Your thoughts about a RO 1 2.0

[Zerono]

I'm sure at some point in our Ragnarok Life many of us were thinking how we could've done a better job than Gravity, with various things. Be it the story line, new classes/equipments/items that seemed unnatural, quests, adding stuff we didn't like, or even worse, removing/changing things we loved, you name it.

Those who seriously tried to change major content in RO usually failed, but at the moment I'm one those who's fascinated by the idea of a RO 1 reboot. I've played RO for so many years, and know pretty much everything about it. The maps, the monsters, the classes. At some point you're bound to get bored. And that's were the idea of a reboot comes to the mind of some. Imagine a "new" RO 1. Where you experience the World of Midgard in a new way. Maybe new areas, or experiencing changes on the maps you know so well. New monsters, in different places, totally new features, which may even be unpractical in the RO we know.

This topic isn't about how hard such a project could be, or how you're sure it would ever become big.
I'd like to hear your opinion, and your ideas about this. Have you ever considered it? Were you ever tempted to work on such a project? Did you wish to play such a server? What would change? I'm looking forward to your answers.

On a side note: I don't see RO2 as a true sequel at this point. Maybe that will change when they can improve it further, but until then I don't officially "know" a RO2.

[yC]

The harvest moon idea, together with fishing and mining already could make the game feel differently than just a kill monster level up mmo.  Just no one make these elements anywhere near to the graphical requirement that could change anything.  Yes it is hard.

[Triper]

People can always do that but the problem is on the public - will they like? will they stay even if they like?

It's like I can change skills to funny ways like giving a falcon to champ and when he does Asura you see a falcon going and char says Falcon Punch!!, Assassin Cross doing Sonic Blow and you see b**** Slapping!! and you see no weapon animation when you do that, when you use hide there is a pop up that appears and says "Not here, try another place", when you use Cart Boost you see "Nitro ON!!" and you hear the sound of it on at a car but you never know if the majority of the public target will like it and if not you will think that, even if the idea was fun, it was a mass fail :|
Giggles are fun and doing stuff how you think it would be good but you need to test and see if the actual work works.

[XicoR4]

I have honestly put a lot of thought behind it and actually considered doing it at a point in time, but the sheer amount of work needed to re-balance RO kinda put me off. It'd be almost a full time job for quite a while (not to mention I don't have many of the skills and experience needed with lots of what's needed to build and run a server effectively) with no guarantees that it'd appeal to anyone besides myself.

But the way to do it imo, is to focus on specific guidelines (aka what you want the game to be like) and work towards achieving them. It's hard to define exactly under which category they fall under and to give more than a basic notion for you to base yourself on, but I personally set a few for myself like:

-> Improving the leveling experience. (This is probably one of the things people will focus on the most, and what they'll spend most of their time doing for the majority of the server's life)

- By tweaking the exp tables so you don't just skip the earlier levels and get stuck getting your last few.
- Outright removing the rebirth system. Not many people like to reach max level just to do 3 times as much to max again.
- Increasing the incentives to party. By increasing overall monster difficulty (while increasing the exp/item rewards as well) and possibly improve their AI too (making monsters less dumb, gravity tried this with anopheles and desert wolves at one point and it was interesting). Maybe giving bonus exp per extra party members and Full Exp if the monster kills are done in Line of Sight range of the party members, with reduced experience if they're out of sight (to encourage parties to stick together). Also disable exp for idle characters past x minutes (to reduce leeching).
- Make sure that there's always a couple available and different leveling spots for a leveling range, so people get a chance to discover more of the RO world (stuff like map of the month / monster of the week / repeatable kill quests are easy [but maybe not that appealing/good on the long run?] ways to do that).
- Server wide exp boosts when something special happens might be an interesting idea as well (either someone moves the story line along if you plan on having a more RP focused server or you achieve a server milestone like opening rachel sanctuary for the first time, or other things along those lines [this also tends to make the server have more community focus]).


-> Ensuring there's good combat mechanics. (This is the baseline of any combat oriented game after all, and it involves everything from status, to gear, to skills and the element system.)

- Starting by the element system on RO, The drawbacks of focusing on a specific element have been reduced over the years, it's far too easy to get high elemental resistance to multiple (and sometimes opposing) elements at once.
- Status effects are also not as good as they once were, they've had their usefulness severely limited (less duration, easier to get resistance/immunity). What was the last time you've seen chaos actually used? My point being, different items should cure different status effects (not panacea heals everything kind of deal) and you should get resistance to status effects by stacking different stats instead of (basically) just vit. They also should have their duration/efficacy increased as to actually make them worthwhile.
- The class and skill design on RO took a turn for the worst with the introduction of trans classes (or as far back as 2-2 some would say), whilst classes used to have more or less of a fixed role before, and had some margin to change builds a bit, nowadays there's a bunch of classes with really limited usage (especially when it comes to WoE). It's not like there's much skill diversity on RO as it stands, I'd personally like to make at least 2 or 3 builds per class to be viable. Keep in mind that any change you do to skills probably has a huge impact overall, and it needs a lot of testing to assure nothing goes wrong. Gears also play a huge part on this (Easy to get 100 mdef makes wizards basically worthless, for example). There has been threads on RMS before about which are the most broken skills as well, it'd be a good idea to look into that.
- Gear and card balance is the hardest thing to work on imo. Like skills it needs extensive testing to make sure there's no unintended effects to changing something (and even small changes can have huge effects). There's lots of outright useless cards and pieces of equipment (with part of it being easily fixed by making it easier to get high refines on crappier gear, and have cards give more bonuses so as to make them not as useless anymore [think odium/chung e. card type of deal]). Also, instead of class specific gears, Imo it should be balanced towards class bonuses (much like magni's set gives extra defense to swordsman class) as to improve an inherent class trait (Swordsman are the tanking class, so they get extra defense or increased healing as to make it more attractive to have them play the tanking role in a party).


-> End-game content. (Once people hit max level on one or more characters, this is what they'll be doing for the most part)

- RO doesn't have that much end-game content, besides MVP hunting, gear farming, WoE and a couple of mini games (which only a few people do, really).
- As far as MVP hunting goes, having everything as open world bosses (especially when they have fixed spawns) leads to a lot of camping and grieving, and just outright denies lots of people from experiencing end-game content. I have thought about making instanced MVPs with actual meaningful quests to get to them (Think sorta like nidhoggr's shadow and the quest/instance associated with it, but even more story/plot focused), having already full worked out details for at least 3 of them with even rough NPC dialogues. Instances also allow for some more engaging party scenarios (like having the boss turning certain parts of the floor into lava that damages you on contact, or other stuff like the seals to turn baphomet's invulnerability off on sealed shrine).
- As for the actual bosses, they are in dire need of change, very few MVPs give rewards that correspond to their difficulty and have nasty skills like Agi Up, Power Up or Earthquake that make them not worth being killed most of the time (and when they are killed, it's mostly by abusing game mechanics. Lhz3 MVPs are close to impossible to kill in a straight up fight, for example). Not to mention retarded mob AI (like monsters changing targets when hit by melee and even ranged skills, but that's mostly a standard eAthena problem).
- I'd rather not go too deep into PvP/GvG cause it's the thing that sparks most controversy (mostly trolls making baseless arguments though), but more types of interpersonal conflict would be nice with actual incentives to playing them (imo they should be tied with the pvm aspect, Guild dungeons are a good example of this, and one of the places where I've had most of my RO fun pre-trans). Flee penalty in GvG is stupid too, makes agi based chars useless (when there's already lots of counters to them). A PK system (with an option to turn on/off, @pkon maybe?) where top PKers get extra exp or drop bonuses would be an interesting idea to mess with too.
- Lots of events, scripted or otherwise are good time wasters. (Mostly luck based though, to ensure it's fair for everyone, stuff like Dodge the meteors, an Okolnir style maze, Turbo Track, Poring Catcher, etc...).


-> Other miscellaneous stuff:

- Adding anti-inflation measures to prevent server economy from spiking too quickly. (paid npcs, stuff like rachel sanctuary, raffles, merchant tax, etc...)
- Add an item use and possibly skill delay, RO is too trigger happy as it stands, it's much more about the amount of supplies you have than actual skill (and this also encourages stuff like WPE and auto-pot).
- Some NPCs like job changers, stat resetters and free healers should not exist, and I'm iffy about dungeon warpers.
- Tweaking the quests to not be so out of the way, and to actually give out rewards to make them worth doing. (RO actually has an interesting plot...)

I'll type more later if I remember and am in the mood for another wall of text. Best of luck if you decide to actually do something ^^

[Croissant]

I think it'd be interesting to play, as something of a separate experience. Of course, I'm much more familiar with the current RO considering I've played for about 8 years, but change is always welcome and that isn't to say I wouldn't like a reboot of the same game even more than I like its current incarnation.

[Jocasta]

It has a more appealing graphics perhaps? I have always loved graphics with some cute renders apparent. It would be a great and new experience to attach yourself to a new graphical environment, with (almost) the same features available (because not all features of RO1 is embedded still on RO2)