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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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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.
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 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.