[Non-Renewal] Ragnarok in 2013, and what we can do to grow the community

[jblazer]

Hey I want your opinions on how we can regain popularity in this game. I'm open minded in all opinions

I have begun working on a draft website that will try to advertise the server I play on and show players what really killed Ragnarok population, I'm not doing this for personal gain.

Ragnarok Frontier online has proved itself to be different from 99% of private servers including officials, because.

It's been running 24/7 for eight years and only wiped once last year in a community-suggested thread to balance the gap between veterans and newcomers, making it fun again for both sides.
Staff actually proved to be mature and professional, and the head GM is a respected dev for aegis/eA.
shown it can handle 1200+ peak in earlier years
Non-Profit, always closed donations once the hosting fee was reached for month
A true classic-RO running aegis with balanced "customs".. (yes no stupid wings or giant pokemon pets =_=)

With optimistic staff & financially stable, all it really needs is players. What reason is there to shut it down? I see other servers make empty promises, but haven't proven they can do it.

I'm not doing this to advertise, I'm doing it because I want Non-Renewal to live on for years to come and feel like we need one server, it's true renewal shot the game cause the majority of people always think "new is better" when clearly gravity didn't take renewal seriously and abused the fact people will spend cash when they PvP, what else are they gonna do once they reach level 150 in 2 days?

but the even bigger reason in our population decline is because even my 5 year old son could create a private server,this meant there were now abundance in servers and many GM's not taking it seriously.

Treating players poorly, with avoidable drama/corruption/greed & worst of all almost nobody wants to spend time in a game when they are at risk of wipes and shuts down.

I thank yC and others greatly for ratemyserver, without it. Non-Renewal would have been totally crap by now.

so I want to make my own website and youtube channel to encourage new players and old players into Ragnarok,

making sure they all understand why it's so important to have just one professional server. Because clearly, Gravity and other GM's haven't proved they are up for it.

[yC]

Doesn't Ragnarok Frontier switched to running eAthena after the wipe?

[jblazer]

Nope

I'm positive it's not, since I help one of the GM's with coding NPC's.. in aegis.

[Star Platinum]

I agree that RO needs more players in general.  But it won't happen.

Too many other MMOs and other games out there.  Not many people would go pick one that's 10 years old.

But I disagree when you say we need a single server.  That would be horrible.  I like that there are many servers with different things to offer.  Though I do think we need less than the hundreds of RO servers with pops of 10.

[Sarin]

Regarding a "one big server" idea...

...how do you intend to stop people from making more servers?

[Noble]

Regarding a "one big server" idea...

...how do you intend to stop people from making more servers?

^ this
you can't. Many want to be GM, many want to run a server because they think they can run it better than others, many are corrupted gms, many are bored of RO, many are just trolls and so on...

[John Locke]

u know I have not loged this forum on years, but i want to state my opinion, RMS has not do any good to ragnarok, on the oposite side it has damaged it a lot, I sugested someway on the road this website to separate servers using oficial mechanics and not, dont think it has been done at all.

So a lot of posible players have gone play "fakeRO lvl 250 500" things and actually thought they had tried ragnarok online.
Also consider the effects of this huge amount of 250 500 lvl servers on gravity idea of "what is RO meant to be".

Im playing oficial european ragnarok now.

[Meta]

The private server world is full of people who wouldn't know ludology from lethargy, but still think they need to balance a game that thrives on imbalance. The thousands of people who still play RO are spread over hundreds of these hellscapes that call themselves RO servers.

The only solution is to nuke RO from orbit and start over.

[yC]

I can't help neither when people are keep making high rates.  I don't like the idea of playing RO THAT fast.  I can understand some people are done with the grinding at low to mid-rate servers after countless wipe/shut-down.  I wish there is a way to bar new players from jumping right into a high-rate server where the game isn't made to be played/learnt that way.  No cure for that, but then if people hate the time consuming leveling / grinding then RO or any MMO-RPG in general wouldn't please them.

[Triper]

Blame MOBA games =P

[leokimah]

MMO's have always been about the end game. A lot of people don't enjoy the grinding to get max level or killing thousands of the same monster to get equips anymore. MOBA's allow you to completely ignore that and play with/against people close to your skill level for the most part.

[Playtester]

The thing that bothered me about Ragnarok Frontier is that is has open PVP.

It will not be possible to please everybody with one server, so a veriety of servers is needed. This isn't the problem either. The main problem is that there are SOOOO many servers that are simply not managed well enough and then there are a few where the owner really cares about it, but those have a hardly any players.

I'm personally a fan of low rate servers that don't have any custom changes and I must say that for over a year, not a single server was any good in that regard. The really successful low rate servers like TalonRO have crazy customs and the other ones who really try to stay as close to official as possible either have staff that just had the right intention but no ability to execute it (easiest fact to notice it: renewal item descriptions! shows the staff doesn't care) or simply have less than even 100 active players.


My dream would be to have something like this:
- by default everything official like it was on 13.2 pre-renewal on kRO (not iRO)
- VIP always active for free for all players (that means you have the normal storage size, only 1% death penalty and 3x exp rates without paying, job change doesn't require cash shop item, etc.)
- drop rates should consider the official drop rate bug that increases all drop rates by 0.01% (unlike eAthena that doesn't emulate the bug by default), which effectively makes rares a bit more common without making common drops dropping too often
- no permanent custom items, spawn changes, etc.
- custom changes that are a part of an event are okay, for example "map of the week" where maps that usually never anybody ever goes to get an exp boost, they just should never be permanent, also event items would be fine as long as they only have a stat bonus during the event
- cash shop items that are not too P2W can be put as donation rewards, donation points should also be receivable through voting for the server
- rebirth allowed at level 95 (this was done on some official servers, since only endgame should be hard to level in and after addition of the rebirth system, there is no longer any point to let players go through tedious grind before it) or increased exp rates for higher non-trans levels
- hack/bot protection system, if I want lots of bots, I go play on official servers
- new episodes can be added (after all even pre-renewal players want new content), but the monsters stats and drops need to be adjusted to match pre-renewal, no renewal equips on a pre-renewal server; the adjustment of stats need to be in the spirit of pre-renewal RO not just some admin inputting random values for all stats (there are some formulas that were used when changing monster pre-renewal -> renewal, so those formulas can be figured out and reverted, it's not impossible)
- increase level range for parties (15) and 10% exp bonus for each party member (one of the few good things that came with renewal)
- availability to use @main, @autotrade... not sure about @autoloot, it's acceptable, though
- for those who don't like PVE / don't want to grind, there should be the possibility to create a PVP character that starts directly at max level, has prepared gear (but not perfect, prerably just upgraded to safe limit) but can't do PVE or trade anything, just participate in PVP, BG and WoE

Yup, that would be my dream server.

[yC]

Are you the real Playtester?  The one with the green (some orange) .. bird ... avatar on the old eA forum?  hey .. I only remember pictures.

You sound like it from your experience of the old RO world.  Yea I like low-rate and the less custom the better.  As I always said, this could be due to my first RO experience starts from official iRO not some crazy high-rate.  The new eps for pre-renewal is a major problem, I can't imagine how that can be handled nicely.  95 rebirth is super nice, consider renewal has the (what was that called?) group that give you level ranged quests for exp and items.  Pre-re is pretty much you have to know where to go and grind for ages.

It just hit me again yesterday that when aeternus died (or dying), I realize we need less of these big promise, big open, fast growing and fast dying server.  Not just Aeternus, there were Neu-RO, Arvis-RO, UV-RO etc etc just this year that attracted a huge population in a very short time frame and died shortly after reaching its peak.  I start to think did they all ran by the same people lol.  Usually you hear the lame excuse from behind the scene says 'oh the population isn't growing anymore let's start over' and then a sudden shut down.  These can hurt the community a lot more than the small scale servers.  They are killing the faith people have in private servers here and there.

[Playtester]

Yes, I'm Playtester from eA forums. I aborted the ship before it started sinking lol.

uv-ro was actually pretty nice, somewhat close to what I was looking for, but I was really bothered by the exp table that made leveling on early levels even easier (I don't want to just skip early gameplay, I guess I'm too nostalgic and miss my 12 member novice parties to fight Pickies and then one player is like "I have 9 vit, let me tank!!!").
The problem from uv-ro wasn't incompetent staff but rather the owner seemed to be more the PVE player and never really managed to understand what the PVP players needed if I recall correctly. He also kinda drifted away from close-to-official with small "adjustments". But in the end the owner of uv-ro was a really good programmer.

AeternusRO simply lacked ANY developer. That's a whole different story.

Opening a new server just won't work like this anymore. The good developers and server owners all have their long running servers that have too many customs for me. Where should we suddenly get a competent admin from who knows a lot about eAthena and what the players want and is competent enough to setup and maintain a server? I don't really have much hope that will happen.

I was thinking about opening a server myself, but even I wouldn't dare to say I have enough knowledge to be able to maintain one properly. I'd rather jump into an already well managed server and help out additionally.

What server owners should AT LEAST be capable to do:
- get pre-renewal eAthena running
- get the renewal client running on a pre-renewal eAthena server without any crashes (and pre-renewal item descriptions!)
- get Harmony or another hack-protection system running on it properly (no hackers, no banning of innocent players)
- know how when the client needs to be updated how to update Harmony as well (this is something even the best server owners have problems with)
- NOT making any promises or only small ones that can be fulfilled in 1-2 weeks (really if I check some websites I'm like "well I personally would need like 3 years or more to do all that" and in the end I figure out that it's the same for others)
- be able to understand what both PVE and PVP players want, explaining the plan to the players and then also STICK TO IT (if you promise PVE players a close-to-official experience, don't start to change it slowly; for PVP make an explanation of the concept and why you think it'll work and once players understand and accept it, execute it exactly like this)
- know how to do small fixes in the source code (many issues I've seen on servers can easily be fixed with a one-line change, yet they are never fixed because the server owner simply is unable to even understand the source code) or have a reliable developer who can do it and who you preferably know in real life (because otherwise he WILL disappear)

Only if this all stands properly, you should actually start a server. Getting GMs to keep the server clean and getting some dev to add some events or quests occasionally isn't the problem at all.

Note that Heimdallr, the admin of iRO (official server) has basically the same problems. Everything is just over his head already. 80% bots (literary!), many of his decisions aren't well accepted by players, he applies custom changes without really understanding why the Korean developer didn't do them, etc. Funny thing is that even his classic server had renewal item descriptions for a long time.

The hope of having "that one server" is fading away.

[Blaubeere]

Hello Playtester,

At first I want to thank you for your wonderful suggestions, they're great, I think.

I never ran a server myself, but I have contact to a Co-Admin, who already spoke with me about his upcoming server and it sounds good to me, so far.
My guess is, that you could be a great help with your suggestions to this server.

The server probably wants to open end of december. I'm talking about this one: http://forum.ratemyserver.net/server-discussion/anyone-interested-in-a-trans-class-9970-server-with-tweaked-formula's/
Validus is the Co-Admin there and Pano is the admin. I think you should get together making a great server, if it's for suggestions or development.

They did sound very promising to me so far. My hope is, that this server is going to be the next big p-server of RO.

I already contacted Validus about it, but he's still offline in skype.

Edit: And yes, I just registered for telling you this. I waaaant a new, great and innovating RO p-server, again... T_T
Please, let this be the chance for "that one server"!