RetRO Online - An emulation of Official EuRO absolutely free.

Started by Bullet, May 30, 2021, 08:32 AM

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Bullet

RetRO Online - An emulation of Official EuRO absolutely free.
The administrator of the server intends to offer official RO experience with a touch of minimal Quality of Life features with strict zero donation/ pay2win options.

Dear all,

Following is an honest review of RetRO private server.
A classic pre-trans RO server. Launched on 24th Jan 2021.

About the game:
01. All Exp & all drop rates x1
02. Max level: 99/50
03. No Multi-client.
04. No phone number/ personal info requirement for game registration. But multiclient abusers check in place.
05. Renewal and 3rd Jobs will never be implemented.
06. Imitates the official classic euRO server progress, starting at Episode 5
07. No donation (Not even cosmetics)- absolutely no medium to make payment to them.
08. Gepard protection. No bots/ hacks.
09. Hosted from europe. Both americas and SEAs are now able to play together in a relatively smooth speed server.


The review:


The Bad:
a. Server released too soon upon the OBT. The OBT ran too short with x100 rate for about 1 day. Too little time to test game mechanics, bug tests and end game settings. The monster "parasite" was not listed on their monster DB and I did not have enough time to test if Alchemist skill "Summon Flora" would fail at level 5. My query on Jan 22nd in bug report seemed to be overlooked during the OBT closure and official release. Absence of information influenced my main character choice to rogue instead of alchemist as im not sure if it was/ will be fixed.

b. Minor glitches and errors. There we some glitches (not game breaking). eg. kafra transportation tickets being transferable, novice battle axe NPC sellable, char attack move routing to monster on clicks, heal bomb damage, flywing bug, missing packets random dc etc. This was fixed rather fast and were not affecting gameplay that much anyway.

c. Server has very little events (follows official like frequency). if there is, it is my bad luck it always falls on month ends (busiest week of my working day,+3/-3 of month ends). There was only a one time x2 exp event on around end of March, for a week- which i missed  /wah

d. im quite a busy person with little time to spend. suggested a small donation feature to keep with Ultra-players who are progressing too fast with unlimited real life time. Suggested the 2 following features during the pre-release discussion in RMS,
QuoteServer Discussion / Re: New Classic Pre-Renewal Server Project
Quote from: Deja on Dec 18, 2020, 04:29 pm
There will also be no donation system whatsoever, no cash shop and no game-changing / breaking custom NPCs or @commands, which means absolutely no pay2win.

Respect this, but a transparency of donation received for minor/ limited value benefit would be ideal. like weekly limited bubble gum/ manuals/ for working folks. At least to fund for charity causes. see my comment on "quality of life"

i dont mind small donations for gums/ manuals to cope with my time constraint.
with good $ received and charity expenditure accounting transparency over decent donation items. i believe you can support time limited people like me and yet avoid being P2W or perspective of possible corruption.

The problem with new servers, for people with work-life-game balance is that, there is always over-active players growing and establishing too fast with huge gap with less active or newcomers. I think a regressive experience/ item gain% can help address this. A 2~3 hours per day gameplay (or 14 hours per week) quota per account could be balancing? if player played more than the quota hours, exp/item rate will regress to perhaps x0.5/ x0.1 etc depending on the over hours spent? in the spirit of keeping the game competitive to busy players yet accustoming to players with alot of free time to allow them to continue playing or encouraging life outside.
absence of any features that checks the balance of gap difference has influenced me alot of quitting twice. Its amazing that in 2021 there are still people with some special power that can bend the physics of time (too free to play too long). For a classic game, i was expecting busy adults spending some time to relish their childhood. But sometime, it feels like someone is playing to strat a childhood.

This has not affected that much and I've decided to stay due to the admins have been really keeping to their word. Absolutely no pay2win, not even cosmetics. In fact, they've provided name change, guild name/ leader change, gender change features completely $ free and strictly requires in game zenny. Talk about sticking to your philosophy, you can't beat that!

The Good:
a. Sticking to principles.
There were multiple QoL features requested by players, eg.
i. increase mob count in maps (valid request, you spend more time walking in certain maps rather thank killing)
ii. dancer/bard song lingering effect (another valid one, theyre almost obsolete zero brain requirement to play)
iii. MvP nerf/ upgrade request (ranging from being too weak or too strong)
iv. NPC warp to WoE
etc.

But they have sticked to their official RO principles without compromise to above somewhat borderline QoL valid requests. This promises long time stability vs. submissive to mass opinions.

b. Authentic periodically updated. The game really follows official settings. Spores and wolfs are poor exp starters like officials accordingly to the episodes. Old payon map (my favourite map and BGM, ever.). Dragonfly spawning at moc_fild06, no rybio in prison1, etc. Yet useful customization, eg. all mobs drop cards not according to episodes like orc archer card etc.

c. master storage. with no dual clients, this master account storage that shares across your 3 game accounts eases intra-account fund transfers, taxes applied.

d. No rush, slow episodic updates. Ensure long and slow game maturity that enables new game content for for future new comers to benefit.

e. Excellent ToS. Detailed and comprehensively covers everything. There should not be any random ban with out of the blue unwritten rule reference. You pretty much can know what you can and cannot do.

f. Amazing game support. Its astonishing, the Admin and the group of GMs are very responsive and helpful. Very quick in finding bugs and rapid fixes. Very consultative on game feature implementations/ changes. Impeccable support services at an absolutely free of charge is an experience I've never seen anywhere. Their discord channel is somewhat at sometime is littered with childish derp behaviour and GM professional response is always well composed and patience. Sometime worried that this small section of community will pull their patience over doing this free professional support service and game hosting. But they seemed to be really consistent with their free to play pure official RO service conviction. This is probably the only and strongest reason for me to stick with this game despite multiple "soft quits". You know the game will be always running with a strong support service behind to come back to relish your nostalgia.

Conclusion:
Personally,
This server offered the best experience following closely behind my all time favourites, KoreRO (bot allowed) and SimplyRO (classic x5).
But this game configuration & support system is simply best ever, it simply topples any minor issues they currently had.

Something about myself:
I've been pretty much solo-loner, only played my bro(Cashis/ Sylar- now quit). Missing my bots that assisted my low rates progression. Currently looking for WoE action (missed RetRO 1st WoE yesterday- another month end busy week). I've been slowly playing in the direction of WoE rogue. Although underleveled and outgeared possibly across the majority of players (that started like from day one like me). Gaming is my old bad habit, i dont drink or smoke. Restarted this habit midst of personal issue (break up) and lock-down due to pandemic, nowhere to go out. It looks like I will be sticking around here for sometime at my sweet pace. If this server shut down in future (god forbid), i would not regret for wasting my time cause i keep my healthy work-life-play balance.

Thanks to RetRO for being around. Kudos to the team for keeping this project successful!

Eiponpon

i gave this server a good try and cant recommend it. the main reasons that this is not a good server is that it is full of multiclienting and the inability to tell the true population worries me. multiple accs allows multiple autovending per person.

they will come and deny this ("Wosi2" was involved in the creation of the server and has known the other staff for years) but its true and population counter does not filter out multi autovending or regular multiclienting. bragi slaves were pretty common. its the open secret to deny this at this server even tho everyone knows about it. on top of that there are 'guild accs' and master storage that make supports uncommon here and go against the classic spirit

when I played I also hated the custom forge formula and the skill glitches but ymmv.

Wosi2

Cant agree with you Eiponpon.
I play on retRO since day 1 and have not seen any multi clienting so far.
On the Website you can see how many Real players and how many auto traders are online, so I do not know what you mean with inability to see true population.
Our guild on classic euRO had a guild account, so I dont know what you mean with destroys the classic feeling.
The forging formular is episodic not custom, the GMs even provided a source for this.
I have had no skill glitches so far, but thats just me.

Bullet provided a pretty accurate and objectiv review imo.

dahman

That was a nice read Bullet :D  /no1

the 1st woe had fights between 3 guilds. i dont have exact numbers, but it was arround like:
SkillCapped(arround 20)
NoFunAllowed (arround 15)
TheGame (arround 10)

2 castles open.

SkillCapped defendet the 1st castle with a few ppls,
while sending attack squads into the 2nd castle where the other 2 guilds were fighting.
so inside the 2nd castle, there were perm guild vs guild fights.
NoFunAllowed got the 2nd castle in the end.

it was very entertaining to experience a woe again, in this state of a 1x server, without all levels maxed out, without perfect builds, without perfect equipment.



one sidenote- that you can see on all lower rate servers:

Dont worry about a few players, having a boost because they are organized and spending alot of time ingame,
since the server provides slow episodic updates, those "fast paced" gameplay will soon come to hit a "endgame wall".
episodic, as well as level and pretrans gear wise.

this is when the casual gamer can catch up and close the gap further and further over time.
the only thing that breaks this one more time,  is the rebirth update. but this far far away.

thats why a slow episodic pretrans server is a really good setting for a casual gamer.
even on a 1x

Kirchen

General

RetRO is a very young server that is currently running on epsiode 6.
It has 1x Rates and aims to be a emulated "Achim" EuRO. ( the real one, not this trash 4game or fro)
There are certained things planned to improve game and RetRO experience such as a new website and client.
Right now its running on a old hercules client, that has trouble with nividia as well as no shake. Just to call some issues. However its stable and I havent gotten a gravity error or any other error since about 2 months.

The Server has potential and it can get to a very decent experience. Its population is not big, but thats due to the audience it trys to reach for. Not because of bad gms or anyother negativ effect that might be a reason.

WoE has started and was very entertaining for a small server. It doesnt allow multi client that means that despite the "low" online numbers during the week it has 3 guilds competing in woe and fighting each other.

The econemy is tricky, because its not too easy to just buy woe mats from the market or sell stuff right away. Atm its mostly like a "need-buy" and not a this is a good price, or i would like to have that item kinda thing. Wich ends up in some items being expansive but sometimes a good item also being very cheap because there was no demand for it.

If you are looking to re-experience 1x, looking for a server to just play ro with your friennds, or if u are tierd of the usual p2w, multi client , costume servers. This one is your chance to get a real nostalgie hit. The GMs are trying hard and are very helpfull.

This is a video of the first woe. I personally hope for 2-3 more guilds joining with 10-20 people. Hopefully see you soon !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaPRUsJDqRM&

Nova

I had actually planned to write a review about this server, but I've only been playing here since a week or so, so I didn't feel like I knew enough yet to write an accurate review. Happy that you wrote a reasonably in-depth one, so I'll just add my experiences here.

I'll just go ahead and say that this is without a doubt the best 1x non-official server I know of. So it's probably the best 1x at the moment.
Servers are very stable. The ping is great for European players and I've heard it's fine for other regions as well, although I've read that they would add proxies if the demand is there.
RetRO closely follows classic EuRO episodic progression.
The staff is very nice and helpful.
Friendly community although that counts for most classic lowrates.
The owners work with a (classic) plan. Sometimes they make changes, but they mostly strictly do their thing. You know what you are getting.
Economy is not the best as items are still quite scarce, but that will naturally change when more players (100 online average) gradually join the server.
They have a nicely formatted discord with clear info.
They have a complete and accurate classic database on their website. Website is currently in the process of upgrading and database will be back up in a few days.
The server is still "fresh".

All in all I have no complaints at all and I think that I will make this my permanent RO home for the foreseeable future.
And that's saying a lot coming from me honestly.
I am not associated with NovaRO.

Wosi2

Thats true, for rare items you sometimes need a little bit of time to get them. But it is constantly getting better and better.

Btw. Nice Video @kirchen.

Deja

Thank you for your honest review and constructive criticism Bullet and of course the rest of you.

We are continuously trying to improve our service and the server and only with criticism it works.

If you still have questions about the summon flora skill or similar, send us a dm in discord, so that this is not lost.


Greetings and thanks again.

Wosi2


Kirchen

server worth playing if u aim for the original ro experience.

still gorwing, just wanted  to share the recent woe video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cm5vqh3wH4

Eiponpon

fyi theres evidence floating around that the staff are secretly giving out major items here

I would avoid this one

Wosi2

Eiponpon stop spreading false rumors about retRO please. I know about the screenshot you are talking about and it is clearly not from retRO

The watermark is missing, which every retRO screenshot has and also if you read the chat box you can see that this is not the official retRO server.

If you have any real proof, please provide it or stfu and go play travels.

Eiponpon

thats a weak cover imo. the screenshot section is full of screenshots w/ out watermarks. some ppl take them with windows and post into paint.

theres another screenshot with a watermark floating around and you can still see the ghostring card in the chat. very very fishy. i gave a solid try to retro during the first month and the other guild there had suspicious items already

Wosi2

And still you provide no proof whatsoever for your claims..

Screen is from a testrun for the aws they put up. As everyone who saw the screen can read in the chat window.

Eiponpon

testrun? what were they testing? retro has been live for 8 months

ping? do you need a ghostring card to test ping?

run