Gravity EU changes XP rates to prevent botting

Gravity Europe is the company running the European Ragnarok Online (euRO) server. Players can play on euRO for Free or by subscribing to a Premium account for 5 euros per month. Premium accounts also provide perks such as more character slots, more space to store items in the game, and a lower XP penalty on character death.

Gravity EU sent an email on October 22, 2015 to notify their players of a change in XP and drop rates:

Dear Adventurer,
As we have been aware that bots are polluting our server more and more every day, we've decided to act and make botting less attractive than it has been so far. From now on, the XP and Drop rates will change for both our Free and Premium users. Indeed, below you will find the comparison between previous and new rates:
Previous rates: Free Players: 100% XP and 100% drop. Premium Players: 150% XP and 100% drop.
New rates: Free Players: 75% XP and 75% drop. Premium Players: 175% XP and 150% drop.
As you can see, we also increased the Premium rates as a thank you to our loyal players and we hope that these changes will make our server a better place to live and play on, for everyone.
Enjoy your time on Ragnarök Online!
Gravity Europe Team

This decision is wrong for several reasons:

• Reducing the drop and XP rates for bots from 100% to 75% does not solve the botting problem. Bots on Free accounts are now simply 33% less productive, while bots on Premium accounts 50% more so. Bots are still here.
• The gap between the Premium and Free rates was moderate. Now it is more than 2x. Why would anyone play for free now?
• Using botting as an excuse to change the rates is a marketing ploy. If Gravity EU had increased the rates without mentioning botting, and only as a thank you to our loyal players, it would have felt like they were forcing players to go Premium. In contrast, by justifying their change with botting, Gravity EU is telling their players: go Premium to fight the bots!
• RO came out in 2002, so its graphics and game mechanics are a bit outdated. Yet, like any MMO, RO must attract new players for its community to survive. Having made the game free was a good first step, but Gravity EU also has to work on players acquisition. Most new players start playing the game for free, to try it out. Reducing the drop rates for the free players certainly hurts day-1 retention.
• The decision to change the rates is framed as a loss for Free accounts and a small gain for Premium accounts (and not as a solution against bots). The decision could have been framed as a large gain for Premium players and no change for Free players. Make it a reward! In fact, the Premium Service page frames it as a 100% vs 230%, not a 75% vs 175%. Why was it not framed that way in the email?

Finding a solution to botting is actually easy. Some private RO servers implemented periodic captcha popups: every 30 minutes, the game kicks out the players who fail to answer a random but easy test (such as 1+2=?). A bit inelegant, but very effective.

Ethnographic play on a 25-rate RO private server

I wanted to play RO for some days. Something quick, but not too easy, and with not too many people to have to talk to while leveling. Kind of a nostalgic try. So I picked a private server which drop and XP rates are 25. That means killing a monster brings 25 times more XP to the avatar than on the official servers, and a 1% chance to drop an item becomes 25% on this server. I conducted an «ethnographic» play: based on my (relatively extended) knowledge of the game I analyzed the server through player avatars in the game but also on the control panel of the website. I found the private server on ratemyserver.net (RMS), but I will not write its name here so that nothing bad happens to its administrator. Launching a private server is an illegal activity after all.

Demographics

At 3pm on Friday, the control panel showed 2 players were connected: T an Assassin and J a Hunter, both around level 80. These are the most solo classes of the game. When I logged in, it was not long before T arrived and, without a word, sent me an invitation to join guild G1, which he was the guild master of. I accepted, and saw in the guild panel that J the Hunter was also in the guild. Three days later, on Sunday night, there were 9 players connected on the server at 7pm. Among them, 4 belonged to guild G1, 2 to guild G2, 2 were not in a guild and 1 was an AFK merchant, used as a mule selling items to other players.

As mentioned before, the guild master of guild G1 was T, an Assassin. He had spent the last 2 days camping equipment on a low-level randomly-appearing monster called Ghostring. He had reached level 98 and had not made any other character. He was very confident and experienced in the game, and gave advice to the other 2 players he had recently recruited in his guild. IRL he was a 19-year-old jobless American. He started playing RO in 2007, had played on iRO Loki (official international server) and 5 other (much more populated) private servers, ranging from 6 to very high rates.
The sub Guild Master was J, the Hunter. He had actually played a lot and was now a lvl-96 Sniper. He had managed to collect a few Field Manuals in fishing, a custom activity of the server. When used by a player, manuals give 3 times more XP for 30 minutes. Although J seemed less confident than T, he said he started playing RO in 2006 on RuRO, the official Russian server. He gave spontaneously several items to other guild members. J and T talked quite much together in the guild chat. IRL, J was a 19-year-old Russian who worked in a call-center. He found his job boring and managed to play at work.
A was recruited after J. He was a lvl-90 Monk, a quite complex class combining support and high damage attacks. He was a basic member of the guild but talked a lot with J and T when he was connected. Each of them gave advice about where to XP or which equipment to get. He said he started playing on several euRO free-trial accounts in 2004, and tried another private server later. He looked quite unexperienced. IRL, he was a 19-year-old German working in a call-center as well (but not playing at work). When they realized through the guild chat that they were all the same age and two of them had the same job, they enthusiastically sent Facebook invitations to each other.
B was a lvl-96 Rogue recruited last. Rogues are a mixed class between Assassin and Hunter. B was not connected at that time.

In the other guild, the guild master was a quite experienced lvl-98 Hunter very in view on the forum. He had, among others, argued that the custom items provided by the administrator were balanced while another player thought they were not. The second player in the guild was a cheerful Bard, a support and/or high-attack version of Hunter. I was enrolled by him in the guild, and he even asked if I needed any piece of equipment. During week days, they were never connected before 5pm, I concluded they worked or went to school. Most of the time they were connected, the guild chat stood silent. When they happened to speak, it was in German to each other and out of the guild chat. Later, the Bard added that the 25-rate server opened following the wipe of a high-rate server. Maybe they knew each other before the low-rate server opened?

Server features

The capital city was Prontera. @go was given to players, but not @storage or @warp; this meant players had to go back to the capital to go where they wanted or use their storage. In my opinion, this increased the frequency of little social events that happened in the capital between players. The custom NPC were those usually found on any private server; they were:

• The Warpra teleports players wherever they want for free. This solves the problem of long and boring transportation time when there is no player to teleport other players to their destination.
• The Healer heals players and solves the scarcity of support-class avatars who, most of the time, need a group to XP quickly.
• Stat and Skill Reseter: resets the avatar skill and stat points. If a player wants to change his character build (eg from a Support Paladin to a Tank Paladin), she can.
• Job Master saves players the time to do job changing quests.
• Banker, Identifier, Bonus skill giver (to save time to the player), Universal Renter (for Cart, Falcon or mount)

There was also a Kafra Employee that lets the player save his respawn point when dead or open his storage, but this is an NPC found on official servers as well. A vending zone had been added as well where Merchants could set up their shops, but the server population was too small to have any virtual economy. The guild versus guild event, the WoE, was supposed to happen twice a week but was deactivated by S, the administrator of the server, probably because there were not big enough guilds.

S was German, although his advertising for the server on RMS mentioned the server and forum language was English. He came on the forum once or twice a day to reply to suggestions or technical problems with the game. He did not harass players for votes or donations, and stayed remarkably quiet. In the game, his player account was the Monk A. As a Game Master, He never improvised any live event for the players. Technically, he designed and coded his own website and control panel, manipulated client-side files, added and edited a few small NPCs in the game, tried (and failed...) to balance his custom items (eg the fishing rewards) but never seemed to have modified the server source code.

Conclusion

Certainly, the players from this private server had different origins (Russia, Germany, France, US) and had different gaming expertise. However, all the players were all males of the same age (16-25) and had all tried official servers and/or private servers before. They all played solo but their belonging to a guild showed they wanted to socialize with other players. Alone Together.

This private server had several custom hats. They all required grinding at least a hundred items, and rewarded the player with unbalanced items (eg inflicting +12% damage on other players). Somehow, it was too easy, but players did not seem to see it this way, or at least they did not complain about it - for now... I doubt the administrator had the community management, game design, programming, and graphic skills required to make his server grow as much as he would like to, but I am sure he had the will. Private server administrators are a particular kind of consumer of MMOG company's products - they use the game client. Of course, this is an illegal activity, or maybe a not-yet-channeled activity. MMOG companies could choose to design their games and pay attention to these determined and skilled consumers. They could be included in the product community as content contributors.

Bowling Bash build

EDIT: This is a pre-RENEWAL build, but it might still be worth it in Renewal :-)

The name of this blog, Bowling Bash, comes from the eponymous Ragnarök Online Knight skill. Here is how to build a BB Knight (or LK). I am not an expert BB LK, but I used to play it a lot in WoE (guild versus guild events) and in small PvM parties. For PvM or leveling, the build is either STR(+DEX)+Spear Stab (you will need potions or a Priest) or AGI+Quicken (little DEX or Heal needed). To my mind, the trickiest and most interesting builds are those for WoE. Below are a few build possibilities; I suggest you adjust and try them so that you find the one that fits your needs perfectly.

Gear

-	Easier to get	Harder to get
Sword	Blade or Saber (3slot) with Hydra and Skel Worker cards	Sword Guardian Card(s) on a slotted Executioner (quest) or Schweizersabel (should be surprising against Unfrozen armors)
Spear	Pike or Trident (3slot) with Hydra and Skel Worker cards	Brocca, Assaulter Spear (obtained in the Battlegrounds), or Glorious Spear (most recommended, obtained in the KVM Battlegrounds).
Top Head	Helm, Bone Helm or Magni's Cap (combo with Odin's Blessing and Stone Buckler), Grand Peco card	Feather Beret (quest), slotted Alice Doll with Vanberk Card or Giant Majestic Goat (from the Sealed Shrine quest)
Middle Head	Geek Glasses, Fin Helm or Evil Wing Ears	Slotted Sunglasses (temporary quest) with Vanberk or Maya Purple Card or Robo Eye (custom or temporary quest?)
Low Head	Gangster Mask or Iron Cain	Pirate Dagger (temporary quests) or Well-Chewed Pencil (Back to school quest)
Shield	Shield, Mirror Shield or Stone Buckler with Thara Frog Card (if one-hand weapon)	Valkyrja's Shield with Thara Frog Card (if one-hand weapon)
Armor	Full Plate or Odin's Blessing with Pecopeco Card or Picky Card	Valkyrian Armor or Glittering Jacket with Ghostring, Evil Druid or Marc Cards
Garment	Muffler, Manteau or Wool Scarf with Raydric Card	Pauldron, Diabolus Manteau or Nydhorgg's Shadow Garb with Raydric Card, or Asprika
Shoes	Boots or High Quality Sandals with Matyr or Verit Card	Greaves or Diabolus Boots with Firelock Soldier or Ice Titan Card, or Variant Shoes
Accessories	Ring with Mantis Card	Megingjard

Stats

STR	buffed, try to reach a 10 threshold (eg 84+26, 99+31 or 55+105)
VIT	buffed, try to get 100 (eg 82+18 or 92+8) to gain Stun and Silence immunity
DEX	aim for an even number (eg 78+32) to get HP bonus; the more, the higher chance to hit your enemy
AGI	what is left; the more, the faster you can launch BB
INT&LUK	1

Below are several build examples. They are just build styles/aspects, as you will have to adapt them to your gear, whether you want to use food buffs, etc. In parentheses are the bonus points for Lord Knight job level 70.

type	STR (+15)	AGI (+8)	VIT (+8)	DEX (+9)
High DEX, low STR, needs 2 Megingjard	35	40	82	97
6x STR, likely to use a Megingjard	67	41	85	75
High STR, could avoid using any Megingjard	97	12	83	56
Not using any VIT food	78	31	92	61

Resources

• Lord Knight: A Comprehensive Guide for PvM/WoE/PvP
• The "Post your Knight/Lord Knight" Thread
• Bowling Bash build help
• The Complete Guide to Bowling Bash on INRO wiki
• Character Calculator

Map updates and nostalgia

Nostalgia of the good old times spent in an old version of an MMORPG may have many origins. Back in the days, there were

• more friendly and well-mannered players,
• more original monsters,
• more believable NPCs,
• a less frivolous virtual economy,
• less competitive guilds,
• balanced equipment,
• authentic choices in avatar appearances/classes/races that have now been updated,
• ...

But in my opinion, updates are most strikingly received by players through the new maps. Characters of a new race start in new maps. New monsters and NPCs are found on new maps. New (unbalanced?) items are dropped in new maps. Many players go to the new maps at the same time, hence one can measure the new gaming atmosphere there. So ... everything is linked to the new maps! Let us look at RO, EQ and WoW map updates.

RO

Payon

A new version of the Payon city was added on kRO Sakray (the Korean test server) in September 2004 with Episode 6.9.

// --- Ep6.9 - New Payon ---
// Requires kRO Sakray 09-03
(from eA svn)

The city previously counted 5 or 6 visitable houses and was very small compared to other cities of the world. A big castle and several houses were added to the city with the update. Nothing else but a larger city was added at that time (no new monsters, NPCs, items or classes). But many players have complained about the new Payon map: God how I miss the old Payon so much...the map was so much easier to navigate through and to memorize... and others have expressed nostalgy about it: Really missed the old payon. So many old memories with firends there. /sob Some players from private servers have asked for the old Payon town to be added in addition to the existing new Payon.

Morocc

As for Morocc, a new version of the city replaced the old one in September 2007 with Episode 12.

// --- Episode 12: Satan Morroc & Schwaltzvalt Seige ---
// -- 2007-09-19sdata_k.gpf
(from eA svn)

Unlike Payon, the Morocc update brought an entire new content set: a remake of the city map, new fields, new monsters, new drops and a new dungeon with a 2-phased 20-million-HP final boss ending a quest (bosses are usually less than 10M HP and quests are rare in RO). I did not see as much complain as for Payon, maybe because there was not only an old map update, but also a lot of new high-level content added.

WoW

WoW started in late 2004 with 2 continents: Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. This pre-BC period has been called Vanilla. Then BC brought the Outland (and 2 new beginning maps) and WotLK Northrend. In the latest update, Cataclysm, Blizzard has decided to add new zones and modify existing maps.

However, some players have started a petition for Blizzard to launch Vanilla servers. Others like the Madcow studio have cleverly identified how Ragnaros - Vanilla-dungeon MC's final boss - would feel after the BC update. In the Molten Chorus, Ragnaros and Executus sing on the Yesterday tune of the Beatles Yesterday, we were everybody's favorite raid and Suddenly, everybody's level 70, we have a shorter life expectancy. Although Ragnaros will be back for Cataclysm, no wonder how clothing such a the "I Heart MC" nearby could appear.

EverQuest

The vanilla period of EQ is called EQ Classic. It lasted between 1999 (when the game started) and 2000 (when the first expansion, Kunark, was implemented). EQ Classic had 77 maps. Since then, around 330 maps have been added (around 400 total).

As for the WoW Vanilla petition, there is a Classic EQ petition.

A few teams have tried to develop a server-side version (also called emulator) of Classic EQ. Eqclassic have not finished their development yet, but Project 1999 was launched in October 2009. A poll of 799 players of Project 1999 revealed 57% started playing EQ in its Classic period and 2% played EQ for the first time on this emulator. Although there are around 500 players online, the team is aware of the legal issues raised by their emulator.

Edit (September 7th): my point is: whatever the update size, there will always be nostalgic players.

[Literature] A qualitative study of Ragnarök Online private server in-game sociological issues

Back in November 2009, I mentioned the multiplayer game design issues impacting social life inside RO. The paper has been accepted at FDG2010. You can read the final version.

I conducted interviews and observed players' behaviors in an official server (2000 users at peak time) and two private servers (200 and 2000 users at peak time). On the examined private servers, the social environment and some of the game mechanics were more adapted to players' needs. Examples are:

• a broader choice in avatar customization
• the ability to observe parts of the game world while not being logged-in (the Control Panel)
• less constrained groups
• events and GM taking the player community more into account
• easier XPing (leveling in RO is the main activity, and it's a lot of grinding) thanks to rates and the Warpra+Healer combo
• @commands enabled to players so that they can see who is online, sell merchandises with a character while playing with another and compare prices

Clearly, the Warpra+Healer totally changed the game. Champions could camp the respawn of MVP (boss monsters) and kill them relatively quickly with Asura Strike. This left virtually no end-game challenge for guilds other than the bi-weekly War of Emperium (battles between guilds in castles lasting between two to three hours).

History of RO emulators

This post follows this one about private server emulators. To my mind, understanding the story behind RO emulators can help explain how some servers easily reach 140,000 accounts and 1000 PCU as of March 2010.

This cladogram took me roughly 20 hours. I relied on a very stuffed tree with no dates (made by Tsuyuki before 2008). Other sources are mentioned in the SVG cladogram here. A (google) translation of the Chinese website I gave for AEGIS can be found here. My cladogram ends in 2008 because nothing has changed since then, except maybe a recent ASB battle cry. Many ending dates could not be found, so I sometimes ended them arbitrarily.

I could not find when AEGIS had been stolen from cRO. Given that cRO opened in May 2003, and UniAEGIS and ASB, based on AEGIS, started in early 2003, there seems to be a time problem. Unless cRO was in beta before 2003.

I could not make any link between Athena and AEGIS. Both seems to come from Japanese developers/hackers, but I do not know if Athena was reverse-engineered from scratch (in the pure sense of an emulator) or based on AEGIS.

Cladogram made with gnuclad and converted from SVG to PNG on fileformat.

Edited March 22 to add Cronus, eAPP and other AEGIS leaks and ASB updates. Split of Weiss (delphi/pascal) and Athena (C).

RO bosses

Appearances and atmospheres

The Mummies series follow the same principle seen with Doom II monsters. A Mummy can first be encountered on the second and third floors of Pyramid dungeon. Then, on the fourth floor of Pyramid dungeon, Ancient Mummies appear, along with Osiris, a MVP. The higher the pyramid floor, the more difficult the Mummies, until Osiris at the fourth floor of the Pyramid. In my opinion, putting in parallel a spatial feeling of "going up the floors" and increasing the monster difficulty makes the player excited about "what's next floor?" and "will I be strong enough to kill them?".

As I described before, the atmosphere really matters to introduce the boss. In a video from Doddler fighting one of the last boss, Nidhoggur Shadow, a particular importance is given to the NPC broadcast in the area. Naght Siegel, the MVP standing at the top of Endless Tower required to empty all the floors of the tower during 2 hours and a half.

The game evolves

RO Vanilla

Golden Thief Bug is one of the first bosses of RO. It has always been in the game since its first launch in August 2002, along with Baphomet or Eddga. But after 7 years for kRO and 6 years for iRO, the players have started to kill these MVP very fast: less than 15 seconds for Eddga, 40 seconds for Baphomet and Golden Thief Bug in 50s.

And even without being totally "overpowered", some players find ways to exploit/use the system to kill MVP, such as this wizard using the warp as a protection to kill GTB, or this wizard killing Turtle General in 5 minutes with Ice Wall. I am obviously not talking about high-rate-server no-cast Creators inflicting ridiculously big damage to any monster (but "Hakuna Matata" in Portuguese is really cool!).

Episode 10 and after

However, Gravity game designers have realized their 200,000-HP 3k-attack MVP were not a challenge for high-level players anymore, and they progressively increased the difficulty of the MVP they released such as Lord Knight Seyren (1.6M HP, 10k attack) in the Episode 10.2 of March 2006, Gloom Under Night (2.3M HP, 7k attack) in the Episode 11.1 of May 2007, or Satan Morocc (20M+15M HP, 32k attack) in the Episode 12 of December 2008. At the same time, Gravity game designers also increased previous MVP such as Orc Lord which was granted the Earthquake skill, inflicting ridiculous damage. As Doddler writes:

Basically, earthquake is an extremely powerful attack that strikes all players on screen. Its based on the monsters physical attack power, though it is calculated as a magical attack. The key feature of earthquake is that the damage it deals is split across all players on screen. The more people who are within range of the boss monster when it casts the skill, the less damage the player takes.

But groups in RO are limited to 12 players, and as Doddler wrote when commenting (look for the "Orc Lord on Valkyrie" post) a video he recorded while fighting Orc Lord,

Like many earthquake MVPs, Orc Lord basically doesn't do anything that can be seen as a challenge other than earthquake. Unfortunately, earthquake is really a bad thing to deal with when you have no cranials, immunes, and limited access to assumptio. As you can see, our strategy generally involved simply falling over when it did end up using earthquake. More than that, the plan was to burn it down in a way that it would never use earthquake while in power up. We were successful in that, though just barely. Another 2 seconds and we would have been toast.

However, RO game designers also tried to innovate and create group strategies to beat MVP. MVP are no longer solo-able but require highly-organized players to group together. This new MVP design provided a challenging non-PvP activity for guilds. As Doddler writes,

The MVP's that I think gravity has done a 'good' job in making fun requiring interesting strategies to beat are:

Beelzebub - For reasons mentioned above [even though it is hard to coordinate the group, his attacks can be countered and his hellflys should be tanked as well, see Doddler's post for a full description]

Fallen Bishop - Same as beelzebub really but scaled down to be easier. Pneuma blocks hells judgement, sanctuary blocks evil land, magnetic earth stops dark/holy grand cross. Tank holds the whole crowd with evil armor... Holy cross will hurt but its managable (crusaders have 50% resist to holy so they're the best tanks). You can counter critical wounds with sacrifice if you need to but its not required here. If you can kill the banshees with an AoE (like focus arrow strike), its even easier. Could probably be done in a killer/priest/bard/scholar/tank combo.

Ktullanux - Textbook boss control. Split mob/boss on different tanks, counter stormgust knockback by using the terrain, block physical hits with safety wall. Ever use magic rod to counter his waterball? Its pretty cool.

Gloom Under Night - Very powerful physically but his abnormally slow attack speed and reaction time highlight defensive skills.

Atroce - Throws around some hefty attack power at high speeds. Pulse strike keeps you watching where you're standing but can be blocked, and you have to watch out for his magnum break counter to being attacked by multiple melee attackers. His two hand quick is scary, but it can be dispelled.

Kiel-D-01 - High powered melee attack, a powerful fire attack and a deadly dark blessing make Kiel tough, but his mob can be reduced drastically, and constant safety wall will keep the tank safe from his relatively slow attacks. Don't forget green potions.

Memory of Thanatos - Weaker than most people give him credit for. His main strength is in his mob, which can be mostly removed without problem. Exile really means you need two people that can take his hits, but otherwise its a simple exercise in monster control. If you can dispel his two hand quicken, its easier to just tank him on a magnetic earth than to use safety walls, as the magic is more destructive than his melee.

This might seem a blunt copy/pasting of Doddler's post, but I could not formulate it better and with more details.

Complaints

As Doddler explains in a RO's MVP System and it's Flaws post in April 2008, weaker MVP's can be killed in a very small group, some are even easy enough to take solo, with the high tier bosses taking a sizable party with many player roles and coordination, and the higher tier MVPs are harder to deal with, usually requiring anywhere from 5-10 people to properly fight. This system of weak, medium and strong MVP seems to provide an appropriate challenge to lower-, medium- and higher-skilled players. However, bosses are free for all, that is to say bosses are what would be referred to as world bosses in other MMORPG's, bosses that appear within the game world where any other players in the game world can attack, influence and interfere with bosses as you fight them. Except for Endless Tower and Orc Recollection, there is no instance.

As a result, some players often stay "camping" on a map, they wait for the monster's re-appearance to kill it first and get the drops. While Heimdallr, a community manager on iRO's forums, wrote he was sure that instancing will become more common in RO as time continues, MVPs are still wandering freely outside instances and are still being camped. A very common strategy consists of sending the same Monk character, capable of inflicting much of damage in one shot, in suicide missions. A player writes Champ solo Atroce really, /memo, fist, inn regen, buff, warp back rince and repeat. I actually mention this problem in my paper about RO private servers. As one of the main activities for high-level players is hunting MVP (along with WoE), camping Champions are spoilsports. A potential solution could be to let many MVPs use the Full Heal skill: this skill can only be used in an idle state (ie not in combat) and regenerates the all the HP of a monster. This happens naturally for all monsters in other MMOGs such as WoW.

Doddler also complained about MVPs. He listed 4 major points to fix:

• A too big contrast between frequently dropped mudflated useless items, and valuable rare (less than 1% drop chance) drops
• Players should play by the boss set of rules, not the opposite (RO game designers tried to address this with the post Episode 10 MVPs, see previous section)
• Ankle Snare, a Hunter skill used to trap monsters, works on MVP
• Earthquake, especially when MVP are in Power Up mode (attack and def multiplied by 3, cf Episode 10.3 monsters), deals ridiculously big damage to players

Even though I have played RO, I am not a RO expert as much as Doddler. However, I think that Earthquake requires really good gears and can be tanked by a party. Bosses in WoW sometimes require weeks to understand, see for instance Yogg-Saron's world first by Ensidia. Not all monsters can use Earthquake, and maybe those who can use Earthquake require the group to follow specific strategies yet undiscovered? Nevertheless, I perfectly understand how frustrating it can be to keep facing failure when trying to kill a boss because not everyone in the group has godly equipments such as Asprika (reduces 30% of elemental attacks, ie 30% of the damage received from Earthquake!). But these god equipments require items (only collectible in very coveted guild castles) to unlock painful long quests to accomplish, such as The Seals or Fallacious Okolnir.

[literature] A qualitative study of Ragnarök Online private server in-game sociological issues

Edit: this post does not reflect the latest version of my paper. I will know whether my paper has been accepted in April, and I will update this post accordingly. Feel free to contact me if you have any question :-)

This is the summary of the paper I have written. This paper may not explain entirely why I did not post anything in the last 4 weeks, but it still took me much time...

Abstract

In the last decade, online games have raised much attention as more and more players gather on game servers. In parallel, communities of illegal private servers have spread and host numbers of players comparable to the official game server. Based on the Korean online game Ragnarök Online, I conducted unstructured interviews to collect qualitative data on different private servers and on the official French server. This paper explains why Ragnarök Online private servers gather so many players and how private servers could help improve official games.

Plan

1. Introduction
2. Playing Ragnarök Online
3. Methodology
4. Fulfilling player expectations
• Rates
• Avatar customization
• In-game events
• Recapitulation
5. Private server issues
• Group level-range
• The Warpra-Healer combo
• Player information
• Virtual economy
• Recapitulation
6. Issues shared between official and private servers
• Double Accounts
• Lack of monster challenge for guilds
• Donation and subscription
• Recapitulation
7. Conclusion

   The wide panel of private servers answers adequately the wide panel of player expectations. Although small private servers intrinsically lack players, their very concerned administrators find interesting ways to get round their problems. More populated private servers benefit from the same technical features as small private servers, but they also share common problems with official servers. Looking at how the most populated private servers deal with player problems might show enlightening.

8. Future work

RO Official F2P servers

This is following my last post.

F2P servers strategy

... but considering that :

• a lot of RO players are Asian (I could not find any proof of that but I truly believe it regarding the reaction of surprise all Western people have when they hear that RO has more than 10M subscribers, considering also that according to wikipedia, though unknown to many Western players, the game took Asia by storm)
• F2P Asian MMO Games (like Maple Story for instance) could attract RO subscribers according to Aaron Delwiche

Gravity changed its (world) strategy in launching F2P servers such as Valkyrie for iRO or Baphomet for kRO. Also, the French server fRO which used to be P2P became F2P in December 2008. The Russian server ruRO is also F2P (I do not know if it was P2P before).

Valkyrie

This server is an iRO server and opened in September 2008. The game on Valkyrie is harder (XP is harder, Teleporting is more expensive, Kafra Mall Items are more expensive, etc.) but it is a free server, so players go to play on it. Actually, there are more players on Valkyrie than on the other P2P iRO servers (see ropd.info).

Considering the 4 figures on the left concerning players on iRO servers Loki, Chaos, Iris and Valkyrie, some comparisons have to be made :

• Different server ages : Valkyrie is much younger than Loki/Chaos/Iris, so I think there is a lower ratio of high-level people on Valkyrie than on P2P servers.
• Different guild involvement : Usually, people go into a guild when they have a bit of strength to bring in, that means when accessing job 2, at approximately level 60. So if we forget avatars who are under level 60, the P2P servers have more than half of their high-level avatars in guilds while in Valkyrie it is approximately 9.000 high-level avatars in guilds for 26.000 not.

From these facts, I do not think that it can be stated that the cost of the game experience influences the type of gamers. An easy conclusion could be : Iris/Chaos/Loki are more hardcore/experimented/PGM servers while Valkyrie is more casual/fun/low-level. But I doubt that it can be easily proven, and some very skilled players (like Doddler for instance) do play on Valkyrie.

Baphomet and Doppelganger

Since I can not read Korean, it is hard for me to gather sources concerning the kRO F2P servers, so I will not detail this part much. kRO Baphomet was launched in May 2008 and is also harder than other kRO servers. As I wrote before, RO F2P servers gather sometimes more players than P2P servers (see Server selection screen nearby), and it is the case for Baphomet. More about Baphomet on Doddler's website. The motivation for opening a free server at this time was the declining number of users. Doppelganger opened in June 2008. It did not bring as many users as Baphomet so the 2 were merged in April 2009.
Anyway, the strategy change consisting in opening F2P servers has been definitely fruitful because Gravity says in April 2009 that the subscription revenues increase in Korea was primarily attributed to increased revenues from launching free-to-play servers.

fRO

To my mind, fRO tries to push the player to buy a Premium Account, or the upgraded version of it : the Infinity Account. I do not know about ruRO (which is also F2P), but it might be the same as fRO (ruRO has at least Premium Accounts).
A fRO Premium account is a monthly 7€ subscription, while an Infinity account is 199€, providing a permanent VIP status and some bonus items.
The iShop is the same thing as the iRO Kafra Shop. It is through this website that users can buy virtual items.

I think that tokens of micropayment are a psychologic easier way for the user to buy virtual items with real money. The reason might be because people can hardly admit they are buying game items with real money, they need an item to make the transition : website tokens! In fRO, these tokens are named Karat. Actually, Carat is the name of a clown monster in the game, so maybe the Karat currency comes from its name. Currently, 100 Karats are approximately 1€.

In my previous post, I took the example of the Giant Flywing item that can be bought on the iRO website with Kafra Points. On fRO, a user buys a Giant Flywing for 10c (10 Giant Flywings for 100 Karats). Compared to the iRO 0.75c Giant Flywings, there is quite much difference.
I think the only reason explaining this difference is the will of Gravity Europe, administrator of fRO, to produce an amount of money big enough to be compared to what other Gravity group branches produce (ruRO, jRO or even iRO). But it is quite difficult for Gravity Europe, because the French player community is much smaller than iRO's, and therefore is likely to bring less profit. So the same products are more expensive on fRO than on iRO in order to «cope» with the size of the community.

Bubble-gum, a kind of item which increases experience gained in killing monsters (see Doddler's BubbleGum tests), is the most sold item IG, but is also the best selling item bought with real currency (€). Lucky Clip is a kind of item that increases the drop rate of monsters and is also among the best selling items. All the other items are «everyday life» items : Oridecon and Elunium are used to refine and repair player weapons and equipements, Yggdrasil Leaves are used to resurrect people and Blue Gemstones to teleport people from a place of the world to another.
What is interesting with Lucky Clips and Bubble Gums is that these items are not dropped by any monster nor sold by any NPC, hence all these items are available to players because they have been bought with euros. That means that even if Gravity Europe does not sell (itself) zeny for euros, roughly 400.000z = 100Karat = 1€. On igvault.com it is possible to get 1Mz for nearly 6€. That makes a huge difference with iRO where it is possible to get 20Mz for 6€/8$. But what is more interesting is that Gravity Europe has a twice better change rate than illegal websites. Because some people want to absolutely soften their game experience in buying items like Bubble Gums or Lucky Clip to get more XP or drops, this could be an explanation why they would rather buy these items through ragnarokonline.fr instead of another ways.

Business Model improvement

RO's leveling is definitely hard. Much harder than many well-known current MMORPGs. But with the opening of F2P servers, I do think that more casual players are willing to play, and even pay a few $/€ to appreciate more their time. Another particularity of RO is the WoE system ; a WoE is a battle between rival guilds in a castle in order to possess it and get rare items its Treasure Boxes contain. But sometimes it is difficult to build a character with PvP stats because these stats do not match PvE stats at all.
For instance, when playing a Priest (typical support class) in WoE sessions, a lot of Vitality (VIT) is needed so that your avatar does not get killed easily. On the other hand, not much Intelligence (INT) is necessary because not need many SP (= mana) are needed. But the easiest way to have your character leveling up as an Acolyte (the class the player has to be before becoming a Priest) relies on much INT to inflict more damages on Undead monsters.
Unlike most of all private servers, in official servers there are no NPC who can reset the player's stats. Hence an iRO survey in July 2006 reported that 68% of the 4266 participants of the survey say yes to a value-added service that provided a skill or stat reset and 28% said no. In another survey occuring in January 2008, 56% of the 7229 participants said they would pay for a Service or Item that provided a Full Stat Reset and 14% said no.

The only currently available service on iRO consists in buying (directly, without Kafra Points!) 20 Stat Points for $10. A level 90+ avatar has more than 800 status points. To move from a character build to another, not all the stat points need to be reset, but to my mind, it takes much more than 300 points. To my mind, this definitely can be improved ...

fRO has nearly the same system as iRO. This thread shows that it is 40€ for a 100 stat-point reset, and it is free if you have paid a premium account (199€). However, this reset is performed only ONCE on your character. The price can be compared to the iRO price of the nearly same service (however, the iRO stat reset can be repeated many times). How this stat reset is performed on fRO is explained on fRO forums.
I do not know the amount of «Infinity» accounts, I do not know the total amount of people using this service, and I do not know how many people have been using the stat reset service on iRO, but I bet that the F2P players use it more than the P2P players. Recently, a RO player told me that he liked that people are «equal» when they have all paid for the same service (P2P), but he definitely finds «unbalancing» the fact that some people could buy virtual items with real money (F2P). I think that is a reason why he's playing on private servers ...

RO Official Servers and money

First, if you do not know what RO is, you can read this post.

kRO Sakray is the most up-to-date RO server worldwide, maybe because Gravity is a Korean corporation (and because Sakray is the usual test server). For instance, one of the latest major updates of the game is called Renewal. This update occured in July 2008 on kRO Sakray and in June 2009 on all kRO servers but has not yet been implemented on iRO servers (no update has "Renewal" in its title, or on the official server features kRO is the most up-to-date server). I would have liked to write about kRO because :

• kRO is the most up-to-date set of servers (containing kRO Sakray, the most up-to-date RO test server worldwide)
• kRO contains Asian players, and as I wrote before, RO is mostly played by Asian people
• Asia MMO Gaming is not really known from Western countries. Also the by-products in Asia may be more widespread than in Europe and America, the game habits might be really different, etc.

But I can not read/understand Korean, so what follows are considerations based on iRO, the RO international server that I find most representative as a non-Asian (and understandable) server. iRO opened in June 2003 and is only a year younger than kRO, so there should not be any differences because of the age of the servers.

Concerning the administration of the servers, kRO is administrated by Gravity Corp. and iRO by Gravity Interactive (cf the server list). I do not know the relationship between these 2 firms, but each time in this post I may write the name «Gravity», it will stand for the iRO administration.

Talking about money, the RO IG currency is called zeny (z). The only origins I could find for this name are noble in Russian and a slavic word for woman (looking for zeny on google image leads to funny results ...).

Value-Added Service and Kafra Shop

As I already wrote, subscribtions are roughly $10 per month. But giving players the possibility to buy IG items or services related to their avatars with real money could bring some more money to Gravity.

First, users can use Gravity's Value Added Service for character renaming, moving (to another server), gender changing and status points reallocation. I think this service may exist since the creation of the servers because it consists only in database management.

Second, in December 2004, a survey on iRO website reported that 55% of the 1001 participants would ever pay real-world money for in-game currency or items, while 45% said they would not. Apparently real currencies against z has not been set up by Gravity yet (and I do not think it will ever be set up), but some websites suggest 6€/$8 for 20Mz.

Anyway, in June 2007 the iRO Kafra Shop opened (maybe this type of online shop already existed for a long time on kRO). Kafras are NPC located in any town or at the entrance of any dungeon to provide VERY USEFUL services such as :

• Saving the player's position so that when your avatar dies in a dungeon, he/she returns to the dungeon entrance
• Opening the player's storage so that an avatar can store drops and equipements
• Teleporting the avatar from a place to another

So the name for this on-line item mall was really well-found to focus the player's mind on usefulness. The content of the item mall consists of any kind of equipements or consumable items. And indeed some of these items are really useful. For instance, the Giant Flywing is the only item in the game that gives a group leader the possibility to teleport his group where he is. The user can buy Kafra Points with USD, on a $75 for 10k points basis.

Micropayments are sometimes used for items contained in boxes (500 Giant Flywing in a 500 Kafra Points box, which means 0.75c/Flywing). As explained on wikipedia the use of a custom token like the Kafra Point is very common in MMORPG.

When the Kafra Shop was introduced, all RO servers were P2P. It is only with the introduction of F2P servers in RO that things changed a little bit.

Ragnarök Online

I did not think I would produce really a lot when I started to write this article. But I actually wrote a lot, and I have to cut my original post into parts so that I can empty my Notepad buffer sometimes ... So this article is the first in a serie of I do not know yet how many other articles. I still have to write about

• private servers
• Gravity Corp. Business Plan with Ragnarok Online
• my RO experience
• and maybe other things ...

But for the moment, let's introduce this MMORPG.

A South-Korean manhwa ...

RO is a South-Korean MMORPG. The Wikipedia article concerning RO is a bit out of date but you can find there some basic informations.
The MMORPG comes from a manga/manhwa from Lee Myung-jin. The author has been working with Gravity, a South-Korean video corporation. I could not find any source mentionning until when this collaboration lasted or will last.

... leading to a MMORPG

The MMORPG was first released in South-Korea in August 2002 (en.wikipedia.org writes 2001 but they are mistaken [edit of January 2010: I fixed the release date on Wikipedia]), then was released internationally as an open-beta in December 2002 and I first tried it in early 2004 (see the calendar given by iRO). At the moment, there are many servers each of them dealing with a particular country. The most known ones are the Korean (kRO), International-US (iRO : Chaos, Loki, Iris and Valkyrie servers named after the manga characters), and European (euRO) servers. There is/was also a Test Server which name is Sakray (more will be said about this later ...). Some servers are F2P like the French one (fRO) or others, but the game is P2P for almost all servers. And there are also Pirate/Private Servers.

Number of players

I know that many people consider obvious that WoW has the biggest amount of players registered in the MMOG market. The MMOG Chart does not show RO, so I thought it must be a too small MMORPG to appear on this chart. I only saw on this chart very old datas concerning RO. I thought RO was a pretty small MMORPG. But :

• March 2004 : The community of Ragnarok Online is dynamic and growing, attracting more than 17 million players from all over the world, in 130 different countries
• May 2004 : The Gravity title has 25-million subscribers, worldwide.
• June 2004 : 25 million registered Ragnarok players remain active
• February 2009 : more than 50 million registered users worldwide on RAGNAROK Online alone

In some of the above links, you can read that Asian players represent a huge part of the total amount of players. I currently do not know why MMOG Chart does not show Maple Story, Ragnarok or some other Asian MMORPG while Lineage II is included. Also, I was only able to find the nearby figure concerning iRO amount of players. At least, this figure proves there are more than 100.000 players on iRO, and thus RO deserves a place in the MMOG Chart.
A RO account is roughly $10 per month.