Does using RCX and Modified GRF ruin the game?

[bisuke]

I'm an RO fan myself and I do have a guild that plays from server to server. As I always see nowadays, Most of the players uses RCX or modified GRF to remove in-game effects and to see the enemies more clearer.

The question is, do you think it ruins the game? Is it form of cheating?

[iro_ori]

a lot of people would probably say the game is better with it.

i don't really know. i know it takes away from /effect switching. but should /effect switching even be needed in the first place?

there's a lot of questionable things about RO such as the woe meta. i don't think the game was ever made to have this many supplies available so easily. slims, bombs, etc. due to bots the items are able to be farmed. bots are not suppose to be apart of RO. without bots, the amount of supplies available wouldn't be able to support the current game's meta.

this is just 1 example. there's a lot of things that weren't suppose to happen with RO but its poorly managed and now everyone thinks its just the way the game is suppose to be when its not.

[exii]

You really should differ between hard cheats and optical benefits. Bots, nodelay, hold (combined with 1 cell range add), friendmode and titan are very hard game changer and really taking part of the success of each player.
But it offends me when I need to read that players really dare to call optical improvements as a cheat. Just take a look how ro now looks like, what interessts players mostly have and then compare it with this focus which players had when the games came out. Its a known fact that ro woe became to one of the most professional contents in the whole landscape of mmos. But when the developers created this game they didnt even had any idea about this evolve. Paying attention to this fact you basicly can say that the standart possibilities dont match with the demands of players anymore regarding to professional gameplay. The reason why rcx is inofficially legit, even on official servers, is simple: devs never had a to reconstruct anything because the comunity solved it for themselves.

If you want to forbid things like rcx get the 2011+ rathena client like the mass of pinoy s*** noob admins who really have no idea about what they are doing. You can sightly notice that only noobs playing on such s*** servers.

The possibily to change almost every sprite or optical process in this game makes it very interessting for me because I can costumize it for my own demands. And unlike other players Ive never focused on creating the hard cheats. But I dont think that I will stop improving and costumizing the client until Im really satisfied. Im planning to create a new .dll file which heavily effects the showcase of skills like Lex A but I have no idea if I ever will finish it. Its slowly getting boring just because I cant find (m)any server(s) which would be worth it to create those new files for.
From my personal point of view the rest of the professional comunity died 3-6months ago.

[iro_ori]

You really should differ between hard cheats and optical benefits. Bots, nodelay, hold (combined with 1 cell range add), friendmode and titan are very hard game changer and really taking part of the success of each player.
But it offends me when I need to read that players really dare to call optical improvements as a cheat. Just take a look how ro now looks like, what interessts players mostly have and then compare it with this focus which players had when the games came out. Its a known fact that ro woe became to one of the most professional contents in the whole landscape of mmos. But when the developers created this game they didnt even had any idea about this evolve. Paying attention to this fact you basicly can say that the standart possibilities dont match with the demands of players anymore regarding to professional gameplay. The reason why rcx is inofficially legit, even on official servers, is simple: devs never had a to reconstruct anything because the comunity solved it for themselves.

If you want to forbid things like rcx get the 2011+ rathena client like the mass of pinoy s*** noob admins who really have no idea about what they are doing. You can sightly notice that only noobs playing on such s*** servers.

The possibily to change almost every sprite or optical process in this game makes it very interessting for me because I can costumize it for my own demands. And unlike other players Ive never focused on creating the hard cheats. But I dont think that I will stop improving and costumizing the client until Im really satisfied. Im planning to create a new .dll file which heavily effects the showcase of skills like Lex A but I have no idea if I ever will finish it. Its slowly getting boring just because I cant find (m)any server(s) which would be worth it to create those new files for.
From my personal point of view the rest of the professional comunity died 3-6months ago.

care to explain what hold (combined with 1 cell range add), friendmode and titan do?

i would also add autopot and ahk to your list. i've seen so many bad players become decent after they use those. i would like to see RO with no bots, no autopot, no ahk, no nodelay but that will never happen. it seems like if other games like WoW or whatever had these issues they would find ways to block them. is RO just too old of a game to block these things or are the devs just bad? talking more so for official servers. kRO devs.

[bisuke]

You really should differ between hard cheats and optical benefits. Bots, nodelay, hold (combined with 1 cell range add), friendmode and titan are very hard game changer and really taking part of the success of each player.
But it offends me when I need to read that players really dare to call optical improvements as a cheat. Just take a look how ro now looks like, what interessts players mostly have and then compare it with this focus which players had when the games came out. Its a known fact that ro woe became to one of the most professional contents in the whole landscape of mmos. But when the developers created this game they didnt even had any idea about this evolve. Paying attention to this fact you basicly can say that the standart possibilities dont match with the demands of players anymore regarding to professional gameplay. The reason why rcx is inofficially legit, even on official servers, is simple: devs never had a to reconstruct anything because the comunity solved it for themselves.

If you want to forbid things like rcx get the 2011+ rathena client like the mass of pinoy s*** noob admins who really have no idea about what they are doing. You can sightly notice that only noobs playing on such s*** servers.

The possibily to change almost every sprite or optical process in this game makes it very interessting for me because I can costumize it for my own demands. And unlike other players Ive never focused on creating the hard cheats. But I dont think that I will stop improving and costumizing the client until Im really satisfied. Im planning to create a new .dll file which heavily effects the showcase of skills like Lex A but I have no idea if I ever will finish it. Its slowly getting boring just because I cant find (m)any server(s) which would be worth it to create those new files for.
From my personal point of view the rest of the professional comunity died 3-6months ago.

Agree. The downfall of Ragnarok is because of Bots, lot of player quit after the infestation of Bot.

Going back to the topic, using Bot, No Delays, AHK is really cheating. However using RCX is not cheating per se, but still, it modifies the game on how you must originally play it.

[exii]

I just named some examples. I also could add WPE, AutoIT, RPE, DDraw, Meth, Maya p hack etc.

What does hold do?
Hold is a feature based on memory read which allows you to change running game mechanics  regarding your movement while casting.
Just an example: if you cast JT on your hw and the target is not in range the char wil move until its in target range. Hold stops this behaviour. If you cast a single target skill and the target is out of range, the char isnt able to move which means you can stack up in woe and never leave your position to cast a single target spell on an opponent. But for some reason the hold feature had the insane benefit that you were able to cast your skills from 10 cells instead of 9. The reason is that the server thinks you have been moved to this cell and unlock it. There is a fixing for it btw.

Titan is just a resize of sprites. So clown can be 3 times bigger because and can be easier targeted. Even on pro players circles using titan meant to be dishonored.
To understand how titan works you just need to understand how hitboxes generally work in this game. But there is a thing which most players who even know or used titan didnt know and I dont want to give them tips to improve it. Like I said: Im costumizing the client like how I want but cheats are created by other persons. I would have some extremly op ideas but never will try to realize them.

Friendmode disables autohitting objects. Meaning if you have a mind breaker prof in your guild stack you never will have missclick by click on him for accident while moving a few cells. Its just ignoring this sprite.


However.
You REALLY mistaken something here. Bots kept official servers alive. If bots wouldnt be able to be 80% of the overall population the economy would have been broken many years ago.
Just look how many players really want to grind their mats for woe there. Ofc there are some and without bots there would be more of them but at least the farmed supplies would be some water drops in relation of the demand ocean of players for every single woe. The fact that many things are available for cheap keeps the iRo alive. Well for kRo.. they still have a huge donation level and a big assortment of items. I dont really know how kRo works so I wont comment this.

Well, for ahk and autopot I must say that these tools became a greyzone over time. They clearly are cheats, if you take the common aspects what a cheap is meant to but big parts of the comunity accepted them. Im playing this game before louyang was implemented which is about 10 years ago and when I farmed very exhausting I really had some spiking pain in my fingers after some months. I wasnt able to touch anything for a week because it hurted too much. And at this point I really to ask why this must be forbidden..
The thing behind to block ahk were 2 things: bots and click macros. I can understand it for bots but for click macros I really disagree with. Lets be honest: player skill does not mean how fast you can clickspam the manual way. A clickspam which was the same for everyone opened new possibilites and players finally were able to focus to basics of this game.
Btw no game really have an effective way to encounter click macros or simple macro chains. Not a single one.

For autopot, well, its almost the same background. Let me say this clearly: you cant stop autopot. I own a couple of programs which can do it the direct way by reading the recv pakets but I also own a full ahk macro and a very exclusive counter piece for autoIT which a guildmate wrote for our small core once. You might be able to stop recv paket reading for a while (a full block like rA2011+ is an illusion, it just would take a while to interprete the encryption but still far away from being safe) but players always would be able to switch to tools which are based on optical signals. So to be fair that everyone has the same chances a lot of admins realized that its better to give better access to them instead to block it as much as possible which only leaded to extrem unbalancings between guilds who still were able to use it and guilds who had no more idea and were forced to pla with the basics.
So at the end of the da autopot became part of the game.

[Playtester]

I prefer playing with RCX or any customs at all really.

But for some things RCX is quite nice like for example see the BB gutter lines.

[Zleepy]

<aid></aid> best titan ever
rcx is great and is very much needed for those who want to create good and play decently

[Blinzer]

actually if a server sets global delay to 150-200ms nogrf actually balances the game



don't know what rcx is though

[Styx]

They have influence on gameplay with no doubt but it is a matter of taste mainly.
The real problem is that they are client-side and not server-side and therefore circumstances are not equal for every player.
I don't see much of a challenge in it and makes me avoid ingame situations where other humans are involved as much as possible.

[Blinzer]

They have influence on gameplay with no doubt but it is a matter of taste mainly.
The real problem is that they are client-side and not server-side and therefore circumstances are not equal for every player.
I don't see much of a challenge in it and makes me avoid ingame situations where other humans are involved as much as possible.

it's extremely easy to nullify the effects of nogrf server side, takes like 10 seconds

i'm surprised so many servers let it pass and complain about it at the same time

[exii]

it's extremely easy to nullify the effects of nogrf server side, takes like 10 seconds

i'm surprised so many servers let it pass and complain about it at the same time

..which result in a scenatio where I need 10 secs after to bypass it 'cause cheap securties are a s*** worth.

Btw what is nogrf? Im a big name in grf mods and still be confused when I read terms like this.

[Blinzer]

..which result in a scenatio where I need 10 secs after to bypass it 'cause cheap securties are a s*** worth.

Btw what is nogrf? Im a big name in grf mods and still be confused when I read terms like this.

uhh

which results in a scenario where you need to modify my server's database files to bypass it

if you're not aware, ragnarok's database allows full control of all skill cooldowns, cast times, walk delays, and skill delays and there is nothing you, the player, can do about it

basically every server you've ever seen never gave a f*** about your exploits to begin with


although at the same time i am aware of bragi hacks and other hacks of the sort, which makes me wonder how they are done


no grf is just 1 frame animations, you basically appear as always standing still

[Nebraskka]

I'm an RO fan myself and I do have a guild that plays from server to server. As I always see nowadays, Most of the players uses RCX or modified GRF to remove in-game effects and to see the enemies more clearer.

The question is, do you think it ruins the game? Is it form of cheating?

I think it's not cheating-related question at all.

Things like RCX or gray world are ruining gameplay's visual experience.
They're being used only to gain functionality
that client without them can't provide:

• Lighter AoE effects, ex:
  spammed Storm Gust looks like just like one huge pile of while screen.
• Fixed timers for skills like traps etc
• More accurate visualising of dance/AoE-skill zones.
• Ability to see everything without any model on map (this one is quite cheaty one).

They are not destroying the game completely, but degrades the gameplay feeling.
This is happening just because of some visual limitations of the client (like AoE-effect spamming stacking on each other, and some effects having round corners while it works on square cells).

Those RCX/grayworld videos from WoE without effects are disaster. It's not interesting at all to anyone but other RCX-using guilds. This makes game more specific and increasing the barrier to entry the game if you didn't played it previously.

[Astraeos]

When RCX first came out, it was a god send. It added so much precision that the game desperately needed to keep up with newer PC games. And it wasnt really a cheat, as it didn't really have any such features excluding the bot which didn't work too well in english and reveled bugs in the client with certain actors not showing up even though the game data was send to the client.

The rest of its all BS, autopotting wouldnt be as bad if people actually had to have the awareness of continuing combat. While I agree the button mashing portion is ridiculous, the concept of not needing to be aware that your character is in danger takes away a lot of gameplay value.