Doddler's RO Journal

The Rant to End All Rants

By Doddler on December 6, 2007 in category 'Ranting'

Today I felt the need to rant... I'm not too sure what about, but it needs to be a rant none the less. So today I figure I will take a stab at a few things I think the game could improve on (from a management perspective). This rant, like every other rant is more of a wild rambling and complaining, and probably doesn't contain anything particularly insightful. You are free to skip past this and view the regular content if you want.

1) Pricing

I've made my views on this pretty loud so some might already know what I think. But here goes.

I think one of the problems facing Ragnarok these days, in terms of attracting new players is competing with other major MMORPGs. RO is neither a graphical showcase like some games nor is it a marketing super-popular powerhouse such as WoW, which might explain why people are less likely to pay the same for RO as they do for their other MMOs.

RO has been moving towards a hybrid payment system for a while, with a basic game subscription fee as well as micro-transactions through the Kafra Shop system. It did take a while to sink in, but I think the Kafra shop is actually a step in the right direction. Micro-transactions are quickly becoming the de-facto norm in the more casual MMO market. I do think however that it's the basic game fee that needs to change.

Other RO servers have been experimenting to varying degrees of success different payment systems. Level Up Games runs a series of free game servers, with modified mechanics and increased reliance on the Kafra Shop. Russian RO is free to play but you gain additional benefits from paying for a premium game account, such as increased experience rate, extended storage, and more character slots. Since the majority of kRO gamers tend to play from net cafes, the game itself when played there is free. However, kRO has tiers of netcafe service where you can elect to pay an additional fee. Higher levels of service open up new kafra shop items for purchase, and allow you to visit a special npc in any town for a powerful buff to your stats (the exact levels of service can be seen here ).

It's fascinating to see what other providers are doing with it. I guess what I'm really trying to touch on is that the iRO subscription system may be a tad behind. I don't think RO can compete head on with big name titles such as WoW when the cost of service is almost exactly the same.

I don't want to suggest though that iRO should go free... with botting the way it is in RO, free servers go to hell pretty damn fast. But I think that they could stand to make some changes. For example, let's say RO basic service is only cost $6-$7/month. You could extend the amount of character slots on your account though for a small fee, and even boost your storage capacity. If you paid the full service fee (let's say $14/month), you could gain additional benefits such as access to some special kafra shop items, reduced death penalty (0.5%?) and free healing and stat buffs in major towns.

It's just a random thought... the idea is that you could lower the price point for new players, but ultimately players would want to use the premium service and make use of the Kafra SHop.

2) Referals

One thing that always confused me is why iRO never had a referral system. It would take nothing for them to whip up a web form for subscribers to send a referral email to someone, and then check later if the email that it was sent to ended up paying for an account.

Referral systems in other games tend to be quite successful, and Gravity could provide benefits to users who successfully refer someone and that person pays for an account. If you referred someone and they paid, you could say get a free month of service, and say enter in to a raffle to win a random prize drawing each month (merchandise, kafra shop points, special headgears, it doesn't matter). That would be pretty good motivation.

3) Marketing

I always harp on Gung-ho, the management company for Japanese Ragnarok for being overly capitalistic, but they have good ideas.

I don't so much mean marketing in the advertising sence, it's just that Gravity doesn't seem to do a whole lot to entice the existing users to further enjoy the game. For this section I'm simply going to go over some of the various campaigns Gung-ho has done with jRO.

Recently jRO has started an interesting trend, attempting to bring players back into RO. Their “Come Back” campaign comprised of several tiers. At the base level, there was the bonus for players to re-activate accounts that were de-activated for over 2 months. These accounts when activated would be given a “Provisions Package” which contains a series of nice things, 4x battle manuals, a full set of bless/agi scrolls, and insurance. New accounts made during the campaign dates were also given a provision package, although the new account one only had half as many items in it.

Another campaign was a Kafra Shop promotional campaign, where for a few weeks you gained double the bonus Kafra Shop points. This is a bit of a tricky one to explain. Let's say you buy $40 in points, you're given 5200 points. Your base points is 4000 (100 points per dollar), and you gain 1200 extra points. So during the event, you would actually get 6400 points for $40. Not a bad deal.

jRO doesn't usually simply give out exp events for free like iRO does, they usually tie them into some kind of event. For example, they had a referral campaign, where they were driving to get a certain number of new subscribers. If they got less than 1000 new paying subscribers through referrals during the referral event, then the server would get a week of 1.2x exp. If they got 1000-3000 referrals, it would be 1.5x, and if they broke 3000 referrals, then the server would have a full 2x exp event. In addition each successful referral put your name in for a raffle, where items were given out to lucky winners. You could win multiple times too; you just had to get multiple referrals to get your name into the draw. They had 100 ocas, 1000 opbs for the raffle rewards, and everyone who didn't win one of those got an obb.

I also wanted to talk about in game hype. I sometimes feel like I'm a one man army when it comes to promoting future ragnarok content. kRO however promotes unfinished game content for future episodes through use of special loading screens and a patch client that updates its look every episode.

Click on a loading screen to see it close up.

4) Expanded Kafra Shop

I'm not going to lie, I really like how the kRO Kafra Shop works, more so than the iRO one. I think it has more to do with the tiers of sales.

For example, on iRO, if you want a battle manual, it costs 100 points. Want a box of 10? It costs 1000 points. It's no cheaper to get a large number, and manuals are really the only thing that you can actually do that with. Not so on kRO. One battle manual is the iRO equivalent of 60 points. A box of 5 is the equivalent of 240 points, and for a box of 10 it will fetch you only 400 points. You save by buying big.

Skill scrolls are the same. On iRO an assumptio box, which contains 20 assumptio scrolls, is 150 points. On kRO, you can buy an Assumptio box of 10, which costs 22 points, as box of 30 which costs 54 points, and a box of 50 which costs 95 points. For consumable items that you use extremely frequently, it would bring greater peace of mind to know that you don't pay as much if you use them a lot. I also feel like I'm breaking the bank less when I buy one box of 50 scrolls than if I have to buy 3 boxes.

It's worth mentioning that iRO gets fairly shafted for kafra shop prices. I planned on making a huge pricing comparison page, but for now you can use the old one which shows kRO and jRO prices on basic shop items. It's very out of date, but you can find it here .

The manuals and gum I think are a bit pricy, as are the ori/elu. At least, the manuals are priced too far out of my price range. The headgears seem fair in price, since they are permanent. I'm fairly happy with the food items. The kRO ones are half the price of ours, but they're still fairly inexpensive. The jRO ones are a fair bit more expensive but the jRO ones don't cancel on death like ours do. The main ones I have a problem with are mostly the skill scrolls. It seems dumb that a super useful headgear like the Peco Peco Hairband costs as much as 26 minutes worth of assumptio scrolls. Actually the fact that basic support skills that last 1-3 minutes cost 5-10 cents a cast is pretty weak too.

I do want to see some new Kafra shop items. The increased recovery potions and the life recovery potions are all pretty nice. I wouldn't mind the rental items as long as they kept it to fairly simple levels and didn't offer anything too broken. The Grinder, hard candy, and other such items are a bit too much though.

What I really, really want to see from the kafra shop, the top item on my want list is as follows:

Oooh yeah. I would be a happy person if iRO were to offer those.

And I think that about wraps up my rant. Damn, this is 4 pages typed up in MS Word... a poorly written monstrosity. I'm surprised you survived to read till the end! Till next time~

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Noob Project: Day 4 - The Grind

By Doddler on December 6, 2007 in category 'Noob Project'

So life goes on for the noob project. Mainly I've been wandering around doing random things, seeing new places. This interesting structure is actually in the goblin village, I don't recall seeing it before. Even to me, there are new things to see in the game.

I do want to address a few concerns about the project though. In particular, a few people have criticized it because I have a pretty firm understanding of the game and have an unfair advantage. I do agree that I don't actually expect people to blast through first class and pull together a strong character and hit second class in 20 hours.

However, the main point of the project here is to show that it is possible to start a character from scratch and still build it to a decent level in a reasonable amount of time. I deliberately avoided hunting for rare items and tried to focus on easy to find items that any player could obtain, and hunted simple monsters without the assistance of others. Players do find rare items though, and they do engage the help of others when they play the game. They also enjoy the act of exploring and learning what the game has to offer. What we find menial and boring, new players find new and exciting. Even if it takes them longer to accomplish what I've done, they've enjoyed the time they spent.

There are neigh sayers on the forums that talk as if breaking into the game is impossible to do with the market as it is, and I want to show that it is possible. When people ask for help on the forums, people don't know what to say because they're not really sure. What I want to show people is that there is a way it can be done. Its possible that these methods could be compiled into a guide of sorts for new players attempting to get into the game. I even want to do that myself, for my (top secret) renewal of the RODE site, but time is always a problem for me...

For the time being, new players could even be directed to the noob project category on the journal for some insight on what they could be doing to be productive with their game time.

Anyways, on to more screenshots. The red fly is the bad kind of fly!

Blue Herbs, score! Part of my incredible money making scheme of course involves finding a nice, steady supply of blue herbs. This little cache is hidden behind the orc dungeon one entrance. There's another one on the map too but orc lord was loitering there so I couldn't kill them.

Of course, regular loot is good. Hodes are in fact really good money, their skin is worth a pretty good sum. It helps that some people never pick up their drops, this all dropped from a single steel chon chon.

So having said that, I am now incredibly rich. I've decided to scale back my money making schemes now that I just want to focus on pushing to Rogue. I spent most of the money already, but it went to a good cause.

Porcellios are good grind material. If I cared about the money much I'd probably stick to metalings since the giant jellopy are worth a healthy amount to the npc. However, I think I just really like the cool noises the porcellios make, they're so cool.

And thats where I'm standing right now. A lot better geared than I was before, I'm owning things pretty good now!

Total Game Time: 15h

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The Project: Day 3 - The Road to Happiness

By Doddler on December 2, 2007 in category 'Noob Project'

So today I looked into my crystal ball, wanting to see what the future held for me, and for each future that brought me happiness, that future also had poison spores. So I hunted more poison spores.

And did I ever kill them.

While the mere thought of having to reach job 40 by killing poison spores causes me physical pain, I cannot deny that they are impressively profitable. Based on calculations from my drops, I figured that barring any sudden deaths due to angry dragon tail things, I can kill roughly 340-350 poison spores in one hour. You can break that down as follows based on average drops:

315 Poison Spores @ 600z	189,000z
42 Mushroom Spores @ 80z	3,360z
1.75 Karvo @ 60000z	105,000z
2 Blue Herbs @ 4000z	8,000z

Total	305,360z

So roughly 300k zeny per hour. It might be boring, tedious work, but its certainly fast money!

Of course, I would be dumb if I submitted myself to too much of that. I suppose I could just sit there and grind on poison spores for a dozen hours and buy some good gears, but it doesn't make for a very good journal post. An hour of poison spores was more than enough for me, so I hunted around for something more entertaining but still worthwhile. Dragon Fly Provided.

Victory is mine!

As most people who read this journal know, I enjoy boss hunting a lot. MVP hunting isn't exactly possible on a level 40 thief, but there are still things that a thief can kill that are worthwhile, as you can see here.

I decided to go back to the Thief Trainer, since I had neglected his training early on and its fairly simple. I got his first exp boost when I became thief, but I didn't come back once I got some skills leveled up. For just talking to him and gathering 10 feather of bird (he even warps you to the field), I went from 10% on level 42 to 19.5%. I probably should have done it earlier, but I can't complain about free exp. I'd do the battle investigation but I'm much too lazy for that lengthy quest.

Next up on my to do list was to go back to Sphinx and get myself that pantie I wanted. This time, I was lucky enough to find one.

My sexy thief becomes even sexier with stylish underwear!

There are still limits to what I can do as a thief still though.

Since I didn't have a whole lot to spend my money on, I decided to create a set of elemental daggers for usage. The daggers are cheap, 10k each, and they provide easy elemental bonus. While they're only really worthwhile against higher element monsters than what I'm currently fighting, I'm sure I'll find some use for them.

Like hunting hodes!

Of course, I've been making a habit of killing Dragon Fly, since he's quite profitable.

And thats where I'm standing right now. Eventually I'll get more Oridecon and make that dagger suck less. Damn that flee is starting to get pretty nice too.

See you next time on the project!

Total Game Time: 12 hours

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Doddlercon, Back to the Loki Part 2

By Doddler on November 26, 2007 in category 'General'

You know I really like that picture... maybe I should make it my main site banner and replace the RO2 one.

Anyways, welcome to part 2! This post covers everything that I haven't posted that wasn't MVP related. Don't worry, I'm still doing the new server project, but I will post that every couple days when I actually play on the other server (can't play there all the time).

So a few things to cover then. Since it was an experience event, I decided I would hit up Volcano Thor and get lvl 95 on my Lord Knight.

Is that a ripoff? A good deal? Only time will tell... but I do know one thing, and that its invaluable when it comes to Thor, because now it means I can mob kasas.

These Kasas don't stand a chance against me!

While Kasas are pretty easy, there's still plenty to worry about. In particular, the guardians. People who have been down there know that they always open up with spear boomerang as soon as they see you. They hit me for about 6k-7k with boomerang, which isn't enough to kill me (I have 16k hp), but it is enough to be annoying.

This however, is fatal.

I did get my revenge though.

One can only imagine the sheer amount of pain I endured, and more to the point, the number of potions I had to use to survive that. But I did it.

Aaah, the Kiel Hyre quest. I decided to do it on my LK over the last couple of days. I must say, more so than the sign, the Kiel Hyre quest is a shining example of how a quest in RO should be. There's a solid story, interesting characters... the direction is good, you can follow it easily without a guide... and there's a good finale that ties in perfectly with the dungeon you gain access to for finishing. Its a good time to be had by all.

In typical Doddler fashion, I completely ditched the party that I was doing the quest with to see if I could solo the boss portion.

Can it be solo'd?

He can.

I of course assisted my group in completing the quest the few more times in order to get everyone done. And then we had an OCA opening session.

**Drum Roll**

Exotic, but not particularly useful. Chance to gain +3 stat food when killing angel monsters. At least its rare.

Afterwords we went and killed real Kiel. Maybe this should have been in the MVP post... but oh well. There were no drops unfortunately.

So while being bored, I decided I would try to mob up Skeggiolds and kill them all at once with bowling bash. I can't afford an Odin Blessing but they're common enough that I figured I could find the one I need. Let me tell you that wasn't a particularly smart idea. Those things hurt without a shield!

This is not the armor you're looking for.

I did eventually drag Momo on the high priest out to help kill them. I question Momo's supportive skills, mainly because you have to remind him that he has a skill that can be used to recover HP, but its certainly easier than soloing the suckers.

And I finally got my odin blessing.

Also took some time to kill a Valkyrie that had spawned nearby.

Cry.

I did end up doing the Brando exp quest on some of my noobier characters since its so easy to do. I must admit, the dialog is pretty amusing this time around.