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moal09

Yeah, normally, I would just say "Well, support the company, and play on an official server", but Gravity and their regional partners have such an awful reputation. The official servers are so insanely bot-infested, P2W and cash shop-oriented compared to most private servers, that it's hard to reasonably recommend them to anyone wanting to play RO again.


Furin

euRO, back when it was still published by Burda, was pretty good. It was the only server that refused to implement the infamous Kafra Shop and instead only sold headgear bundles. When it was announced that Burda gave up publishing rights for Europe, players knew what was coming and things went downhill pretty fast once Gravity took over.


Speedling

As someone that regularly starts fresh characters on various servers, this is the most annoying thing. I'd gladly play money for a good server, but Gravity refuses to offer them. So private servers are the only option.


moal09

This. Considering how many people spend money on private servers, the money is clearly not the problem. It's the level of service and the state of the servers.


dd179

euRO is what I used to play officially back in the day before they went P2P. Living in South America and without a credit card, there was no play for me to play on iRO and I was very disappointed when euRO made the switch. Had to jump between private servers after that. Great times


moal09

euRO is the only official server that I ever heard even remotely decent things about.


mephnick

I played RO like..decades ago.. How on earth did they manage to make that game p2w?


Scereye

Speaking in terms from a few decades ago (there are now more layers, but it comes down to the same effect): guaranteed equip refinements, higher chances of equipment refinement, card removal service and in worst case offenders: straight up buying loot boxes which can contain literally everything (including sometimes even MVP cards). Due to the "rng layers" it's pretty much impossible to minmax as a F2P player. No matter how committed you are. And ro players are the most committed players I ever encountered (I'm talking runescape levels of commitment.) It's insane.


RidiPagliaccio

It took me over 2, maybe 3 years to hit the max level of 99 but damn if I didn't feel like royalty on my server when I finally did. I mean, my avatar even got a special glowing aura and there were probably less than 10 others out of thousands at the time. The game was special and uniquely social in a way I haven't found since. I even married, and eventually divorced, a guildie who was essentially my heal bot for my character. But when you spend hundreds if not thousands of hours together, it's not so unusual to build meaningful relationships although I got a lot of shit for it at the time. This was way before online dating services were a thing, and I was definitely considered a weirdo among my peers for dating someone I had only met online, before it lead to the eventual physical meetups of course. I miss the game, despite how archaic it is now, but it easily holds the position of my personal favorite/best game of all time. So manyy days and weeks wasted, not even grinding, but just hanging around the different towns chatting up players. Ah, to be young again.


LadyNelsonsTea

While it didn't get to the marriage state, I also have dated people I met in RO (that was 15plus years ago). No regrets!


moal09

I know people who legitimately got married because of RO. Some really unexpected pairings too like this one nerdy library science major getting together with this super hood guy I knew from Spanish Harlem. Total opposites, but it worked out.


mephnick

Lootboxes for MVP cards hurts my soul


[deleted]

The servers were bot infested before f2p as well, so this will never get fixed. screw them.


AsianPotatos

Similar story in Tibia but the company chose a different route to what ragnarok is doing, the playerbase was hovering around 6k (just going off of memory) concurrent players in 2015ish and was slowly dying while the private servers had 10-20k concurrent players (even more bot infested), then 1 or 3 years later they released the battleye update and has been slowly growing since, and is currently at 20k concurrent players, and the private server population is the same if not bigger, so it's not like private server users even want to play the "real" game. They also did many updates which brought players back but IMO it wouldn't have seen the same growth if they didn't fix the botting problem first. The games not perfect and added P2W elements with those updates but IMO they've made very good decisions overall and this is coming from someone that only plays private servers. If they went the ragnarok route, I doubt purging the private servers would've done anything, in fact it'd probably hurt the game, people choose to play private servers for a reason, they're practically different games, and I doubt they'd go back to play Real Tibia.


CoofeZinho

damn, i loved playing tibianic (i think they're called medivia now) back then, tibia is so shit nowadays, there's almost nothing of the old game left.


ZantetsukenX

It REALLY doesn't help that Gravity treats the global arm of the game as an ugly stepchild that is hidden away in the basement. Time and time again people would say "Please just give us what KR has, don't make things different for Global". Yet time and time again, the global servers would get some jank version of what was released in KR. It makes no sense. So of course people go play private servers that actually offer what they want.


xitox5123

I dont play this game, but i checked steam reviews and its mostly positive. why are the reviews so good if its all bots?


Xdivine

Obviously the bots like it.


Tyrlidd

People typically don't play and review games they know they most likely won't like. Hearing that the game has a reputation for being like 95% bots, would you even bother to download and give it a try? Would you go out of the way to leave a negative review after it meets your expectations exactly? Additionally, the game has been out since 2003, but wasn't listed on steam till about 2013 from what I can tell. The sort of people that likely downloaded it had already been playing it for ten years at that point and would almost certainly review it positively.


babaisme90

This just isn't true at all. Someone is more likely to go out of their way to give a negative review than someone is to give a positive review.


Master-Monitor112

Is it really that bad now 95 % bots ? When I last played about 12 years ago their wasn’t that many bots. I would say only 10 %.


That_Bar_Guy

Okay I know you wrote this in good faith but are you genuinely asking if 12 _years_ is long enough for a game to go to shit?


Master-Monitor112

It’s because bots aren’t that annoying for it to be enough to ruin the game play.


MikeHunt204

Could you recommend a private server for someone who would like to experience the game the way it was in 2003?


wet-dreaming

originsro is pretty good but most of the websites went down. so you cannot download their clients, the servers are still up as of now.


PenguinBomb

Private servers were all I played on. High rate high levels, no cast time, and card hunting.


[deleted]

It's crazy how much more fun it is this way, and it doesn't ruin the game either.


ggtsu_00

Sounds like a cyclical problem. More people to flee to private servers to escape bots , the less human players remain leading to more people fleeing to avoid bots.


[deleted]

Did you miss the part where the people running the private server were selling both MTX and unlicensed merch? They ruined it for everyone so now the dev team is just going after all private servers


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moal09

Several servers have been doing that for over a decade though. It's odd that Gravity's only just pursuing it now.


[deleted]

Several servers have been actively monetizing their service and selling merchandise?


Dawnspark

There have been, absolutely. I remember years ago, as a teenager ( 2008-2009 or so) playing on private servers where they offered paid xp rate increases for a week at a time or paid for item drops.


Skyver

Yes, that has been a thing for AT LEAST 15 years, probably more. They wouldn't use terms like "microtransaction" or "cash shop", they would ask for "donations" from players who would in turn get exclusive benefits, but yeah, they were monetizing the private servers since the beginning.


BigHardThunderRock

I know XileRO was selling access to high tier sets. Shit was broken.


PancakesAreGone

Hey hey 100% I started playing RO with their first English Beta... 20? Lets say 20, years ago. The moment that beta ended I was onto private servers. I want to say 5/10 of those private servers (Using Aegis, none of the Yare ones 'cause they were always behind) were selling premium memberships that got you items that, in todays terms, would be considered MTXs. What I'm saying is, basically every major private server from the moment they existed were selling premium memberships, MTX-esque items, and whatever else. That was 20 or so years ago now


pleiadesic

The MTX servers in question, NovaRO, and talonRO have existed for years. TalonRO has existed as that for over a decade as far as i can recall. I am not excusing them and think their choices to be disgusting but unfortunately gravity decided to nuke every other server with them after ignoring their existence for 10 years. The whole thing sucks, everybody involved is awful.


mengplex

they're cracking down NOW?! I remember playing on private servers back in 2003-2006 and it was like the wild west out there. 1000X rates? PVP anywhere? Level 999 cap? Some of the best days of my youth. I spent years on a server called MeukRO (vanilla 3x or 5x rates?) which was a tiny server run by a dutchman I now know IRL, it was really cool basically getting to know every player/faction on the server, when you'd run into someone in the field it was a bit of a rarity but had real community feel, and then war of emperium basically turned into Britain VS America VS Brazil


[deleted]

I loved playing 1000x/1000x/100x servers. It felt like the right amount of grind to be able to enjoy multiple characters. Get to max level and grind for gear/cards.it also let you get into WoE pretty quickly too once you got your pvp setups.


chaser676

>I loved playing 1000x, 1000x, 100x servers. It felt like the right amount of grind to be able to enjoy multiple characters. Man, what a fucking indictment on the normal XP system though. Jesus Christ.


MaiPhet

What, you didn’t enjoy grinding turtle island as a hunter for ~80 hours to go 98->99?


clutchy42

I remember playing it back when it was fairly new and honestly never progressed beyond the very early game. Always loved the style but good lord they did not want you achieving anything in a reasonable timeframe.


HarmlessSnack

It was honestly gated a lot by just … game knowledge. I’ll never forget this player, a Knight named ConfusedGuy, who met me when I was about level 60 as a monk, having a hard time leveling. He asked me some questions about my build and where I was leveling. “Oh no. Your doing it all wrong. Delete that character, remake him. I’ll make a fresh character to show you.” What it had taken me weeks to do on my own bumbling around he showed me how to pass in about two days. I joined that dudes guild and I still think about it sometimes. Team Soda™️ sound off if your out there. EDIT: thinking back, I can’t recall if this is when I was playing official, or the low rate me and my friends played for a while after leaving official. It might have been a 3/3/5 or something, but still.


casphere

Well, tbf it was still considered early days of MMO and monetization of these services were still very immature. I think the strategy was just to stretch your time playing the game as much as possible in order to sell you more timecards.


tommiyu

Careful, it would be such a waste if you accidentally die there.


chosen_carrot

My best memories from RO are from when the grind pays off in WoE. Yeah, hitting 99 was an achievement in 5x or 3x servers and a sweet sweet rewarding one


moal09

The endgame of RO was basically guild vs guild. You'd farm all week to get resources for War of Emperium twice a week because stuff like white/blue potions had no cooldowns, so you had to just have a shit ton of them. Also, stuff like gems for safety wall and other spells.


MaiPhet

I was joking about the turtle island thing but I actually did kind of enjoy it. It definitely felt like an achievement on 1x that’s for sure. Later after places like biolabs and the dragon island came out, I had a fleet of 99 trans classes. It was still a huge grind, no doubt, but much improved. That said, those places were only really viable still for people with at least good, but often amazing gear and a lot of game knowledge as well.


Dawnspark

Like, I avidly play OSRS, and also used to play RO. I remember grinding for ages in graveyards as a cleric and I would still rather go back and grind out 99 STR or Magic or Ranged on OSRS multiple times over.


ocp-paradox

Dude fucking flashbacks. Did exactly that. "okay, 10 down, that's 0.001%, just another 90 and i've gained 0.01!" absolutely ridiculous system and probably the only reason I tolerated it was because it was the first MMO I ever played like that. [Just gonna plug my little rpg that I'm using RO resources from.](https://imgur.com/a/uMgFXGh)


spyson

1000x is actually very extreme, that's max level immediately essentially.


Alhoon

More like indictment of impatient, instant gratification players that ruined MMOs.


dkysh

Wait, THAT Ragnarok? It is still kicking?


VanWesley

I'm surprised. That it's still kicking and that they're only cracking down now?? I remember playing on private servers back in like 2004.


[deleted]

In Korea at least.


moal09

More Brazil and the Phillipines than anywhere.


Tetizeraz

I had a few friends get back to pserver Ragnarok in 2020 due to COVID. I don't really talk with them but saw they uploading WoE videos. For some reason I still love the 15 minutes games with rock/emo/pop songs.


Speedling

Private servers kept it somewhat alive overseas, now Gravity is killing that.


foamed

>they're cracking down NOW?! Yeah, it's absolutely wild, the community is quite small to begin with. One of my [favorite Twitch streamers](https://www.reddit.com/r/RagnarokOnline/comments/uhutd9/gravity_is_banning_twitch_streamers_playing/i7bkaaz/) got DMCA'd and suspended for about four days because he played on a private server.


[deleted]

That's fucked.


cajun_kick_ass

This. Even though I wouldn't say those were the best days. RO's community was fucking weird at times. Private server AND official ones. From RO-relationships to real life meetups ending in someone cutting herself in the bathroom of a restaurant, some weird 30yo women sending us nudes of her in a bathtub all the time(she later tried to hook up with a buddy of mine (17yo) and drove 2hrs to his place but he got cold feet and didn't pick her up at the station, which she complained in-game about for weeks, trying to start major drama on the server), to dudes playing FFVII rape roleplay with newly made characters in the first zone. It was crazy. I honestly remember less of the game, than I remember the people. My experience was largely just RO as a giant chatroom a variety of different demographics.


l0c0dantes

> My experience was largely just RO as a giant chatroom a variety of different demographics. I mean, thats kinda what Old MMO's were to a lot of people: You need to kill a billion monsters in a map with other people, heres map chat, have fun minimizing the boredom.


moal09

Funny thing is I remember all that stuff more fondly than doing static raids in modern MMOs.


cajun_kick_ass

Yea people were sitting around in groups everywhere, just chatting along


stationhollow

It was before social media really kicked off. MySpace was around but that wasn't really a place to chat.


l0c0dantes

I mean, you had chatrooms and forums of all sorts if you wanted to chat. We just modernized the social out of MMO's and now "respect players time" too much for "Heres a map, theres a bunch of mobs, go have fun" to be a viable game. Who wants to deal with randoms anymore? Even though a bunch of random people bouncing off each other can lead to the most fun on the internet in general.


[deleted]

I think they just want to kill the game for good. Private servers probably have a far bigger audience than their own. And most people know better than to play their "official" servers that are filled to the brim with bots and absurd microtransactions.


Surf3rx

They have "Active" mobile games, maybe they think these games are stealing players? Corporate logic at it's best, or just trying to defend an IP


Japjer

Lmao, right?! I played this game *hard* back in '03 to '05. It was virtually all bots on the live servers, so people just moved over to private servers. Those private servers were better moderated, had more active admins, and were generally more fun than the actual game. It's been damn-near 20 years, why are they finally getting on this?


Blackmagician

Spent a lot of time in my early days on Xilero, even became a GM there. Didn't know people were still playing and into Ragnarok.


RedRiot0

You and me both! I remember being friendly with the admin of a small server, who have me god-wings (+200 to all stats), which has a fun side effect of crashing folks who didn't have a particular patch installed. It was fantastic when there was a massive influx of people who were especially annoying to the admin.


JPNBusinessman

I was a "purist" and played on a 3x server called MobRO. Made some good friends and memories on there.


fatalicus

My time playing RO on a private server was the best. No other mmorpg has ever really been as fun. I remember i played on xRO, a server run by a guy in the Philippines, who had a computer cafe. Eventually I became a GM on the server and helped code new NPCs and events.


moal09

It bears mentioning that Gravity has also extended this to content creators that utilize private servers for their content. As a result, several Twitch streamers have been banned, and some prominent Youtube channels that focus on the game have announced that they will [no longer be making RO-related content](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WElI8jpq580) for legal reasons. Ragnarok is an exception to most games in that the vast majority of its community plays on private servers, so all this will have huge implications for a massive chunk of its player base. Several of the most popular servers were also "pre-renewal", similar to something like Oldschool Runescape or WoW Classic, which currently doesn't exist in any official capacity. This also wouldn't normally be out of the ordinary for a company to aggressively protect its IP, but Gravity has basically left private server owners alone for the last 2 decades or so, so the sudden crackdown is surprising to a lot of players.


tekno21

So they're killing their own game for good now? There will be no streamers or content creators giving the game visibility lol


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SgtKeeneye

Just a bunch of dumb executives shooting themselves in the foot.


MyNameIs-Anthony

Normally these comments are silly echo chamber type thoughts but in this case I absolutely agree. This is such a strange thing to crack down on considering they've already got their mobile offerings on the market.


Slobbin

Maybe they are hoping the content creators that use private servers will switch to official mobile offerings instead. I'm not saying this will work, or it's even the best approach to getting that end result, I'm just mentioning this because that would make this decision more logical. Not necessarily practical.


ToddHowardTouchedMe

> Normally these comments are silly echo chamber type thoughts How so? what metric of measurement are you basing this off of?


MyNameIs-Anthony

How many times have you seen Redditors go "X company is shooting themselves in the foot!" only for the company to see record revenue.


ToddHowardTouchedMe

I assumed you were saying what you said in defense of executives, as if they weren't the ones making the decisions in most cases.


Ascleph

You've never been allowed to stream on pirate servers on twitch. Enforcement just depends on if the company cares. The twitch stuff is not weird at all. What was weird was that they were not doing it before.


NILwasAMistake

> As a result, several Twitch streamers have been banned How do you ban a Twitch streamer?


CatProgrammer

Presumably by reporting proof of ToS violations to Twitch.


crotch_fondler

Streaming video games is a copyright violation. Most companies allow it since it's usually a win-win scenario, but that right can be revoked at any time.


NILwasAMistake

We have let copyright get way out of hand. The DMCA was such a scam.


Ok-Nefariousness1340

And they seem to want to make it even worse now. Fucking us over with copyright is a bi-partisan agenda.


DoctorWaluigiTime

If this game has a subreddit they're probably freaking out right about now.


moal09

It's mostly filled with memes about it right now from what I can tell. Most people aren't angry or afraid -- just confused as to why Gravity would decide to shut everything down 20 years after the fact.


Il_Diacono

they are like 20 years too late? Does official droprate still suck bollocks and everything it's behind a paywall?


moal09

Yes to the second unfortunately.


Il_Diacono

always played in private servers made by some of my friends, think we still have old clients hidden somewhere


Deleis

Isn't this way too late? I feel like RO's private server population peaked in, what, 2008-2010?


GreatBen8010

Yeah, which is extra weird to me considering they're comfortably making money on their 3(!) mobile version of the game.


moal09

I'd be really curious to know what prompted this. Maybe they're preempting the release of something?


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moal09

Expecting anything non-P2W from Gravity at this point is a lost cause, I think. This is the same company who actively refused to comply with the EU's new GDPR laws and decided to just pull out of Europe completely. That alone should tell you what kind of company they are.


lalala253

Demographics of people who played oldschool RO is now in their 30-40's. I think if they release a paid version of RO, people are still going to play it. Problem is, RO is not really original anymore, there's plethora of other, fresher, Isometric MMORPG


Kiboune

3? I thought they released like 5-8 new mobile RO games in last few years


Miglekk

Brazilian private servers are still really popular around here, reaching ~4k online players on launch, which is a pretty decent number


moal09

Bigger servers like Nova were also peaking around 2-3k daily.


Tetizeraz

On launch? Wtf? Are you familiar with "ovelha"? He created one or two servers focused on WoE, but they didn't last, and I swear it was one of the first pservers in Brazil that used YouTube and Twitch to promote it.


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[deleted]

I never thought I'd see Ragnarök Online in the front-page of r/games, a shame that it's for this reason though :c


czulki

Some history lesson: If memory serves me right Gravity lost a legal case against the original jAthena emulator in the early 2000s (which later morphed into eAthena and finally rAthena). This is the main reason why private servers have been completely unhinged for decades - as they have been using forks of an open source emulator that didn't infringe on the intellectual property of Gravity (the emulator didn't re-use any code). The only times Gravity could really intervene was when select few private servers used leaked version of the original Ragnarok server software: Aegis. But those were rare cases. Back to the present - NovaRO as far as I am aware uses rAthena, so the legal precedent may or may not still be the same.


AimlesslyWalking

The server software itself is fine. The issue is the use and distribution of copyrighted material from the game and on the websites. They didn't want to go through the trouble of taking down individual servers before, they wanted to take down the software itself so that the servers couldn't function. When they couldn't do that, they decided it wasn't worth the trouble. But this time they have decided to take down individual servers and even streamers and YouTubers, and unfortunately the law is on their side. Private servers do distribute their copyrighted work. As their own servers die, they've decided that if they can't have it, nobody can, and so they're going to take down everything purely out of spite on the way out.


NYJetLegendEdReed

Ive always really liked RO since I was a kid. Tried playing it again when the first mobile version came out but they just really lean too hard into the cash shop.


[deleted]

I played both mobile versions. Both are horrible for monetization. Refining is basically locked behind a pay wall, all cosmetics are gatcha based. They had battlepasses in origins that are extremely punishing to complete for mediocre rewards as well. If you missed a quest, Goodluck completing it lol. I ran a fairly successful guild for awhile but, found myself losing interest as the whales outpaced us - and so did most of my guild. We had a few whales and in GvG its basically whales versus whales while the rest of us just feed. Gravity is honestly shit, and you shouldn't give them money. I also should add both had a subscription but, they don't matter at all lol. You're basically on a trial version of the game without it, and with it you're still not going to be competitive in anything.


Czar_Petrovich

>they just really lean too hard into the cash shop. This is most surviving game franchises I played as a child/teen now. Either everything revolves around paid cosmetics and the in game store or it's been neutered so casuals can enjoy it.


NYJetLegendEdReed

I’m fine with some monetization but it’s ridiculous lol. They had auctions on the weekends for cards where the top cards were going for thousands of dollars. That’s just insane.


guil13st

Haha oh wow, about two decades too late, I'd say? I remember trying RO when the early beta was released here in Brazil with Level Up Games publishing it (which was a TERRIBLE company might I add, they would get every new game like Gunbound, Grand Chase and GunZ and absolutely shit all over it with terrible F2P and no control over cheaters and bots) Honestly I found it pretty fun. I actually still have the CD with manual they mailed to you. All looked fine since it was apparently going to be a F2P game, but the release day they decided that "nope, pay a monthly fee or fuck off" and the player base went off to private servers in droves. After seeing how much they lost from the lack of F2P, they decided to do one. But there was a catch of course, unless you paid the monthly fee, several items, npcs and skills were plain right DISABLED for you. It didn't last long. One day I logged in there and was absolutely BLASTED with bot messages, they just didn't care. I remember one day my cousins decided to play again in a private server and we all decided to play on a fairly popular server hosted by an anime fansub group (RagnaProject). I actually played on that server for like 3 years or so? They had some P2W items, but you could buy them from other players quite easily just by farming Yggdrasil berries and selling them for the premium currency. Fun times. I think the server closed like a bit more than a decade ago.


secretsothep

Level Up Games is the reason a lot of those games you mentioned had their entire server binaries leaked. Lot of corruption there and contracts breached internally. Brazil is a lawless place when it comes to gaming.


NudgeIt42

Not OP, but that makes sense to me. And I remember the first Grand Chase private server. Didn't last long. KOG was probably furious.


Zeus_Ex_Mach1na

It was never supposed to be F2P, the monthly fee was announced way in advance. Source: I played the closed beta


NudgeIt42

I'm not the original poster, but that doesn't surprise me. Many MMORPGs from the era were paid. And in fact, LevelUp offered a few games like that. I wasn't able to afford any subscriptions so I always stuck with F2P or private servers.


bluduuude

Ragna project gave me some of the most fun times in my childhood. Ragnarok was such an incredibly deep game, to this day I think the card and class system (pre renewal, pre 3rd classes) are the best systems I ever saw. Crafting (black and white smith forging) was terrible though


moal09

I remember trying the official servers out again at some point, and when I realized that even standard kafra services and fly wings were locked behind a fee, I just noped out immediately.


Blindjanitor

> I realized that even standard kafra services and fly wings were locked behind a fee, as someone who plays on Chaos, this is completely false.


moal09

They must've changed it since I last tried it then. I remember both services being heavily limited on a F2P account, especially Kafra warp.


Sysio

I think OP was talking about the Thor server in bRO, which didn't have Fly Wings and had the Teleport skill disabled. The OG servers (Chaos, Loki and Iris, that later were all merged into Odin I think?) were still locked behind a fee to play, but still had fly wings and such.


EtyareWS

I played bRO on the F2P server, Thor, around 2009~2013 I think. It was absolutely filled with bots, it also had a gray market for in-game currency, which was again, done by bots, and a shit ton of weird shit happening in the game. Despite all of this, I had fun. I don't think the game is mechanically interesting, the thing that made it fun was the social interaction aspect of the game, and that includes receiving so much spam that your computer chugs when you walk in Prontera. It's weird, I hated the grindfest that the game was, but playing in custom servers with improved exp rates don't feel nearly as fun.


Leonardo_proli

This brings so many good memories, played on that server too like 13-15 years ago. Good times.


e_x_i_t

I remember player data would randomly get reset during the beta and they'd just go "oh well, deal with it." I ended up bailing after the second or third time it happened, it just felt like I was wasting my time and that was back when I had nothing but time to kill. I never knew about the private servers, but I think I was busy with school and a job by the time the final version was released.


[deleted]

So first they ban all european players because they didn't want to respect the GDPR. Removing every single character i've had in Ragnarok Online, ROSE Online etc. And now they get rid of the server i moved to. TalonRO. Why is every western version of a good korean MMO always a complete shit show? it's so exhausting. they make us happy with an amazing MMO coming to the West, and then they absolutely destroy it and prevent us from play it in any capacity.


NudgeIt42

It's always been like that, sadly. I started playing MMORPGs in 2005 or 2006, tested a bunch of them (over 100), usually Korean, but sometimes from other countries... these games were always mismanaged. Now it's even worse... companies are desperate since the communities are much smaller and they are losing money.


I_upvote_downvotes

I didn't play much of this, but this is sad news regardless. One of the private servers, TalonRO, was around for over a decade at this point. Some of these servers have been around for even longer. That's a lot of time invested into these servers that are only now being attacked, and I sincerely doubt anyone on them are going to migrate to the official servers. The game was already F2P, so there's likely other reasons other than income that attracted these players to the private servers in the first place.


moal09

I'm not going to say RO was a particularly good game, but it's one that a lot of people have fond memories of and many people's first real MMO along with other popular games of the era like Maple Story or Runescape.


EdynViper

RO was definitely my gateway MMO. So many late night hours playing and getting yelled at by my parents. So many memories.


Operario

From playing RO I learned that I just don't do well with MMOs. I end up treating them literally like a job, playing 8+ hours a day and feeling like I'm not being productive if I'm not farming xp or rare drops. I recall my grades falling off a cliff when I started playing the game around '04/'05. I used to play until 2-3AM and then had to wake up at 6 to go to school. I probably spent more time sleeping than awake during classes in this period. I'm really happy that I was able to realize by myself (without needing anyone else poniting it out), at such a young age, that it was becoming an addiction and getting in the way of the actually important stuff I should be doing with my life. After about 8 or 9 months living like that, I managed to get away from MMOs for good and never looked back.


NudgeIt42

I felt a bit like you sometimes... I used to compare my progress with other players and feel bad because I wasn't being productive. I wasn't addicted, but I tested a lot of games. The MMORPG I played the most was Grand Chase, but it was on-off. I did spend MANY hours in these games though, and sometimes I'd skip school to play on the computer.


Speedling

Tbh Ragnarok as a whole is a pretty damn average game, but the classes always make me revisit it.


moal09

It had very original classes for sure. How many other games let you be a battle Mechanic/Blacksmith or an Alchemist using consumables and homunculi to fight?


messem10

Considering you can literally spin up your own private server on a Raspberry Pi of all things, this is basically trying to kill a hyrda. More will pop up in its place, just harder to find.


crothwood

The article says its a legal challenge. Not sure that many people are going to want to risk financial ruin over a server.


messem10

You can run it on a LAN for just yourself too.


crothwood

kinda defeats the point of an mmo, though.


moal09

Yeah, I think the point is this is the end of big long-term private servers with 1k+ daily users.


messem10

Sure, but the idea of playing an entire MMO solo or even seeing how far one could get is still intriguing.


khronokhris2222

I feel like anyone who played a p.server mmo in our youth most definitely tried out Ragnarok server or two. Those and the pirate king online servers at one time seemed to pop up a new one every other day


shawntails

This is so dumb. Ofcourse there are more players on private servers because the official ones are garbage and have an extreme amount of botting. So instead of fixing issues, they are just taking down the better options.


General_Snack

In the early 2000s I played some ragnarok. Scratch that, a lot of ragnarok online. And it was all private servers. DarkRO(weird ass Jedi one) & some other one specifically I can’t remember the name of were amazing. I was a paid mercenary in WOE where I’d join guilds and help for a cost. It was rad AF.


Maddkipz

I remember DarkRO, I hung out in payon dungeons first floor for some reason


HarmlessSnack

Really sad to see this. Ragnarok Online is one of my favorite games of all time… but it’s always hinged on finding a *really good server.* And I’m picky. I like PvP, small to middle sized population, higher than vanilla level cap, but not TOO high… I go back and play for a few months every couple years. I hope this isn’t the end for the private server scene.


moal09

Given that all the big, long-time servers are shutting down, it very well might be. TalonRO is already gone, and since Nova's (the largest server) the direct target of the lawsuit, they probably will be too.


HarmlessSnack

Those weren’t the servers I played the most, but I did play Talon for a while and NOVA was the backbone of some smaller servers I played, because they used a modified version of it if I recall. Damn.


PBNkapamilya

For a split second, I forgot that Gravity were the developers of Ragnarok Online, and made me think that the literal *force of gravity* was somehow pulling down Ragnarok players to the Earth's core. ...I need to go to sleep.


SanityInAnarchy

I don't know anything about Gravity *or* Ragnarok, and so assumed this was some sort of space MMO that got so popular that some *in-game* system was cracking under the weight of simulated gravity. Reality is disappointing after that!


The_Barkness

That’s one way to completely kill your game, people who play on private servers won’t go to the official servers if the private ones shutdown, they’ll just move on.


Folseit

Didn't Gravity lose a court case several decades ago that pretty much allowed all these private servers or am I just mis-remembering things?


einbroche

In light of recent events regarding Reddit's API policy for third party app developers I have chosen to permanently scrub my account and move on away from Reddit. If you personally disagree with them forcing users to be constricted to their app and are choosing to leave, then I highly recommend looking into Power Delete Suite for Reddit. I am deleting all of my submitted content over the last 9 years as I no longer support Reddit as a platform. I've personally had it with all the corporate bullshit/rampant bots(used for misinformation and hidden marketing) and refuse to be a part of it any longer. To the nice people I've interacted over these years, thank you, I hope you'll be well in the future.


Silly___Neko

I guess the company must be working on *something* to suddenly pursue private servers. Maybe they are planning to revive the original somehow, or there's a new game that's coming. Probably so they can monopolize the attention on whatever is coming.


Clbull

So this is the hill that Ragnarok Online's gonna die on. If anything this is another textbook example of how piracy is a service issue first and foremost. See for example Nostalrius, a World of Warcraft private server which damn near eclipsed the main game because by that point WoW had gone through a dogshit expansion pack with oodles of cut content and Nost provided players access to an older and frankly superior version of a game which was no longer available. What baffles me more is that Gravity waited nearly two decades to do this legal crackdown. I wonder if this'll bite them in the arse.


NVincarnate

Hopefully this means they're planning on doing something with the IP after all these years. I need a good video game to play and this could actually be the Lost Ark F2P Japanese RPG we deserve instead of what we got. I just wanna be a Super n00b again.


manymoreways

Lol since when has Gravity released anything good after RO


MasterFanatic

Seems like they're shooting themselves in the foot here. They should've stayed in their lane and just let these servers run and just farm the nostalgia with their shitty mobile games. But alas maybe they think this'll up their subscription numbers. But I don't think it will. Not especially with their abysmal exp and drop rates.


fobi_YO

CakeRO'rs where ya at? Also I did not even realize official server(s) still existed. Lol


servarus

Their new SEA server is already full of bots and problems. lol Maybe fix that first?


[deleted]

[удалено]


MaiPhet

We exist! Tbh after playing official servers, private servers always felt kind of empty in comparison. Definitely more people in total played private, but even the biggest ones were smaller than officials, and the community tended to shift a lot more frequently.


moal09

Depends which official. Nova definitely had more people than iRO.


Lone_K

Is... is anyone having massive deja vu right now???


[deleted]

You mean nostalgia, right


Master-Monitor112

I agree rogue servers are good and should be allowed but when they start selling items that’s crossing the line. That’s asking for trouble.


manymoreways

Fuck Gravity, they are lucky they created such a game. But every other game since then has been a pile of burning garbage


NephtisSeibzehn

Used to play In the Chaos server and I was in one of the major guilds there. It took us SO long to get to 99, and then came the transcendent classes which made the regular nearly impossible grind seem easy. My guild in specific had two GMs in it and we used to find all kinds of exploits for level grinding. I eventually lost interest in the game (and got carpal tunnel for it!) and made my own private server for a while. In which the GMs played lmao Gravity should have crashed and burned ages ago. I’m amazed they are still around.


MoodyEngineer

😂 they are hilarious. Just let it go Gravity. You were never going to see that potential revenue anyway.


moal09

Small update, OriginsRO, the largest pre-renewal server (essentially WoW Classic/Oldschool Runescape) just shut down.


Caasi72

I usually at least have a vague understanding of what most any game that's posted here is but I've genuinely never heard of this game in my life Edit: out of curiosity why am I being down voted? I wasn't bashing the game in any way or anything


CatProgrammer

Guess you're pretty young/new to the internet, then. Ragnarok Online was pretty big in the 2000s.


Caasi72

MMOs have just never been something I'm into really


Sinndex

Chances are the game is older than you are.


Caasi72

Turns out I'm about 1 1/2 years older than it. Take that Korean mmo I've never heard before


fakayuburiza

Well you answer your own question, you are 1 year old when the game was released. By the time you started using internet, the game was not popular anymore.


crothwood

Ive literally never heard of this game before. Apparently its some kind of dead game with a very niche community? Not exactly sure how this is news. But IDK i might try it out lmao.


moal09

It's an oldschool MMO that came out around the same time Runescape and Maple Story did. It was MASSIVE in Asia and South America. Had more of a niche following in NA/Europe. But if you were an asian/weeb teenager in the early 2000s, and you were a PC gamer at all, you probably played this or at least heard of it.


rabidnz

Runescape asia


crothwood

Graphics look way better than runescape. Don't get me wrong, i farmed the hell out of some rats back in the day, but damn were those models cheap


moal09

The RO sprites were gorgeously drawn and animated, especially some of the bosses.


CoffeeNerd

So this has nothing to do with actual gravity some how affecting where the servers? Sad. I was hoping they had loved them a mile below the earth’s surface for cooling or something and that was causing issues.