Review of heRO Server

[Azure]

I first joined heRO in August 2007.  It had been a long time since I played on a low-rate server, or a server without a job changer NPC or ready-to-be-used warper NPCs.  It was a surprisingly easy transition, however, as the community was, and is, full of friendly people. 

The reason I generally avoid low rate servers is because I don't think they're fast-paced enough for my attention span.  heRO Server, however, contradicts all of that.  Not because it is any faster in leveling than another 5x server - but because there are events, a nice community, plenty of custom quests, and a generally friendly atmosphere in which people are most often willing to help each other.

After having played heRO for a few months now, I can say that there is very little to say on the negative side for this server.  I would say that there is some trouble between guilds, but I believe that this is common (or at least has been in my experience) on every server in which WoE is competitive.  WoE is competitive here, though generally only the big/old guilds gain much ground.  Actually, this has proven to be less true of late than I had believed.  One of the bigger guilds has no castles right now and a new-ish guild took one or two last war.  It is quite exciting. 

The GMs have been nothing but friendly in my experience and there is no corruption or item gifting.  Oh, that brings me to what I think is perhaps the nicest thing about the server.  There are no donations required to compete.  Donations get you DBs, BBs, OCAs (for bigger donations) and other presents like that (hardly game-breaking, but still nice enough to encourage donations).  Pandora (the head admin / GM of heRO) has always stated that if someone wants to host a server they should be able to support it with or without donations - and thus heRO does not give away massively overpowered items to those who donate in order to encourage people to do so.

One last thing that attracted me to heRO were the custom mining and fishing quests.  I don't want to give too much away because part of the fun is doing the quests to be able to pursue these ventures, but they are quite cool.

Overall, I would tell any friend of mine (and I already have, in fact) to try heRO if they're willing to give a LR server a shot.  If you are not willing to play LR or don't like to do a little work to get great rewards, then don't bother - but if you are up to the challenge, come try heRO.