Comments about this post: Reasons Why Ragnarok Online Failed

[Zopokx 7]

I want you to read this post about RO that someone shared with me on twitter few weeks ago : http://treeofsaviorgame.com/general/375/reasons-why-ragnarok-online-failed/

Once read, what do you think? Are you agree with those reasons? Please comment

 

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IMO, I don't think that Renewal was the nail in the coffin for RO. But I don't really know if Renewal was an update to support the Kafra Shop and make players to spend real money.

I don't think either that the last paragraph about hacking is correct. Does anyone have more information about it and wants to share?

[Mystery 594]

I would like to comment on this! I was just a little tike when I played RO for the first time... when I actually had that 30 day trial back then... and those 30 days I loved every minute of it even though it only got my to level 30 Acolyte... old days of playing constantly as an Acolyte in Payon Dungeon... good times!

 

I think Renewal sorta did kill it. I personally don't have to much interest in Renewal. I love the new jobs and stuff, I think that concept is pretty cool... but should of kept it on the same line as the trans jobs... 'cause now the third jobs are just way to powerful in my opinion. They're able to kill a lot of monsters easily (especially MvPs).

 

For the Ragnarok Online 2 aspect, I hate 3D games so I hated RO2. End of discussion. xD

[otaku 0]

I think one of the main reasons for the great success of RO was the lack of real competition by the time it became world wide known, perhaps that is one of the reasons for its downfall too. Nowadays you have a new MMO almost every single month, and unless you have something really unique, your game will not live long enough to see a second/third year on the market. So the bar wasn't really set too high when Gravity developed it. 

 

Well, the game itself wasn't half bad.  A lot of jobs, equipments and cards, providing the player the opportunity to make an unique character. There was room for all sorts of players. You like to RP? Cool, the game has an interesting story and a lot of quests, enjoy. You're into PvP? Okay, we have a chaotic (and yet really fun) GvG system, besides the usual PvP rooms. You're more into PvE? Oh, what about this big ass world we provide, with tough mini-bosses and challenging bosses which you can hunt with your friends.

 

The bots may have been the big issue... in the beginning. Now I think they're the only thing holding the official servers together. The main reason IMO is the lack of, I don't know, game designers? The game came out just fine. It was fun, balanced, interesting. But then they started to introduce a lot of new stuff. It's good to have updates, this keeps the game alive. Some of the new stuff are good. New maps, new mobs, new quests, new systems (I loved the battleground when it was released, I lived there for months). But then you have new classes, new (unbalanced) equipments, cash overpowered items. Unbalanced change after unbalanced change, cash digging after cash digging, the once game of strategic and competitive gameplay became a one-hit-KO game made for those who have money to spend on it. Plain and boring...

[kisuka 178]

RE wasn't the main factor that killed RO. RO was already on a steep decline in terms of population and new vs returning players. The only thing RE did was push out all the players who didn't want to try the new mechanics and stick to old methods. This is why pre-RE servers got a huge boost in population and why iRO offers pre-RE servers now. The "hard core" players are so used to the old system that they didn't want to learn the new stuff.

 

RO died from 1 simple thing: time. It's time came and went. It's peak was 2004~2007, post 2008 it's been in it's declining phase. It's main draw is to people who have already played it and return purely for nostalgia purposes. Gravity has been trying to rebound and reclaim that throne but they're doing it in all the wrong ways. Give it maybe 4 more years and I'm sure the population will be halved again. Most the official licensed servers have been closing down here and there.

[c_tower3 1]

Renewal and in-game purchases came as a response to an already declining popularity. I don't think the author of this article is qualified to say if these changes ended up being beneficial for Gravity and their publishers. The bot problem is likely a product of cuts in staff, again as a result of declining popularity. Also I don't think Gate of the World and Legend of the Second actually were that bad. They just weren't what the audience of Ragnarok Online wanted, and by the time they got them out the market was already over-saturated. In summary I don't think any of these were direct reasons for why the game isn't as popular anymore. More likely it's because it's an old game. People grow up and you can only keep it interesting for so long.

 

However the point about publishers is fair enough. I've heard that the licensing model may have difficulties. The last section also gets into what I believe, if anything, is the reason why there's been a few bumps in the road for Ragnarok. Gravity wasn't an AAA game developer when they started on Ragnarok Online. In fact they weren't even Gravity Co. Ltd. until mid development of Arcturus, which they developed in cooperation with Sonnori Entertainment. Before this they were Team Gravity, a team of indie game developers who made DOS games in collaboration with other minor studios. Arcturus became a success in the Asian market, and they managed to raise about $700,000 in paid-in capital for their new project. At this point they reused the development tools and source code from Arcturus for the game client, and brokered a deal to create a game based on the popular Ragnarok comic. Saying that Gravity at this point were close to bankruptcy is misleading. They were very much a start-up company and needed investors to get their first big project out there. A few years later they had one of the most popular MMOs in the world. How's that for failure?

[chrizmarilag 0]

I will respon what the title said.

 

Immatured server and pay to win servers failed. but other than that nope... i am amaze how RO compete to with other mmorpg still ro is fun to play. Even if i played a lot of 3d games i realize that its not about the animation its about the community or ideas.. remember not at all people could buy some high end computers to play those next gen or high end mmorpg. So until then RO will be in categories of mmorpg.. haha its funny some servers got 100+ could you imagine that? Thats why failure belongs to immature developers not the game itself. Even my friend still playing ro

[Playtester 18]

I would quit literary consider Renewal "the final nail on the coffin". It's the perfect metaphor.

As the others said, RO was declining way before that.

 

I disagree that it's just that "RO's time came". The problem was more that RO turned into a niche game, but the developers didn't treat it as such and tried to go mainstream, but the game itself is just too outdated for that. They should have stayed niche and focus on the things that made RO unique.

 

Things that are negative for many mainstream MMORPG players are exactly those things that loyal RO fans liked:

- no quests that tell you what to do, instead encouraging role-play, quests are only there for the lore, not for the reward

- your characters growth slowly, you grow along with your character over the span of years

- P2P over F2P

- each class is unique and most classes are designed so they work well together, rather than playing alone

 

If they just had kept focusing on these.

[Playtester 18]

I don't really get how their server being hacked and Aegis being stolen prevented them from fixing any bugs, though. I don't really buy that store. And iRO doesn't even have the source code, so how could they have restored it from there? By reverse engineering? Yeah right.

 

In the meantime those "super Aegis hackers" have disassembled most of the Aegis code and detected most of the bugs that Gravity apparently can't fix (like Bowling Bash gutter line, which could easily be fixed with a one-line change). How come they can do it but the one who actually created the source code in the first place can't?

[zackdreaver 90]

overpowered cash shop item

bot

immature player

 

made me quit playing years ago

[Zopokx 7]

Immature player <- That is a BIG reason in my case too. (But being admin with immature players is worst)

[GmOcean 92]

While, I don't feel that RO has died or failed. I do agree with a few of the points made. Also, RO2 I hated it, tried it, didn't like it, deleted it. End of story there.

But even now I can't bring myself to play RO as I used to back during subscription days when it was first released, before there was even a single 99 player.

However, I do find quite a bit of joy in creating scripts and the like for ragnarok. Perhaps I've just moved on from playing to creating !! Call it my feeble attempt at trying to bring to RO what, in my opinion should have been there to begin with.