Roguard Online (Pre-Renewal 5/5/2 - 8/8/2)

[Shayariel]

About the Rates:
Max Level: 99/70
Max Aspd 190
Instant Cast: 150 Dex

Normal Rates:
Base EXP: 5x
Job EXP: 5x
Normal Drop: 2x
Equipment Drop: 2x
Card Drop: 3x
Boss/MvP Drop: 1x
Boss/MvP Card: 1x

Premium Rates:
Base EXP: 8x
Job EXP: 8x
Normal Drop: 2x
Equipment Drop: 2x
Card Drop: 3x
Boss/MvP Drop: 1x
Boss/MvP Card: 1x

About GMs:
Its like an official server without renewal (feels soooo oldschool) and the GMs are skilled (professional
and private developers), friendly and helping.
They react to players suggestions fast to improve the server and make it better for the whole community...
No question is left unanswered and its so great to finally be heard out by GMs.
Maybe you know them from playing RO2 cause they made the translation pack for RO2 for english and german language.

About Availability / Stability:
The GMs really work hard so there are no downtimes or crashes and maintenance takes 10 minutes only usually.
The server is hosted in France so you got the best connection from all over the world.

About Donations:
As non-donator you dont have any disadvantages compared with donators, which i like most. You can get
everything from the cash shop and even premium for your account by voting or paying zeny for it.
This is what i would call balanced.

About Custom Changes:

• They implemented an own Quest for Town/Dungeon warps which is very unique and well-thought about.
  
• Custom Card Quest planned for near future (in a not abusable way).
• Also some monsters and spawnrates have been changed to support party play and improving fun in general.
• Anubis has been changed to earth element to prevent TU-Priest flood and improve party play much more and it works.
• Custom auras have just been added and you got a Stylist with 380 cloth colors, 127 hair colors, 27 hair styles (for now).
• They also just added an ingame overlay for the effects like its known from RCX, so you can play without effects properly if you PC is not the best without any disadvantage.
• Another unique featuer is @watchitem, even with autoloot on you dont miss when you get something rare (animation above your head).
• Additionaly you can change your memo with @memo which helps you to keep your desired warps and overwrite those you dont want to keep.
• Last but not least they removed the level up cap, so you can get multiple level ups for higher monsters or quests. That really helps if you start from scratch.

About Bots / Macros:
What i really like about the server: NO BOTS
I mean of course they are forbidden on most servers but nearly no server really gets rid of them. You wont find
one here. As well as you wont find people using macros or other 3rd party tools.

About Economy/Population:
The economy started to appear, but atm the server isnt really populated (unfortunately). I dont get why, cause it works so good and you dont have bugs and problems or lags like on so many other servers. This needs to be improved, hope its gonna change soon, the server has such high potential.

About Starting:
Every player gets a starter package (through doing a little quest in novice ground) and every guild (5+ players)
gets a guild package on start which makes it a bit easier for everbody who likes to start over new here...

About Community:
As far as i saw it the community is nice and helping. I have seen a lot of worse thing on officials. On Roguard its starter and newbie friendly so far. Of course you got black sheep everywhere, so i cant tell about ALL players, thats just my experience. Hope this wont change with more players to come.

Result:
Availability: 10/10
Stability: 10/10
Connection: 10/10
Rates 10/10
GMs 10/10
Donation 10/10
Custom Changes 10/10
Bots/Macros 10/10
Economy 5/10
Population 5/10
Starter-Friendliness 10/10
Community-Friendliness 9/10

Overall: 109/120 ---> 9/10

Seriously the best server i ever tried out, but it definitely needs more players to improve economy and make woe possible thats why 9/10 only.

[SkylarNetwork]

I agree this server is awesome and has amazing potential.

The GM's on the other hand few others and myself do not entirely agree but to each his/her own opinion.

the server is still DEFINITELY worth playing.

[Gardosen]

Thanks for the nice review,

we do our best to improve the parts who are still lacking on our Server :-)
But we are optimistic that we are also able to improve these areas and increase the Fun for the players.

Greetings
Gardosen

[Shayariel]

im sure you can do this. all youve done yet made the server better and we trust in you and your decisions... 

[Shayariel]

updated my review, some things have changed...

[Shayariel]

updated my review:

a lot of changes happened inbetween and i added some rankings for all the points mentioned.

[Styx]

Yes, good server but orientated a bit around a certain playstyle, changing element of monsters for instance is a choice that brings something new but cuts out something old.
To improve partyplay? Ok, but it still is a subjective opinion.
Maybe one day I am able to connect again to this server to try it again.
Scanner problems, firewall problems with InternalGuard 3.7, when that was solved it just closed the client for a virtual problem.
Currently the patcher gives runtime library and file verification errors. Eeh sorry, no teamviewer allowed on my system.
I am not suprised it stays small, I think is based and orientated too much on a small audience.
I was impressed how they run a server and their knowledge about it ,not sure if their game knowledge is equal to it.

[Gardosen]

@Shayariel:
thanks for the nice update :-)

@Styx:
please stop blaming us for your lazieness. 
If you would call us for support, we would be able to help you even without teamviewer. (teamviewer support is just faster and easier to solve the issue and then explain what it was to the customer)
But you never called for help in our technical section.

regarding your scanner or firewall problems.
https://www.virustotal.com/de/file/ac9700f13d33947b6532c42c522f7336951848a4c40e40f53c5801a4b262bce4/analysis/1397465732/
this is called a false possitive. 1 of 50 scanners recognize it as a RootKit, but its not. this even happen to windows updates sometimes at AntiVir, so this is nothing to worry about.

Greetings
Gardosen

[Shayariel]

Yes, good server but orientated a bit around a certain playstyle, changing element of monsters for instance is a choice that brings something new but cuts out something old.
To improve partyplay? Ok, but it still is a subjective opinion.

As i saw more partys down there than ever before on any other server, its not a subjective opinion, but a fact.
I would have written: "they tried to improve party play with that change, but it failed" if this was the case.

[Styx]

@Shayariel:
thanks for the nice update :-)

@Styx:
please stop blaming us for your lazieness. 
If you would call us for support, we would be able to help you even without teamviewer. (teamviewer support is just faster and easier to solve the issue and then explain what it was to the customer)
But you never called for help in our technical section.

regarding your scanner or firewall problems.
https://www.virustotal.com/de/file/ac9700f13d33947b6532c42c522f7336951848a4c40e40f53c5801a4b262bce4/analysis/1397465732/
this is called a false possitive. 1 of 50 scanners recognize it as a RootKit, but its not. this even happen to windows updates sometimes at AntiVir, so this is nothing to worry about.

Greetings
Gardosen

It is not only AntiVir that did react, it happens so now and then and I can solve problems like that.
Nevertheless it is not wise to just ignore it and think there is nothing to worry about, there is quite some hacking going on in this scene.
Still there are other problems to connect to your server and I don't have had that problem with other servers ever before.
I remember you wrote somewhere else you did support around 15 players to connect to your server.
That is quite a number on a low pop server, you think it is possible more players have problems but don't notify you about it at all?
What would happen if the server is x 10 in pop, you are going to connect 150 players, who patiently wait till you have time for it?
I am just a messenger, it is up to you to think I am lazy or take it serious.

[Roguard.Flash]

It is not only AntiVir that did react, it happens so now and then and I can solve problems like that.
Nevertheless it is not wise to just ignore it and think there is nothing to worry about, there is quite some hacking going on in this scene.
Still there are other problems to connect to your server and I don't have had that problem with other servers ever before.
I remember you wrote somewhere else you did support around 15 players to connect to your server.
That is quite a number on a low pop server, you think it is possible more players have problems but don't notify you about it at all?
What would happen if the server is x 10 in pop, you are going to connect 150 players, who patiently wait till you have time for it?
I am just a messenger, it is up to you to think I am lazy or take it serious.

We are using InternalGuard for client protection because it's still in active development and harmony can be bypassed. It's still kinda new but more and more server start using it. If people get false positives it's always bad but it's not really fair to blame us for this because we are just using the default InternalGuard version. Would you blame server owners if your anti virus software suddenly starts false detecting harmony files as a virus? This is a general problem with anti hacking tools but we believe that it's still better than having bots and hackers on our server (we haven't seen neither one since our server started!). And as Gardosen already said only very few anti virus tools detect IG files and usually all of them stop some time after those new files are used.
Only very few people had problems to play at our server as far as we know. Of course we don't know if or how many people left due to problems but we know that only a small percentage of people really have problems. We now this because we asked for feedback when guilds join and usually none of their members have problems. If this really was a common issue it would be different.
Regarding those people that we helped: Most if not all cases were not related to our software / our server but the general setup of the user. We had users trying to run our Client under Linux what has always been tricky to imposible. We had a case where someone was not able to connect to our server. We joined him in teamviewer for quite a long time to find the issue and in the end it was because his ISP blocked the needed ports (we are using the default ports so he wouldn't have been able to play on other servers either). And actually this is the common case of our help. Usually it's people that didn't gave the ragexe permission to connect to the internet, people with blocked ports in their routers / ISPs etc. I'm not saying that InternalGuard or our client ist perfect and fail safe but in 99% of the cases the problem was general but we don't mind and are happy that we can help those players fixing these problems.

Still there are other problems to connect to your server and I don't have had that problem with other servers ever before.

Can you be more specific about it because I would like to fix it if there really is an general issue that is not related to wrong setup und your computer. I read your last post were you said you got "runtime library and file verification errors" which sadly happed for some people for a couple of hours due to an incorrect setting in our patch server. But we fix those issues as soon as we are aware of them to make everything as smooth as possible for the players and will keep doing so

[Tsudere]

My spam macros still working. GG
And even IG still have leaks, but yeah, still better as harmony.

[raggybaby]

I'd prefer harmony rather than IG, IG is banning a lot of players for sometimes no apparent reason.

[Styx]

Well meanwhile I know the exact problem for me with IG. It is not sufficient that you run IG with administrator rights from a restricted user account.
In that case IG will give the debugger and virtualization message and close the client.
It is required to login with an administrator account with full rights and now this won't happen anymore.
Awkward since obvious IG requires other programs on your system working with full administrator rights to function properly but that is a red flag for a very malicious program.
At least you will have quite some problems with refunds in case of software and credit card company troubles where you're system was involved.
Beside that issue IG requires to lower the defense of your system and that is not wise in a scene where DDOS is quite common for instance but also in common because there are more threats on internet around.