TalonRO: First Impression Series

[Mania]

Server Name: TalonRO
Rates: 5x/5x/3x
Owner: Talon

Summary – TalonRO is an extremely friendly community overran by vendors.

Ease of Use –  Well the Downloading went fine, but I would suggest a better layout or a more prominent button for downloading. http://i46.tinypic.com/szx7kn.jpg

Economy Glance – It's kind of hard to tell how balanced the economy is in a server like tRO. They have donations for almost every item in the game, but you are able to vote for points so everyone is able to get the items. Because tRO's data base came from a preexisting community you have players that literally have EVERY item. At my last count the server population was at 109; 60 of them were vendors. http://i45.tinypic.com/2mchb0p.jpg and more over here http://i49.tinypic.com/j58sw0.jpg

Balance – Classes: Well, tRO has SQIs (custom God Items) for every class. Even extended classes to help balance them out. I didn't see any particular class ruling over the server. PvP: No one in PvP  http://i47.tinypic.com/2nvxu1y.jpg  Donations: You can donate for every card, headgear, and weapon available. http://i45.tinypic.com/14cwdau.jpg Customs: They have custom Kahos, Valk Helms, and Special Quest Items. Some of the cards have been changed from their original buffs to custom buff for the server http://i50.tinypic.com/2wc3d34.jpg

GM Responsiveness – Well they had a very nice GM on the forums greeting everyone and taking care of player questions http://i50.tinypic.com/35d2ezs.jpg. There was also a GM in game talking about the lag and having some hosting problems http://i47.tinypic.com/ma9xls.jpg and http://i46.tinypic.com/2ztk9li.jpg but I was very impressed with the GM presence in the forums and in game.

Forum Environment – Gosh, super nice people. http://i45.tinypic.com/jhauqa.jpg the forums weren't  exactly full of excitement but there were new posts ever few minutes or so.

In-game Community – Can't say too much about the community. Everyone seemed friendly, but a lot were speaking in Tagalog so I'm not 100% sure.

X-Factors – Main Chat: Was being used for what it was intended. Most were general questions about price checks. No spamming of “buying” or “selling”. Main chat was actually nice.  Events: They had an in-game Halloween patch in use http://i50.tinypic.com/n34u42.jpg and there was this very in depth Halloween event on post http://talonro.com/index.php you can read about it on their main page.  Website: I'm not sure if Talon or someone else edits the website or not, but whomever is doing it is EXTREMELY wordy. The site is confusing. http://i47.tinypic.com/2dv69he.jpg The red circle shows where I clicked to view the customs. The list on the side are all the “main topics”. The blue circle shows all the “sub-topics” in each “main topic”. Every topic has a crazy amount of text and back story and description. It's just too much. BONUS: When you change your job you get 10k and a weapon. Unfortunately, I changed at level 17 and my weapon was for 18+ http://i45.tinypic.com/5l6tmf.jpg

Conclusion – A lot of time went into tRO unfortunately there aren't many players on to enjoy it. If you can get past the overly descriptive website to download the client you'll be fine. There weren't any “bad” things about tRO. I think they have come a long way from their origins and the similarities are still present they take a back seat to all the work Talon has done to make the server stand out.

***You'll notice a lot of the elements of the review are the same as my aRO review. I was attempting to prove that each server has different elements making them unique. Please don't attack me saying I had ill intentions.***

[McManus]

Server Name: TalonRO
Rates: 5x/5x/3x
Owner: Talon

Summary – TalonRO is an extremely friendly community overran by vendors.

Ease of Use –  Well the Downloading went fine, but I would suggest a better layout or a more prominent button for downloading. http://i46.tinypic.com/szx7kn.jpg

Economy Glance – It's kind of hard to tell how balanced the economy is in a server like tRO. They have donations for almost every item in the game, but you are able to vote for points so everyone is able to get the items. Because tRO's data base came from a preexisting community you have players that literally have EVERY item. At my last count the server population was at 109; 60 of them were vendors. http://i45.tinypic.com/2mchb0p.jpg and more over here http://i49.tinypic.com/j58sw0.jpg

Balance – Classes: Well, tRO has SQIs (custom God Items) for every class. Even extended classes to help balance them out. I didn't see any particular class ruling over the server. PvP: No one in PvP  http://i47.tinypic.com/2nvxu1y.jpg  Donations: You can donate for every card, headgear, and weapon available. http://i45.tinypic.com/14cwdau.jpg Customs: They have custom Kahos, Valk Helms, and Special Quest Items. Some of the cards have been changed from their original buffs to custom buff for the server http://i50.tinypic.com/2wc3d34.jpg

GM Responsiveness – Well they had a very nice GM on the forums greeting everyone and taking care of player questions http://i50.tinypic.com/35d2ezs.jpg. There was also a GM in game talking about the lag and having some hosting problems http://i47.tinypic.com/ma9xls.jpg and http://i46.tinypic.com/2ztk9li.jpg but I was very impressed with the GM presence in the forums and in game.

Forum Environment – Gosh, super nice people. http://i45.tinypic.com/jhauqa.jpg the forums weren't  exactly full of excitement but there were new posts ever few minutes or so.

In-game Community – Can't say too much about the community. Everyone seemed friendly, but a lot were speaking in Tagalog so I'm not 100% sure.

X-Factors – Main Chat: Was being used for what it was intended. Most were general questions about price checks. No spamming of “buying” or “selling”. Main chat was actually nice.  Events: They had an in-game Halloween patch in use http://i50.tinypic.com/n34u42.jpg and there was this very in depth Halloween event on post http://talonro.com/index.php you can read about it on their main page.  Website: I'm not sure if Talon or someone else edits the website or not, but whomever is doing it is EXTREMELY wordy. The site is confusing. http://i47.tinypic.com/2dv69he.jpg The red circle shows where I clicked to view the customs. The list on the side are all the “main topics”. The blue circle shows all the “sub-topics” in each “main topic”. Every topic has a crazy amount of text and back story and description. It's just too much. BONUS: When you change your job you get 10k and a weapon. Unfortunately, I changed at level 17 and my weapon was for 18+ http://i45.tinypic.com/5l6tmf.jpg

Conclusion – A lot of time went into tRO unfortunately there aren't many players on to enjoy it. If you can get past the overly descriptive website to download the client you'll be fine. There weren't any “bad” things about tRO. I think they have come a long way from their origins and the similarities are still present they take a back seat to all the work Talon has done to make the server stand out.

***You'll notice a lot of the elements of the review are the same as my aRO review. I was attempting to prove that each server has different elements making them unique. Please don't attack me saying I had ill intentions.***

Bit benjy that your conclusion states tRO is better than aRO. I saw something about you bein a GM on tRO? if so then you're a feckin dirtball.

[Tom~]

Lol!

Mania is not a GM on tRO.

Click her signature <.<


-x-

Good review, Mania. Personally, I think Talon is a great server. I used to play there, and I enjoyed the 8 months I spent there.

[DeePee]

Thanks for the review

And no, she is not a GM on TalonRO.

I agree that some bigger download buttons would be a good idea. I'll see to it that there will be some image buttons to click instead of the current text links

There are indeed some players who are very rich. That's our "burden" from the place we came from (aRO) and seeing that we have a "no wipes ever" policy, we just have to live with some things. We've been working hard on closing the gap though and I think so far it's going very well. The majority of the players (70%) is relatively new (1 year or shorter), which is a good thing. More ways to become wealthy without donating. Voting is just a very small part of the reward system. You can earn reward points in many, many ways~ and there's the choice to play without the custom gears in Vanilla PvP/WoE/Events.

The ingame community is quite diverse. While there's quite some Filipinos around, they are (from what I know) not the majority. There are increasing groups of Dutch, German, Italian, American, English, etc. players~

As for the website being wordy, well... we like to give the players the information they are looking for. Some features are pretty in-depth and require some explaining. It's quite tiresome having to keep explaining features over and over again ingame, which is why we chose to do it this way. Perhaps in the future a lot of these pages can be placed in a Wiki or something, who knows

As for the job changing weapon thing. Yeah, we will probably lower the level req. of a couple of those weapons. However, we encourage people to finish the custom novice training grounds, which give a good idea about the kind of server we are The novice gears are very powerful, so we encourage people to stay as a novice till at least level 20-30. If people wish to jobchange earlier, that's up to them of course.

But yeah, thanks again for the review. We've actually picked out a couple of things from it that we will work on so we can keep improving the server