RagnaCORP review

Started by Inspector Clouseau, Jul 18, 2022, 06:48 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Inspector Clouseau

I played on RagnaCORP Semi-Roguelike a while, but I think I've had enough. Here's the basics on this server in case you were interested, and then I'll go a bit more in-depth.

Donations: donations do exist. There are many cosmetics, but there are also various items you can purchase too, which give more than a tangible edge.

Customization level: quite heavily customized. There's new quests, but also, many many NPCs and basic necessites are removed. Gameplay starts off quite differently than what anyone is used to.

Stability/availability: the server is up quite often, and I hadn't noticed much downtime, if at all.

Community: everyone I met was friendly, but worryingly, there IS an open world pvp element to the game. The primary languages spoken are Portuguese and English, and most people I met were from Brazil or all around the world.

Game masters: professional and responsive, but there is a massive language barrier between them and English speakers. What I really don't agree with are their newer ideas and balance changes.

Gameplay rating: very poor. There's an extremely small population, and no economy. Equipments are hard to come by but easy to lose. From what I understand the last pvp tourney was a complete flop. And there's a lot of class imbalance in the game - particularly the difference between those who can cast teleport, and those who cannot. Some items you can create with the "NEO craft" system are just completely broken. But it's all down to RNG.


The Good

If you are looking for something different and quite unique, at first the server is quite amazing. You begin with practically nothing - just the starter cotton shirt and knife. Your character is starving and you have no food. You can get some food for free at first.. but you need to go out to make ends meet. So you leave the south gates of Prontera to go kill a poring.. and you are immediately waylaid by arch angeling and die before you know what hit you. Well, it's probably just bad luck. But you've lost one of your precious "Guardian Angels". Might as well delete your character and start over.

The server has a unique system of progression, and a steep learning curve. Most monsters are where you expect them to be. But often times there's a few other menacing things that don't belong there, or even MVPs. You have to get much stronger in order to face them, and when you do get stronger, it feels a lot more meaningful. You can also stumble across treasure chests, which is another way to get exp and the primary way to get items, albeit quite randomly.

The most popular past time for players to do are the "collection quests". Basically, there's a random quantity of things you are asked to go out and collect from mobs. They could be some random etc item, or a use item. Keep in mind, use items are practically nonexistent and aren't sold in shops normally, if at all. So during your adventures, you would want to hoard every little jellopy and apple to be sure you can complete your next collection quest, as that is a very easy way to level - assuming you have or can acquire the items.

The sheer difficulty of the server and complete lack of hand-holding makes everything challenging indeed. You don't start off with very powerful novice equipment, nor do you ever get 500 starter potions. It's just you vs a hostile world full of things that want to kill you. And I am not exaggerating when I say that literally everything is trying to kill you. The vast, vast majority of monsters are aggro and will attack you on sight. When you see a monster, it sees you, and it will stop at nothing to end your life! This certainly makes exploring more difficult, but on the other hand, gameplay can be more interesting, and it's easier to mob monsters if that is your playstyle.

The hunger system also puts a unique spin on the gameplay, making it feel more realistic. Every three minutes or so, you'll be wanting to eat food to keep your hunger meter up, otherwise you'll start starving, which makes you lose your SP and you walk very slowly as if cursed. Starving is a bad thing, but on the bright side, once you start making headway, the hunger food is affordable, and it recovers 10% hp/sp upon use.

Overall, I feel that when you first start out and are willing to suffer some abuse to get the hang of things on the server, the experience is good.


The Bad

Now, as I mentioned before in the little story where you go out as a novice and get absolutely clobbered by a random monster, dying can happen quite randomly, unexpectedly, and usually, quite unfairly. On top of this, dying is also quite punishing. You lose ALL of your exp upon death. All of it! Even if you were at 99%, you go back down to 0%. Furthermore, if you happen to have a "guardian angel" item (henceforth to be called GA for short) you lose that too.

GAs are actually extremely, incredibly important and valuable. Because if you die without a GA, you lose all your equipment, and a lot of other random stuff you were carrying too (if not all of it). Now what happens if you die and lose your equipment? Well, you are SOL. You are starting over from scratch, unless you happened to have other spare gear in storage. That really strong sword you were insanely lucky to find, and then upgrade and card? Gone. Your armor? Gone, and you're naked. When this happens to you and you lose all your gear, it's a terrible feeling and extremely discouraging. And it's even worse if it wasn't even your fault that you died.

Here's a few scenarios that can happen: you're low level, an extremely powerful mob that isn't normally there sees you, you either don't react fast enough, or can't run away because it's too fast, or it uses a ranged attack, and you're dead in one hit. Similar to the above: you have no fly wings to escape the the horrible situation described prior. You try to do a collection quest to get points so that you can buy some fly wings. You encounter said vicious mob and die. Or perhaps something like this might happen later in your career. Third scenario: you teleport or use a fly wing for one reason or another. Maybe to escape danger, or you just are lucky enough to have the teleport skill. You land right on top of a MVP. You aren't allowed to teleport again for another 5-10 seconds. The MVP tears you a new a*****e in 2 seconds. Game over.

Let me use these examples to segway into something else that is pretty bad and unfair with this server: the difference between classes that can use teleport, and those that cannot. As mentioned before, basic items simply aren't available by normal means in the game. Luckily, butterfly wings are reusable, but it takes a full 10 seconds of casting to use them. So if you get into a really bad position, you need to teleport. But you can't buy fly wings normally, and creamy card has been replaced by a knockoff Antonio card effect. You can only buy fly wings in a special point shop. Therefore they are a very limited item that you don't have a reliable access to - at least at the beginning of your adventures.

What this means is that while you are pretty much dead if a gryphon or Orc Lord randomly finds you if you don't have fly wings, acolytes, monks, priests, and super novices can simply cast teleport for free, whenever they want. On top of this, in the same special shop where you can buy fly wings, the special tokens used for refining and NEO crafting are also bought for the same points currency. Therefore, these classes have a huge advantage over all the other classes who don't have teleport. Monks and priests can just teleport willy-nilly whenever they want, at their convenience, while everyone else must be frugal and does not have unlimited access to teleports. Every few handfuls of flywings will lose them a refine attempt.

That's pretty much it for the "bad" but there's two more custom systems worth mentioning. The sickness system is.. rather pointless. I can see there is effort to try to make the game gritty and difficult, but what it boils down to is quite a bothersome inconvenience. You either have to sit down and wait hours for it to end, or try playing the game at 40% hp/sp. And for persevering through all that, you get quite a meager exp reward. Most players just opt to pay 15k to end it immediately. The other thing is the fatigue system. This isn't quite so cumbersome, but it can sneak up on you. There's simply no warning. One minute you're fine, the next instant, your character's movement speed slows to a crawl from fatigue. This can be quite troublesome if this happens to you, and you get fatigued while being pursued by monsters. Again, the main problem with this system is that it occurs with absolutely no warning.


The Ugly

The ugly is what slowly creeps upon you as you play, and you realize the ugly, horrible truth. There is simply too much RNG in this godforsaken server. We already know that Ragnarok Online already does have many random elements, such as from monster drops or refining success, but this server exacerbates these issues in almost a predatory way.

For starters: since equipment is not normally available, and it has very low drop rates, one must rely on finding treasure chests to get their gear. However, treasure chests can appear completely randomly in fields and dungeons, and in your travels and searches, while you are being harried by every monster which is now aggressive and trying to kill you, you are also likely to run into powerful mobs which were also randomly placed throughout the maps. Then, if you're lucky enough to find a treasure chest, you could get 1-5 mob treasure items (though usually it's just 1), and they function much like an OBB or OPB. From what I can tell, you always get an equipment, but it can be anything random and crappy from knife[3] or rope[3] all the way up to a useful level 3 weapon or some other armor, which may or may not have a slot. For all that effort, you are likely going to get something completely useless to you, or something that nobody wants. My main point of complaint here is that it's too much reliance on RNG to get basic gear and necessities to equip your character.

Then, let's look at the NEO crafting system. Immediately, you can see that something is amiss here, as what it boils down to is armors and accessories not only getting multiple gems (like the enchant system you may be familiar with on official servers) but also multiple cards. In fact, armors and accessories could be enchanted with mvp cards even, and armors could also include bonus stats from other completely random gears.

So basically, if you thought the official enchantment system was bad and too reliant on rng, or you hated all the random bonus stats on Asgard Legends, you really aren't going to like this. Consider: the sheer amount of grinding and mvp hunting you have to do (without dying!) in order to get the tokens you need to enchant your equipment. But then the result you get is wildly erratic and heavily dependent on RNG. Maybe the card you get on your ring[1] turns out to be poring, or maybe you get a dracula card, and now you're generating infinite SP. Whatever the case happens to be, there will be some people who get insanely lucky, and some who are very unlucky, but in the end, what we have is a lot of power creep and a potential for items that are just too powerful for a 2nd-job-only server.

However, the server isn't quite only second job. Once you reach a certain high level, you can do a quest to unlock some powerful trans and 3rd job skills. The selection of skills you can get is limited, but unfortunately, what skills you do end up learning are random. That is correct, you heard me right: after grinding your way up to a very high level on this brutal and unforgiving server and doing a quest, you can be rewarded with two powerful (but completely random) skills on your character. So hopefully you get some good skills that compliment your current build! Because you will also be unable to reset your skills after that point...

---

All in all, that's my review, which kind of turned into a rant. There are good things about this server, there are bad things, and there are things that I absolutely hate.

But if you are a masochist, or love the idea of starting over from scratch just like in a true rogue-like game, or are just addicted to grinding and gambling, this server may be the one for you!

Ryukajin

#1
played there for a while as well ... but after a couple days it just became too much and tedious for me. The randomly spawning monsters on each maps get hunted down pretty fast (they give huge exp and enchant materials) and a new random monster spawns resulting in only strong minibosses and mvps on every map near the end of the week before the monsters reset.

Every map i tried to level on had an mvp in it with the speed of usain bolt, and to be able to even remotely play there during this time everyone suggest me to make an aco twink to check the maps first or wait out for the monster reset... but thats not really my playstyle so i quit xD.


Pretty great concept though had quite some fun for a while  :D

kronobr

After an initial test, we invite you to reopen the server August 5, 2022. Many points of this review are already out of date and we work to improve the gameplay and make it more friendly, with less rng as possible (the skill released at the maximum level is no longer random, among other modified points) and other improvement factors, especially for new players. We are constantly changing to improve the game. We are waiting for you.

https://forum.ratemyserver.net/low-rates/ragnacorp-semi-roguelike/   updated July 26, 2022

Ayami

I wanted to try to remember my old account but i failed, F.

I played RagnaCorp with a friend in the past, when it was "Full RP server" we had a lot of fun and the owner really seems to care about the server, however the server closed for months and opened recently as a "hardcore" server only, and all accounts from the RP server were reset, which is sad. This has really discouraged us and both me and my friend don't see ourselves playing this server anymore.  /sob

kronobr

#4
https://forum.ratemyserver.net/low-rates/ragnacorp-semi-roguelike/

Hello everybody! Our server in the past was roleplay, but over time we switched to roguelike and survival. We've had a lot of modifications and we've worked together with the player community to make the server awesome.

I updated our page here with the latest information. I ask you to disregard old reviews, as we have had many improvements.

I look forward to seeing you for a test driver.


As it is a server with many modifications, we are open to listen to players and correct any bugs or problems that may occur, just contact the staff. Our server is improved every day.