Having played there for a little while now, I want to give my bit on this server as well.
I don't know if my lack of too deep an experience with RO ended up hurting or helping me, but you really do need to re-look everything. I was a bit skeptical on starting there, as I was looking for a higher population sort of server since the smaller ones have always been incredibly clique-y as far as I had seen. So I started out as I had with every other server, keeping to myself until I knew my way around better as to not become that annoying pest that keeps bothering everyone with questions, but because I tried to stick with my old methods, I ended up doing a whole bunch of things wrong all at once. Something like...
"Okay, Acolyte! Off to the heal bombing~ Wait, heal has a cast time? This is awfully slow...What's that monster doing here? He's not even undead, so how am I supposed to heal bomb if this random monster spawning gives me stuff like this?! Ah geez, a bat and no agi up, guess I better burn some poti-Wait, why the crap do I have such high attack speed already?"
...
Unfortunately, a good chunk new players come with the mindset of "just another RO server to grind on"
Okay, so I can validate a good amount of what Mario's said already. So I posted about my poor start, and found...
Well that's why you have Holy Light. At L5 it does very decent damage, and it has no cast time.
Oh. That's different.
Then I tried talking on main, and was able to start talking with someone pretty easily.
Oh. Not cliquey.
Basically, I realized just how poorly my old methods got me starting out, and gave it a second try.
That's probably what most people giving Mou a shot need to do. This part worries me, since now that I've done just that, I've ended up really liking it and wanting to see what else is different. I can only imagine what new colors WoE will give once it starts to get competitive. However, Mou's changes and what I'd consider it's selling point (The emphasis on partying) are pretty much a really bad double-edged sword, especially since they almost made me quit too. For example:
Mou's changes are all well done, especially the ones made to balance out certain cards and builds, as well as diminishing returns to make it so stacking one thing so high that it makes you invincible, such as super HP regen with high defense, isn't really possible.
However, there are so many that it's hard to read through them all, and you may miss something important like I did and be driven away by that.Parties on Mou are highly encouraged and have bonuses such as 100% exp to all members while set to shared experience, as well as a different challenge with the tougher mobs.
But because of the low population, you don't always see these parties, so people leave and it's even harder to get a good population going.*I do have one thing with parties, however. When you get into one of the server's "super-parties", where everyone on at the time is able to organize themselves and go to one higher end dungeon, leveling does seem to go by quite quick. The fact that I didn't need too much gear other than some resistance to neutral damage and could just spam Hammer Fall on my blacksmith getting easy levels as I went makes me wonder what you meant when you were talking about leveling. When I got out of that party, I was able to finish up my last few levels pretty easily as well now that I knew how (and happened to have a bloody branch on me).
Basically, what I wanted to say was that you can't let Mou's changes drive you away. Once you get into them and are able to rethink your approach, you can start to see what's really going on in there. Also, Mou seems to have been growing pretty well lately, and since a lot of what Mou is comes from having a good sized population, it's getting better and better each day. It's hard to say all I want to about this server without feeling like I've left something out, so I have to hope I remembered everything with this.
(Hope I didn't hijack your review too much, just didn't want to make a new thread for it since there already was one. :x)
Edit: eep. The posts are almost two months old. ;-;