Return to Morroc [Merged]

[ArclipseVertigo]

I would like to write a review on a server known as Return to Morroc, there is a lot to say about this monster.
Some things are going to generally be heavily disagreed on and opinions are like a certain thing that everyone has.


This is a recent entry to the RO private server world that has really struck out, and is a prime example of the capabilities that someone with no dev experience can have using rAthena.
First lets go into what this server is, Return to Morroc is essentially a restructure of Ragnarok Online, Every class now stems off a new type of Novice. It has it's own classes, skills and class paths while there are some extended classes in there as well all custom.  The Database is completely rewritten, every single monster and item nearly do different things, lots of configuration of how stats impact your character and General overall  monster AI and skill changes. Every NPC nearly has been overhauled and some core mechanics have been changed to be less korean MMO style (Gear refinement)

Lets go down the list, looking at everything objectively from RMS rating perspective I won't be giving scores I will just be giving my thoughts, if you are sensitive because this is your new favorite server then get over it, I'm not doing this to attack the server.

Stability:

The server is very stable even in live maintenance mode I've had relatively no hiccups unless the Owner causes these hiccups and he will, The owner will on occasion apply hotfixes to the server as live maintenance be warned that this can disconnect you or get you killed.  You are warned ahead of time to get somewhere safe.  Server has had almost 98% uptime, only going down for scheduled short maintenances. The server also saw a popularity boom when it was designed around a small community and with the idea of appealing to a small crowd of people. The servers handled well despite this.

Community Rating:

The community is pretty much exactly what you would expect from FOTM servers, people are relatively friendly to answer your questions. People that poke fun at the server, clowns and all sorts of characters. Seems to be less drama but we are only a few weeks in. There are some events, you get exp buffs for 30 minutes when the server experiences an issue at the discretion of the owner. The orphanage system appears to be a constant ongoing event where it levels up via community and provides benefit to the players, each orphanage level gives more functionality to the player hub. There are events that spawn periodically Mr.Q and an invasion event that threatens the orphanage level, it has yet to be determined if there will be a bigger impact or if this live event will go away once the orphanage is fully leveled. There are really no personal GM led events.

Game Master Rating

The owner is not very friendly they are actually kind of an a******, but he is very transparent about what he wants and he gets stuff done when he wants to.  He is the sole DEV, there was recently a CM added to the discord but have not seen any CM's in-game.  He is moderately available despite working on the server constantly this is a bit surprising, but you can tell they are very attentive.  The owner is not the most helpful for good reasons I won't go into.  There isn't much to say here really.

Game-Play Rating

This is the meat and potato's of the review so buckle up,  This game starts you as an Orphan, you are fed a quick tutorial that gives your basics. It goes by very quickly but you are rewarded with a lower head gear that gives you benefits based on your answer at the end of the tutorial.  You you are not told what this benefit is, this means you will need to make multiple characters or look up information to see what each lower headgear does.   You are then booted into the player hub, there are NPC's to talk to that give you freebies, you get a mirror that allows you to reset for a short period of time or if you hold onto it you can get a useless card album.  You get an orphanage badge to teleport to the orphanage at will  (also a get out jail free card when you are about to die, more on that later)

You are given pretty much no direction, it is very pre-renewal esce with a feeling of renewal splashed literally everywhere. You will spend maybe 5-10 minutes gathering an understanding before figuring out what to do or where to go.  There are tiny little secrets hidden, when you speak to npcs.  You can use the journey caravan or go into the pyramind basement and off you go.  Adventure awaits... Hazzah

The game gives you the choice to fight out in the field early or explore a low level dungeon,  the starting field is low level morroc mobs, pickys and other weak mobs nothing fancy.  You start as a Orphan(Novice) But you are given useful abilities.  This is nice as before as a novice you really were pretty useless.  You have Increase AGI which is now a self target buff that buffs your movement speed and gives you a % of agi.  You have Sense (lets you see drops and stats of enemeies) Area loot, heal and hide.   There appears to be a high emphasis on hiding attacks as hide will be treated as a breaking of LOS engagement when trying to stay alive.  you do need to be careful as you will accidently MPK someone if they cross paths with you at an inappropriate time. 

The dungeons have a revival mechanic where if you die in the dungeon you spawn a shadow, if you kill the shadow you come back to life.  It seems to work most of the time, but sometimes it really does not work.   Dungeons can drop Shadow gear, this is gear that gives extra effects to your character or acts as a stat stick to improve your characters traits. It is not equipped as regular armor it goes into the secondary tab slot of gear.   You can get Runes, these are another secondary piece of gear that buffs your character normally it appears that here is a no compromise trade off.  Most runes seem pretty worthless and bradium is rare early on so you'll mostly only use the +1 all stats or HP/SP regen Rune.
MVP's Spawn between 30 minutes for the starter dungeon and 60 to 90 minutes in every other dungeon.  There are plenty of them to kill and they are constantly respawning, some guilds already have them on constant farm with alts timing maps in between.  MVP card drops are 3% and the effects are really good but nothing that will write home about.  Some are apparent BIS but niche and the value is more placed on its existence rather its effect. 

Dungeons are categorized into ranks but they do not really reflect their difficulty its best to just ignore the difficulty altogether some lower ranked dungeons are harder than higher ranked ones.  Some mobs in dungeons will attack and teleport you around, this can be detrimental in parties if you are in a small group party in a large scale dungeon. This often forces lower level players to have to reset and meet back at the orphanage and warping back to the dungeon entrance.  Just some really strange design decisions.  Despite this, the dungeons feel more engaging and are more fun at the appropriate level ranges.

Monsters are relatively more dangerous early on but as you go into the mid/late game are less dangerous because you know every trick in the book and you'll eventually find the experience to be much easier than base RO.  Potions, fly wings have longer cooldowns so you can not pot to win. You will generally sustain yourself with Heal and eventually you will need to get a LV10 heal book to equip, these are known as manuals.   Manuals allow you have extra abilities that your class may not always have, these can be bought in Prontera or off other players.  They also serve as another stat stick.  You can only have one manual on at a time so it can be kind of annoying to apply buffs, warp , heal then back to buff and heal.  Just general tedium but its okay I suppose.   You can later on get X or Z rated manuals that are much stronger, players charge very low for these despite them being on monsters that are very scarse.   Monsters will cast AOEs, single target, meteor crashes and strip and debilitate you much more than normal base RO does.  Be prepared but not surprised.

Leveling is straight forward, you can level off monsters within a 15+/- difference This also goes for parties, there is no xp tapping bonus. Just a flat bonus to encourage partying.  Partying is way faster than soloing if the group is going with KYOM rules (Kill your own mob) There is no established party pathing or etiquette yet, some maps are starting to become more established such as  Orcs 35+ or Toy Factory etc.  This will probably evolve as the server ages.  Speaking of server aging the server has aged quite a bit within launch and its a testament to how fast users will consume your content if you provide.  The game effectively has many players who are endgame with lot of endgame gear and we are closing in on the more autovenders than players stage.  This issue is due to the item drops.

So lets talk drop rates, the drop rates are simply not suited for this server they are kind of the big gripe, item are just too readily available at a 1% drop rate.  The server was designed to not be grind heavy but players are grinding harder than your minimum wage Chinese gold farmer. Cards are 1% , Equipment is typically between 1 and 3%  Rare drops are more of the monsters you don't see much of.   Some limited stuff like runes is 0.50,  some pieces of shadow gears are less obtainable.  You can summon MVPs on a 0.10% drop chance with a summoning item.  The drop rates are cracked out for the speed you are leveling at.   This has created an issue where you will fill your storage faster than you can sell to players.   Now on that note, there is an enchant system and gear will drop with enchants, this may solidify a strategy where only good enchanted gear has value, time will tell and this may be where the true drop value lies, Cards and MVP cards will eventually be over saturated though.

Economy

I have spoke about drop rates so taking that in mind lets talk economy,  there really isn't one you get zeny on kill, every piece of gear sells for 200, there are strategies to get zeny at rapid speeds. As of this post there is Zeny 284,972,506 in circulation.   That is a lot of zeny for a nearly 1.5 week old server.  You can earn a couple mil pretty quickly with the right build and buy anything you need.  Prices do not meet inflation and you'll see stuff between 10-50k tops for mid game and 100-300k for late game.   Everything is easily farmable so really if you are shopping you are looking for enchants.  There are too many merchants to sift through all the crap that people try and sell. There will need to be a searching function via website eventually or it just wont work out.   Word of mouth is the best way to buy/sell because you can see advertised what stats are on a specific gear before you even send the tell.  Money is worthless.

Guild Play:
There really isn't any guildplay or reason to have one other than have extra storage or share loot with friends without sharing acc info

Class Balance:
this is designed by a single developer with no coding experience they have a degree in science but that does not really say much. Balancing is a completely different skillset that is handled by a team of people in the industry.  That is like appointing one guy to handle balancing in gravity but hey, that is how we ended up with transcendent jobs * wink wink*  You will either be super over powered or very underwhelming,  Some skills are also disabled because they will occasionally crash the server.  This a PVE focused server so that is not a big deal you will either ruin the experience for yourself or feel awesome being imba.

Some classes are really stupid in design,  Some are just really overly complicated for no reason,   Kimi barely functions half of the time,  some classes require heavy emphasis on gear swapping but are not considered "expert" classes?   What the hell is even a expert class, the expert classes are easier to play than some of the others.   Some classes are so gear reliant you won't want to play one right away.  Some classes are just straight up broken and you can look at the leaderboards to see which are.  Plague is nuts.  More classes are planned but really I think some classes need to be overhauled first.

Donation Level:
Donations range from unavailable to pretty much useless,  there was a push to give us useful donates but because of the population boom the owner wanted to go a PTNW route, monthly headgears you can donate to help the server out.  The issue with this design is that the game already spoon-feeds you many custom headgear options and most of them look better than what you can get in the cash shop.  So if you donate you are really donating to help the server out.   There is a strange thing here where the owner is from SEA but is focused on the WEST probably because their money is worth more, I guess.  Server tailored for them but lets be real there is a bigger sea presence than Americans, euro, for Ragnarok online.

Balanced
No pay to win donates, only costumes not even pay to convenience

Imbalance:
None

Customization Level:
Maximus extensive 100%


That really is all I have to say regarding the server, If I sum my thoughts up.  I think its a refreshing take on RO and a nice break from playing RO as if it was a seasonal VPS s*** that I'm used to seeing.  Given the level of work put into the server I do not see it closing down in 2-3 months but I have seen another Super customized RP server close down within a year a long time ago.  I think that one was a bit more ambitious but this person seems a bit more attentive to his vision.

It was fun to play and I'll continue to watch and play to see how it unfolds, the owner appears to have a roadmap in place to keep creating new content for his players to enjoy and hopefully it works out.  If you are looking for something new but still want it to be Ragnarok then try this server out.  Just be weary of the initial problems it has so early on its lifespan


Stay safe my porings


Edit: To fix spelling mistakes and English errors


Staff: Merged with another review of the same server.

[ADM Ornstein]

Hey there. Thanks for the Honest review, it's our first and I believe it deserves a response. If you took the time to write it, the least I could do is the same to provide information and comment each point from a "development point of view".

Edit: Forgot to mention, I'm from the West. Not from SEA. the focus on "western markets" is because the server is western hosted. And this information is available on discord.

I'd just like to preface by mentioning that our current average merchant ratio is 400 players <-> 90 merchants. Please, avoid spreading misinformation as the  "who's online" on the server is clearly informative and no data is hidden. You can see for yourself.

Stability:

I'm glad you like it! The server was designed to be as stable and polished as possible, and while I'm not 100% satisfied with it, work is being done where I don't need to worry about it any more. The 2 currently disabled skills (from our 240+) are due to RO code not really liking over complex stuff and are being worked on.

Community Rating:

I like our community, we do have some "colorful" people (like every server really) but it's part of any game.
It's also important to mention that we have no automated events, and even the "Call to Arms" (our core community event) is 100% manually handled. So while we don't have "find the GM" or "guess the monster on disguise" events, because I personally dislike them, our large scale events are manually made and managed.

Game Master Rating

True. I can be an a****** sometimes. In my personal defense, this is mostly due to expecting 20~30 players and suddenly having to handle 800+ unique players. As I myself mentioned, I'm growing both the server and as a person. I also have a full time job, family and personal life obligations and no plans to live-off the server.
Another reason I'm usually mentioned as an a****** is due to the sheer flood of requests/begging/"please add this idea I have" to the game. People look at the server and thinks I should cater to their every need. and as you said youself on the start, opinions are varied. I NEED to be an a****** sometimes because some people just won't take a NO or believe any decision different from theirs is wrong.

I had people stalk me and harass me over me refusing to add a bad job idea in the past. And I had over 30 "I designed this in 2 hours, please spend 80hours working on adding this FOR ME", I also had plenty of people who offered help and on the very little they did try, they tried adding cheats, bending my ideas or straight up causing major problems for me on a personal level. And I'm not taking any of it.

Also, some people straight up ask for things I'm either not familiar with to do yet (not a full-on developer) or dislike entirely.

Game-Play Rating and Economy

PRM was designed to be Renewal (due to flexibility) with a pre-renewal feel for nostalgia and exploration. The feeling of being a little lost early on is by design. Like we were years ago when we started RO. But take a quick look at our achievements ingame and they can provide information for those starting (and the scarf choices not showing stats reflects our vision, of doing what you feel is right, not what provides the highest stats).

While the gameplay of PRM is not 100% what I wanted it to be, working with RO's engine is a pain. Plenty of things should work in specific ways but they don't for multiple reasons.
Just adding that the Shadow system for revivals in dungeons are working 100% as intended, and it's important to know exactly how it works. Every single instance of reports of it not working in the past have been answered with a link to the appropriate wiki page. (Namely, if there are other shadows alive on the map, you won't ress).

As for the gameplay experience. PRM was designed around "Adult with a job and 2~3 hours of gametime every few days". We have plenty of games for no lifers to run into and while I'm 100% aware some people are already pushing Lv130 in 12 days, I don't mind it. People can play on the rythm they want and adding arbitrary limitations is not planned. The server from the ground up was designed with one core idea:

"Casual time investment. Hardcore gameplay session."

This will continue being our design concept for future content and people who want to rush it, will rush it. And those who take their time and enjoy the ride (actually quite a lot of those), will do it.

Finally, the drop rates are high on purpose so everything is farmable. I fully expect the market to over time focus on powerful random mods and bonuses instead of "the item". The market being saturated with average items is expected and people who try to hoard it will just fill their storage with trash. The server was 100% designed around "getting items to play is easy, getting perfect items is hard and expensive" because I myself believe the "wizard to Lv99 with knife and cotton shirt" to be a clear flaw in the original game. Eventually the market will adapt and I expect people who have trash equipment will give them away to those who are leveling or just sell them for zeny.

Btw, @whosell/market boards are not possible due to the way the items are made and codded in the game. you may for example see a "Echo Dagger" in game but in-database they may be named "ECH_DAGG" or something similar, and database searching won't work. The reason is simply that it's over 1300 equipments (not including cards, etc) made and it's simply too much work and minor shortcuts had to be made either for efficiency or being realistic.

Also, 40% of the mentioned zeny on the control panel is on my Admin account.

Class Balance:

Class balance is around what I wanted it to be, take it with a grain of salt as no game has 100% perfect balance.

Kimi is meant to be 100% manual-controlled (even if some people did get homun AI to work with her) and we have plenty of main streamers even who play it pretty well.

Job variety is all over the place for people to pick. Some prefer equip reliant jobs, some prefer casual choices. The "Expert Jobs" are named like this due to them having unique mechanics to them and not being recommended to newcomers to RO (which we have a few), this also has been described in the wiki. It specifically doesn't mention they are harder to play.

Black Plague being "busted" is also my opinion, but you'll find the community disagrees heavily due to its reliance on status effects  .

Improvement will come over time, like every game.


Donation Level:

Donations are meant to keep the server running, I did add over 200+ costumes as drops ingame or rewards, and that's because from the start, I was making a server I'd like to play, not something to make me rich.

The few cash shop choices will be expanded over time, but will continue being 100% cosmetic.


Final Information:

Thank you for the review and i actually was really happy to see it here. While I can't agree with all points raised I believe this applies to everything in game and in life. Feel free to DM me to discuss ideas and details you may have missed, as I hope things are understood very well.

Content will be added over time and I have no plans to stop, as I made this server out of my wish to make something cool, so do expect PRM to last for a long time.

Regards,

Ornstein