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A first look at RF Online
Heartless Gamer wrote to mention a set of beta impressions from RF Online at GamerGod. RF Online is a MMOG that's been out for a little while already in the east, but has now been published here in the U.S.. The launch date for the U.S. service was yesterday, the 21st. From the article: "If I had to point out a single aspect that keeps the pre-30 game fun, I would have to say that it's the totally eliminated down time between fights. Potion use, or "potting" as the locals put it, is a vital part of the game and the reason why healer classes are unnecessary enough for only one faction to get them. Potions are sold on NPC vendors for bargain prices, enough that it's easy to afford to keep 99-potion piles."
The game is called Rising Force Online, but from the description I thought it might have been Radio Frequency Online or something. Is it so hard to expand the abbreviations the first time you use them? Not everyone on IMBs knows what an MMOG is, for the QPFth time.
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You failed it!!!!!!!!
... for the confused.
The lack of any type of healing ability/item that could be easily/affordibly gotten by any class has always been one of my biggest gripes with most mainstream MMORPGs. I always liked being able to stock potions in Diablo and go out and fight on my own.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Funny enough, RF Online is the name of the game. It's on their webpage, the game splash screen, and yes even on the game box. Rising Force online is the expanded version, but not what they're selling it under.
They also have extended titles, "Fantasy and Romance" and "Episode 1: Beginning to the New World", but it's somewhat debatable about if they're really titles or added descriptors.
I've wasted a few hours with another korean MMO called Flyff, they had the same idea with healing items, you could have any number of them and use them as much as you want. As a result, players put almost no stat points into stamina because all they needed to survive was one hit, after that you could spam healing items to survive the next hit. Can you imagine how much crying there was when the developers introduced a two or three second delay between potion uses around Christmas? It was done primarily for PvP so people wanted PvP removed again just so they could keep spamming healing items.
Make the healing shorten downtimes but don't let it become a big factor during combat.
And while we're at it, when potions are dirt cheap and trivial to get, wouldn't it be better to just give players a very high regeneration rate out of combat (like Guildwars does)? If you expect people to maintain huge stockpiles of them anyway and that doesn't cause any real cost, why do you make people run to the store to get new potions? Trivial aspects of a game should be automated or eliminated because anything that can be done without putting effort into it and without challenge is just unnecessary work.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I played the beta about 10 days ago and the Engrish was terrible! I sure hope they fixed that before the official release...talk about unprofessional.
From the article: "If I had to point out a single aspect that keeps the pre-30 game fun, I would have to say that it's the totally eliminated down time between fights. Potion use, or "potting" as the locals put it, is a vital part of the game and the reason why healer classes are unnecessary enough for only one faction to get them. Potions are sold on NPC vendors for bargain prices, enough that it's easy to afford to keep 99-potion piles."
If that's the best they can come up with to attract me to the game, i'm not going to bother. Sure, a change of mechanics would always be appreciated, but it's not the one thing that comes to mind every time I play the current crop of MMORPGs.
http://www.rf-onlinegame.com/?territory=EnglishUSA
I don't mean to sound like a troll, but every Korean MMO I've tried was a pointless treadmill with little in the way of quests or anything else for that matter.
Looks just like WoW's. how original. WTF
I found the game to be visually beautiful, but I hated playing it. The one "plus" discussed above, the potion thing, really pissed me off, because I always play healers, and they didn't balance for the healer playstyle at all. It's entirely a solo game. Heals and buffs from the beginning of the game really suck.
Example: when you play as a group, there's some amount of shared XP for killing things, but a much larger portion of the XP is given based on the amount of damage you dealt. Furthermore, quest credit is given when you get the final blow on a monster. So you really have to spec for damage.
It was painful: when I was playing, at peak hour, there were 10-15 people camping the same spawn at once. Whenever anything spawned, people would rush for it and start whacking it. Since it was the final hit that mattered for quests, everyone wanted to wait until it was almost dead and then time their attacks. Kill stealing was everywhere.
sigh
I played Ragnarok Online a while back on a private server with about a few thousand players. On this server, MP potions (a.k.a. grape juice) were sold dirt cheap, so magic such as healing spells and special attacks could be used indefinitely and levelling runs could go on for a long time. This was good because levelling went relatively quickly.
Unfortunately, this was problematic for the economy. The problem was that every enemy in Ragnarok drops at least some sort of trivial item that can be sold to NPC vendors, so when a player amasses hundreds of these items, their stash of gold gets pretty high. Since a lot of the trade in the game goes through player characters of the merchant class, and large sums of money were being collected, the merchants could continually raise prices to maximize their returns; inflation went through the roof. All the while, grape juice was held at low prices because they were easily fabricated by merchants and flooded the market unlike rare weapons, armors, and other items.
The adminstrators of the servers eventually had to institute a money wipe, where every player's fortune was cut by 90%. I stopped playing at this point.
I also I knew where this game had been, and so I set my expectations on a very painful grind. Thus, when I discovered that the grind, while existent, was considerably less painful than I thought, it was a welcome relief.
AAAAAAnd that's the point where the game should have been thrown back.
I swear, any MMPORPG that can be described as a "Grind" this late in the game, should have the entire development team shot. Four years ago they should have been fired. Two years ago they should have been deported. Today there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to make a contentless grind and sell it as entertainment.
The ______ Agenda
After seeing what goes all wrong in allowing them in on Lineage II, they best be on their toes to keep botters away from this game. Drop them out of the game fast, discourage botted grinds, and enforce a 2-region world - one for the botting nations to boil in, and one for the Rest of Us.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Potting is very widespread in asian MMO's and has pretty drastic effects on PvP. It nearly always provides a strong boost to high damage characters who can kill in one or two hits and makes the high speed/low damage characters much less effective. A good example of this is Conquer Online (www.conqueronline.com). CO is a free to play MMORPG similar to Ragnarok Online that has become extremely popular in China. Pots are fairly inexpensive to buy and your only limit is inventory space. The Archer is a popular ranged class that gets a very fast attack (two arrows per second) that can hit any object on the screen without missing and can also fly for nearly a minute, avoiding all melee damage entirely. The Trojan on the other hand is a melee class that requires actually connecting with an opponent to do damage, which is fairly difficult if the opponent is dodging around. However, their attack is strong enough to kill most characters in a single hit if they can land it. As you can imagine, without pots the Archer will win everytime by simply flying and then shooting the trojan until he dies. With the addition of pots, however, trojans can simply renew their health whenever they want until the archer has to land again, at which point they can easily kill them in one hit. The pots do not benefit the archer in this case because they die in a single blow. At the same time, the healer class (water taoist) is in very high demand for reviving, but never for healing. In CO you only gain experience for damage done to monsters as well, so it becomes difficult to level a healer.