Increased Rates

[Kiwis]

Is it time for heRO to change our official rates, YES/NO?

After experiencing long periods of increased rates, both experience, and drop rate, I think we can all agree that there isn't a drastic difference. What it does do is create more ease for players, new and old (particularly new).

HeRO, in the past has had its experience rates up to x8, from x5. And, drop rates up to x5, from x3.
Of course, Keeping the rates at a high x8/x8/x5 may seem drastic. Perhaps, a more reasonable rate of x7/x7/x4 may be more ideal.
However, a drop rate of x4 may seem unreasonable, especially taking into consideration MVP drops, making a bunch of things 100%.
Additionally, x4 is much too low for card drop rates, if we want to be a progressive server. No one has time to farm cards for a week, and it's frustrating af, at as low as 0.03%

So, my personal proposal would be:
Base Experience -> x7
Job Experience -> x7
General Drop -> x4
MVP Gears Drop -> x3
Card Drop -> x5

These new rates will still allow for reward-increased rates, and donation increases. Hopefully, this will also allow for heRO to completely re-brand, and re-market the server to attract newbies. Especially, the card drop rate should entice people.


EDIT:
Post your proposed rate changes o/

[Bakorzero]

[The Roger]

No one has time to farm cards for a week

what? WHAT?! o.o


also, a week? those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump up those numbers.


Anyway:

Grinding at 5x isnt hard. Nowadays there are many good spots to grind exp.
Droprate at 3x is ideal imho, its doesnt makes common stuff thats under 100% at 1x impossible to farm and keeps the rare stuff at low chances. Rare stuff should not be too easy to acquire or the economy and tradings would get ill-affected by it.

It has been reeeeally nice to live this "eden" of 5x droprates, but it cant be kept, not even 4x.
Imho, 5-5-3 is already fine.

[Plant]

I'm partially agreeing with this. I think 3x drop rate is already decent in terms of gears progression / farming speed, but I honestly think 3x card rate is stupid.

I'm going to keep saying this: Cards are crucial in heRO gameplay. You need cards to farm at an acceptable level or even perform in parties. It makes zero sense to all of them at 0.03%. Maybe, somehow, in some way, according to the ancient scriptures and the words of elderly sages, that it makes sense in an MMORPG setting, but heRO was honestly never a decently sized MMORPG to begin with only ~600 players including autovendors at its peak and therefore should balance to these numbers instead.

I don't care if 'weeks' are rookie numbers or it 'hurts' the economy if card rate are boosted. 0.03% card rate hurts the gameplay nor is dedicating weeks hunting one piece of paper rewarding and/or healthy to players in any form.

My suggestion, if you really want to lure more players into this genre/game/server and maintain it, is to crank card rate much higher than two decimal point rates, or balance card rates on a case-by-case basis instead of making all cards drop at the same rate. Make gear progression much more rewarding and noticeable instead of surprise-shitting on players during parties for not having farmed such and such cards when playing such and such classes.

If everyone is going to keep pretending that there's nothing wrong with:
1. Card albums being the main source of cards instead of the monsters itself
2. Players most likely not consistently getting any remotely useful cards during their grind from level 1 -> 99

then I'll just continue losing interest into this game and join the rest of the population that prefer spending most of their game hours in Prontera.

tldr: card rate stupid.

[Menace651]

.03% card drop is too high. Make card rates .000001%. I'll kill MVP's, pop guild castle OCA's and abuse events all day and sell it to you guys for profit. Make the rich richer and keep the poor newbs poor.

[The Legendary Joe]

I spend pretty much all of my time in game farming gears and cards for said gears and ores to break said gears to make my fantastical whims a reality.Having been frustrated with my luck being bad recently, I wouldn't be quite as against a rate hike as I ordinarily would be.

Personal Biases aside, 3x is alright. I'm fairly well off from my days of High School where instead of doing what I should have been doing, I played RO pretty much religiously. All my farming was on again, off again, sometimes with friends, mostly by myself tho. A lot of newer games do cater towards the people who favor the instant gratification though. Some of the older players are like those Rats in that one experiment where if they push the button enough times, they'll get the cheese, where as a lot of people have decided the sparse rewards aren't worth it.

Part of the joy I find in RO is the work it takes to build the gears, and make these characters at the very least above average. with increased rates, yea I'll get there quicker, but it might cheapen the overall experience.

[Lyrux]

Personally I don't particularly care one way or another since I've had the luxury of no-lifeing the game pretty hard, however I think we have to face the reality of the fact that maybe... just maybe not all players can afford to spend all day everyday hunting things anymore, most people playing RO aren't teenagers anymore. Boosting rates, even slightly has dramatic impacts on players success rates in farming.

While I think keeping rates as they are is fine, I think it is ridiculous to take that it is a positive in any light. This server has a massive new player experience problem as it is, and I don't think the resistance to change helps it at all.

The economy does not exist, and while I would say that pricing is relatively fair all things considered, its ridiculous to say that there is a balanced economy that is based upon rates or anything else, its purely based upon the whims of the people vending, there is no competition for loot or gear and demand is relatively low.

Roger frankly your elitist attitude is fine, however understand that its entirely self-serving and you are extremely fortunate to be in a position where you can play how you play currently.

I don't think theres any real solution to the decline of ragnarok online, however there's no question that low drop rates are a huge barrier to newer players who do not have the gear to solo everything in the game and are desperately looking for parties in order to get up to snuff.

On a server where the number of players actively playing at any time is well under 50, I don't think its fair to ignore that experience and pretend as though it is not a clear issue that needs to be addressed if the longevity of the server is of any import to you.

[Kiwis]

In hindsight, I suppose x3 would indeed be ideal, for item drop rate. Since, as stated above by many, a lot of items would just become 100% otherwise.

But my proposition still stands, for all else.
I would like to reiterate what Minnt said - Card rate is dumb asf. Seriously, 96.9% of card supply these days is from OCA, and if you can't see that as a problem, you're delusional.
0.1% card drop rate (or even 0.2%) may be more ideal. (don't quote me on these values, they're just an estimate. *ahem a certain someone*)

From a marketing stand point, In order to bring in more people to the server (asides from reviews), there has to be significant changes (or even just change). The introduction of more custom content would have done so a fair bit. But beyond that, we all know that the first thing every RO player sees, when looking for a new server, is the Rates.

In terms of experience rates, grinding at x5 is NOT easy, not for newbies, who are looking to TEST the server, or are casually playing. Basically, the server doesn't have much to show whilst you are low level.

EDIT:

No one has time to farm cards for a week

what? WHAT?! o.o


also, a week? those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump up those numbers.

Also, gdi stop taking the literal meaning of every one of my words.

[The Roger]

Jokes aside, manually increasing the droprate of cards directly on monsters could be a viable solution; as mintt suggested.
The advantage of this kind of operation would be able to tweak up greatly the % on useless/semi-useless/pseudo-useless/hatter cards, tweak a little the somewhat-useful cards, while keeping unchanged at 0.03 those cards that are good/very-good, mvp and miniboss.
Facing the reality, all the first category cards (which arent hatter) are already dumped in storages and not traded in the market, so it wont hurt to increase their %. Half that for the semi-good cards, which see little power-increase if used. Good and strong cards must stay at 0.03%.

Examples:
- Wormtail card 0.09%
- Archer Skeleton card 0.09%
- Dark Frame card 0.09%
- all the class-combo cards 0.09%

- Alligator card 0.06%
- Loli Ruri card 0.06%

- Zipper Bear card 0.03%
- Green Ferus card 0.03%
- Zerom card 0.03%

edit/ps: if we actually end doing this, then going to increase the world-droprate would have extreme effects on cards at 0.09 becoming nearly 0.2% and those at 0.06% becoming 0.12%. So, we should keep this in mind.

[GM-Ayu]

From practical perspective, we really have no intention to boost every item's drop rate with a flat increase. If we are increasing drop rates, it'll probably be a "floating rate" similar to what GM-Ciar did with the drop rate touch-ups last year. The goal of last year's changes are only to reduce frustration with getting one terrible low percentage drop that is significantly worse than "another item of equal rarity." Perhaps when GM-Ciar returns from his internet-less days, we'll look at actual drop rate change of items.