Pure-RO: Many Issues

[RMS Shin]

Hello RMS Community,

This will be my first review so please bear with me.

Pure-RO started off in March and it started off with a blast. There was tons of potential with the community and staff and loads of updates which made the staff seem very dedicated. The server itself wasn't too bad. With only moments of lag, over all, it was completely playable and I personally had a ton of fun.

Soon after, 3 big guilds left and the server became less than full. Currently at the time of writing, there are 52 "players" online where 36 of them are in Prontera, 8 of which are non-venders who don't reply to my "hello". If you love small communities then definitely Pure-RO is where you'd want to be.

I initially had the thinking that I would like to stay in a small community because my voice could be heard more and there would be potential for the server to grow. That is why I decided to stay long past any real player activity. I decided to monitor the situation and then write a review about it a few months later. Well this is my review.

Server Activity

As of this moment:

- PvP has seen 2 people total in the last week.
- The only castle for WoE is owned by a dead guild with 4 players and they've held it for close to a month now.
- Parties are a rare occurrence and requires a ton of recruiting spanning close to 30 minutes to start one up.
- BG requires 3 vs 3 (6 people) to start yet no one on the server wants to do so.

A player named parental guidance (Biochemist) tried to get some PvP action going by writing in global chat that she would pay 1 Million Zeny to any player who goes into PvP and kills her. Needless to say, she kept her 1 Million zeny easily.

WoE is currently dead. The same castle has been owned by a "dead" guild with no guild leader.

Parties are fun! But not here. I tried to recruit a ton of people by adding active players onto my friends list. It worked out initially but now I have no clue where 70% of my friend list has gone. Either way, parties are a rare occurrence so expect to level solo.

BG initially required 5 vs 5 to start. This was before the three big guilds I mentioned earlier left. Even then, apparently it was hard to recruit players for BG because the player requirement was lowered to 3 vs 3. And now with less than 20 "active" players during the US Time zone, it's once again, impossible to start up BG.

GM Staff

The staff are helpful when you need it. You can ask them many things from clarifying rules to doing something interesting. The only problem is..actually finding any staff. To try and keep this review as fair as possible, I won't name any names but for the longest time on Pure-RO, it was maintained by Helios the owner and two GM. Let's say GM A was the main GM and was the very initial GM. This person I haven't seen or talked to in over 2 months. I've PM'd him before and I've tried to catch him in game. He has yet to appear on either and even now with a quick search over forums, you won't be able to see any new posts from him in well over a month.

GM B, is a somewhat active but very helpful GM. He's willing to listen and used to be active. He now is similar to GM A and can only be seen sometimes.

Helios the main man, Admin of the server, has only been seen by me twice in my 4 month stay at Pure-RO. Both times were before maintenance where he was there to give a countdown before server would be updated.



Economy:

The economy for Pure-RO is pretty tough to describe. With only a handful of active players, expect to do a lot of hunting for yourself. Prices are pretty fair I suppose, a bit on the higher end based on initial pricing of items from when there were still over 100 players. But with no end purpose of these items, it's hard to decide how the economy is. You can judge it for yourself if you decide to play.

Forum:

The forums are usually a place where you can chit chat with players who aren't in your time zone, perhaps buy and sell gear, and start conversations. At the time of writing, there has only been 25 people online during the entire day and no sign of Helios again. Forums for Pure-RO are a daily thing. You can start a topic, and then wait 24 hours for maybe one or two replies and repeat.

Donations:

If you're looking for a server with extremely balanced donation items. Then Pure-RO is your end game server. With no equipement overpowering other NPC obtainable gears, you don't have to worry about that rich kid next door who will just buy his way to elite-ship. Probably one of my favorite features of this server.

With the server as is, it also begs the question, just how much donations vs personal pocket money is Helios using to pay for server hosting fees. I personally am not sure as most server owners keep this secret.

Bugs and Misc.

I got extremely bored one day and decided to go around seeking out what bugs I could find. On the same day, I discovered 3 major bugs which are extremely abusable. The staff have yet to discover what bugs they are minus one which I told GM A and Helios about a month ago and to this day has yet to be fixed. Lovely.

An active player and a friend of mine recently had an issue where he couldn't log in whatsoever. The topic posted was on June 7th and a solution was finally found on June 22nd. I'll leave any personal feeling out of this and let you decide for yourself. At the time of writing, the topic is still active and can be found here: Pure-RO forums -> Support -> Technical issues -> "Can't Log in".

Overall impression:

The server had a lot of potential and I was one of the people trying to welcome all new players and trying to get them to stay. If you wish to be part of a small community, then Pure-RO is definitely where it is at. I personally gave it a try and after my 4 month stay, I think I will not be calling this server my home.

[iceb0x720]

I was a player of pure-ro once, it was a very good server and the GMs were all active.

[isen]

Just started for 2 weeks, needless to say that the server wasn't as active as I hope it would be and I have to agree with the OP. For the 2 weeks ish of stay, the BG only started twice.

While I'm trying to settle down in the server hoping the server will get better and more players will join because it's summer anyway, we should be getting more players, but unfortunately people in this server didn't seemed care about new comers which was pretty sad. My LFG thread went for a week un-replied, in game main chat is pretty dead, saying hi over the main chat will result in total silence for atleast 10min. If the community itself didn't even bother or motivated to keep the server alive, why should I join this server and spend time on it?

[Wyvern]

What made the guilds leave the server in the first place? I played here before, but I only stayed temporarily while waiting for another server to open. It had lots of potential like you described, but a month or so later, I kept seeing the population declining, mostly after the first few WoEs. Glad I didn't invest more time into the server as it has come to this now.

[Kagamine Rinto]

I'm the person who was unable to log in for a couple weeks and I have to say Shin's review is pretty fair.  If you want to have fun on this server you really need to be in a good guild.  I can get into 1-3 parties everyday and usually bg will run every day or 2, but usually the parties are only guildies and the BG are 3+ guildies.  Also I was sad to come back from my trip to find out you quit.

@remia CBP seems like a guild that hops around a lot, they left EvolveRO after staying about as long.  I believe  there was some drama about killing SM where people would tele it, activate it's slaves AI and mob drop.

[RMS Shin]

Sorry Len. I had a blast partying with you and chatting in Prontera. I'm actively searching for a new server to call my home. Perhaps if that happens I'll give you a shout.

I tried to remain as impartial as possible to this server and I'm glad I came across fair in the review.

[Kagamine Rinto]

I've looked around and there's really no other good LR that aren't overly customized. I actually get lots of people on Pure tell me they spent the weekend looking for another server but there really isn't a better one.  You really don't get too many choices for LR's nowadays unfortunately.  If I were to stop playing on Pure I'd probably have to quit RO altogether for a few months until another promising server showed up.  Also Flopsy was disappointed that you were gone too .  If you find a server pm me on here though and I might check it out with you.

[RMS Shin]

Yeah Flopsy sent me a PM over RMS forums and I said that if I found any amazing LR server, i'd spread the word.

I think i'll probably be on a 1 month absence from RO.

Finished my job in Japan and going to travel before returning back to Toronto. Hopefully find a good server sometime soon!

[Kagamine Rinto]

Good, we'll be basically in the same time zone

[Daletos]

@remia CBP seems like a guild that hops around a lot, they left EvolveRO after staying about as long.  I believe  there was some drama about killing SM where people would tele it, activate it's slaves AI and mob drop.

#Offtopic:

Actually most of the guilds that were on Pure RO are still at Evolve RO. I'm not a CBP member or representative, but they did not quit/move from Evolve they just fused into another guild (WTFJH) to get bigger numbers I think since all the guilds on Evolve are pretty large in WoE. Basically in short everyone has acknowledged Pure has been dead for 1-2 months now is and on its death bed waiting to die (slowly?).

#Ontopic:

I'm not sure why Pure began to die either as I left before the big drama/mass leaving of guilds occurred. But I think there was some internal stuff with the server and staff I have heard from past players and a combination of rocky relationships between guilds led to it at some point. It was great at the start but also had some other issues that I personally disliked (the guy with like 9 homunculus.....) and so on. And basically as Shin said I checked it out a few weeks ago and it was so empty that I never went back and sometimes check the forums here and there.

Basically this year three new LRs launched (Pure, Evolve and EO). And most of the initial population of all three has sort of started to decline, I'm not sure if this is because of the grind or a lack of players overall due to the age of each server (2-4 months ranging between all 3). I've played all 3 and currently have quit Pure, WoE/BG mainly on Evolve and play EO when I have time on the side. The LR population in general when Pure started to die either quit, went to Evolve which has higher rates and more emphasis on customs, or went to EO which is similar to Pure in that it sticks close to official/has lower rates. Thus I'm suggesting to you guys to possibility try it EO if you'd like since it still has potential and quite a few ex-Pure RO players have joined lately. And not sure if you guys have seen my review but no high end like nyd, beelze etc. have been touched on EO (I saw some current Pure RO videos of you guys doing SM and stuff) so you should come check it out if you guys want to. Lately the LR population has been scattered and everyone is all over the place which makes it more difficult for everyone to find a good server with a decent population. Or try out Evolve if you guys want since they got a nice stable population and developed economy etc. Just some food for thought

[RMS Shin]

The videos posted were between a few old BS members, Tanaquil and myself.

No one else on the server has yet touched SM/WM and I think someone has finally managed to kill VR once.

Aside from that, no one else has touched the MvPs.

[Kagamine Rinto]

Shin come back and help me kill SM

[RMS Shin]

I see no return on my time investment there anymore so unfortunately, I'll have to pass =(.

Plus I got a new camera and it's bloody amazing. Canon kiss X7i <33

[Playtester]

I want to clarify a few things:

1. Staff
The original staff is long gone basically. One of the GMs disappeared right on the day of launch forever, the other staff members just eventually didn't have time anymore. The admin (Helios) is busy because he works and studies at the same time and didn't really expect to be "this busy" and at the same time didn't really see how much time effort it is hosting a RO server (honestly it's basically a full time job if you want to do it right including fixing bugs and stuff).
But the staff isn't really dead. Upon seeing there aren't enough active GMs anymore, more GMs were hired and two of them are active up to now.
The biggest problem is that the admin is hardly available except for 1 hour before the update to quickly update and then disappear for several days again, so even if the GMs are there, they can't really do any decisions without contacting him.

2. Loss of population
I think it's important to point out that the server did not lose population because of mistakes in management. The server is very good, the setup is good, player wishes are represented very well and everything a close-to-official player wants is offered.
The reason why the population went down so much is simply something you can consider "community issue" or even "bad luck".

a) The biggest and WoE dominating guild left due to personal issues (they made it clear that they were very happy about the server, they did NOT quit because they disliked anything, they quit because the core members had personal issues come up and the rest decided to quit RO forever and move to more modern MMORPGs, none of them went to another RO server).

b) There were (in my opinion) silly guild fights over Satan Morroc between the remaining PVP guilds. In short one half wanted Satan Morroc to not be free for all, because the competition makes killing it harder. The other half wanted all MVPs to be free for all and said that the competition on fighting for an MVP is one of the most fun things in RO. Eventually that first half left because they couldn't get any SM drops and felt they wouldn't have a fair chance in WoE like that. The other half left after that because they were the only active PVP guild left and there was no competition (there was an upcoming fourth PVP guild, but they said they'll need a few weeks to be ready for WoE and that other guild didn't want to wait for them). That fourth guild left also due to no PVP guilds left. Then population went from 350 to 100 now and for most people a population of 100 is too low to continue playing so many of the smaller guild or guild-less players left as well. Of course if all your friends left, you will leave too. It's a chain reaction until only a small amount of population is left (this happens with all RO servers eventually, there are many many RO servers with a population of 10-30 players).

Hardly anyone left due to the bad management or because they didn't like the server setup.
This is also reflect on forums I think. You hardly see any complaints from players completely dissatisfied by a certain feature and there are hardly any bug reports either, which brings me the last part.

3. Bugs
It seem it was criticized here that the server has many critical bugs, I wonder which they are. I saw the person who write this review once made a report that vending works on the street, I'm not even sure if that's a bug - there's a rule against it, not sure if the mechanic ever prevented one from doing it. But that's far from critical anyway.

The issue with players not being able to connect - honestly if there's a bug and you don't know the source of it, you can't fix it. It has nothing to do with the staff being inactive, it has just something to do with being unable to fix it. I mean as server owners, what would you do if someone tells you he can't connect to your server anymore after you switched your server provider? You can tell him to make sure he has the correct client. You can contact your provider and ask him if he is blocking certain IP ranges or something that would explain why a person can't connect anymore that previously could with another provider. If the player tells you he is sure he has the correct client and the provider tells you that there is no block and the connection was checked and it works just fine and people from all over the world can connect, there's not much else you can do, can you?
Also as far as I understood, the issue in the end was indeed a problem in the client files, so it was nothing that the staff could have resolved in the first place.


In my opinion PureRO is still a great server. It does NOT have "many issues", it only has one issue: Not enough players. All the other issues like not being able to find a party and nobody greeting you if you say hello are just follow-up issues.

[potatopie]

a) The biggest and WoE dominating guild left due to personal issues (they made it clear that they were very happy about the server, they did NOT quit because they disliked anything, they quit because the core members had personal issues come up and the rest decided to quit RO forever and move to more modern MMORPGs, none of them went to another RO server).

Chronic Back Pain went to Evolve (at the time before they got banned).