Runes of Magic US / AU

First and foremost a Note to the moderators. I mention a lot of gray areas or areas of discontentment. From model folder to hacking in siege. Please leave them in. These aren’t instructions about it, and I never name and shame anyone or any guild directly. I speak my mind in this post and appreciate you keeping my post whole and uncensored.
Hello, I’ve wanted to do something like this for a while. I’m sort of going to post everything about my RoM life here. The first thing I’m going to do is comment on the affairs of the game in general… My take on stuff. I am making this for people to read, think what you want. I could care less if you agree with me or not. Hell, either way don’t post that. This is food for thought. A summary of how I see the game.
If you are going to post, let the content sit for a while. Think about these topics.

Let’s start with Festivals. It’s bugged me for a while that festivals in this game suck. I don’t give a ::hoot:: about zodiac pets, and there really very minimal reason to do these festivals. The only one worth much value is the storytelling titles and the Secret Garden. Which are actually good incentives. Everything else is just a waste of time. I mean everything from milking cows, to making chocolate, to rounding up squirrels. It’s just stupid, and pointless. Some like the fire festival are also totally broken.
Now to a more lengthy topic of siege. I have a lot of issue with siege. Siege has been laggy crashy, buggy and hacked. I have seen everything from guild point dropping, to people seeing invisibility on non-scout classes. I have seen people walk through walls, and people send pets through walls. I have seen people have permanent invincibility and have been 1 shotted by a level 1 character. I have seen merits duplicated, and seen herald obtained not even 30 seconds into siege. I have seen people spam universal potions, and soul bond. I have had to deal with Y coordinate manipulation, and cannot face target messages. I have seen rubber banding and entire servers disconnect from siege. I have seen balloons in the castle, and a guild guard attacking the honor crystal. I have seen 500 flame towers stacked… The thing that really makes me mad though, is the DC hack. The fact you can forcibly disconnect someone from siege, against their will. I had one of my own guildies do it to me just to prove it could be done. It’s about time you fix siege, as at least 30% of the entire U.S. population log in just to run siege. Polls have been done.




I’m just talking about the ones I remember the most. (In my experience.)
There have been past meta’s, some of which were enjoyable. Some were not. The first Meta, involved Ram’s. We used ram’s to down gates, and had badly geared players farm balloons. We had 30 people in a siege at any given time. We could gain hundreds of honor badges in a night. These were unfair, yet fun days. We had to work to down guild guards. We also had to communicate well to take towers, and down gates. Buildings also had to be rammed or nado’ed. These were good days by my book.
As time went on, we evolved into a very brief rouge meta. This was also an OK meta. Rouges didn’t one shot us, but had the ability to help with tower capping. We still had leftovers from the last metas, and healers were also on the rise here.
It wasn’t long and people started to catch on to the Priest meta. We started to see some bubble capping with fearless. Good times, it was also in this meta that we had the rise of the P/S. During this latter part of the priest meta, we had a very toxic time. Priest scouts couldn’t be beat. And the best P/s I can remember was Grandmama from Artemis. She was so powerful, that it would take 6 equally geared players to kill her. These days were nonsense and started to lose their fun. Rams started to lose their effectiveness. And rushing forge buffs was very common.


At this point they nerfed P/S and we saw a temporary rise of P/M’s being tried. These classes worked, but not to the same broken tier of the P/S. Warden’s started to see a significant rise in play, as banishment was common, and so was the broken Wd/S Chiron. Chiron was abused and would kill buildings and guards now. Such an easy way to play. The first W/M’s started to see their glory days here as well. One shot meta became common, and you had to out damage your opponent. Range of skills also became important. Towards the later part of this meta we saw a small amount of M/D’s try out magma blade combos.


Slowly the meta shifted, towards a more burny type of class. Dwarves had come into the game last meta, and were now being used widely in siege. A whole lot of ::cough::, could be done with them. We learned of M/Wl’s being able to place towers while moving. During this meta, we had common M/wd’s and other super bursty 1 shot type of characters. In this meta guards were buffed in HP, and aggro. We commonly saw guards kited to gates. Everything from K/m, to even wl/chmp was common. Chmp/M saw a fair amount of play. We lost all importance of everything besides forge buffs. Nothing else was important. Burn the other guy down. Fearless capping was rampant in this meta. Add-ons like GSQT popped up helping out with merit collection, and forge buffs.


After the HUGE buff to ram’s, we ended up where we are now. In this current meta, we have people statting PvP gear to reduce damage, 1 shotting people is very difficult, and rouges are very common. Healers are hard to kill, and their targets do lots of damage to you. For about a month, very few guilds used rams effectively, seeing them as gate downers, otherwise useless. The few guilds that did use them, used them very effectively. Rams were operational shortly after herald, and rams would continue barreling down the lanes. Rams were used for tower capping and HP banks. Hit and run tactics were common. Eventually most of the guilds caught on… We had a large influx of smart people abusing rams. The next logical progression was how to spam rams. A few guilds took advantage of the ‘buff squad’ idea. Where backliners would farm balloons, until herald, then get a few extractors and full buff to mine from towers. This was highly effective, and produced 50k+ merits and crystals over a single siege. Rams were affordable and forge buffs could still be produced. This is starting to catch on, but some guilds have yet to catch on. Stoneforge’s Multi Purpose Add-on became a thing, further helping out with merit counting and timers.


Summary: Siege is fun if you have a team, but gear and numbers is still everything. The front liners still mean everything in terms of gear and numbers.




I’d like to talk about instances for a bit now.
We can’t sustain the current rate of burn. At the current rate that they have been increasing defenses, hp, and even damage… We simply won’t be able run instances. At level 110 or sooner, we will NOT be able to burn them without 5-6 chmp/m’s. We have been increasing and abusing our damage at a simply unsustainable rate… We can’t continue, we can’t add more people to the party, we can’t add more buff/debuffs. We have reached the maximum we can do, even with gear improvements. We can’t continue outputting hundreds of millions of dps in under 20 seconds. We need to acknowledge this and accept it. There is nothing else we can do. The only feasible options, are more people in a raid. (Which exists as an item.) Selling sigils (Which exists as an item.), not increasing boss HP/Def at the same rate (Runewaker is in charge of this.), or everyone becoming a sustain class, and burning the boss down slowly, taking minutes to do so, but would be much safer (this is not a viable option, since it requires the strats to work, and people to actually be smart.)

As for buff alts, I have no issue. We (as the community for this paragraph), are simply using the available resources. And I don’t blame people for picking Flavor of the month classes. It makes sense in a way. And in some twisted way, buff alts fall under this category. In the game we are given 50 Buff spots to use. Why would we not use them all if we could? We want to make use of them, and often buff to the max in burn. Buff alts are a way to increase your stats, and while a gray area for morals is generally supported. I understand and have used my own character to buff the party. Where I find fault is when we forced a meta unto the game… And believe me when I say we the entire community forced this. Starting at clops, (AT THE VERY LATEST) we began to try to burn things. We tried to do it as fast as possible, and started to exclude people who didn’t meet the ‘burn standards’ even though they could run it technically by numbers. In response to this, they (RW) made the instances harder in accordance to the meta. Which simply excluded more and more members and classes. In response, we did not change, blind to our own destruction, continued excluding people. And we sit here now, almost 50 levels from then. Look at us now. Top DPS classes or GTFO. Are you proud of us? I’m not. I’m very displeased by the community and RuneWaker. We BOTH took the easy way out. BOTH OF US, I can’t stress this enough. We BOTH hold equal burden for this.

And don’t even say to yourself… “We had no way of knowing.” Yes you did, if you took the time to think about it. At HoS level, I knew what was coming. It has been coming for a long time. It’s like boiling a frog, turn up the water quickly and he’ll jump out. But boil the frog slowly, raising the temperature super slow. And the frog will die, never realizing every ‘patch’ turn up of the temperature is 1 degree closer to death. For most of you, you can take the cheap excuse… “Not me… I wasn’t around back then. I couldn’t be involved, or responsible.” Sad to say, but you are. You continued the choo choo train of burn or die. You were involved and still are involved. You don’t need a t15 weapon, as a M/W with full buff parties and buff alts. Bringing this paragraph back to buff alts… We don’t need them. But we use them. They are enforced and encouraged in the meta we created. I support buff alts (as their place in the current meta). I do not support the current meta as a whole.


Now debuffers filling an actual party slot… That’s a different story. It’s one, when buff alts aren’t doing direct hurt to anyone (besides the meta enforcement contribution.) Debuffers (For the purpose of this thread, when I refer to debuffers I’m talking about chmp/p wl/m that are SOLEY there for their buff purpose. Wd/s can go either way, or both.) Those spots could be filled by real people. Now I am going to make a very distinct split here. There are 2 kind of debuffers, the kind that is a buff alt, of someone who has a character who is capable of running the instance (not burning.) And there is the buff alts that are individuals that do not have any character in party, and have no characters available to them, that can run the instance at this time. In this second case, the buff alt is fine. It is their main, or very close to it. They are sincere I their attempt to try and get a run. They are trying to be useful. Now tih the first actual ‘alt’ case in mind. I disapprove of this, greatly. You could PUG the spot, or invite another guildie. The only reason I would be ok with this. If you server literally has less than 12 people. On the whole world… The only server this would happen on would have been thalia. It is wrong to place multiple of your toons in a raid, and in the instance, if someone else could be there.


Somewhat leading into my next point. We need to learn to forgive. I could list most of the servers players, that have issues with this. Myself included I’m not a saint. There is very little that justifies hatred in the game, (the reason being complete degradation of the fantasy barrier into real life). I don’t give a biscuit bacon, if XYZ stole your poms, or hacked in siege. Get over it grow up, you aren’t children… Pugs have died, and guilds are separated. The server merge will not fix these issues. Be united as a server before the merge. Don’t let the little things interfere with the ability to run things, or be a team. I miss a 36 man siege, with no alts. And I’ll explain this later. Forgive your guildies, your sever mates. Please, I cajole you with all my heart, I petition you. Be united, or this game will fail, and what we have left here will be lost.




I’d like to discuss my view on market and economy.
First of all, let’s talk about diamonds. Diamonds make the game easy and convenient. AS THEY ARE SUPPOSED TOO. There is nothing wrong with them. The issue arrives, when running endgame content becomes ‘on the brink’ of possible without them. It TECHINICALLY is possible to +20 all your gear and t10 everything, and t15 your weapon with just Phirius tokens. Chances are this will never happen. I happen to be one of the few left, that can run endgame content of PoMH with not one single penny ever invested into this game. I have spent other peoples diamonds. My point being that it Is possible by rules of technicality. It would not be possible however by rules of probability, or time. Diamonds are a means to necessitate speed in wants and needs of the game. And they do this, the only problem is there is no reasonable way to achieve endgame without them. It would take thousands of characters. And I literally mean thousands of characters to do as plussers would have to come from secret garden. Not counting how you would actually get the gear or stats for ‘free’, the pure amount of grinding for gold would be insane. It is too hard in this game to gear in the actual game, without using diamonds. More than it needs to be. This is my only qualm with diamonds.


Now again to the rant part. We all knew this was coming. Gear is too expensive, so are stats. It’s stupid. It really is. So to get to the point. Greed needs to stop, you aren’t benefitting anyone. Not even yourself. In the end your hurting everyone. Your just to shortsighted to see it. A reasonable affordable price is fine. But 600 mil for a t10 sandos dagger at +16 is ::nonsense::. You know who you are. Two things need to change, people need to learn to settle for not the best stuff. Its ok to be missing 20 p crit and some pa per piece. Crafted gear is fine. Take it from someone who used to use crafted gear. I’m still using a level 80 staff. And level 72 gear running PomH. Its ok to not be the best. The second issue, is the greed thing. Shoutout to Zid… he sells crafted gear super cheap, hell he even gives it away. There is an excess of gold in the market, more than there should be. The main reasons for this are gold dupers and gold spammers from a long time ago. It makes the market highly unaffordable for newcomers.




Currency in general has some issues. We got a lot of currencies, that can be exchanged for other things.
Phirius tokens are one of the main currencies in general, that have issues. They are used in minigames, consumed by buying wedding food, they are also easily expended and have a limited number you can get per day (Normal day, no resets, and no minis) Max: being (120). The main issue is I would like to see quests that give you 20 Ptokens, but at reduced XP and TP (Probably 50%), so you could choose 200% tokens, and 50% XP, or 100% XP and 100% tokens. Simply a suggestion.


Ancient mementos are fine. I honestly believe this. You get gear in a run normally, and everyone gets a piece of gear after X runs, through the use of mementos. My only qualm would be… The pieces of gear you can pull. 3 Full runs of the normal endgame instance should produce a normal mode piece, from that instance, available when the instance opens. Likewise 3 HM runs should produce 1 HM piece you can pull, the price for weapons should be doubled. I refrain from commenting about the stats on these pieces, simply because I have mixed feelings when it comes to ancient mementos. Dura should be random on all these pieces. This way everyone can get a piece they want, if it already hasn’t dropped. And you won’t need to run ENDGAME instances, although it certainly would help, as memento farming would be more difficult. My idea would be make each ‘instance’ drop and cost 20% more mementos per level increase.


Diamonds have already been discussed, although I will comment I would like to see some way of obtaining diamonds in game, although maybe not for gold. But I would be ok with something like a Diamond event (Like a PoM event.) That would be occasionally enabled.
Gold is useless in most cases, and is irrelevant for almost everything. There is such an excess of gold, that even the biggest gold drain, (increasing pet levels) barely puts a dent in most endgames pocketbooks. I have no solution at this time, for this problem.


EoJ is a good solid currency like ancient mementos… It allows people to buy endgame (stats in this case). This being the case I would like to see an option at 3X the price, where you can select the stat you want on the piece. So you could specify if you wanted a Stam/Def. All stat choices should be available for the stat picking including, int/hp, pdef/mdef. EoJ should be the way to pick your stats. Mementos is for your gear. This is how I see it, as this is sort of how it is ‘meant’ to be set up.

Dreamland currency doesn’t do enough. And I’d like to see you be able to buy Sigils with these. Something else we could use these for would be great.

Server merge and population of the game, has become a very hot topic this year. I thought I would address it. GF announced a server merge sometime late last year. And the server merge was meant to build populations up, however even now I fail to see the good it will do. It is very late to take such drastic action. And merging will bring very few people back long-term. I for one, hate ::nonsense:: in this game, all the bickering, all the arguing, all the hatred of other guilds, it’s pointless. This is the reason I left Artemis. And the Reason I left Govinda. And I found it on Reni too. The community is running this game, and it isn’t fun to play anymore.

I really hate seeing pot-shots at other people and guilds. I’m willing to bet a lot of people in this game have left because of the community’s lack of positivity. I am going to make an analogy, and you’re going to find it true, and disturbing. RoM is an old people’s home. Nothing fun happens here, most of us would rather not be here, and the only thing holding us together is a few friends. No one new comes around to visit, and the people who run the place, cared at one point but simply stopped trying. There is a general lack of cohesion and we all do our own thing. Complaining and debating over issues that can’t be fixed. The game I believe is too far gone at this point to ever come back to what it once was. A lot of fun happened here once. But no longer. We are simply wasting away bored out of our minds. Until we finally die. And leave this world of RoM for a better one.

There is a lot I haven’t covered here… And I know I should. But writing this much was already tiring to my body, and my mind. The last section is what I wanted to cover was code. I’m going to split it up into 2 separate parts, 1. Source code and Runewaker. 2. Add-ons/Model folder.

First and foremost let’s talk about RW and SC. There is a big issue with the developers being Asian. And I’m not being racist here. They live on the other side of the world, and it is hard to get common hours for U.S or Europe people to talk with RW directly. As well, there has been multiple communication issues, because of language barriers. RW made this game, and it was a good game, but it was abandoned around RT. At least that was my impression. While we hated FA(Frogster America) they were amazing at getting stuff done with the game and hosting events. For some reason when Gameforge (GF) inherited the game. Their license with RW apparently was very strict as to what they could do. And has become more strict ever since. The actual code of the game has some inherent flaws. As a lot of people noticed from the common crashing and lag that occurs. This is the fault of the game code itself (fault of RW). Several issue have been traced back to their original code, and there are several memory leaks in the game. I myself have tested one out. And the FPS drop/ eventual crashing in siege, for multiple years was because of flame towers directly. Please feel free to contact me In-Game I’d be glad to show you the video of it. There are a lot of tools, to find these bugs so they can be fixed. But I’m not sure RW is using any.


Sort of transitioning between 1 and 2, some programmers/coders have offered to help GF out, since they are local to the U.S. and we have since applied for position in the GM ranks. All attempts to help out directly with the source code have been denied, even here is what is wrong, and why, at least to my knowledge. RW apparently either thinks they are competent enough to handle the bugs alone, or simply despise us as a community. So us being programmers we have taken it into our own hands to try to fix what we could. Or at least make the game better/easier. The main way this was done was through add-ons. We could make the world maps easier to look at through WOWMAPS. We could change your buff bars, or even the whole UI, through XBAR III and the like. We could auto trade merits in siege using GSQT. We could allow you to not have to think about where you were in your skill rotation via DIYCE or its numerous children. We have a super in-detail add on quest helper that practically tells you everything about the quests in game. And we have Scrutinizer to measure average DPS. We even have an add on that tried to fix the EoJ timer, and help out with siege made by StoneForge. The main issue is we as the coders of the community want to make RoM better but we can’t. Even through the model folder technique. We simply can’t do it, legally that is. And it’s sad because we have it the worst in the community. Knowing we could fix RoM, and we even offered to fix RoM. But we were rejected. We were told leave it alone, or even to go away. And the knowledge that we could have fixed RoM makes it so much worse.


Because to many of us, regardless of guild, or status, endgame or noob, server of gender, race or religion. Coder, lumberjack, retiree, office worker, power plant supervisor, knight, warden, priest, scout, champion, druid, rouge, mage, warlock, or warrior. To us the people of taborea, RoM is a friend, or even a child, a weird uncle, or an estranged lover. Something real, someone close to our hearts. That is why we stayed, we loved it. Sometimes we left and came back, sometimes we stayed faithful to this game. RoM was something that was always weird or broken. That we simply couldn’t fix.

Quoted from "Drakkarsdad"

Almost all of your points are valid to you personally: Some I agree with, some I do not. If you could "care less is people agree or not" why post in the public forum? With more of your thoughts being con as opposed to being pro, why play Runes of Magic? There are other games that are far less buggie, have simpler monetary systems, and have no festivals. Choose one of them. I play this game--mem leaks, crashing, lagginess and all. It has been there since I started and those things have remained constant.

It sounds like we agree on most of the points. Siege used to be fun for me, when we had to use our brains. Now it is simply to unbalanced to be fun. As for deleting your post, I would have preferred to see it moved below my 3 worst case... but ya know.

There has always been an elitest aura about the game. And I try to petition people to stop, but they don't realize they do it to their own destruction.

Quoted from "radeon"

I applaud you for taking the time to show that you really care about ROM, as do most of us that are still around. For some reason we all seem to keep hoping and hoping that someone over there would suddenly start caring about this game even though all the evidence so clearly shows that they don't. Anyway, the one area where I absolutely 100% disagree with you is an open source code. The potential for abuse is far greater than any good you can do helping to fix programming issues. I just don't trust other people like you do, and I think I'm more right than you are in this case.

That was in a different thread, I in no way mentioned it here. Also everyone in that thread ignored my call in the beginning to make it hypothetical. Its an imaginary world where people wouldn't abuse it. But in any case I could think of hundreds of things that would guarantee no abuse. If you want comment in more detail over in that thread. But keep the 2 separate.

@gig Thanks for reminding me, I wrote this in one sitting. So some things slipped my mind. I missed a few more things, most people didn't even know about. As for the warden glitches, and things of that nature, I generally refrain from mentioning it. Although if we would like to bring that up, remember when forge graphics would stack? That was... something else.

I think a few people are missing the point. This is my interpretation of the highlights of this game. Literally my thoughts. The entire point of this thread, was to make you think about how you feel about this game. Let me quote myself

Quoted

I am making this for people to read, think what you want. I could care less if you agree with me or not. Hell, either way don’t post that. This is food for thought. A summary of how I see the game. If you are going to post, let the content sit for a while. Think about these topics.

The entire reason I took all this time, was to get people thinking about how we can better the game, irregardless of the perceived incompetents towering over the hierarchal chain. What can we do to better it. As for all the posts above, I hold you to my standard. How can we better this place? What are you doing to help RoM. Because if the answer is nothing, re read this melo-dramatic writing. Because this is what the game will become.

Quoted

RoM was something that was always weird or broken. That we simply couldn’t fix. For most of you, you can take the cheap excuse… “Not me… I couldn’t be involved, or responsible.”

Well guess what, you played this game, you owe it to the game, to the community and yourself to make it better. All day ever day, all I see is greedy endgamers. On every server. With no regard to anyone but themselves.