Game Master RatingsFriendliness: Oh boy, this is it. This is what makes this server a complete waste of your time. The management. Where to begin... I'll start with the assistants (sub-GMs? I don't even know what they're supposed to be called or what their purpose is...). There's about a 35% chance one of them is online. They don't seem to really do that much or be too involved with server development, after inquiring multiple times about some future updates. However, half of them are okay. I didn't have the most extensive contact with them, so I can't really be a judge. I didn't really have an issue either, besides a couple of them teaming up with Megumi all the time and not contributing anything. GM SloMo, who was I believe our developer (y'know, the one who couldn't figure out how to allow dual clienting? Yeah! That one!), was not online that much. That's okay. He's a developer, and developers tend to work behind the scenes. As such he wasn't heavily involved in the poor rating of this category. GM Amethy (spelling?) was MIA, and I never talked to him/her.
Unfortunately, this puts the admin, Megumi, front and center, which forces this category to be 95% about him. Honestly, admins need to lay low. They have far too much control, access, and power to be such involved public figures (especially the types of admin who allow themselves to see private chat, such as guild chat or PMs). Megumi is absolutely incompetent, inexperienced, and terrible at managing players. Ah, yes. I think I'll review Megumi's performance in story format!
During the first week, he was okay. I thought that he didn't really have his priorities with management straight, as there were a lot of unimplemented things that really should have been developed or even decided prior to opening, such as headgear quests, proper web, loading screen, and patcher development, and advertisement investments (I mean, come on. It looks like the presentation of this server was done in Paint, and you guys didn't even do the CP design yourself. None of it is cohesive, and it's all hard to look at and think you're taking this seriously... But this is only relevant in a FIRST review). I thought he had good intentions despite being a stick-in-the-mud. However things took a real turn for the worse. Being a stick-in-the-mud rapidly evolved into being a stick-up-the-donkey. With no new content, people wanted more. Many suggestions were made in the forums, and very few of them were actually implemented. A lot of these were good suggestions and they were very popular, such as adding Battlegrounds 2.0 rounds (we only had Rush and Conquest, and these got old very quickly as 3 vs. 3 GVG isn't really fun) or fixing a lot of the griefing and abuse issues with the Devil's Square event.
This is the event that I was talking about, earlier, being the most reasonable way to access Gold Coins. The Devil's Square event, as many of you know, spawns a ton of monsters in a small area on a secluded map. The monsters spawned were difficult things such as Bow Guardians, Retributions, Salamanders, Kasas, Sword Guardians, and Anubis. This event gave out 10 Gold Coins. However, there was an issue. This event had a maximum capacity of 10 players (often leading to leeching for Gold Coins and griefing by filling up the room before a guild can get their whole party in). One main issue is that this event required about 8-10 characters and an hour and a half to complete. With a very low population, this makes the event near impossible without dual clienting (as dual clienting is against the rules, but apparently not automatically enforced through an NPC's IP restriction capabilities... Incompetent!). The suggestion proposed that the 100 potential Gold Coins were distributed evenly between players in the event (in order to reduce the abuse of dual clienting and promote real team play), and that the event would be a party-registered instance instead of a public event, in order to remove the ability to grief. Megumi rejected this suggestion, stating "100 GC prize is way too Op ." Megumi misunderstood the suggestion with his failing English (which was more often than not inconvenient for trying to communicate). The prize was already 100 Gold Coins. I brought this up in the shoutbox. I said something along the lines of "Why the hell was that topic closed and moved to rejected? It was a good suggestion that fixes a lot of issues with DS (Devil's Square)." His response was something rude like, "i know a bad suggestion when i see it and that suggestion was bad." I argued that the suggestion forum should be a place of debate (which never truly happened while I was there; no thread ever made it to the debate stage before being hastily rejected or approved). Megumi's response, to the biggest (and most competitively viable) guild there? Leader of 21 different members? This server's only real asset? Something like "i'm not making you play here ." W-WHAT?! SERIOUSLY? Who says s*** like that? What the hell kind of admin thinks he can get away with that? At this point I was livid. I pointed out that that's probably not the best thing to say to the largest guild's leader, and that the server will likely die were we to leave (as the population was already stagnant and small). I reloaded the forum page to check the shoutbox. Got this:
At this point I was cracking up. Unreasonably forum banning the largest guild's leader was the first step to this server's self-destruction. Reason code: "Stupid". It's good to know that Megumi can really take criticism on his management style like an adult. (Note: If you want to see the actual logs of the shoutbox chat, I had a guild member take screenshots of it. I can upload them in the future, if requested. I just don't have them on my computer, yet.)
A couple days later, I log on in the afternoon. I'm in Prontera, and 8 of my guildmates were online and in a line. I sit in front of them and start idle chatter and all that guildmate trolling that we do to each other out of affection for each other. Nothing unwanted here. I notice another player is getting banned. He is pleading in Prontera to unban an account. He starts insulting me and I lightly insult him back. Nothing really out of the ordinary, just a normal trollish "ur ugly aehuiaheiae" or something. I don't even know what this guy looks like. He disconnects. He logs onto another alternate character exclaiming "what was that for?", and that character disappears as well. This continues for awhile. We'd had problems before. In fact, I hated this guy. He sucks, and he makes playing on the same server a much lower quality. But I never really cared about anything enough to report him. It couldn't have been bad enough for an IP permaban, could it? So he disappears. He stops logging into all of his characters. This was something I noticed without really bringing up in the chatter to my guild. So we just continued talking. Nothing out of the ordinary. The topic was penis, as it usually is in Prontera on any server ever. Megumi broadcasts "last warning". My guild had no idea what he was talking about. He never told any of us we were breaking any rule in town, and never distinguished who he was talking to. This was the response and result.
The "last warning" broadcast is one or two lines above the chat box. I had only said those two lines before getting banned. Nothing else. ummwat? Today, I still have no clue what I got banned for when I was just joking around with nothing offensive or really disrespectful, especially between "last warning" and the ban. Even if I made minor offenses before, nothing justifies banning someone for doing nothing against the rules after saying "last warning".
I wasn't online, obviously, to see what everyone was saying. Everything from this point on was learned second-hand. About three of my guild members retaliated. They knew this was the end of the server, and there was no point in playing on LiberationRO without a guild leader or competition. Two of them started quietly dropping their valuable equipment. I had one of them log onto my Paladin to drop my Combat Knife in town. Wasn't doing me any good. IP banned. The other member (Hiro), who had NEVER said anything EVER, publicly started dropping his valuable DD High Wizard items. Banned. 85% of our members quit after hearing about this, or witnessing it. A few other witnesses quit as well, and asked where we were going to move to since they didn't want to play there anymore, either.
Now, I brought up that some admins allow themselves to see private chat channels. This would be the ONLY reasonable explanation as to why I was banned. In guild chat (WHICH SHOULD REMAIN PRIVATE AND NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS TY), I was discussing with my guild about what server to move to, because I was really unhappy with Megumi's performance, the population size, and the lack of competition. I have heavily criticizing these things in the guild channel, as the rest of us were. We were talking about new homes and telling each other about other midrates, and moving there while only WoEing on Liberation and nothing else. If Megumi read any of it, of course he has a right to be angry. But no right to take action for what's said privately, without being reported by an uncomfortable recipient (as there weren't any).
I don't know who Megumi thinks he is, but this isn't how you manage a server. bestadmin2k13.
1/10.
Availability: Megumi was on somewhat often later at night. He was often AFK, though, but he would check the shoutbox every couple of hours if you needed support. As an American, he wasn't online too often when I really needed his support. I already mentioned everything else about availability in the friendliness section, to justify the review revolving around Megumi.
5/10 here because their activity wasn't awful but it wasn't good either for the western world.
Helpfulness: I'll address my experiences with Megumi (as he's the only one I can really review, as described earlier) chronologically. The custom headgear quests. Normally, I'd be patient about this if they were real quests with separate NPCs and small story-lines. Unfortunately, Megumi has no excuse for this. The NPC used for custom quests was a crappily made all-in-one NPC. It's also worth mentioning that a large portion of these hats have ridiculous requirements, and/or weren't researched properly. Autumn Leaves took 50 Feather of Angel. Yes. Feather of Angel. The god-item material. Why leaves require feathers, don't ask me, but that's some brilliant planning. When really trying to push Megumi to release quests and contribute ideas for popular hats that were in high demand, he blew me off. With an NPC constructed so simply, it's so easy to make a quest it's not even funny. Only one of these popular hats was implemented, Well-Chewed Pencil, for the initial insane requirement of 75 Gold Coins, as I mentioned earlier. Additional Battlegrounds 2.0 matches were never implemented. Decisions were hastily made regarding implementation of the Graveyard system. After applying for the guild package (and other guilds had received their pack somewhat promptly), I eventually got a bit bored of waiting. I believe it was a week and a half before the ban that I applied for the guild package. We never received it. He often did not reply to any of my PMs. I noticed he ignored people frequently in the shoutbox on the forums. My other guild members had the same problems. There was an instance I witnessed in the shoutbox where one of the assistants was addressing a player who misunderstood the reason why @mi marc states that the card drops a .01%. It's because there are two Marcs. The normal one, who dropped the card at .5%, and the quest one, who does not get modified by rates unless configured to. The assistant thought the drop rate was .01% too. Helpers of any kind need to have more intuitive and problem solving abilities, along with general Ragnarok knowledge, in order to correctly do their job. This is just a brief example.
2/10, and only because Megumi responded to my PMs for the first week (although without doing anything in a timely manner).
Game-Play RatingsEconomy: Absolutely no economy. Only once did I ever find someone making a reasonable trade deal. It was the only trade I ever made, within one month. There are about 15 venders online at all times, all of which host rubbish items that nobody wants. The only things in demand were Special Event Tickets and Gold Coins, because nobody wanted to do all those stupid events.
2/10, rightfully.
Guild Competition: Now that my guild is gone? None. All that's left is a single pinoy guild that is 50% Assassin Crosses, 50% Champions. WoE never even started on this server. Don't bother, you'll find more competition on RMS' test server.
1/10.
Class Balance: Mostly Champions. Readily available and large amounts of potions were obtainable from the Battlegrounds for use in the PVP arena. You only had to do a few rounds of BG to get enough supplies to make this server's PVP scene ChampRO. Snipers and Champions were really all I ever saw here, outside of my guild (as I REQUIRED high class diversity).
2/10.
TOTAL RATING: 25/100!!.....
There you go. My review of LiberationRO. Oh, and thanks for reporting my review, Megumi. Now that I really gave myself the chance to sit down and write down all of the displeasure I had playing this server, I can really justify all the low ratings. In fact, this review has lower total ratings than the initial brief review.
Biggest disappointment of a server in my 9 years of Ragnarok. AND I PLAYED EUPHRO 1.0 TIL ITS MELTDOWN. ):
-Reality
