MindRO: the best pre-re right now (high rate)

[Stella]

The concept of MindRO is simple yet bold. It's a pre-renewal server without any custom equipment or cards... yet with 100% drop rate and with MVP cards enabled! At first this doesn't sound like a long term idea for a RO server, there would be no economy and with MVP cards everywhere there would no balance, right? I thought that too, but here I am proven wrong after playing for months and still wanting to play more for a long long time.

The server surprisingly has a good economy, yes, you heard (read) that right! MVP Cards (2.5% drop rate - the only drop rate exception) are always in demand, high tier equipment like Nydhorgg's Shadow Garb, Diabolus Set, Valkyrie Set, Battlegrounds equipment, highly refined equipment, enchanted armors with 3 stats and a lot others all make browsing the market worthwhile. It's amazing how this is possible in a 100% drop rate server. The key that made this possible in my opinion is that they made Zeny valuable! They weren't greedy like other servers and instead decided to put Cash Foods and other normaly Cash Shop Only usables in the Tool Dealer NPC to be sold for Zeny. That and requiring large amounts of Zeny to enter some instances or to rent private MVP rooms made Zeny valuable and moved the economy.

The server has 0 pay2win. The Cash Shop is mainly made of costumes and you can get costumes from everywhere. There are Zeny costumes sold in Costumes Shop, there are MVP costumes exchanged with MVP Kill points, there are PK costumes exchanged with Player Kill points, there are Battlegrounds costumes, there are vote 4 points costumes... They are all different and look cool.

Ok what about balance? The MVP Cards are still flying everywhere. True! The server has no custom equipment, no card modifications, except these 5:

• Doppelganger Card: Effect increased by 3x
• Moonlight Flower Card: Effect increased by 1.5x
• Golden Thief Bug Card: Effect reduced to half inside PvP, BG and GvG maps
• Fallen Bishop Hibram Card: Effect reduced to half inside PvP, BG and GvG maps
• Memory of Thanatos Card: Disabled inside PvP, BG and GvG maps

These changes make all the difference, from a complete imbalance to a fair and brilliant balance! I don't know how the GM arrived to this but a GM post can be found here if you're interested.

All in all MindRO has everything an avid PvP/BG/WoE/KoE player would want in a pre-renewal.

But the reason why I decided to write this review (as my way to support the server) at this time and not before are the recent server updates (QoL additions). The consistency of which they are added impressed me a lot so as others. Some months have 3-4 updates!

They recently added proxy servers



and helpful custom status icons that make the PvP play more convenient (previously we couldn't tell when an elemental converter item is no longer in effect and had to use an other one just to be sure in PvP. Same for other items)





and "@bulksell confirm" command to sell all items in your inventory except items in fav tab and other safe items - @bulksellsf to see list. This has made farming Zeny much more convenient, and they recently added Gepard and @lgp command too.

Updates are mostly player directed in the development requests forum and all are well logged in Changelog forum.

The server as of now has 100 ~ 130 player online at any time of the day. The server has never declined in population since as far as I can remember. It kept on growing slowly from 30 online to 50 to 70 to 90 until where it is now and I'm sure it will continue to grow. I asked why the population is small for such a well worked on server and was told there was no grand opening or anything, all players came only from the RMS listing that's why.

The community is small but tight everyone knows everyone, there are friends, rivals, MVP jerks who steal your kills, all types of people... but mostly good people. The server has a nice unique feature that is #main messages in game appear in discord and discord messages appear in game. This lets everyone stay in the loop of what's happening in the community even when not online or just on the phone. I sometimes join the fun conversations that are going on directly from my phone and it feels amazing.

Thank you for reading!

[toilette13]

The server is small because not many people who are interested in high rates would be interested in 2.5% drop rate. Those who like 2.5% drop rate can play mid rates instead. There's also a split among people who prefer pre-renewal high rates between 99/70 servers and others. The MVP cards drop rate is exactly why I would not touch MindRO.

[OldPoring]

The server is small because ...

What do you mean "small"?
"100 ~ 130 player online at any time of the day.".
Where are significantly more live players playing now, can you tell?
I have been looking at this server, I will soon create an account on it. It can also be used as a test server, test builds and dream gears

[Aikuzo1]

Well, around 55 of those 100+ players are vendors. And more than half of the other online players? You'll see their characters in main town afk, not moving, just to get their hourly gold rewards.

It can also be used as a test server, test builds and dream gears

Yeah. Unfortunately, that's where it all ends. I left a positive review before because I LOVED this server, not to mention they got a very helpful gamemaster. But I HATE how stagnant the market is, and how it's getting even worse each day. The market gets so bad to the point that mvp hunters who put effort to build their equips and skills are earning less or the same money as newbies who are farming on petite. It's pathetic. You'll have to BEG for someone to buy your mvp cards and mvp items that you worked to get because there are so few buyers and so many sellers. And buyers keep haggling because they can tell how desperate sellers are.

The real reason this server is small is because both active players and newbies quit on a regular basis.     

[OldPoring]

All of the above problems with the market will be on any high-rated server.
As for the number of players, most always sit in Prontera or somewhere else. Where are there more than 50-150 live players? There were about 300 on the Oath. Therefore, who is not a "small" server now?

[toilette13]

What do you mean "small"?
"100 ~ 130 player online at any time of the day.".
Where are significantly more live players playing now, can you tell?

I'm currently playing on a high rate 255/120 pre-renewal called Empire Classic RO (ecRO) #1 server on RMS high rate list at the moment, which is a DarkRO rebuild. There's about 650 players online at the time I'm typing this, including vendors and afk of course so probably half the number.

[Stella]

Hi toilette13,

Not that it is relevant to my review here and I doubt it's allowed to mention other servers in reviews like you did but your server's population is fake.

This is FAKE:


This is REAL:


The server status page is nowhere to be found with a direct link on the website (to hide this apparently) but if you modify the link manually and enter it into the browser you can reach here.

The server is "lying" to have 727 online whereas in fact there are only 142 online and 262 auto vendors.

--

Currently on MindRO:



There are 97 online and 48 auto vendors.

--

If we compare the two,

MindRO has twice online as the auto vendors, while your server has twice auto vendors as the players online.

Considering MindRO is fairly new and still growing, I say it is much better than your server based on your metric of comparison (population).

--

Lastly, if I were you and found out that the GM has been lying to me about population, insulting my intelligence, I would leave their server because everything becomes seriously questionable after that.

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Edit:

Soon after I posted my reply, this begun:



As expected from people who fake their online count /sigh

PS: I don't care what a server does if I don't play it, but you forced me to expose your server with your irrelevant comments.