SMRO>>>>>>>novaro

[hexonie]

After playing on novaro for a year I got turned off by the huge amount of grinding in the endgame. Several players quit after the bad choices bade by the GM after implementing Bio5 towards the end of last year along with many other flaws of the server. After writing my review the admin of novaro told me to find a better home and what can I say - SMRO was the best decision I ever made.

I was a bit skeptical starting on SMRO because of the number of new things I saw it felt almost alien to me. I needed to confirm for myself if all these things were actually on kRO. I had to dig through a lot of the kRO changelogs(not the divine pride ones, but the ones that are on the official website). I had to go through a bunch of the inven forums as well to confirm many of the things I saw on SMRO.

Stability/Availability: 7/10

SMRO was pretty laggy for me and I would barely get a decent ping from it. I changed my IP and voila, problem solved, turned out it was my IP causing issues all along. It used to crash quite often when  Helheim opened up but things seem to be a lot better now.
novaro on the other hand also gives me a decent good ping and for a well-established server over the years seems to be stable enough. In terms of bugs though, novaro really failed me when compared to the GODLY server that is SMRO. I noticed a bug report from 2017 lying dormant and waiting for "testing" meanwhile a well-known player on the server abuses it to farm his stuff. Recent patches on SMRO shows that this bug is indeed a thing and has been fixed. No one can abuse it anymore! Makes me feel really good.

Community:
10/10
It's obvious that there are a lot more players in novaro than on SMRO. But the 2.2k population is definitely a lie at least in terms of active players. Draft WoE which used to be the main show of novaro was canceled because no one showed up for it this week. With the population, the server boasts it should at least have a pretty decent BG situation but its hard to get BG going. SMRO currently has bugged BG but Lunar, the GM, has shown enough skill to prove he can easily fix something like this. Gramps party isn't on SMRO Helheim but they have bounty boards which allow you to level in parties together and whenever I'm online I see a leveling party going. And because of the lovely map-wide kill count, people don't have to cluster together. On novaro, the Gramps parties are absolute cancer, if someone is done and leaves it makes the whole party suffer, not to mention needing almost everyone to get the party started. Instances on NovaRO need you to be in small parties to get the most loot out of them. Meanwhile, SMRO is a gift that keeps on giving, it promotes a full party to run any instance because of its beautiful Advanced Loot System. Everyone gets the loot equally be it a 4man party or a 12 man party. It's just orgasmic.

Game Masters:
10/10

Lunar is a really fun GM to mess around with. He knows a lighthearted joke when he sees one. Meanwhile, GMs on novaro though being helpful, aren't as tolerant as Lunar is. I really do have fun having conversations during my downtime with the GMs on SMRO. Wish my older GM was nicer to me when I made fun of him just for the memes.

Game-play (10/10)

This is where the biggest differences are:

The economy of SMRO was reaching a point of inflation when the mighty hammer had to be put down for obvious reasons on certain farming maps. It is slowly stabilizing to represent a decent economy not full of numbers ending in way too many 0's. There is absolutely no need to donate to the cash shop since everything is easily available for free. After speaking to Lunar it occurred to me that the man absolutely hates the cash shop! He has made it so that everything in kRO's cash shop is available for free by all means in the game. Even the silly cash shop eggs in kRO which give random rewards ranging from worth your money to worth a single jellopy. Love how all the systems in the server are in place. Nova, on the other hand, has the cash shop stuff being sold by players, but where does it initially come from? You have to open your wallet for it or get it from the measly daily rewards recently implemented which takes a lot of time and isn't enough to refine. And speaking of refine, SMRO has a very very very good refine system which needs you to acquire one piece of gear and get it to high refines. Novaro, on the other hand, is a joke compared to this - you will need literally 100s of the gear to refine it. Imagine farming 16.1 robes and refining them to +10. Absolute hell, it's torture. I almost broke down from the pain of breaking those Flattery robes in Nova. Meanwhile, SMRO has systems in place that allow you to get your mind off the endless grinding and farming allowing you to have a life outside of RO. A game actually giving a f*** about it's players mental, physical and social state, just amazing.

Guild competition:(1/10)
SMRO has a lack of PvP currently. Mostly due to the BG being borked and WoE guilds focussed on farming PvM currently. But I do have hopes for this system to drastically improve and pick off as the most active PvM servers. As mentioned above, draft WoE, novaro's biggest attraction, had no one playing on it this week, which gives you a good estimation of the actual active player count. BG is also pretty time consuming to just get started there. Just a sad situation and I wish nothing but good luck and improvement to it.

Class Balance:
10/10
I usually play the most off-meta classes because I absolutely hate sticking to the meta. And hey, guess what, my weird whacky builds actually work and pay off. I can actually have fun playing on this server. I don't care what the best DPS class is as long as whatever build I theory crafted bloody hell worked. I couldn't make the things I do here work in Nova because of severe gear limitations and the grind I have to put into obtaining and refining said gears. So far, the refine system seems to be the backbone of novaro's monetary gains so I won't complain but I would prefer somewhere I don't have to open my wallet to get s*** done.

Overall Shining Moon RO (Helheim) has given me more of an authentic kRO experience than NovaRO ever did(even though that was what it was advertised as and that's what got me to play it). From the events to the gameplay, it all gives me nothing but authentic kRO vibes from all the digging and research I did on kRO's official changelogs and the inven forums.

The toxic attitude of the GMs and few GM lapdogs, some toxic players and the overall lack of decent gameplay ultimately made me leave Novaro but thanks to his reply on my review I found a new home in  SMRO and Lunar has been nothing but a pal to me like he is to all the other players on his server. An absolute darling both him and his wife Crescent, his team of GMs and all the players that helped me accommodate in SMRO. 

[Deegs]

Don't forget that nova has indirectly admitted to the failure of his refine system by making changes to equipment by lowering the refinement amount required for said effects to work. He wouldn't outright admit such a thing because it's already heavily implied that the sheep of the server open their wallet for enriched elus/oris  nice authentic kro experience~