I've been thinking about the blog and how much I love it. But it's hard to keep reviewing MMOs in the way I had been. Do I try old ones or ones that no one really plays or has heard of? Do I try out the pay to play ones? I've also been playing a lot of games that aren't MMOs; do those count?
And then I started feeling nostalgic. I wanted to play something that I enjoyed and something that I hadn't played in a long while. And no, it wasn't Fiesta. God help me, I will never play Fiesta again. Although I did look into it not terribly long ago and it still looked just as bland as when I first played it. I poked around my games lists and then I realized what I wanted to play: Ragnarok Online.
I tried to play iRO ("international Ragnarok Online") again, after many years of having not played it. I decided on Renewal mostly because it seemed like the system I wanted to play. (For those of you who may be scratching your head and asking "what the hell is Renewal?"-- Gravity, in an attempt to revamp the game, so to speak, and draw in more players, overhauled nearly everything, from drop rates to EXP mechanics, etc. It was met with... mixed results.)
Let me tell you. I really dislike iRO. The server is, first of all, overloaded with spam bots. I swear I tried to disable my chat window log because of the near constant "HEY CHECK OUT THIS SITE FOR RO CURRENCY" spam messages in towns. And speaking of towns, oh my god the population of vendors.
So for those who aren't familiar with the game, Ragnarok Online has -many- classes to choose from. And unlike other MMOs, you can actually sell items to other players as a sort of shop market stall with a skill called Vend. Mind you, only certain classes can do this-- the Merchant (and its higher classes) and the Super Novice. It's really neat because your character basically has this little bar that has a store message you can put in that pops up over your character's head, and you can set up a "vending" store to sell items or a "buying" store to buy items from other players. And that's all well and good until you get things like this.
And then suddenly, moving in the cities becomes nearly impossible, because you have to click to get where you want to go. I swear, trying to walk through the main city (or even the Eden Group headquarters) without clicking on someone's store was a nightmare. And then you get the spam bot spam on top of that.
Between that and an absurdly frustrating time with leveling, I gave up. Playing the game became irritating and frustrating and I swear I ragequit more in this game trying to level up than I had in any other game. I barely had hit transcendent levels as a character.
But I still wanted to play Ragnarok Online. I loved the concepts and I loved the game itself, but I just could not go back to iRO. And then it hit me: private servers. They exist. Tons of them do. So I began researching. I tried out a few of the larger private servers. I investigated close to 20 of them. Eventually I decided to try out LeikaRO.
It was, at the time, one of the most updated, having content from Episode 15.1 (Fantasmagoria), as opposed to many private servers which were still in Episode 13 or 14. Even the official servers were on 14.3. (The Japanese and Korean servers are vastly more up-to-date than other servers. Last I heard, the updates were like, 2-3 years behind on iRO.) Leika also hybridized between Classic and Renewal server content and had made a lot of updates outside of just bringing in items, monsters, and maps from jRO and kRO. The staff claimed to have made a lot of "quality of life" updates, fixed many bugs that had been released on the official servers and left as is--something which I hadn't been aware of-- and had fixed a lot of grammar and general Engrish. It seemed to be worth a shot.
And I think I fell in love.
The rates seemed a little high for me at first, at 15x for Base and Job EXP. When I started playing, I thought I was leveling far too quickly-- I had barely completed the novice training area and was Job level 10 and I think Base level 15. But then I realized that the EXP leveling system used the system from the Classic servers, which meant that EXP requirements to get to the next level sort of increase exponentially, instead of linearly like you find in other MMOs. I was still leveling faster than in iRO but not so fast that it just felt like everything was too fast. I was still hunting monsters, still grinding a little, still doing quests and such.
What honestly sold me on this server was the quality of life changes. If you've read anything else on this blog, you know I play a full-support healer role. It's what I do. I tried that on iRO and leveling was painful at best. I found myself in dire need of other people in order to be able to level successfully, and even then it was still painful. In retrospect, I should have leveled up with a more offensive role, but the game shouldn't force players to level up with a build they don't like in order to actually, y'know, play the game. But on Leika, I was easily able to play as a full-support Priest. It was glorious. Sure, I had moments where it was frustrating, maybe dying unexpectedly or something, but I didn't actually ragequit like I had so many times before in iRO.
The updates the staff made are smart. From what I've heard from other players, the updates made on LeikaRO make builds that were normally obsolete or wholly unusable on iRO actually playable. Skills are behaving as they were intended. Bugs were fixed. New content, on top of that, is being released steadily. Two megapatches, in fact, have been released recently, with the newest one coming out yesterday. And the list of fixes is impressive. And to top it off, this server is only roughly 8 months old. It blew my mind to think about the amount of work that has gone into this server in such a short amount of time.
If you liked Ragnarok Online and want to get back into the game, I urge you to play on this server. Even if you haven't played Ragnarok Online, but wanted to, I would really suggest you check out this server. You can check out the server's information and get more details here: http://leika-ro.net. I've become sort of addicted to it. It's everything, honestly, that the original game should have been. And don't even talk to me about Ragnarok Online 2. I'm trying to forget that that game even happened.
