Private servers and me a lesson from lowrate servers.

Started by tristar, Feb 09, 2013, 09:28 AM

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tristar

Hi I hope this message gets into anyone who's looking for a server to play RO.
I've been playing RO since alpha state (only first class available) from offical servers to many private servers.
My first server was eRO (iRO before it changed name) I was playing there until it went out of beta and goes P2P.
It was that time I starting to look for a private server to play,my first big private server that I play was EuphRO.
It was a hugh and alot of people playing there until GM lacking of updates some players leave and find a new server.
There was a rumor server went down because GM corruptions so I move on and change the server I was playing small private servers like paradiseRO.
But unknown reasons server went down again so I keep changing until I found EternityRO it was like EuphRO it was hugh and big they said no corruption GMs.
I settled here and made like 7 characters here I was playing there until population goes down GM said we need a wipe but everyone had a high expectation for relaunch.
I was one of them too so here we go again for EternityRO V2 but history keeps repeating itself.Admin said they busy with real life lacking of updates players starting to decrease.
They wiped again and relaunch with V3 but I'm not going to participle with them this time.I had enough with this cycling,I changed the game to Aion.
I went to play a private server name InfiniteAION it was really a great game alot of people there and then offical server launch a F2P model the populate of IA decreasing.
Server begins with lacking of updates and GMs suddenly busy with real life and couldnt check forum to communicate with people anymore,they shut down the server without notice.

RO and AION private servers are same.They promising u many great things said no wipe no shut down ever but in reality its depend on server population that keep server alive once pop decrease donation stop no more update it will leading to shut down of the server.

Dont trust in a private server.  /x
If u're looking for a server to play do play in offical server,I already got my lesson from private servers and never again playing in one.

iRO is the best.  /no1

yC

I agree with your realization, but I do agree with the time it take for you to learn this lesson (+10 yrs ... from the alpha times).

I think most of us know about this in our heart, that's why there are mid-high rate server exists.  For those that are sick of this pain but still want to have fun in RO, pick a less painful rate with the wipe/shut in mind before start. 

The general idea is "do not trust any promise", human will change and when they change any promise will be forgotten or ignored.  That's life ...

Then there are others that want to change this "busy life shut server" cycle and open up their own server, promise there will never be shutdown or wipe.  Well guess what, they grow older and life/school/work get into their lives = busy then you know the story all over again.

iRO ... I can't say it's the best.  It's stable and it's company run GMs are paid so that remove your worries.  It depend if you want to play an ultra low-rate and compete with professional bots and zeny sellers. 



Playtester

iRO isn't exactly good. Extremely cash shop heavy and the majority of the population are bots and nobody really cares about hunting them or at least adding some better bot protection to it. Also official servers are missing features that for me are vital to be able to play the game properly like a global chat channel. Even on a private server with only 20 players and a main chat I can find people to party with easier than on iRO because there I have to travel from town to town and ask everyone I see (and mostly those are bots so they obviously don't reply). Also you can't really say that the iRO staff is more competent. They can't do many of the changes that basically every good private server admin can do and when they do their custom DB changes they are often not very well thought through or so custom that it makes the official servers feel more custom than private servers. So I dunno, it's hard to play on official servers if they aren't well managed at all.

You are right, private servers will rarely last forever or they wipe, but there are often good reason for a wipe. Wipes are needed to get a larger population again because players will only want to join new servers usually. You shouldn't really blame the staff members, it's also the players. If players would prefer long lasting servers over those that just launched the situation would be completely different.

Admins losing interest is also a problem, true. Not all admins are like that, though. Finding a good private server is all about learning to understand the staff and evaluating how serious and realistic they are with their expectations. And of course you are always free to join one of the servers that already lasted 5 years and didn't even close down despite only have 10-50 players. Then the chances that the server will remain for several years is pretty high.

Also nobody tells you that the official servers don't close down. euRO was closed too. And just a month ago Trickster NA was closed, despite being one of the most popular old-school MMORPGs and very similar to RO. Same can happen to iRO too.

So I dunno. What I'm thinking is I take a server that seems promising, I hang around on forums to see how the staff reacts to bug reports and stuff and when I'm convinced it will last then I start playing. Even if that server closes one year later, I don't really regret playing it, because I had a lot of fun. Honestly I'm really happy that I played on EternityROv2 and v3, even though it closed down in the end, because I found several friends there and had a lot of fun playing with them.

Of course it'd be cool if there was a well managed server with big population that keeps the population forever and never closes down, but that probably won't happen. Even if the staff is perfect, fixes all reported bugs and doesn't lose interest, the population will also start to drop eventually, because the older the server, the less new players will join as explained above.

Fruit Pie~

Well, OP, that's how private servers go. I've seen some that were literally made to scam players out of donations and then quickly dismantled. Some have been made by starving college students and are still up for years, despite nobody playing there anymore.

Being official, you can expect it to be the first hit in Google for "ragnarok online", as well as the one every MMO site links to, so you can expect it to be heavily populated and most of that population seems quite happy in dropping 10 bucks for a basic newbie kit for their new characters every now and then, so you can expect it to last for a long time. If every iRO player happened to die of fat-induced heart attacks at the same time then yeah, I could see it going down, too.

My point is, of course low population means doomed server, someone's gotta foot the bill (unless you fit one of those two extremes up there). Also...


Quote from: Playtester on Feb 10, 2013, 11:11 AM
iRO isn't exactly good. Extremely cash shop heavy and the majority of the population are bots and nobody really cares about hunting them or at least adding some better bot protection to it. Also official servers are missing features that for me are vital to be able to play the game properly like a global chat channel. Even on a private server with only 20 players and a main chat I can find people to party with easier than on iRO because there I have to travel from town to town and ask everyone I see (and mostly those are bots so they obviously don't reply). Also you can't really say that the iRO staff is more competent. They can't do many of the changes that basically every good private server admin can do and when they do their custom DB changes they are often not very well thought through or so custom that it makes the official servers feel more custom than private servers. So I dunno, it's hard to play on official servers if they aren't well managed at all.

You are right, private servers will rarely last forever or they wipe, but there are often good reason for a wipe. Wipes are needed to get a larger population again because players will only want to join new servers usually. You shouldn't really blame the staff members, it's also the players. If players would prefer long lasting servers over those that just launched the situation would be completely different.

Of course it'd be cool if there was a well managed server with big population that keeps the population forever and never closes down, but that probably won't happen. Even if the staff is perfect, fixes all reported bugs and doesn't lose interest, the population will also start to drop eventually, because the older the server, the less new players will join as explained above.
Oh man, you almost got me there with that "good pserver changes" and "iRO is custom" stuff. XD Good show.

...you're not kidding.

Pserver RO is a stagnant game - low rates in particular suffer the most from this. What changes are you talking about? The warpers and healers? You can't be serious. Hell, some of the more popular low rates adamantly REFUSE to stick to standard kRO just to make the whole thing harder, more boring or more tedious (sometimes just to eke out a few extra donations out of players who want it easier).

Say what you want about iRO, but the staff is trying to make RO a better game by changing what they can. You can't say the same about the Pserver community, which has apparently been stuck in 2006 for better part of a decade.

FAKE EDIT : yC, as a professional bot (?), I take offense to your post. :/ On a more serious note, iRO is surprisingly fast (3x to 6x floating rates, Eden gear, Renewal) compared to the usual low rate server antics.

Triper

iRO is actually fast and even faster if you get inside a guild with friendly people filled with gods+mvp cards that will leech your chars as soon as they see you as a good member as long as you help somehow.

Pre-Renewal it was incredible fast abusing GTB+Megs+HW respawns+manuals at stairs at bio 3 as soon as you can go there and before it, thors leech ftw. You just need an archer+gypsy with humming+sp items+High Priest for that at lv 1.

Renewal is even faster[until last jobs that actually take a bit to get on 3rds] with the stuff already said by Fruit Pie but it seems to make more parties actually exist[well, at least a bit more thx to Eden Quests].

iRO devs also have some problems[or had, they seem to now have better authority on this so maybe something changed] with what they can change. Due to how the server was made and the contracts signed with Gravity, all the changes that they want to do have to be checked first by the kro devs making everything being slow to be changed/added.

And as Playtester said, they really need to add a Global Chat to RO officials. Every single mmorpg or ro pserver nowadays has it and it's like a must, official RO not having it looks lame but I guess I know why they don't add it - zenny sellers :c even if a filter for some of those words could work temporary for that.

Fruit Pie~

Quote from: Triper on Feb 10, 2013, 07:40 PM
iRO is actually fast and even faster if you get inside a guild with friendly people filled with gods+mvp cards that will leech your chars as soon as they see you as a good member as long as you help somehow.

Pre-Renewal it was incredible fast abusing GTB+Megs+HW respawns+manuals at stairs at bio 3 as soon as you can go there and before it, thors leech ftw. You just need an archer+gypsy with humming+sp items+High Priest for that at lv 1.
What's up, iRO bro?

If you want a picture of iRO, imagine Archers killing Kasas. Forever. (never had access to a GTB, unfortunately, so couldn't try the HW thing)

EDIT : Just so this isn't a meaningless post, I want to say that Triper's got it right about the iRO team. They have no autonomy to make changes, which is what I meant by "trying their best". There's just no fighting Gravity. Lord knows they're lucky enough to be able to allow RCX in iRO (bRO wasn't so lucky).

Playtester

Nah, I wasn't talking about custom NPCs. More like main chat, bot protection and reverting several renewal updates (but without removing all the renewal content). Not to mention that the rAthena engine is much more performant and less laggy than Aegis.

I dunno, I really would like to play on official servers because I really like it close-to-official and since I hated renewal I tried out iRO classic, but I just couldn't bear it. No main chat, bots and even bot-trains on every map, nobody talks with you, client is completely outdating and doesn't including any of the useful improvements from renewal, content is outdated, every time I visit a town I'll get spamed by gold sellers... I just couldn't take it. EternityRO was 100 times better than that. And if you consider that 90% of the actual player base are bots, they don't have much more real players than private servers anyway. Even when EternityRO had only 200 players left, I could still easily find a party, but I could hardly find one on officials.