Project Alfheim is back

[SagitariuS1]

And then suggesting another server that a) blocks multi clients, which freedom is basicly a key selling point for PA these days since the majority of LR just copypastes the 1 client policy trash without even thinking when and why it makes sense b) prohibits grf mods c) has an even lower refined woe scene, sets the cherry ontop. Im not even sure if you have played the server if  you compare both with each other and think they are equally for a quick transition, lol.

I understand it's nonsense that comparing A&B under inequality conditions. Pre-re, 99, low-rates server and renew, 255, 3rd job server are completely different. But in fact pre-re, 99, low-rates vanilla and middle-customized are not big different, IMO. If basic conditions are same, what people really care and importance is population when choosing server that why I wrote 1.4k without dual UARO. Oh btw I neither hater of PA nor salesman of UARO.

[Ijustwanttoreviewservers]

What I hate about multi clienting is less about inflating the population numbers and more that you're basically playing an MMO to just play by yourself, it really doesn't make sense, I'm not crapping on solo players because there is content in the game that doesn't really make much sense to make a party for even though it's nice to play with the company of someone else, it's also kind of annoying that some guides will basically boil down "ok so you're first going to make 3-4 separate accounts and on each you'll make a priest/sage/soul linker AND THEN you'll make the [class of choice] on your main account" if it doesn't straight up tell me to leech all of my characters with the slave priest.

While I despise that, I think it's still interesting that PA is kind of seeking a middle ground, it allows for multi clienting but actively discourages it in a way that doesn't really punish players, a good example of that is inn buffs, usually when people make these slaves is to farm at the low floors of a dungeon, you could aways go back to the inn and refresh the buffs for another 30 minutes and just go back to farming, so this already discourages you from making a priest slave, this doesn't affect the usefulness of actively playing priests either, since you'll still be needing one for deeper or harder dungeons.
You could always buy element enchant scrolls to cover for sage needs, they're quite cheap too imo, usually go for 10k, for 20 minutes that's a pretty good deal even if you make only 1-2m an hour. the only disadvantage of this is when there isn't anybody selling them which isn't that big of a deal for me.
Partying with other people gives you more exp, you don't have any exp bonus for multi clienting I think but I'm not too sure how it works.

So to me multi clienting in PA is a huge waste of time, while I'd rather have it banned, it's nice that players at least have a choice in the matter, people that have grown used to this sort of thing can still do their thing.

[bigx]

OP here. I posted this over the summer when Alfheim came back from "hibernation" following the gravity litigation vs. NovaRO. I hoped that once the server started advertising again we'd see an influx of players, unfortunately this hasn't happened.

What's great about Alfheim:
- Quality of Life: MVP instances, individual loot for party maps and the "Tap" exp mechanic encourage party play. I've played the server for a year now and almost never play solo. However, if you do like to play solo it's very easy due to moderately fast leveling and multi-clienting.

- Random Options / Build Customization: Every gear dropped by a monster has random options applied (ex. +12 ATK; 10% physical dmg to medium, +1 DEX, etc.) this adds a ton of replayability and build customizations. You will spend time farming mobs to get that oh so perfect roll to fit your super unique build. GM does a decent job adding new armor, cards with content that increase the level of customizations.

A few issues:
- The pace of development in incredibly slow, I can't speak to the level of effort required to create RO custom content but the Old Glast Heim roadmap became a meme ("release in Two Weeks") and the server bled population while players waited for it. From what I understand there is one main developer and sorry: it's just not enough to execute on the proposed roadmap and it's caused players to lose faith in the project.

- When long-awaited OGH content was finally dropped, it turned out to be the wrong "product" for the "market". Its fumn for sure, but it's 100% endgame and was more difficult than most players wanted (Personally, I loved it). In retrospect delivering on Expanded Rework probably would've been the better choice to increase the level of player engagement.

- Nerfs. WIP Patch Notes were published on the wiki showing massive EXP nerfs to custom late-game dungeons, a large part of the economy and player experience resolves around this dungeon and while the EXP nerfs were the right idea they came incredibly late (billions of z and thousands of players hours already invested) and without a corresponding "buff" to any other content to make players feel like they had an alternate.

- WoE. WoE here is very competitive, but only if you get lucky and have the 3-4 major guilds participating on the same day, with similar strength. There's so much drama between these guilds and it appears they no longer want to play with each other. Like it or not there is a perception of favoritism due to half assed rule changes and slow response from the GM to implement suggestions from experienced WoE players. GM recently started streaming Saturday WoE:SE which is cool.

Overall, it's a great server, running for two years now so you know the team has done something right; but its definitely in a winter period as player frustration and boredom has reached a tipping point.

My suggestion to the GM:
- Get more development resources.
- Re-engage with the community, the #doom-posting channel is a sign of a GM who stopped caring.

[charlielovesu]

OP here. I posted this over the summer when Alfheim came back from "hibernation" following the gravity litigation vs. NovaRO. I hoped that once the server started advertising again we'd see an influx of players, unfortunately this hasn't happened.

What's great about Alfheim:
- Quality of Life: MVP instances, individual loot for party maps and the "Tap" exp mechanic encourage party play. I've played the server for a year now and almost never play solo. However, if you do like to play solo it's very easy due to moderately fast leveling and multi-clienting.

- Random Options / Build Customization: Every gear dropped by a monster has random options applied (ex. +12 ATK; 10% physical dmg to medium, +1 DEX, etc.) this adds a ton of replayability and build customizations. You will spend time farming mobs to get that oh so perfect roll to fit your super unique build. GM does a decent job adding new armor, cards with content that increase the level of customizations.

A few issues:
- The pace of development in incredibly slow, I can't speak to the level of effort required to create RO custom content but the Old Glast Heim roadmap became a meme ("release in Two Weeks") and the server bled population while players waited for it. From what I understand there is one main developer and sorry: it's just not enough to execute on the proposed roadmap and it's caused players to lose faith in the project.

- When long-awaited OGH content was finally dropped, it turned out to be the wrong "product" for the "market". Its fumn for sure, but it's 100% endgame and was more difficult than most players wanted (Personally, I loved it). In retrospect delivering on Expanded Rework probably would've been the better choice to increase the level of player engagement.

- Nerfs. WIP Patch Notes were published on the wiki showing massive EXP nerfs to custom late-game dungeons, a large part of the economy and player experience resolves around this dungeon and while the EXP nerfs were the right idea they came incredibly late (billions of z and thousands of players hours already invested) and without a corresponding "buff" to any other content to make players feel like they had an alternate.

- WoE. WoE here is very competitive, but only if you get lucky and have the 3-4 major guilds participating on the same day, with similar strength. There's so much drama between these guilds and it appears they no longer want to play with each other. Like it or not there is a perception of favoritism due to half assed rule changes and slow response from the GM to implement suggestions from experienced WoE players. GM recently started streaming Saturday WoE:SE which is cool.

Overall, it's a great server, running for two years now so you know the team has done something right; but its definitely in a winter period as player frustration and boredom has reached a tipping point.

My suggestion to the GM:
- Get more development resources.
- Re-engage with the community, the #doom-posting channel is a sign of a GM who stopped caring.

I rarely respond to posts like this, but I have to laugh when someone says development time is extremely slow. Old Glast Heim created a s*** ton of custom maps, with custom textures, we had custom sprites created, custom card art, and all of it was implemented by hand by two people. I wanted to do something special and grandiose and it took a lot of time. A lot more than I even anticipated.

My main fault here is setting unrealistic expectations. I will more than admit that I gave people bad expectations but thats mostly due to my sheer inexperiene. Most content I have created can be done in a few months. OGH was of a scope I did not realize would be as time consuming as it was. You really don't realize how many small moving parts and how s*** and outdated the client side work is on this game until you start creating truly custom stuff.

Get more people? With what money? Do you want to pay people? How much money do you think RO servers make? Spoilers its barely enough to feed yourself after you pay server fees, and thats if you don't have housing costs like myself. I'm one of the more fortunate server owners who is in a good situation where I can afford to do this. Going to be fully transparent on that one.

The only time we could afford more help, back when we had the playerbase to do so, 3400 or so unique, we did so. we had hired extra staff. Unfortunately due to haters we got a lot of activity that led me to believe we may be under focus from gravity. I actually at that time planned to go all out turning Alfheim into a professional business, but we had to go into hiding thanks to haters.

And yeah, in hindsight I wish I could have not hid the server again, but at the time I felt like I had no other choice. Anytime you get popular, you will get haters who will try to do anything and everything to burn the server down on their way out and hold the threat of gravity over your head. By now, I've learned to ignore this but a population is hard to get to return.

As for everything else, you blame me for not listening to experienced woe players, which is suggesting literal bias. I should do what I feel personally is best for the server plain and simple. and I always have. For or better or worse, you may not like my decisions which is fair, but to suggest I should be biased is gross. And despite what others would say I am not a pawn of anyone or any players in particular. I try to design the server based on a combination of what I think is fun, and player feedback. WOE Players, in my experience just cry for changes that benefit them and their guild rather than what is healthy for the server. As for the drama, there isn't much we can do about that. We've been bannig people harassing other people, we've told people to stop posting drama in discord and I've muted people in game for causing drama in game. If people don't like each other and don't want to play because of it, that is not my fault. There's only so much we can do.


And full transparency here, people like to pretend I don't care about the server when there's been so much negativity and toxicity that I've had to step away from my own discord just to get things done because to be blunt you guys have unrealistic expectations of what we can do with the budget that we have.

And to be clear, I understand why. I do not expect players to understand how time consuming dev work can be. Or how challenging it is to adjust the server balance in a way that will be fun while also not breaking it. Things are hard, and I've been far from perfect. Many of our changes have been had good changes but bring some negative with it so we're forced to adjust, but adjusting takes time and players for better or worse may lose patience in that time.

I don't blame players, I don't know what else I could really do though besides keep being dedicated to my project the way that I am. No, we're not perfect. I've made plenty of wrong decisions with Alfheim, but hindsight is always 20/20. All I can do is keep trying to make the server as fun as it can be.

And for what its worth to anyone out there who may read this I do still care about the server very deeply. I've legitimately worked on it all day today alone just responding to suggestions from players and questions. There's a video in our discord for anyone who wants to see that I do still indeed care.

The doom posting channel is there so negativity can be dumped into one channel rather than throughout the whole discord where it was dampering the mood of all the players who just want to play in peace without being told the server is dying left and right when it isn't. It's not going anywhere and I will continue to work as hard and care as much as I do regardless of criticism and regardless of population.

[Azu_Raged]

Much respect to you sir. Hope u keep up the good work. Someday I shall return.

[SagitariuS1]

I rarely respond to posts like this, but I have to laugh when someone says development time is extremely slow. Old Glast Heim created a s*** ton of custom maps, with custom textures, we had custom sprites created, custom card art, and all of it was implemented by hand by two people. I wanted to do something special and grandiose and it took a lot of time. A lot more than I even anticipated.

My main fault here is setting unrealistic expectations. I will more than admit that I gave people bad expectations but thats mostly due to my sheer inexperiene. Most content I have created can be done in a few months. OGH was of a scope I did not realize would be as time consuming as it was. You really don't realize how many small moving parts and how s*** and outdated the client side work is on this game until you start creating truly custom stuff.

Get more people? With what money? Do you want to pay people? How much money do you think RO servers make? Spoilers its barely enough to feed yourself after you pay server fees, and thats if you don't have housing costs like myself. I'm one of the more fortunate server owners who is in a good situation where I can afford to do this. Going to be fully transparent on that one.

The only time we could afford more help, back when we had the playerbase to do so, 3400 or so unique, we did so. we had hired extra staff. Unfortunately due to haters we got a lot of activity that led me to believe we may be under focus from gravity. I actually at that time planned to go all out turning Alfheim into a professional business, but we had to go into hiding thanks to haters.

And yeah, in hindsight I wish I could have not hid the server again, but at the time I felt like I had no other choice. Anytime you get popular, you will get haters who will try to do anything and everything to burn the server down on their way out and hold the threat of gravity over your head. By now, I've learned to ignore this but a population is hard to get to return.

As for everything else, you blame me for not listening to experienced woe players, which is suggesting literal bias. I should do what I feel personally is best for the server plain and simple. and I always have. For or better or worse, you may not like my decisions which is fair, but to suggest I should be biased is gross. And despite what others would say I am not a pawn of anyone or any players in particular. I try to design the server based on a combination of what I think is fun, and player feedback. WOE Players, in my experience just cry for changes that benefit them and their guild rather than what is healthy for the server. As for the drama, there isn't much we can do about that. We've been bannig people harassing other people, we've told people to stop posting drama in discord and I've muted people in game for causing drama in game. If people don't like each other and don't want to play because of it, that is not my fault. There's only so much we can do.


And full transparency here, people like to pretend I don't care about the server when there's been so much negativity and toxicity that I've had to step away from my own discord just to get things done because to be blunt you guys have unrealistic expectations of what we can do with the budget that we have.

And to be clear, I understand why. I do not expect players to understand how time consuming dev work can be. Or how challenging it is to adjust the server balance in a way that will be fun while also not breaking it. Things are hard, and I've been far from perfect. Many of our changes have been had good changes but bring some negative with it so we're forced to adjust, but adjusting takes time and players for better or worse may lose patience in that time.

I don't blame players, I don't know what else I could really do though besides keep being dedicated to my project the way that I am. No, we're not perfect. I've made plenty of wrong decisions with Alfheim, but hindsight is always 20/20. All I can do is keep trying to make the server as fun as it can be.

And for what its worth to anyone out there who may read this I do still care about the server very deeply. I've legitimately worked on it all day today alone just responding to suggestions from players and questions. There's a video in our discord for anyone who wants to see that I do still indeed care.

The doom posting channel is there so negativity can be dumped into one channel rather than throughout the whole discord where it was dampering the mood of all the players who just want to play in peace without being told the server is dying left and right when it isn't. It's not going anywhere and I will continue to work as hard and care as much as I do regardless of criticism and regardless of population.

Charlie, first of all, I'm not your hater. I enjoyed good time on PA and grateful for it. Second, this world only need good result, reasons.com changes nothing. Third, you should't "laugh" for good review especially neutral one. This attitude is one of the reason why 3400 people left.

[Gulielmus]

"Third, you should't "laugh" for good review especially neutral one."

He laughs about how the normies think devs, programmers or anything related to technology is just to press a friking button and then it is solved.

[Xellie]

What?!  I thought everything existed on Google and you can just copy/paste every npc from rA,herc forums and fix it with StackOverflow searches!

I would love to see people have their own servers, script just ONE functional NPC, and see their comments afterwards.

(I have my own server that I made my own maps/npcs on and although not complex, it's somewhat tedious and takes time, with a basis of coding elsewhere I have a healthy respect for what Charlie and his team do! Also making custom mobs is super frustrating.)

Servers with bigger teams are much, much slower, not naming any servers that have been on hiatus for two+ years now but...

[Metan]

What I hate about multi clienting is less about inflating the population numbers and more that you're basically playing an MMO to just play by yourself, it really doesn't make sense, I'm not crapping on solo players because there is content in the game that doesn't really make much sense to make a party for even though it's nice to play with the company of someone else, it's also kind of annoying that some guides will basically boil down "ok so you're first going to make 3-4 separate accounts and on each you'll make a priest/sage/soul linker AND THEN you'll make the [class of choice] on your main account" if it doesn't straight up tell me to leech all of my characters with the slave priest.

While I despise that, I think it's still interesting that PA is kind of seeking a middle ground, it allows for multi clienting but actively discourages it in a way that doesn't really punish players, a good example of that is inn buffs, usually when people make these slaves is to farm at the low floors of a dungeon, you could aways go back to the inn and refresh the buffs for another 30 minutes and just go back to farming, so this already discourages you from making a priest slave, this doesn't affect the usefulness of actively playing priests either, since you'll still be needing one for deeper or harder dungeons.
You could always buy element enchant scrolls to cover for sage needs, they're quite cheap too imo, usually go for 10k, for 20 minutes that's a pretty good deal even if you make only 1-2m an hour. the only disadvantage of this is when there isn't anybody selling them which isn't that big of a deal for me.
Partying with other people gives you more exp, you don't have any exp bonus for multi clienting I think but I'm not too sure how it works.

So to me multi clienting in PA is a huge waste of time, while I'd rather have it banned, it's nice that players at least have a choice in the matter, people that have grown used to this sort of thing can still do their thing.

The issue is that an admin who cares about player experience cannot ban multi clienting without overhauling the entire game to compensate. Playing without Agi/Bless is a miserable experience, and the further you explore maps of later episodes, the worse it gets, as monster balancing apparently assumes that there's always a HP around, i.e. fast movespeed (hard to outrun without agi), high flee/hit, absurd atk/matk and powerful skills; eventually this evolved into the assumption that medium to large groups are required and certain classes are not allowed to partake. By the way, I find it ironic that most pre-re servers which prohibited multi clienting had just classic content, and those which got up to Nidd or further episodes (but still pre-re) generally had no idea what they were doing.
Of course this is not a problem: this is an MMO, after all; but all these were made with kRO in mind (and I suppose nothing but), where I'm sure HPs and SLs weren't hard to find back then, with players abound by the thousands. Here? Whether you're in a private server which is at best kind of big, with a couple hundred concurrent players, and at worst a dead corner, it basically comes down to the same condition: assuming you're actually playing the game instead of being a Prontera tile warmer, if you can't multi client, you better have some friends, or you're s*** out of luck. Farming Incarnations and Thor Volcano would be lengthy and costly, for instance, and some builds quite simply would not exist without a SL to allow it. Without multi clienting, this game ceases to be a game and becomes an ordeal.

Having a buffer NPC like you mentioned alleviates this issue some, but does not fix it.

Just wanted to throw this rant, I'm surprised this thread is still up.

[iixe]

As for everything else, you blame me for not listening to experienced woe players, which is suggesting literal bias. I should do what I feel personally is best for the server plain and simple. and I always have.

So as an example, boosting treasure chests with consumables for our beloved sickpo- excuse me, weekend warriors was your own idea entirely? You came up with a decision that results in less related farm activity from the remaining people up on your own? You did not balance the mat grind further for everyone but for one specific party and call it a decision that is "best for the server"?
The latest changes in the last weeks you made werent even tested anymore by anyone. And dont tell me they were after you have butchered literally any testing instance on the server with your own hands. You just threw these changes out and be like "here, deal with it" and that is what you "personally feel best for the server"?

Dude, who do you even want to clown here?

[TuckerCarlson]

Who were the sickpot users? And why didn't the admin do anything about it?

[bigx]

What?!  I thought everything existed on Google and you can just copy/paste every npc from rA,herc forums and fix it with StackOverflow searches!

I would love to see people have their own servers, script just ONE functional NPC, and see their comments afterwards.

(I have my own server that I made my own maps/npcs on and although not complex, it's somewhat tedious and takes time, with a basis of coding elsewhere I have a healthy respect for what Charlie and his team do! Also making custom mobs is super frustrating.)

Servers with bigger teams are much, much slower, not naming any servers that have been on hiatus for two+ years now but...

No one is saying that dev work isn't complicated, I'm an engineer myself and wouldnt dare touch RO code. This is about managing expectations and your development roadmap. The server bled population while waiting for this patch and you know it. I hate to play backseat dev but even releasing content in smaller patches (if possible) would've been better than a 6+ month black hole in content.

[Xellie]

No one is saying that dev work isn't complicated, I'm an engineer myself and wouldnt dare touch RO code. This is about managing expectations and your development roadmap. The server bled population while waiting for this patch and you know it. I hate to play backseat dev but even releasing content in smaller patches (if possible) would've been better than a 6+ month black hole in content.

I don't disagree, but in terms of work flow it seems to work better for them. I'd rather have content a bit at a time so I don't burn out on a ton of content at once. But that's a player speaking, not a dev.

[Kazuki]

Tbh, I'll take updates with actual new content we've never received in pre-re (rebalanced of course) that take a while over the typical pre-re server cycle stuff of starting at a lower episode like 5~9 and then slowly releasing the same content we've already replayed over and over for 16+ years now until ep13 and then they get nothing else.

Are there any servers out there even outputting new pre-re content at the pace you want? Even Gravity doesn't update that often, although they're the ones actually building the content from scratch (usually) to be fair. They still have a whole team of people working on it though. I'm sure a lot of dev time goes to their cash shop and new ways to upgrade in order to drive people to the cash shop.

Ep13.2, the last pre-re update was released in Nov 2008.
Ep20, the most current episode, was released Mar 2023.

I can't tell you how boring it is to get that RO urge every year and then find yourself back grinding at wolves, high orcs, sandmen, geffenia, etc again for the umpteenth time. The QoL changes on Alfheim and the rebalanced Renewal content I'll finally get to see are stopping me from just leaving RO behind altogether. RO has never been a game with a lot of side content, so I play other games too (Destiny 2, FFXIV, etc.), but Alfheim is where I play RO and it will be the last private RO server I play on. I'm not falling back into the old pre-re cycle again.

[Lunalepsy]

There are better RO servers than this one. The whole "multiclient" thing is just an excuse. Excellent game, terrible management.