CasualRO

[Hawk Of Endymion]

I have been on Casual for just over a year. Here's a fair review of what has and hasn't been going on.

Stability: 9

9/10 points, the server doesn't lag often.

Availability: 9

9/10 points, the server is almost always up.

Community
Friendliness: 3

The majority of people who inhabit Prontera are loud, annoying, and insensitive. This is not indicative of the population in general - there are great people; just not in Prontera. Prontera's the face of any server, though, so it's not the best. You have to go out of your way to find friendly people.

Eventfulness: 4

"Events" do not consist of automated events and other such things.
However, around holidays, we do get some new content.

Game Masters
Friendliness: 1

The GM's are overly sensitive and take any kind of criticism as slights to their authority. They are also not above calling out people and being generally petty. Ever since Staff Manager Saki left and Lorelei took over her position, the GM team has seen general decline. Furthermore, the GM's are biased toward certain factions; I have seen two people fight and only one punished, not once, but many times.

Availability: 1

The event GM's are occasionally on, as are the sub-GM's.

Helpfulness: 1

The GM's are rarely able to answer questions that veteran players cannot. Generally, if you have some sort of bug, they will tell you that they'll bring it to their superiors, who then write bug reports on Hercules. Most of the playerbase has stopped reporting bugs in lieu of going directly to the developer - why bother posting bug reports to the GM's when they can't do anything to fix it?

Game-play
Economy: 1

The economy is pretty bad; the only things worth buying are MVP cards and donation credits, which are used to buy more MVP cards.
You can get three random MVP cards for 50$ of donation credit. This has ruined the economy and flooded the server with excess MVP cards. The introduction of massive zeny-sink equipment has done little to deter the economy from declining.

Guild Competition: 1

There are basically two guilds. One of them doesn't even show up the majority of the time. They also accuse the other team of being an alliance - that's what alliances are for. Furthermore, the "alliance" consists of Demigods, the main branch, a few people from Carpe Diem (3-5), and one person from Castling. They could all fit in one guild, but don't, because they like seeing their own banners.
Guild competition is also lacking because of stacking demi-human resistance; you can stack over 100% demi-human resistance here, and it has been ongoing for months. Only now is anything being done about it.

Class Balance: 1

PvP/WoE is dominated by 3 classes - RK, Shura, and Genetic.
They all have skills that ignore demi-human resistance; RK has DBreath, Shura has GoH (a major problem because of an overabundance of Tao Gunka cards), and Genetic has Hell Plant.
These three classes make up by far the majority of players in any type of PvP situation.
Furthermore, Mandragora Howling's success rates are broken and hit 90% of the time, if not higher.

[Meta]

I tried this server for about a week and had most of the same experiences, except for WoE. I didn't stay long enough to try it. I also didn't seen much of the GMs, so I can't comment on that. I did get help when I asked where an NPC was, and the support person was nice when I put in a ticket, but that's not enough to call it representative.

[eflow]

Hm, having been on this server for a bit over month and half now, I can't say I agree with your whole review.

I've personally found the server to be quite friendly. I can KINDA see why the good folks in Prontera as "loud, annoying, and insensitive" but I've found them quite fun to chat with. Guess its not everyone's cup of tea. 

For events, we did have quite a bunch of them in the last few weeks - mostly to do with Halloween. But there's still a fair amount of GM hosted stuff like Death by Dice and Hide and Seek?

For the economy, I see it as perfectly fine for a 100-ish player server on 125x rates. No one is going to vend basic gears or mats. And you're going to have to explain how lots of MVP cards ruins the economy as I don't quite follow?

Guild competition and class balance does seem to be issues though - of course, I don't really WoE/PvP so it affects me little.  The server is looking into addressing those issues though - there's a thread for open discussion for improvement and looks like the GM are going to be addressing other balance issues.

[Meta]

That's what happens when you bend rules. People who don't understand why the rule was in place will take advantage, and freak out when you put your foot down.

[Karuna-tan]

One thought swirls around in my mind now: "Dafuq when did Saki leave the staff?" Then again, the amount of ... ehheh, stupid people she was forced to deal with (based on what the community was like back when I still GM'd), I'd say it's no wonder...

[SnowBunny]

Spoiler

[close]

Hi Justin.

Hi f*ggot Brain.

Just gonna screw around with your topic cause I don't really like you anyway.

The majority of people who inhabit Prontera are loud, annoying, and insensitive. This is not indicative of the population in general - there are great people; just not in Prontera. Prontera's the face of any server, though, so it's not the best. You have to go out of your way to find friendly people.

There's a lot of friendly people, we just don't gather in Pront all the time. Mostly because we're avoiding people like you.

Game Masters
Friendliness: 1

The GM's are overly sensitive and take any kind of criticism as slights to their authority. They are also not above calling out people and being generally petty. Ever since Staff Manager Saki left and Lorelei took over her position, the GM team has seen general decline. Furthermore, the GM's are biased toward certain factions; I have seen two people fight and only one punished, not once, but many times.

Availability: 1

The event GM's are occasionally on, as are the sub-GM's.

Helpfulness: 1

The GM's are rarely able to answer questions that veteran players cannot. Generally, if you have some sort of bug, they will tell you that they'll bring it to their superiors, who then write bug reports on Hercules. Most of the playerbase has stopped reporting bugs in lieu of going directly to the developer - why bother posting bug reports to the GM's when they can't do anything to fix it?

You don't even go for their events. You annoy them. And now you dare to give a sh*tty rating. Dude, you're the lowest of low that I've ever came in contact with on the internet. Here, have a potato. 

[Karuna-tan]

Vivi resigned after losing interest in the game (and dealing with the less desirables of the community) around March or April, though I don't think we publicly announced it "officially" until Summertime (June or July?). She broke her finger recently so she's not been online, but I'll text her and tell her "Hi!" for you!

Ah, tell her also to get better soon! o3o