CookieRO

[Seravy]

Server History
I've started play on on CookieRO in February, when I found out that there is finally a fully-renewal based server around. It did provide what I was expecting, had fully renewal stat, refinement, mount, etc systems and formulas.

A lot has been changed since then, unfortunately for the worse.
It escalated to the point that there was a wipe yesterday.
Since I decided not to start over there again, all information in this review will reflect the pre-wipe server, but since the post-wipe server is the exact same thing with same rates and mechanics, this shouldn't matter much.

The greatest downside of the server used to be the attitude of the GM team.
While some bug reports got responded to quickly, and got fixed during the next maintenance, others were being completely ignored, with no answer whatsoever, not even a "Sorry, we can't fix this anytime soon", even when players bumped the topic, asking for a GM response.
One of these things was the high refine MATK bonus of weapons, it simply didn't work. While +15 and above weapons got +25 atk/refine level, the same MATK they were supposed to gain didn't exist.
Weapons also didn't have any variable damage bonuses from refinement, a +19 Composite Bow had the same amount of variable damage a +0 had. This topic has been ignored for like 6 months and is still being ignored.
While at first, we were told "The server is in open beta and we didn't expect this many players", when the server got out of open beta, it got worse. Updates completely stopped, and GMs became a rare sight. Apparently this was because one GM found another giving items to a certain player (items being consumables for woe), and the admin refusing to remove him from his position. I also heard this certain GM got into the team via some sort of a family relation.
This escalated things to the point that one day, that admin announced to leave and also replacing the entire GM team. Around the same time, the economy started to overflow by zeny, and in about a week, it was obvious to everyone that there is a zeny exploit around causing this. GMs were still nowhere to found for at least another week, then they announced a wipe suddenly.
Although the exploit was only item related (zeny, item and cash point duping bugs) they went and wiped characters as well, wasting all our work for no reason.

This is enough for history, now about the server itself :

Rates
25x/25x/25x was promised for post-wipe rates but some people complained about it being too high so it was reduced to 25x/25x/10x on the whim of the admin, which is about the same as the pre-wipe rates.
It is easy to level on these rates, with decent equipment, you can max a character out in just a few days. Of course, since there was a wipe just yesterday, you can't expect to have decent equipment if you join now, but in a few weeks or months, the economy will probably start up again, and it'll be easier. 10x items are fairly good for normal items, and make most mvp drops to be 100%. While this is ok for mvp drops that get used up by refining or enchanting, things like variant shoes that you only need one of will end up droping in price significantly on the long term, which makes them a lot more accessible.

Core game mechanics
-Fully Renewal based stats system
This system makes the game a lot more enjoyable to play, and pvm a lot more balanced and easier. It lets you distribute your stat points more freely than before.
-Renewal Refinement system, refine everything up to +20
While the system itself is working, there are some problems with it. First of all, the rates above +10 feels significantly higher than what was posted about them on the forums. For example, level 1 weapons are supposed to be 70% from +10 to +11, yet I have never seen one fail. I also managed to make a +20 lv1 weapon myself, and it "only" took about 1500 HD ores and one +10 weapon to make. I have seen even +16 lv4 weapons around, so the refine chances are definitely higher than what was announced on the server forums.
Due to the obvious difference in result between normal and enriched/HD ores, using normal ores for refining is generally not recommended unless you refine a worthless item. This forces you to either donate, or buy the cash points from other players for those ores. While I can't call donations imbalanced, especially since you can trade them all, you do need a lot of those ores if you want good weapons and want to make them yourself. The good side of this is that this means the server won't ever go down due to lack of funds, and the obvious downside is that if you can't find people willing to donate, you'll have a hard time getting your equipment.
-Renewal Mount system
With the item, Reins of Mounts, you can get on a mount which allows you to move about at the speed of what agi up provides, but it is not cumulative with agi up, and many classes can't use it (this includes any class that has some sort of a mount, even if you don't have the skill for it or use it.)
-Renewal Costume system
You can convert any headgear into a costume version of the same item. Wearing it will make this item appear on your character even when you actually wear another item for that other item's effect.
Unfortunately, this also had a bug, the costume headgear is supposed to lose its weight but it doesn't, so using heavy headgear as costumes is not recommended.
-Buyer shop
This is the opposite of vending, you set an item, price and amount, and players can sell you the item at that price. Works with autotrade.
-Dual Clienting works and is allowed
-Afk hunting or leveling works and is allowed (autoloot+autocast or homunculus)
-Instance dungeons have the official cooldown time, and the official bug that allows you to re-enter in another party into another dungeon before the dungeon expires is also available.
During beta, cooldowns used to be 1 day, but it was increased, making recruiting a hopeless, long process. A lot of parties never managed to start due to not enough players being able to join, and those that did, generally spent about 1-6 hours on recruitment.
-There is an custom instance dungeon, Endless Cellar available
This is a copy of endless tower, but has all monsters ET doesn't instead, like Dracula, Kiel, Gloom, or Thanatos. The top floor has bio3 mvps, Great Demon Baphomet, and Pori Pori, but almost no one ever goes there because the 99th floor has the 6 bio3 minibosses on it, that have no drops and are really hard to beat.

Community
I'm somewhat of a loner, so I can't say that much about this, except that there generally are public ET/EC parties that anyone can join, although the increased cooldown times did made these a lot harder to organize.
The server doesn't have a @changegm command, so when a guild leader goes inactive, the members are forced to quit and make another guild instead, which doesn't really help.

Donations
They are mostly the items you can get on official servers by donating. Nothing game breaking, but they do provide significant advantage, and are a must if you want to play seriously (ores for refining, most mid and lower headgears, some really good upper headgears, tokens of ziegfried, etc are all cash point only), so look forward to spending most of your zeny on buying these from other players once you have all your normal gear completed.

Customization
Customization is minimal and rare, other than the pretty significant Endless Cellar. The lack of updates on some skills do make the server be very different from officials though. Many sorcerer skills don't work, most performer skills are outdated or bugged, etc. Even though the Gm team said "Any updates on kRO you can expect on this server in about 2 weeks later", this has never been true. While some updated were implemented fast, others still haven't happened from 4-5 months kRo updates. A good example of this was the earthquake monster skill, which did party wipe amounts of damage (like 100k on each member in a 10+ people party) and was only fixed in May or something, while EQ got implemented in RO like 3-4 years ago?

Stability
I had no complaints here. While there were a few crashes, and sometimes it took several ours till an admin was able to reboot the server, it is to be expected when adding so much new stuff. The server has never been down for more than 8 hours, even after a crash, and there was like ~10 crashes in the 8 months I played.

Economy
Other than the already mentioned non-refinable equipments like Variants, most other stuff had a stable price while the server was in good shape. After the last maintenance 2 months ago, probably due to too many players quitting, prices started to drop though, and economy stalled. Then came the zeny exploit and a huge inflation, then the wipe. Since wipe was just a few days ago, there isn't any economy on the server yet, as no one has anything to sell, nor zeny to buy.

GM team
As most of the GMs left the server recently, I can't comment on them much, except that wiping characters when there was no need, and not providing the rates they first announced, not to mention the connection troubles many people had with the new client shows that the GM team isn't really on the top of the things, and there is a reason for worry. Since there already was a wipe on the server, you can never know when to expect another one again.

Summary
Pro
-Full renewal based game mechanics and features, pretty much the ONLY such server at the moment
-Endless Cellar Instance dungeon
-Dual Clienting and Afk leveling/farming is allowed
-Easy to level up compared to most midrate due to renewal and the paradise quests as a beginner.

Con
-The server had a wipe just recently, so no economy yet
-The server had an unplanned wipe in its history, so it's hard to trust the GM team being capable, your progress is in risk of a possible future wipe. If it happened once, it might happen again.
-The server lost a large part of the GM team, and the wipe most likely made a lot of players quit.
-Donation items are important for endgame, especially ores for refining.
-Several skills not work, and many are bugged.
-The promised customization to balance skills gravity messed up hasn't happened yet, and with the change of the admin, it is unknown if it's still planned or not.
-The server got delisted from RMS the day the wipe got announced, probably intentionally by the GM team to hide the bad reviews they got during that last month and prevent people from posting more bad reviews.

[yC]

Thanks for the background history and the clear review on various issues.

I noticed bad reviews started popping up to the Cookie RO listing not long ago, actually I didn't notice they took the listing down until you mention it.  It should be related to the wipe.

You opened my eyes on the gm issues.  I mean I was on couple times in the last few months but I don't have the time to pay attention to the gm team etc.  It looked like it was a promising server to begin with and has been for a while.  The refine thing wow .. how can they leave that for so long.  I was a magic class so probably didn't notice that as well. 

The Cookie RO team from what I seen and heard, are the people that heads 3ceam, releases new dungeon scripts and the renewal database svn.  They must not be lazy people and they should have the knowledge to fix a majority of bugs.  It shouldn't end like this.  There must be something wrong or I could only guess that the core people are busy with something else more important. 

I hope they can rebuild itself.  Are people quitting simply going back to school without a server or they moved somewhere else?

P.S.  Your signature ... are those your chars that just got wiped clean into RIP?

[ragnazorg]

@y C afaik Cookie RO's GM are not Heads of 3ceam.

[yC]

Hmm, maybe I did have my memory mixed up.  The scripts and db only then.  Sorry if I offended the head of 3ceam

[Randfeon]

+19 Composite Bow had the same amount of variable damage a +0 had.

AFAIK, that's a problem with RO itself - for whatever reason, bows don't get the variable extra damage from overgrading. Blame Gravity!

This forces you to either donate, or buy the cash points from other players for those ores.

Couldn't you also vote for cash points as well? I had about 10k points lying around before the wipe, and I've never donated a single penny.

I'm sad to find out about this wipe, as this server was what the only thing that motivated me to play again some time ago due to it being basically the only Renewal server by then. I doubt I'm going to bother making my characters again, especially since now I absolutely have no will nor time to play...
So yeah, thanks for the cookies, they were pretty delicious at the time. I hope they don't let bugs go unnoticed again in the future, and for God's sake please let there be no more wipes. All those quests I needed to do to make my Dragon Vest/Shirt (don't remember) and Bradium Brooch took way longer than they should. and rgs were nerfed as well so noooo

[Cawliflower]

At first, I actually thought the server was doing pretty good - this was awhile back. This surely is an interesting review though. Judging by the reviews they have on RMS, however, there seems to be some internal problems.

Haha yC... insert foot.

[Seravy]

P.S.  Your signature ... are those your chars that just got wiped clean into RIP?

Yes, they are. I was kinda forced to triple the amount of characters I had when they increased ET cooldown from 1 day to 7, just 2 months before the wipe.

AFAIK, that's a problem with RO itself - for whatever reason, bows don't get the variable extra damage from overgrading.

If I remember well, there wasn't any on my +17 Lich Bone Wand either, at least no variable MATK. Didn't really pay attention to this because the missing high refine MATK bonus was the real problem, but I couldn't observe any actual effect on damage from recognized spell, which means no variable MATK present. (+17 should have a LOT of variable MATK so I should have been doing noticeably better with rec. spell, but I didn't.)

Couldn't you also vote for cash points as well?

Yes, you could, but let's be reasonable. If you hunt for example 10-20 of an item a day for refining, you'll need like 20-50 enriched ores for them. By voting, you can get...6/day at most. And this is just the ores, for one item, from one day of farming. If you are a rich player in zeny, you can expect to buy a lot more stuff to refine/day. Also, all lower headgears, and slotted mid ones are cash, plus some good upper ones (like Anubis helm that is a very important gear for MVPing). In general a single character would need the following donations :
-Slotted mid headgear (2x5k points as slotting is 50% chance)
-Lower headgear (3-6k points depending on class and purpose)
-20-400 enrichened oridecons depending on weapon and desired refinement level
-100-1500 HD bradiums depending on weapon again (+20 comp bow costed me 1500, but +18 can be made from ~100)
-10-50 pieces of enr. elunium for every piece of armor (if you only want +7-+8, if you want +14, a lot lot more)
-1 Gym Pass Box (4k points, some classes don't need one but most do)
-Anubis helm if you want to MVP, other upped headgears for other purposes (3-6k if you need one)

This is well over 25k points for a single character but you generally have more than one. A vote gives 50 points. You do the math. This is just basic equipment, a +4 donation headgear, some +7-8 armors, one decent weapon, one mid and lower headgear for one character. If you want some pieces of +9 or above armor, +7 or above anubis helm, etc, you can look at a much much higher amount.
Consumables like Token of Siegfried (very useful in ET), Kafra cards, etc also not included.
Voting is only an option if you play like an hour a week, and have only one character that needs to be geared up.

Are people quitting simply going back to school without a server or they moved somewhere else?

I only know about myself, I'm quitting RO and started to play another game.

I've checked the server forums today, and I'm disappointed. Since the wipe, there seems to be some serious new bugs appearing that weren't present ever before (like special pharmacy, catalogs, and some other skills crashing the game, heal requiring cure and cure requiring heal on the crusader skill tree so neither can be learned,  Detecting skill having no effect, Stalker copied skills being lost on logout, and who knows what else), so I think they are having problems with the skills of the remaining staff.