NovaRO honest review

[TreasureEyeland]

~2 year player here, offering my very very honest review about this server and its GMs.

SERVER RATINGS
Stability: up most of the time, but with occasional lags and disconnections.
Availability: updates take few to several minutes only. Shutdown of server very rare.

COMMUNITY RATINGS
Friendliness: there's #support for newbies in the server but many trolls abound. Many incorrect information shared at #main but experienced players don't rectify at times.
New players are not allowed to ask for items but other players simply toss away those starter items.
Discrepancy between rich people (especially "Donators") are too apparent, especially on server culture and events.
Rich jerks are allowed to roam about and troll players but poor newbies who complain are instantly shut down and muted.
Advertises the server as newbie-friendly but in truth is more donator- or overgeared player-biased (more on this on "Eventfulness").

Eventfulness: semi-regular games act as a refresh from "grinding" which the server obviously but not blatantly promotes.
Server-wide competition events do not allow lee-way for less-geared players to prevail. It's all about grinding and donating to get better gear. Case in point - the latest King of DEEPS event.

--About the King of DEEPS--
Last day changes were done to a month long event which clearly discriminated against teams that used certain strategies.
GMs will simply offer the lamest of excuses, tagging those skills as "bugged" (they weren't - they were simply "not disabled" because of their failure to do so). They offer no apologies, show no remorse for their failure, and give no consolation - all to the discredit of other players' time, resources, and confidence.
They will empathize with well-geared players but not with thinking ones.
Event outcome discourages further participation in future events and disparages interest in the server proper.

GAME MASTER RATINGS:
Friendliness: Will say hello if you greet them, fair enough.
GMs stay 99% at pront and converse only with the players there. No effort to reach out to other players in other towns.
Some GMs, particularly the server owner, are ridiculously self-absorbed and are immune to criticism (read "Defiant"). Oh, he will dispute this too.

Availability: They're at Prontera every now and then. They sit down and converse with players. But it takes them a month to "fix" their event mentioned above which is located at, you guessed it, at Prontera.

Helpfulness: Answers queries of everyone, but make biased decisions towards overgeared, overdonating select.

GAMEPLAY RATINGS:
Economy: mostly dead market, takes weeks and even months to sell overupped items. Why? Because the gap between the rich and poor is huge and "encouraged". The rich don't need them, the poor can't afford them.

Guild competition: There's WoE, and that's that.

Class balance: Skill fixes here and there happen occasionally but classes don't really matter as much as gear does. With the inclination this server has on overgeared players, even non-dominant classes become dogs atop the food chain.

[Tokeiburu]

Heya,

I'll say the same thing as I replied to you on the forums regarding the King of the Deeps event (copy pasted)...!

Heya,

Yes, we did fix these skills on the last day of the event and for that I apologize. We would have blocked them since day one if we knew about them sooner, but that was unfortunately not the case here. To me however, that was where a big part of the problem came from: nobody reported this issue until the very last day, people simply assumed we knew. We didn't. We only recently learned that Ominous Moonlight + Warmer was used and that people sold services in Prontera to other players for Deeps Coins using this method. None of us had any idea prior to that, so obviously we blocked it.

As for the @duel command cheat and Mental Breaker, we also only found out that day as well. That one was easier to fix as only one team used it so far. Instead of reporting the issue however, the said team went ahead and silently used it, complained about us fixing it, accused the top team of cheating and then went on a RMS bad review train about us being bias. I must say, and maybe that's just me, but I do believe this behavior is utterly disgusting and really messed up. It's one thing to be upset about a bug being fixed, it's another to throw accusations around and attempt to damage the server afterwards. The bug was later reported by the team, only after we had already fixed and blocked it.

I will take the blame for us not finding out these bugs sooner however. For that, I apologize as well. It would have been much easier if these were blocked sooner and we wouldn't be in this situation right now. Be that as it may, our options became much more limited at that point. We would either purposely reward teams that cheated or we could reward the teams that didn't. Now I'm well aware some people won't see it this way, but the right thing to do here was easy. All the runs were recorded and all the skills inside the instance were logged, so figuring out which team did what was fairly easy.

I must say that I'm very proud of our staff for going that route as well. We knew this wasn't the best decision to take to avoid drama, we knew it would upset the top teams, and we knew we'd get a lot of crap for it. And yet, the staff took this decision anyway.

On a final and more personal note, the whole event just made me sad. I had to learn that only very few people actually report bugs. To those who did, I do want to say a big thank you; I really do appreciate your help towards making a better server for all of us. Not just for this particular event, but those who report bugs in general. I don't say it often enough, and sometimes I even take it for granted, but I'm really proud of you all. I know many of the people involved with this drama and it's somewhat hurtful to see them behaving in this fashion. This event had flaws, and I think it's fair of me to say that it wasn't what we had aimed for and that it caused all of us a lot of stress we didn't need.

[Ara]

I just want to say, that these are what the 2 disabled bugs were, to the best of my knowledge anyway.

Ominous Moonlight + Warmer:

The dummy in question had over 1 billion HP. Warmer + Ominous Moonlight did a fixed % of this HP every couple seconds.

From what I hear, people were getting around 1.8 billion damage with just a support sorcerer (which was a staple on every team, no gears required) and an Oboro (ungeared). Just those 2. For comparison, a geared DPS (spellfist, wind) and Warlock (extremely geared, chain lightning) and a Wanderer (ungeared, for bragi and Swing Dance) and was doing around 1.7b damage together. My numbers for the Warmer damage might be slightly off, but the 1.7 is from my own testing.

In addition, many people were unable to reach even 1.5b damage with 5 players. Would you really call the Warmer/Ominous Moonlight behavior not a bug?

Mental Breaker:

You need to be in a @duel to use this skill. However, @duel is (and was always) disabled on the event's map. When I got the message telling me that @duel was disabled on the map, I thought "oh, guess I can't use mentalbreaker" in this event.

To the best of my knowledge, you could still cast mental breaker like this:
1) 5 people enter the event map
2) A 6th person types @duel from outside the event
3) The 6th person types @invite(sorcerername) from outside the event
3) @invite, @accept, and @leave were not disabled on the map, so the sorcerer could @accept and @invite the warlocks on the team.
4) Every 30-40 seconds, the sorcerer would @invite each warlock, MBK them, and the warlocks would @leave right after.

I could be wrong, but this is the gist of what I heard about the MBK issue. MBK doubles MATK, which effective doubles a warlock's damage more or less.

Do these two really seem like "good strategies" and "not bugs?"


Also, wasn't it YOUR team accusing MINE of abusing THESE "exploits"? Skills that we didn't even use?

[yC]

You made a review topic previously that contain more opinion and was moved to here > http://forum.ratemyserver.net/rant-and-rave/novaro-the-great-pretender-warning-to-everyone/15/

No point to open another topic to include less details to try and fit into the review section.  Locking.