Doddler's RO Journal
Ciromny wrote on December 3, 2007
how, pray tell, does one acquire 1.75 Karvo?
M. wrote on December 3, 2007
@Ciromny: Through the magic of averages
Tinari wrote on December 3, 2007
Devil's Advocate here again.
I think I figured out what a bigger portion of the problem is with new players getting into RO. The total lack of knowledge of economy, and the way things work in it. Doddler here knows how to get poison spores, what they're used for and what you can sell them for and has a merchant to do it. A new person would see poison spores and just NPC them. Blue herb? Use or NPC it. Karvo? Storage and forget. Spores? NPC fodder once again.
That is the unfortunate route that most new people are going to go, and though I applaud Doddler's efforts with this, frankly unless we put out some pretty specific guidelines or rules to this, it's a very, very poor reflection of how difficult it is for a new person in the game.
Now, imagine if Doddler were supposed to follow these rules and tried to start over.
1. No vending. New players, unless playing a merchant specifically, won't know values of items, will make random stores or, in most cases, not do anything except play their main. All misc items that aren't rare are to be NPC'd off and anything rare, just thrown in storage.
2. Only able to hunt specific places or areas that are very easy to find or to find information to in a very general way "google search: Ragnarok thief build/RO thief guide" or something similar, no inside info.
3. Follow exactly to the letter any "guide" that we find as far as stat and skill distribution, or throw oddities in that a new person might do without realizing the result, such as throwing 10 points in vit, 20 in dex, 20 in str and then the rest in agi, or even 6-10 in int just because "hey, faster SP regen!"
This is like trying to prove that "Math is easy" by having someone who possesses a BA in mathematical theorems. If you were to just grab a random person off the street and ask them to solve a natural logarithm in an integration problem, and guess what will happen?
Love ya, Doddler, but this is a skewed view of how hard it is to start in the game. Hope I'm not being too hard or harsh in my observation.
Elina wrote on December 3, 2007
I enjoy reading your noob adventures !
Even as a little thief you're taking out mean stuff LOL.
M. wrote on December 3, 2007
Actually, I'm pretty sure you don't need a BA in mathematics to do the integral of a natural log :P. If you tried to get someone off the street to do partial differential equations; that's another story.
While I do think the game of RO has become easier, the general attitude of the players has made it harder. Years ago, there was always a crowd of newer characters sitting in places like Payon 1 or Sohees. The novice training grounds for instance, have sped up the transition from novice -> 1st class tremendously. However, the general anti-newbie attitude of players is what keeps many new players from the game.
Tinari wrote on December 4, 2007
The biggest hurtle to keeping anything old alive is grabbing a lot of new people at once. Take game mods or independent games. There are some out there that are truly wonderful, yet the fact they're unknown, unfindable, lack player base or a variety of things make them fade into obscurity. To get into Ragnarok Online, you have to battle against the odds compared to most other games that coddle players and present them with minimal difficult choices. Look at WoW. Automatic stat leveling, cheaply resettable "skills" and a tutorial system which explains almost anything and everything you do the first time you do it, even so far as saying "Hey, this is a real person you can play with!" Unfortunately, I think RO needs a newbie zone overhauling. But, else wise, I really don't have much in the way of suggestions to make things better, and I doubt anything I say will ever reach Gravity, so it's just you, I and whoever else here sharing our own thoughts.
K wrote on December 4, 2007
RO is very forgiving toward rerolls though. Consider if in WoW you were able to give all your high level gear to your noob and power through lower levels on a new class. While some items in RO are level restricted, they're not particularly hard levels to reach. Only exceptionally powerful stuff requires levels worth mentioning.
That said, Doddler is simply showing that it is possible to start RO and get going with a complete noob. He stated already that he is going in with extensive knowledge. I started RO with absolutely no help, and chose terrible leveling spots. But I got to clocktower on my wiz and started farming alarms. Got enough money, started a new wizard, and was good to go from then on. One thing that peeves me about RO is you really need to hit a lucky break somewhere between 1-80 and pick up a rare, or your options for future leveling/parties becomes very limited. For me it was getting a few clips(1.5m) and ori(600k+) in alarms, and being able to afford a heal clip(cheaper than card+clip). This was a huge enabler for me, and reduced my need to restock pots while farming alarms, and opened up a lot more solo viability. This in turn let me gear up for race guards/etc.
Also, I think the biggest hurdle with RO is that melee classes are restricted to killing large numbers of weak monsters, while casters(well, wizards) are better off killing stronger ones that typically drop more valuable loot. This is of course barring the poison spores and other random reagents for important materials pertaining to WoE.
A true noob upon arriving to pront would likely check shops and consider the drops being sold in stores and look them up. Im sure google has plenty of hits for RO databases. Using this they could find the information they need to make money. If the individual is not enterprising, then that is their own problem, not the game's.
Tinari wrote on December 5, 2007
Everything you say is quite correct. WoW is more forgiving of starting over due to the ease of swapping gears back and forth between characters. You can even load up an account and get a full set of gear wearable by almost everyone that's good and use that to shuffle back and forth with every character you make that hits the level to wear it all. And then you're also right, you do need a lucky break to get a foot in the door to high level parties, but you also have to know what you're doing to get into those. The problem again that I see is that RO, above all other MMOs I've played (including several small independent ones) require less "google it" resource to get into things, get going well and understand how things around you work. I also came into RO with no clue what was going on and I was able to make things work just through sheer determination to get into the game. But, it doesn't make for a largely growing game if it requires someone to "stick it out" before they eventually get some understanding of the game or somewhere where things make sense. 600K for Ori... man... back when I was still playing and fairly new that would have been the biggest rip-off ever. <.<