone starts with nothing new players will be able to join and find that reaching the top is easy and maybe they should try playing on the real 3 server plus they will make friends to help them play on the main servers.

You could call it 13.2 1/2 "Opps", or 13.2 1/2 "Time Zone". I think that it will help kill 2 birds with 1 stone. Plus im full of ideas for bring back the 80's, I mean the Thousand's. Wouldn't it be fun to relive those days when there was nothing but first classes and no Shiny 99's, plus a treat for those that make XX (and everyone should).

*On a side not could you change my display name to Fax*

I just want to know how much of this "FUTURE" Direction of RO. Involves PAY REAL Money to win, or PAY REAL MONEY EVENTS like it been going for last few years, and how much of that future involves actual fixing the countless problems and balance issues.

I just want to know how much of this "FUTURE" Direction of RO. Involves PAY REAL Money to win, or PAY REAL MONEY EVENTS like it been going for last few years

whether you like it or not, its a business and not just a game and that's how it works. just imagine the costs of the servers (electricity, database, softwares, etc.), employee salary, office cost...

how much of that future involves actual fixing the countless problems and balance issues.

this! i want to see this in the future.

Edited by iCandy, 28 April 2011 - 06:56 PM.

I just want to know how much of this "FUTURE" Direction of RO. Involves PAY REAL Money to win, or PAY REAL MONEY EVENTS like it been going for last few years, and how much of that future involves actual fixing the countless problems and balance issues.

I think someone's trying to retie his cut strings... *chuckles*

i cant mash 5 stars hard enough

No level restriction~! \o/

Can we have some buff to archer class? Please?

The party revamp won't get people to party unless you guys really follow through with the more risk more reward model. Why would anyone want to party another person if it's still way less than soloing? It's so easy to solo now that no one will want to do a 2 man party with a 20% boost let alone a 12 man party.

It's also not viable for everyone to do such large parties because of level difference and population. Turn ins only work because of the large level range and soloing becomes ineffective due to exp being turned off. You can't forget about simple two man parties among friends with just an ab and a killer. Sometimes I don't want to party so many people.

+1 for neenah!

My main concern wth the party system is exp. Like stated above, i would rather solo then party because its probably 2x faster. I would like to party with friends, but the exp is a major turn off. As it stands right now, I'll stick to soloing!

I agree. Ultimately, my main concern is, even if you go and make partying just as good as soloing, if you don't increase the difficulty of the monsters, all you're going to end up with is ksing gwing parties that look to optimize leveling speed (similar to the recent turn-in events). Almost every single 3rd class has a devastating PvM mob skill which makes real partying worthless. These VIP dungeons you're planning need to have monsters difficult enough that it takes a half or full party to defeat, and then the exp reward needs to match that effort so that it is more enjoyable and more rewarding than just grabbing kaahi, running to Magma 2, Juperos 1, AL 3, or Bio 2 and blasting mobs with 1 or 2 uses of a skill. Personally, I'd like to see far less AoE skills in the game, but I know that's not going to fly (I actually have a lot of crazy ideas about skill and job balance, but this isn't the place for it).

The ksing gwing parties bring me to my next point. The GM team needs to get serious about enforcing the Terms of Service. Although some might consider the banning of Insurrection a bit harsh, it was a good step in the right direction to let the community know that bad behavior won't be tolerated. For the first time in a long time, I saw that people were concerned with cheating or just generally being a d__k heads. But then you went and let people get away with murder at all these turn-in events and the fear of being banned is now gone again. Far more people than you realize won't complain about being harassed, they'll just quit. It's happened to countless people I know who've played RO. You might get a few players back and attract new ones who will actually stay if they know that rules are enforced and that cheaters and douche bags are a one off thing, not the norm. I don't know if you have any young children, but online gamers really are like them in a lot of ways. They need to know where the boundaries are in order to be safe and have fun at the same time. Enforce your rules so we can all start having fun again. For every paying customer you lose for banning, I promise you'll have 5, who you never would have heard from, that will stay because they know justice was served.

Finally, I have an idea that can satisfy the freedom one had during pre-renewal, with the exploration of new locations that Renewal wanted to usher in. The plan is three-fold:
1. First, change the level based exp penalty to only lower exp from monsters that are more than 50 levels above you, but not below (simple enough, nothing to explain here).

2. Second, allow the same monster to have different stats, exp, etc. based on the map they spawn on. If that's too difficult then make a duplicate monster that has a ranking (say from 1 to 10?). My idea here is that we can try to scale dungeon levels to revive all the dead dungeons we have in the game. Take Payon dungeon for instance. There are 5 levels, and yet no 3rd class (most of the iRO population), has any reason to go there outside of Moonie. What you could do is set level 1 to be good for players ranged 10-30, level 2 would be for those 30-50, 3 would be 50-80, 4 scales from 80-110, and level 5 would be good for players in the 110-140 range (exp per hour here should be comparable to a magma 2 or juperos). What this means is that the 1-2 nine-tail you fight in level 3 of the dungeon is suitable for players in their 50s, 60s, and 70s (exp and drop wise), while the nine-tales you find on level 5 are fun to fight for people in their 110s, 120s, and 130s. Drop penalty is no longer a problem if you're fighting them on the correct level based on your character's level, the challenge ramps up (stronger attack, more skill usage maybe?), and the reward gets better (higher exp). On top of this, you put a scaled version of moonie on all levels. Level 1 moonie can be defeated by a party of people in their 20s, while level 5 moonie is the real deal that is a challenge for people over 110. In addition, lower level moonies would tele (or be immune to damage) if anyone over the recommended level of that map tried to attack them, while the level 5 moonie would be a normal non-drop penalty MvP. Take this plan, and apply it to as many dungeons that make sense as you can (Odin's probably wouldn't make sense to scale below level 90, while dungeons like sunken ship or toy factory might not make sense to scale over level 70) and now you, once again, have more options and freedom. The side effect of this is that you also remove a lot of level based drop penalty issues/complaints. I imagine with this that a group of well geared or highly motivated people could tackle a floor higher than their level for even greater exp rewards.

3. Lastly, start adding a TON of short, medium, or long quests focused around not only the eden group, but specific job class guilds (they should be limited to base level). Hold contests or have a forum dedicated for players to submit quests, and if you select a quest, reward the player with something nice for helping to support the community (kvm badges, medals, red envelopes, box of insurance, etc). Encourage players to be original and design quests that get people to go to places that they normally wouldn't go in Midgard. For example, let's say I write the dialog for an epic, 2 month, bard quest that takes the player on a journey to write a love song and a 1 hour swordsman guild quest to collect some items. If they both get picked, then I get 5500 kvm points (500 for the 1 hour one, 5000 for the 2 month one). You could even reward the most published quest writer by giving them a +10 item at the end of each year. But then also make the reward for the players doing the quest enticing. A 1 hour quest should theoretically give you about 10% of whatever base level you're at, instead of a flat 1mil exp (obviously a 1 hour quest for level 30 swordies should be much easier than a 1 hour quest for level 130 RKs). A 2 month quest should probably be able to take a level 40 bard all the way to 99/50 and then all the way to 99/70 as a minstrel (making a 99/70 trans from scratch takes less than a week for someone dedicated so this is more than fair or maybe not even good enough?). If the community is involved, this would satisfy the exploration of new locations that Renewal tried to push on us forcefully.

This plan would allow me to stay in one place and level from 1/1 novice to 150 3rd if I really wanted, or I could switch dungeons every other day and not have to worry about 1 dungeon always being the best choice, or I could just do quests and, while slower, still level up while playing the way I want to play. I can grind for an hour, and then go do a quest for an hour and not feel like I lost an hour of leveling. Best of all, I can level in a dungeon in my 30s, leave and not return until my 130s, and still find a challenge (no more hit it and quit it dungeons).

I have more, but I'll stop for now.

tl;dr: don't it up!

Edited by Akin, 28 April 2011 - 09:05 PM.

@akin, having same monsters with different EXP, ATK and HP would do a lot of scripting. hence, it is not possible to do. just imagine how many monsters out there that they need to individually script(skills and stats), assign sprites, assign respawn rate and on what map. this is a tedious process i have to tell you.

the quest contest is viable though it is also a tedious process since it would only involves NPCs since it is also scripted (quest dialogues)and assigned a sprite.

This is a great suggestion though but i doubt that it will be implemented anytime soon as this would require a massive update if thats the case.

I see nice updates being planned in the future =)
Maybe i'll come back after my finals if everything goes fine here.

Edited by Miii, 28 April 2011 - 09:37 PM.

@akin, having same monsters with different EXP, ATK and HP would do a lot of scripting. hence, it is not possible to do. just imagine how many monsters out there that they need to individually script(skills and stats), assign sprites, assign respawn rate and on what map. this is a tedious process i have to tell you.

the quest contest is viable though it is also a tedious process since it would only involves NPCs since it is also scripted (quest dialogues)and assigned a sprite.

This is a great suggestion though but i doubt that it will be implemented anytime soon as this would require a massive update if thats the case.

Thanks for reading!

No doubt that it's hard work but it is possible. A cheaper method would just be to completely change dungeon map spawns with monsters that fit the scheme I suggested (i.e. put blue dragons in payon 5, etc.), but then you'd end up screwing up the overall theme of each dungeon.

Scripting for quests could be made easier if they provide the format and syntax for scripting quests to the community. It'd be pretty easy to write a little parser that can test scripts for errors before submitting..

I just want to know how much of this "FUTURE" Direction of RO. Involves PAY REAL Money to winto get a needles boost in exp and drop rate, or PAY REAL MONEY EVENTS like it been going for last few years, and how much of that future involves actual fixing the countless problems and balance issues.

Why can't a company do both?

The kafra shop model is fine, hardly "pay to win". Paying gives you an edge when it comes to drop rate and leveling, sure, but it's not so much of an edge when said items can be bought from players for zeny.

As for events, you mean there's a company that doesn't do that?

No wonder said company is dying.

Thank you, Heim!
After reading this post, I have a new happy-song
Hearing "I'm so excited" over and over again now...
This may sound strange to a lot of people, but I'm in a really happy, funny and dancing mood since this morning (it's 01:12 pm here, read the post around 8am) that isn't going away.
I think it's funny though, cause I haven't experienced the old nostalgic days of iRO.
I played euRO for over 6 years till it was shut down.
I started iRO afterwards. I left everything behind. fRO is a terrible server in my eyes, so the transfer (which has worse restrictions as everyone imagined and isn't going well at all!) never came in my mind.
As euRO closed we had 13.1
As I came to iRO there was 13.2 allready implemented, Renewal shortly came afterwards and I felt a bit lost without my chars, my stuff and without being really up to date about what changed in detail. I still see me playing like pre-renewal sometimes, to be true.
Still, I liked it. I started to feeling a bit home, but also still a lot as a stranger on the server - not giving up though. Now I'm starting to really feel "home" here...
Even in the last days, more and more german RO-players I know begin to have more interests in starting anew on iRO, which may be because many players have big issues with Gravity Europe.
This allready made me happy.
Now reading all your plans for the future, I'm really excited and really, I'm hyped. I don't know why (and I'm sure some of you think I'm crazy now XD) but I'm really hyped about it. It's like a bit of my own nostalgia (which differs a bit thanks to a different server) is returning. Everything I ever had in mind which could improve RO seem to come in a close range - and I'm not even a pvp/woe oriented player!
I love how you handle user requests, that you listen and at least think about the stuff. I love the creative contests you have here in the forums.
All of this makes me feel like the users can forge RO a bit, too.
I love this changes. Alone thinking on new dyes, Costume system, mounts, maybe even some of the player created mounts here... makes me happy and grin :3

So... yeah...
strange way to say I'm happy about this future plans, hu? XD

Edited by Rutana, 29 April 2011 - 03:27 AM.

Why can't a company do both?

The kafra shop model is fine, hardly "pay to win". Paying gives you an edge when it comes to drop rate and leveling, sure, but it's not so much of an edge when said items can be bought from players for zeny.

As for events, you mean there's a company that doesn't do that?

No wonder said company is dying.

agree, Kafra shop is fine and lets face it, they need to make money. However I do beleive kafra consumable like Manuals and Gums should NOT be vendable. Allowing players to gain large amounts of zeny by using real money takes away from the game in my opinion, and while it is their choice, it causes prices to increases sometimes (because newer players with large amounts of zeny buying things at high prices).

This is just an opinion however, I could be way off.

The vendable Kafra shop stuff puts pressure against zeny spammer companies.

The vendable Kafra shop stuff puts pressure against zeny spammer companies.

ohh I see, well that changes things

The amount of respect I have for the work you guys are putting into this game is grand. I know you all are trying, GMs, and thank you

Also, just an idea I want to throw out there.

In terms of the "Gritty" nature of the community versus the more lighthearted wholesome fun in the past:

People's nature in a game is determined by their viewpoint of the game. There is a certain amount of "mystery" involved that leaves the spark in peoples eye in entertainment.

Back in the day, fansites weren't as detailed, every single possible build of char wasn't made and especially not displayed daily, and frankly the technology of the game was ahead of it's time.

That is different now. When you let the players know everything that's when it becomes more of just "grind to 150 and get best equips and that's IT" versus "OMG what's this skill do? Wow! I wanna see what a fire only mage looks like"

Sorry if it was improperly worded but it's just an idea. I think the general emotion of the community comes from playing mentality.