Houkago Game Time

Best Games Ever: Ragnarok Online // 라그나로크 온라인

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Developed by: Gravity
Platform: PC
Genre: MMORPG

Ragnarok Online is a very unique MMORPG. In this brief article I want to try to articulate what makes it stand out from other games to me, as well as give a brief overview on the game’s good points (and its ultimate downfall) in a way that can be understood by people with limited or no knowledge of the game (gonna end up using a lot of specific terms though). Since tackling what makes such an expansive MMO “good” is actually incredibly hard, I’ll break it down: Sekaikan, twitch, freedom, community, and competition. I hate to turn this into a “shitty segmented gamefaqs review” styled article, but with so much ground to cover I am not sure how else to do it. Again, this’ll just be fairly brief summaries.

Preliminary

RO comes in a lot of different packages and general time periods; private servers, official servers, pre-transc, pre-renewal, etc. What I’m going to be discussing is mostly based off of my personal favorite time-frame of RO; that is 2005-2009 low-rate private servers running on eAthena (post-transc, pre-renewal). Before you write me off as “pserver scrub”, it can easily be argued that RO is a rare game in that a decently setup and well-managed private server provides an equal (or better) playing experience than officials – no, not because of boosted exp and drop rates, and not because of custom items or additions.

A well-run private server has close to no bots (a client protection application called harmony stops openkore bots pretty effectively, and GMs are more dedicated to bot hunting), softlayer servers run far better than iRO does (which is so laggy that it’s impossible to play well), and there’s an issue of major over-development on official servers – they have no shortage of over-powered items (+9-10 gears, god items & mvp cards) which are relatively rarely seen on a low-rate private server. Because of WoE town castle rotation, making god items is close to impossible on most pservers. Since the servers are only up for a year or two, you generally don’t see many GTBs, GRs, or other intense cards. Many private servers also try to keep custom NPCs to a bare minimum, and more often than not do away with custom items/gear entirely. The official cash shop also takes a lot away from the game, and most pservers opt to just not include those items.

However, my intention is not to slander official servers or their players. Ragnarok Online, on a proper low-rate server (yes, including both officials and pservers)… your first time playing is an experience that is shared among all. My only intention is to justify private server’s existence; beyond “lol cheap bastards don’t want to sub” and “no dedication, just want an easy time”, there are legitimate and appealing reasons to go to pservers.

By the way, I am a WoE oriented player.

With that aside, I’ll begin explaining why I like this time period of RO (I’d probably have enjoyed playing any time before 2005 too, but I didn’t play then).

Sekaikan

世界観(Sekaikan) is a Japanese phrase that I struggle to put into English perfectly. It translates literally to world(世界) view(観). It means something like “The outlook and appearance of a world”; but it isn’t just limited to the actual “setting” of a world, it encompasses everything the world has to offer. In fictional works like games this includes things like what items are in the world, whether the universe hold consistency in how it’s crafted, character designs, music & sounds, hell you could probably even stretch to include a game’s UI into this. It’s basically how the entire atmosphere is held together and feels.

This game is based heavily off of Norse mythology. However, I will not spend much time talking about that, as it’s just a sort of central theme to naming schemes and monster designs.

More importantly, RO’s 2D sprites in a 3D world (with an isometric view) feel very right.

The game’s graphics are A+. The 3D world does not clash with the 2D sprites at all; instead they hold harmony and consistency. RO is very consistent in its graphics style – despite being updated for almost a decade now, if you check out how new content and areas look compared to things from release day, you’ll find that the style and quality is consistent. However, new areas still feel… new. They make subtle effect enhancements, add cool new backgrounds, or otherwise give new maps an “updated” feel… but it never breaks the original style of the game.

Both the player sprites and mob sprites are well made. The class designs are all really nice (and fitting). One of my favorite aspects of the class designs is how well the official art translates into the in-game 2D sprites.

You can find a complete collection of class sprites + their official art (for second/transc classes) at iRO Wiki. Just click on the class.

You can’t customize how your character looks passed color palettes, hairstyle/color, and their headgear. Surprisingly this level of customization is pretty nice, as it strikes a good balance between easily being able to distinguish classes and an acceptable level of uniqueness. Your character absolutely feels like your own (even with this seemingly limited customization, it’s very rare to find other characters with the exact same style as you), and in fast-paced PVP you never need to give a single thought to “what class is that?”

I’ve compiled some of my favorite monster sprites sorted by cute & cool in this post. RateMyServer (a bad website over-all) has animated sprites for every monster in the game. Just click on the side links to view a certain type of monster (for example; small, medium or large). As you can see, pretty much every single monster in the entire game is super detailed. They all plant themselves onto each and every map perfectly, a monster almost never feels out of place in the world, and they’re all unique enough to define the atmosphere of any given area.

These bosses each look sweet as hell.

One baller aspect of RO is that it doesn’t resort to simple sprite/model re-colors for new mobs in different areas, as many MMOs tend to do. There are a few similar monsters (hydra/peno for example), but it’s never a theme of RO’s to reuse monster sprites. Each and every monster feels unique, and most of them are fairly interesting in gameplay, too. They all have their own stats, skills, race, element, and various different types of AI – each of these play a very large role into how a map works.

Maps and how they play are another thing that feels very unique about RO, but I’ll go into the specifics of “how they play” while talking about freedom. For now I just want to point out that every map respects itself – what that means is they all hold to their over-all theme perfectly. This can be said about many games but RO is no exception. The “themes” that RO implements into its maps can be anywhere from childish & silly (Toy Factory), to chill (Byalan), to dark or gruesome (Glastheim, Endless Tower).

Every time that you step into a map, the music sets the tone perfectly… and I don’t mean in an ambient way like most games that have “mood setting music”; soundTeMP’s scores really stand out in the foreground. The sound of the music also fits with the graphics and look of the game. This aspect of the OST is amazing. The music is memorable as hell, too. If you are/were an RO player, go ahead and try to tell me that some of the BGM doesn’t give you a nostalgia rush. Like seriously this BGM is super freakin’ INTENSE.

Effects from spells, mobs, or items look and sound great. Again, the sounds of items and spells are very in line with the game’s general atmosphere. But more than that, sounds are extremely satisfying. The sound that skills such as Firebolt, Acid Demonstration, Asura Strike, Sonic Blow, Meteor Storm, or Mammonite make are just really satisfying. DS’ing a mob doesn’t just feel good, it sounds good too. Adding to the satisfaction of how nice a skill sounds is how nice the skills look – magic especially. Even the damage numbers of skills look good… the font fits nicely and the way some skills hit multiple times, then chain together as a huge yellow number, that’s really satisfying.

Damn I love the way AD’s damage flies.

Speaking of fonts and UI-related things, this game’s UI is never intrusive. Many games nowadays seem to like throwing their UI at you – overlaying tons of shit on your screen and being generally annoying. Sometimes this is useful information but many times it’s just added UI flash, and that is annoying as dickballs. Here’s an example of what RO’s UI looks like in the middle of some high-end Player vs Player action:

A small status window in the top left (Which most players hardly look at, since your HP and SP is displayed underneath your character), a map in the top right, buffs+timers displayed underneath that, and some (highly customizable) chat logs.

That’s it. This is WoE so guild emblems appear above every character’s head, and most of the time (depending on class) you also have a party window open, as you can target people via it… at the time I had mine closed (even though champs should keep it open to bless d00ds). The point is, though, that the UI is never in your way or obnoxious looking. Very minimalist.

Another thing RO does right is items.

Every piece of gear and every item has a small sprite which appears in your gear/inventory windows. However, every single item in the game also has a description (usually not very interesting), accompanied by a nice piece of art. That Valkyrie Armor there? Its got an okay sprite, but the art owns:

It is not until you think that this game has over 10,000 items in it that this really has impact. Every single etc item dropped by mobs, every single piece of gear, every single consumable, they all have fairly nice art to accompany them.

You can just look at your random gear/item’s art forever, and it makes getting new gear that much more interesting, too. Personally I value this over gear showing up on your character, especially considering the freedom you are given in picking and mixing/matching your gear (which, if displayed on your sprite, would just look dumb).

What’s more than that, though, is every monster in the game drops a card (which do effects like add stats, skills, or… they’re pretty unlimited in use, but I’ll get to that later). All cards have their own art to accompany them. This art is more detailed and elaborate than the small gear & item art.

The above are not necessarily my favorite cards or anything, they are just ones that happened to be in my inventory at the time. Which means, yeah, like almost every card in the game has art that intense. Again, all of it is consistent with the rest of the game’s atmosphere. It’s little touches like this that make RO feel like an extremely complete and well-crafted game.

All of the classes, sprites, monsters, maps, BGM, sounds, UI elements, items, cards, NPCs, buildings, all the way down to every last tile in every single map – they all respect each other, they all hold a common consistent feeling, and they’re all nicely made. The truly intense part about this is how expansive the game is; it’s been getting regular updates for many, many years and has hundreds of unique monsters and maps, dozens of classes, somewhere around 15 billion items…

Twitch

RO is a twitchy MMO. Your APM matters. Your execution matters. Yes, in these regards, it is actually a “skill-based” game. Often times you can tell if a player is decent or not based simply on what they’re wearing on their head, and how they move around and attack things.

The game has means to eliminate cooldowns entirely (but you need a proper party to do so), and it’s full of high-damage attacks, some of which are just straight up instant kills (but only if your character is built well and geared). For anything that isn’t an instant kill, you can bet that it’s spammed extremely quickly. Basically, the game is full of spike damage and spike healing. What this leads to is fast paced gameplay in both PVP and PVE.

If you come from a background of WoW, GW, or other games that are almost purely mechanical and based on pressure damage or mana management, this might just sound straight up retarded to you. But it isn’t really a bad thing, it’s just a preference between “fast-paced twitchy gameplay” vs “slower-paced mechanical gameplay.” No, the fact that the game is full of spike damage doesn’t mean it’s just a complete retarded spam-fest; there are a lot of ways to heal very quickly, and likewise most damage can be prevented entirely – but you can also prevent damage prevention – so that’s how the game plays out, essentially. You can think of it almost like CS1.6 vs Rainbow Six… they’re both good games, but one has far more extreme execution requirements, as it’s faster paced.

This also closes the gap between playing skill and level/gear, to an extent. An undergeared party of lv85 characters could easily dominate a well-geared party of lv99 characters, if the lv99s are noobish or the 85s just play very well.

Rather than talk about the specifics of PVP though, I’d like to focus on how unique this gameplay style is to an MMO. The isometric view makes it very easy to see everything around you; the gameplay is point and click. Targeting quickly is an acquired skill in RO. When you’re in a high-end dungeon (bio3), every single move you make counts… you can wipe your party in a flash, just by moving a few cells in the wrong direction or targeting the wrong mob. That might sound typical to high-end MMO content, but this is a regular leveling area that you spend a lot of time at, not some big boss or anything like that, and you can’t press tab to make sure you’ve got the right thing targeted, you have to quickly click on every target individually.

Basically RO feels really fast because of its twitchy gameplay.

It does depend a bit on class, but you’ll almost never feel like the game can’t keep up with you. With no (or very short) cooldowns and the isometric view, the only real limits (most of the time) are how fast you react, how good you are at targeting, and how quickly you can play. There are no limits on how many times you can switch your gear, pot, or cast a skill. In other words, you are free to do whatever you can in a situation, without ever having to worry about the game’s mechanics severely holding you back.

The interesting part about this is that the game, underneath its twitchy execution, is actually really technical. Removing your classes major limitations requires a party, always. There are a ton of factors to take into account in any PVE or PVP situation, your gear and character builds matter a lot, and you need to have a wealth of knowledge to do much of anything, anywhere. Most games stop there. Your knowledge and ability to comprehend orders, or figure out when the best time to pop a skill is… that’s where the MMO gameplay ends. In RO, all of that knowledge moves itself to your subconscious, you are always aware of it but rarely ever directly thinking about it – instead your mind is generally focused on playing quickly and skillfully, with pristine execution.

Twitchy and fast-paced gameplay on top of a highly technical base is probably the most unique thing about RO. DotA and RO players tend to cross-over a lot; I’ve never spent much time on games like DotA/HoN/LoL, but the way you control your character does look somewhat similar. I believe it also slightly similar to D2.

Freedom

The character creation window looks like this:

That’s it. When beginning, you pretty much have absolutely no direction in your character or stats passed common sense. If you wanna be a mage you’ll probably know to go for INT, if you wanna be a swordsman you’ll know to lean towards STR and VIT.

When you login you find yourself in a “novice training grounds” with various NPCs that explain the game’s basic system, commands, and classes. You are free to skip this area if you wish. If you read all of the dialogue carefully, you will probably complete the training area in about 25-30minutes.

Then you are never told anything. Ever again.

The game says “Have fun”, warps you to a regular town full of players as a classless novice, and leaves you there. RO does not hold your hand at all, instead it forces you to actually explore the world and what it has to offer.

Leveling is not quest based. There is no main story. There is no help or direction in where to go, how to kill mobs, what your stats do, what a decent build is, how to utilize your skills well, what gear to get… it tells you nothing. You cannot reset your stats or skills should you mess up in allocating them. You have no indication of how strong a monster is without trying to whack it first. And yes, the map design puts harder monsters on newbie maps just to say “Fuck you.” You lose experience upon death and many areas are not easy to get to.

RO is not an easy game to learn. But a fun one.

There are a lot of different areas, classes, and builds. The “open sandbox” style of the game makes it feel very free, very customizable, and very knowledge based. People who play this game end up becoming encyclopedias of knowledge – you know the game inside and out, all aspects of it. RO has so much stuff in it that even how PVP builds end up taking shape is a result of how players actually play. Its got a proper metagame and that metagame is determined solely by the player’s styles alone.

The community figuring things out together is exactly how this game works – from standard gear, to decent builds, to how skills work, to the best way to level or kill an MVP, everything is left up to the players to figure out themselves. Also, the game is nearly impossible to solo efficiently in, which forces players to come together and party – this is an amazing aspect that more MMOs need to learn from. Researching extensively on forums or wikis won’t do you much good, either… some things you just won’t get until you see them in-game.

Cards are dropped by every monster, and they are able to give a wide-range of effects when you compound them to gear. Reducing or increasing damage against certain races or elements, giving you access to skills that normally only another class can use, dropping certain items at a low percentage when you kill monsters, preventing or inducing status effects under specific conditions…

An example is the smokie card, which compounds to accessory. It enables the usage of the skill “Hiding”, usually only accessible by thief classes. Hiding is useful because if timed correctly, you can “hide” from a skill cast on you to prevent its damage – you have to time it well, though, and using this card takes up a valuable accessory slot. Everyone that isn’t a thief will use a smokie, but all good players only switch to it when they need it – this kind of basic gear switching adds a bit of depth to the game’s mechanics when you realize that every class switches gear in many different situations (PVE and PVP) a lot. Managing it also adds a bit to the execution requirements.

There are seriously no limits on where you can go or what you can do (passed the hard limitations of your class and build). If you have the playing skills to kill a monster like a Sting, on your level 16 first-job archer, when they are typically killed by level 70ish hunters… nothing is stopping you. If your party is completely undergeared but feel like you guys have what it takes to avoid damage in a higher end dungeon, do it. If you feel like making a melee hunter, or a magic-based INT knight that works off of auto-casting swords… why not? If you want to sprinkle a bit of AGI into a build to outflee a certain mob, or if you want to max VIT on a wizard so that you can take some extra hits, then you’re doing it wrong, but you can still do it.

The game gives you full freedom in stat builds, gear builds, skill builds, and playing style. But the interesting part is that it doesn’t let you just undo things, and getting anywhere in building your character actually takes effort. You can research and network to figure out how to “not mess up” or you can just experiment and remake if you don’t like the direction you’re heading in; but either way you absolutely require a level of dedication to your style and your character. Typically resets are given for huge updates, however, since they change the game a lot.

Your character’s destiny is built by you. Stats do not allocate themselves, you do it… the best gear to use in a situation changes drastically from map to map, or even what class you’re gearing up to avoid damage from in PVP. Skill builds are also completely free. In this way, you become extremely attached to your character… every little thing about it was decided by you alone, not by how the game wants a class to play. Playstyle also ties itself into stat builds – how you play is related to how you should build your character. When you reach max level, you could be vastly different from another character of the same class, with totally different builds, gear, and focus… but often times you’ll both be viable in some important end-game situations. Well, assuming one of you isn’t retarded.

You do not quest from hub to hub, with the game holding your hand, walking you around area from area, each to which you say “Oh, that looks cool” but end up holding no connection to (and skipping tons of NPC dialogue) just to get some EXP. Seriously, quest based games feel like “MMOs on rails” that lead you around by the nose. If you ask an RO player what maps they remember the most in PVE, they’ll have solid answers for you – you marry yourself to your character, crafted entirely by your own judgement, and the maps, which you learn how to play inside & out.

How you want to tackle a map is also up to you. Sometimes you’ll be hard shut-down by a mob that moves too fast for you, or has too much defense (thus requiring magic, or def-piercing skills, to kill) – then you need to party. But mobs don’t “leash” in RO, and you’re free to do as you please on every map. If you can mob the entire map and kill every monster on it with an AoE, do it. If a map has a few irritating monsters on it, but over-all is a nice place for you to level, “demob” the map by throwing all the tardshit into a corner, and enjoy your peaceful leveling.

The meta-game built itself in an incredible way. Standard builds were made from items you’d never expect to be used on a certain class. When updates come out, they do implement better gear, but your gear is never rendered totally worthless. The way the gear updates work is, you simply sprinkle some of the new gear into your old gear’s build. You mix & match parts from 2002 and 2009 to create your optimal and unique build. Players today still use cards and some gear from near release. But they’re farming the newest MVPs and dungeons to get geared up, too.

When speaking of WoE or MVPs, players eventually figure out what the “best build” for each class is, but they continue to evolve based on general strategy. Focused Arrow Strike was a Sniper skill that saw close to no use at all in the game – you were considered noob for using it over Claymore. Eventually the meta-game evolved in a way that Snipers became pure FAS machines, it was utilized so effectively that the skill had to be nerfed. All that changed was the player-oriented meta-game. People find new ways to work underused classes, old gear, old cards, or unused and seemingly worthless skills, which sends rifts throughout the meta-game, thus making it evolve around new strategies.

In the end, you will always sacrifice something when you build your character. You will never find a straight up best, just an “optimal for what you want to do.” Teammates have to pick up your weight for anything you can’t do – likewise you are carrying the weight of their deficiencies. In this way, RO’s classes all mesh very well, partying becomes essential, and your character feels free, customized, and well-built, but not overpowered.

Community

You can never do it all in RO. You require other people, straight up. You won’t reach max level on your own, you won’t gear up on your own, and 1v1 PVP is a laughable concept at best. You need friends, you need a guild, you need to party to get anything done. It’s an extremely team-oriented game and you become incredibly close-knit with everyone you play with on a regular basis. You (normally) do not spend hours a day farming by yourself to get ready for a boss fight or WoE… you’re constantly surrounded by your friends in everything that you do. Leveling, farming, gearing up, MVP’ing, PVP’ing, WoE’ing… you’re constantly with these people.

While playing, you also never feel like you’re just a pawn listening to orders – you never feel replaceable. People develop synergy with each other and shift their actual play styles, skill builds, and gear to suit each other. This also builds up heavy trust with everyone you play with. I’ve played with many different guilds throughout my time playing RO, but every single one had something in common – shared gear, shared accounts.

Gear does not bind itself to your char in RO, anything you get can be dropped, traded, or sold (there are a few exceptions but they don’t matter). If you find an MVP card, it isn’t yours. It is your guild’s. Any player happily passes around that MVP card to whoever needs it in a given situation, often times going to different players for WoE and PVE. The reason it’s your guild’s isn’t because you’re pressured into it, but because you trust everyone around you enough to just let it go.

I’ve always shared accounts with everyone I play with. Playing someone else’s character when they aren’t around, but their build is needed… or hopping on to steal some of their gear; it’s never been an issue for me. I’ve never had my gear go missing with no trace, and my character has never been fucked with… likewise I have never done anything malicious to a friend’s account. You also end up having “guild characters” like potion brewers, storage whitesmiths, support classes played by whoever is on at the time… Man, the mutual trust you build with your guild in RO is unparalleled.

Most guilds are like this. It isn’t a matter of getting lucky and finding good people to play with – instead, the way the game is designed, building up this kind of trust is the natural course it takes. Almost all guilds share accounts and items with each other. That makes many different close-knit guilds with very stable cores.

Higher profile low-rates generally have a couple thousand dedicated players. This is actually a perfect amount, as it’s enough to keep an economy very alive, while not COMPLETELY swarming the game with tons of bullshit. You often see the same people in the same places – guilds each take their own town, claimed as their guild town, and randoms pretty much hang out wherever. It’s enough players that you’ll constantly see both people you’re unfamiliar with and people who you know. In PVP situations, you eventually learn other player’s builds and the most effective way to deal with them. Most of the core of one guild knows who the core of another guild is – and that’s actually where RO’s major competitive aspects begin to come into play. The game is heavily based around guild rivalry… So you’ve got core groups vs core groups, and that’s why RO’s competition is interesting.

Competition

RO’s end-game is competitive-based play.

War of Emperium is RO’s true end-game. There are two different types of WoE – First Edition and Second Edition, but rather than getting into the specifics of how the meta-game plays, I’m going to focus on what makes the concepts interesting. WoE is a two hour session, which happens twice a week. Both modes of WoE are centered around castle sieges (different castles are open for each day’s WoE). You need to break various choke points, held by a defending guild, to get to the final room of a castle and destroy its Emperium. When you do, all guilds except your own are warped out of the castle, and you must quickly setup your own defenses.

Defending a castle until the end of WoE grants you the ability to build up economy – you put zeny into the castle, investing in it, and then it’ll drop “treasure boxes” at an increased rate every day, containing items to help gear out your guild. Castle invest maximizes at 100, and you’ve gotta hold a castle for a considerable amount of time to actually hit the cap – but it pays off in treasure boxes. Each time the Emperium is broken and castle ownership is transferred to another guild, invest decreases a little bit.

WoE is the only mass PVP I’ve seen done right. Generally mass PVP in any game – more than 6v6-8v8 or so – it just turns into a random-fest. In most game’s mass pvp, people are kind of everywhere, there’s no real direction or organization, no real leader. In RO this is not the case. Guilds are very tightly packed and form stacks – your typical guild battles look like this:

Large stacks of guilds (sometimes alliances – guilds are about 46 people each, and usually have an alliance formed with like two other guilds, so you have stacks of typically around 120-130 people) defending and pushing up on choke points. It’s mainly a ranged fight with a few classes playing the role of ground control. DPS is high but the game is centered around support classes and buffs, which can be dispelled – there are also classes with high survivability, which have the ability to significantly turn the tide of battle if they can get into another guild’s stack and do their shit (preventing this is why ground control is very essential). The range fight ends when one guild feels like it has the proper advantage / momentum to push into the other, and that’s when melee classes clean up to wipe them completely, allowing your guild to advance farther into the castle. Neither of these videos are sped up btw, movement is just fairly quick.

Guild movement means a lot – you don’t want to get sandwiched between two other guilds while moving through a castle, you will absolutely wipe if you have to fight from two sides. Everyone moving as one, and everyone always being in the right position in their stack (front line, midline, backline) is essential. Two stacked guilds trying to wipe each other is called a GvG battle.

High-end guilds always end up hating on each other. A lot of the game’s fun comes from guild hate, as it fuels competition inside AND outside of WoE. Guilds that dislike each other ‘cuz of being WoE rivals, will also carry distaste for each other in PVE – since guilds are so close-knit, you are always with your own, and when you see another guild’s party at a high-end MVP, your goal instantly changes from “kill the boss” to “wipe the other party – steal their kill.”

RO does not have open-world PVP, but it’s got a very “free-for-all” style of PVE. You cannot attack other players directly, but you can prevent their attacks from being effective, essentially supporting the monsters they’re fighting. You can mob up and drop monsters on a party in an attempt to wipe them, or just break their setup. You can teleport away from mobs to a random area on the map, which makes your party scatter and forces you to regroup+setup again. There aren’t really any notable instances, everything takes place in the persistent world, so competition over bosses (who respawn every few hours) takes place frequently.

Guilds who are holding a WoE castle have access to a map called the town’s “Guild Dungeon”. Guild Dungeons are generally valuable farming maps, so most guilds make use of them. Thing is, the guild dungeon is a shared map among all guilds who have a castle in a given town, and in GDs, open-pvp is turned on. This is basically the game’s PvPvE mode. GD PVP is pretty much just fun as fucking balls, you get to mess up leveling parties directly and it’s always a competition between rival guilds. When GD PVP wars start, they don’t stop until one side gives up, surrendering the dungeon to the victors, who can then spend time farming there. Any player will tell you that the days of GD PVP were some of RO’s best times.

Gearing up in RO generally works like… you get all of your shit-tier equipment with a small party, or sometimes even solo (or your guild just hands it all to you). Then you do “regular” MVPs and relatively difficult dungeons for a little bit to farm decent gear, or just make zeny and buy it. Using those equips, you can begin farming “high-end” MVPs, which guilds compete over very often. High-end MVPs drop WoE gear, and WoE generally produces drops that work for a variety of purposes. You’re PVE’ing to get better at PVP. Your goal is always WoE-oriented, but the ride there is a blast because of PVE competition and the tightness with your guild.

RO does have a smaller-scale Battlegrounds PVP mode too. Battlegrounds rewards are, once again, gear. Two different teams (which anyone on the server can join) compete to complete whatever the battlegrounds objective is (there are a variety of different modes on pservers, all of which are scripted well – capture the flag, team deathmatch, modes that imitate a mini-WoE FE or SE, etc). On a decent low-rate server, battlegrounds generally turns into more guild wars. You will always have “random” players in BG since it’s open to everyone on the server, but two guild parties generally stack on opposing teams and compete there, too.

Guild competition really is everywhere in this game. In the higher-end play you are always surrounded by your guild and always hating on other guilds – wiping them everywhere you possibly can, however you possibly can.

Ultimate Downfall

The combination of all the above elements is what makes RO such a great and compelling game. The game world is detailed. You slowly learn everything the hard way or through community interaction, you build up your character yourself, directly shaping it based on what you’ve seen and what your goals are. You become extremely close with both your character itself, and everyone around you, forming interesting rivalries in the process… which have so much drama and story behind them, each guild could have a freakin’ anime series about them, or some shit, lol. The amount of freedom and different competitive approaches to both PVP and PVE keep the game very interesting at all times. But if this is all true… why, in the beginning of the article, did I specify the time-frame of “2005-2009”? Shouldn’t the best game ever just… continue being the best?

Unfortunately, the RO that I have written about, is dead and gone. It’s a combination of mismanagement from Gravity and the player base themselves destroying what they loved.

Gravity attempted to refresh the game by reconstructing the mechanics from the ground up and adding another class advancement for every job, which was released as an update called “Renewal.” The only reason I can figure for this is that officials were highly over-developed and they needed a gigantic update to help reset things and bring interest back. It did sort of work, at least for jRO, which saw a huge influx of players (also happened to line-up with FFXIV’s gigantic failure, which helped, no doubt).

There are some seriously fundamental problems in how they “renewed” the game, though. They borrowed a lot from western MMO design philosophy (aka WoW), which… I still don’t really “get” why they’d do that. The ultimate result of their renewal was slowing the game down, taking away some of the complete freedom you used to have, and adding too much new content at once. Adding another class advancement was a very bad move, at least with how they went about it – they’ve added a major class advancement in the past, but in order to advance to that class, you had to “transcend” your character, aka reset it to level 1 from level 99 and re-level to 99, with a more intense exp curve. This isn’t the case here, instead you just level from 99 -> 150, and the classes are shit-easy to level, hell you can even solo pretty well now (highly inefficient before).

Transcendent characters were far better than their non-transc counterparts in every imaginable way, because they got a few new skills and a bit more HP/SP. This is not how they handled the third advancement. Third classes get a lot of new skills, and compared to transcendent classes, are massively overpowered. Transcendent classes are OP when compared against their non-transc counterparts, but not to the insane extent of third-job vs transc.

To give you an idea on how they added way too many skills to the game, check out the new skills you get access to when you transcend a Monk to be a Champion (4 new skills), compared to what Shura get (I think I counted 22). Most of the classes look somewhat similar (4) to that (too many). It’s just ridiculous how much they added to and changed about the game with third jobs and renewal’s mechanics. The updated mechanics essentially restricted you more, and make the game feel slower, like it’s more… casual.

How I feel about players who embrace renewal.

But at the point of renewal being released, official servers were kinda over-developed, dying, full of bots, and madness laggy anyways. Private servers have an advantage in that if they don’t want renewal mechanics and third-jobs, they just don’t include them when setting the server up, and bam, pre-renewal RO.

Only problem is, the competitive private server community did a perfectly good job of destroying the game without Gravity’s help. RO’s competitive aspects are only interesting on a low-rate server, because that is where people feel invested and connected to the game, their characters, their items, and their guild.

Decent players got sick of starting over from scratch though – they played enough low-rates. Obviously, the end-game was the most fun part of the game, with all of its competitive aspects… so, people started making high-rate servers aimed at the competitive community so that they could just hop on, play for a couple weeks, be all geared up and ready to WoE/BG. This actually wasn’t so bad at first – if anything it felt like a “short break” from low-rates.

People didn’t really have the foresight to see what would happen to the game they claimed they loved, though. After playing on high-rates, players quickly got spoiled. After having such an easy time in PVE due to increased rates and spending most of their time on the end-game competitive aspects of the game, people found it hard to go back to low-rates and start anew on a server that would take several months to achieve the “same end result.” The obvious problem here is that it isn’t the same because you just don’t care about anything on high-rates. You aren’t attached to anything.

Competitive high-rates did well for a little bit, super WoEs and servers like ChronosV2 or VisionsV1 were a nice break from low-rates (people usually played them in between versions of servers like Eternity). But inevitably those high-rates didn’t last long, and eventually all the guilds and players who mattered just quit, or became relatively apathetic. Players got too spoiled – shunning PVE play, after things like BG Suppliers (handing out important materials like candy, when you usually have to farm a whole week to get them… this also unbalanced some classes) or gym passes (restocking in WoE? builds with str? nah. @storage and +1000000000 weight!) became standard. It ended up passing a point of no return and then low-rates were a dead concept after a majority of key players just quit.

Really ridiculous gear also became standard. Gear that was usually unavailable on private servers, and very limited on officials in the form of event prizes, became widely available. Holy Marcher Hat [1], Sunnies [1], lower headgear that gives redux and stats, etc… it became “If my creator doesn’t have full redux set on, doesn’t have unlimited bombs, AND can’t stun, all after playing for 2 weeks or less, I don’t wanna bother.”

People also started relying on third-party programs far too much, which fucked up their fundamentals and actually made them shitty lazy players. AutoHotKey, nodelay, RO medic, WoE GRFs that edit out EVERY SINGLE MODEL in a castle…

Mmm! Free consumables, RCX, AHK, and overkill WoE GRFs that make the entire game a dull gray corridor? I can smell the skill!

Competitive players detached themselves from what matters in the game, killing the game’s soul and jading the fuck out of themselves, which made them straight up lazy and bad in the end. Guilds these days are asking for “pure GvG; just remove emperiums.” No one gives a shit about castle invest or the server they play on… they don’t care about their own characters anymore (which were each made in 2 days), and guilds are obnoxious more than competitive. Skill has been replaced almost entirely with third party programs, your items and gear don’t matter to you.

Using a bit of hax never hurt anyone, but people take it too far nowadays. Replacing hard to target sprites with LoD in your GRF, or WPE’ing some AV on MVPs… you know, I don’t think that kind of thing really hurt the game that much in the end. Even using AHK to pot was all right. But the extent to which hax are used now… is just disgusting.

There used to be a time when the blue aura under your character meant something to you. When if you were hitting someone that you knew wouldn’t die, but you saw them potting, you’d say “Lol, look at him waste his pots! Get owned.” You felt truly invested in breaking an emp and raping economy. A time when creators weren’t the only DD class, because they didn’t want to waste their bombs (fucking laughable now, the current competitive server even gives you PVM bombs, I BG’d for one day have 8.9k in storage).

Those golden times are long gone. Players didn’t get better, they just got jaded. Leaning on the crutches of AHK became the norm for everyone in everything they do. Guilds these days are built on e-peen alone, not trust or rivalry. Every competent player left ages ago, guild leaders are mostly shit now (where’s seph and AJ?), and over-all the game feels dumb/full of 14 year old jackasses.

RO is now a dead, soulless game thanks to renewal, BG suppliers, high-rates, and over-use of third party applications. Killed by the company which made it and the players who loved it the most.

Sad, isn’t it?
～fin～