An open letter to Warp Portal - Feedback & Suggestions (2024)

6873130523221128927

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To whom it may concern,

My name is Terrey. I'm an avid MMO player. I've ridden the wave of dozens of MMOs, rise to fall. I write this letter to you in the respectful hope that your goals from the beginning were actually to make a successful game based around the Ragnarok name. I was ecstatic after hearing about Ragnarok Online 2's release in the United States. After years and years waiting for it, it was finally here. I'd heard about the problems in Asia, with the pay to win structure, and the horrible implementation of feature after feature, but still I hoped, that perhaps, Warp Portal, as a content developer would learn from the mistakes of the other third parties that had taken over the management of the game. I had sincerely hoped that to them, my dream of a proper Ragnarok MMO in the modern day would be looked at as a longstanding endeavor, and not a spair of udders to squeeze until that particular cow was a dessicated husk.

I'm sure you haven't missed the fact that your virtual goods in your item mall are flying off the store pages like hotcakes, and people are investing insane amounts of money into virtual rentals. But I have news for you. Each and every one of those sales is a nail in the coffin of Rune Midgard. For every one of those virtual sales you make, you are ensuring that there is no fairness, there is no balance, and there is no care whatsoever for the longterm viability of Ragnarok Online. Each one of those customers will force five other potential paying customers to leave in disgust, and your utter abandon of forethought and reason in your monetization scheme will result inevitably in the record of your stewardship over your product being thought of only with mirth as gamers reminisce about all the mistakes that were made.

It's becoming all the more obvious that the community is not the focus of your business model, yet the community is supposed to be your consumer-base. How exactly, do you plan on enticing the "micro" transactions from the wallets of a community that no longer trusts your steermanship? I do hope we can at least convince you, that in the west, we expect our MMOs to be fair for all who play, and members features to affect the balance as little as possible. We expect our developers to be open and forthcoming about changes to the game. We expect bugs fixed before new content is released. We expect language localization to be more than reams of google-translate text inserted into our game, and we expect the game to not expect us to play it like the developers expect us to. We want to be able to accurately control our own experience, not have some half-baked interface thinking for us.

The fact is, that unless there are some serious revisions in not only how you are approaching the monetization of ragnarok online 2, but the way in which you interact with the community, it's going to be little more than a misadventure into the world of game developers who thought that they knew what made a working MMO better than their playerbase did.

This isn't a melodramatic lambasting. It's a cry for help. I desperately want to play Ragnarok Online 2 for the next five or more years. I want it to be worth that amount of time. I want to have guild experiences and lifelong friends emerge from it. But at the rate that Warp Portal seems to be running it into the ground in search for quick and easy remuneration, I don't believe I'll have more than nine months of it before the community collapses and this becomes yet another barely-populated ghost of an MMO.

Just having the Ragnarok name does not mean it is made of gold. I beg of you, rethink your profit model, stop putting stat-bonuses to people who pay money, and stop charging for necessary activities in game such as skill respecs. Please rethink your subscription model to per-account, rather than per-character, and for the love of odin, stop and think about the longterm health of the game before thinking about short term profits.

You have a limited window of time to fix this game before it loses any hope of recovery. For an MMO, the first three months are absolutely critical, and will permanently shape how the game is thought of for the rest of its life. Games do not recover from poor decisions at launch (Look at RO2). And the more time you let these things continue to happen, the larger a portion of who is left will be made of people who do not actually stop to think that pay-to-win is only fun when you have people who have not paid to bully.

I'd much rather pay to play than pay to win. At least then, I know that my dollars are being spent to better a community, and not destroy it.

Thank you,

Terrey

Edited by 6873130523221128927, 04 June 2013 - 08:23 PM.

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Kirinet

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Kudos on the open letter, you took the words right out of my mouth.
I would like to add a few things to this,
The game is not pay-to-win, it's just throwing money at the game for no reason, mainly the problem with costumes. They serve no purpose and are useless to have.
In order to make the game more fun to play, I suggest item quests would be added like the ones from RO1 where you made items from junk off monsters (like Jellopy).
It adds more time of in-game play and gives a fulfilling sense once it's done and you've made your gear.
Another aspect I would like to add is that an AFK event is pretty lame and doesn't really add anything to the experience. It just comes off as lazy if that's the best event you can think of. How about more interesting things, like an invasion event, where you would release powerful MVP's on prontera which the players will have to team up against (how about Vadon, Giant Driller? Willow? RSX?). Unlike adding hat quests, this event could easily be made, as it uses elements already in the game and it would certainly be more exhilirating than an AFK event.
Please don't let this game die, at this rate and the way you are handling the game, I don't even know if it will have 9 months... Serious damage control HAS to be done, whether it would be the find dungeon or giving players more things to do after they've reached level 50. As it is, many level 50's are simply quitting for lack of content and the game is slowly dying.
Set aside the extra costumes for when the game is fully fixed and you have a strong fanbase. I would put it aside for at least 3 more months and use this time to fix whatever issues the game has. Take the patches more seriously and don't overuse the Kafra shop, because that was part of the downfall for RO1 and it will certainly be your downfall.

Edited by Kirinet, 05 June 2013 - 04:39 AM.

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dancingpanda

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Another aspect I would like to add is that an AFK event is pretty lame and doesn't really add anything to the experience. It just comes off as lazy if that's the best event you can think of. How about more interesting things, like an invasion event, where you would release powerful MVP's on prontera which the players will have to team up against (how about Vadon, Giant Driller? Willow? RSX?). Unlike adding hat quests, this event could easily be made, as it uses elements already in the game and it would certainly be more exhilirating than an AFK event.

I very much agree!

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Kyriuu

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Kudos to this man +1

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Norava

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Another aspect I would like to add is that an AFK event is pretty lame and doesn't really add anything to the experience. It just comes off as lazy if that's the best event you can think of. How about more interesting things, like an invasion event, where you would release powerful MVP's on prontera which the players will have to team up against (how about Vadon, Giant Driller? Willow? RSX?). Unlike adding hat quests, this event could easily be made, as it uses elements already in the game and it would certainly be more exhilirating than an AFK event.

They do this to boost their CCU numbers so that they can show the higher-ups that people are actually playing their game.

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231130502232346700

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I'm just planning to do a little list of things why Gate of the World was better in the end... but I'm breaking a spear for them.

Costumes DON'T NEED TO give stats or sheet like that. That's how you change a play to win in a PAY to win. No stats to costume means that costumes are only a way to DRESS-UP, which this game can really go for (and I'd totally like it) and be an awesome casual game. Yeah, casual.

Looking at Ragnarok, the game was both casual and franticly hardcore for someone, who took it too serious. Ragnarok is the kind of game which can have an hardcore "phase" with a "looking" phase on the run. This means that, if you couple a stimulating gameplay (which, given the basis we have, is pretty difficult) and enjoyable dungeon instances, funny events, PVP/Battlegrounds made a bit more of a "Tactics challenge" than a "well, i'm quicker than him, got better gear... I'm done" and also humor (and all those things which always seem to give a "better look" even at something "Water&Soap" like an MMORPG pre-formatted) with the fact that, with not too much money I can get dresses and costumes and things to dressp up differently, if I want... well, here you've got a nice hybrid of Japan/Korea/eastern styled game and a western solid base.

Often, I "throw" my (little) money only to companies and games I really admire for something. For example, NCSoft did a great job with Guild Wars 2, and I gave them the chance, and I was so pleased, like I was when Lineage 2 first came out. I can do so many examples of money I gave to companies and games I like, but this isn't the point.

Point is that you get money if your game deserves money.
No art, no part.
Doing a Cash Shop is also really difficult, because it must be both attractive, fair for the game, and not too pricey. It's a huge problem, we all know it.

The REAL problem here, however, is the game itself: quests could be enjoyable and funny (escort, pick up, dungeons, "time escape", killing bosses) but most of them are a bit grindy (kill those monsters... report - get 15 of that item, report... <- the last one can be quiet grindy, also) and pretty repetitive. You should REALLY try to get a bit more dynamic quests, because the gameplay is a standard "wait for the character to perform it's thing with a button press" which is already dragging you down, because it's an obsolete model. There are so many action-mmo with a free world around (and not only lately, already in 2007-2008 those were Free to play) and Ragnarok 2 really hasn't "charme" so far.

I'll probably explain it in another topic, mostly because this thread is getting too big and confusive, but you really need to insert a "feeling" in this game, because Gate of the World probably wasn't the best game around, it was FULL of bugs, and didn't make the cut... but it was so obvious it had a feeling... it was planned, and complex, and comprehensive of what a game in 2011 should had. What this game feels for me is a standard korean MMO not much different from Ether Saga, or Rose Online or any MMO around. I'm not a RO1 fan, and I'm not of the idea that you should transform Ragnarok 2 in Ragnarok 1 with 3D graphics. You NEED to make time and money worth the shot, and the best way, for my humble and critic opinion, is that you NEED to implement what Gate of the World had on the good side. "Take that feeling and put it into a song game.
More from me in another topic.

P.S. I agree with the above, except for the "window time"... Final Fantasy XIV is once again populated, and a GREAT game was built. An MMO is always a developing game, which can take wrong roads and then step back and take the right one: advertising and hope are the key.

You failed once with Gate of the World, because you thought a NEW game was better than correcting that one, great, your decision. But now you can't make it again from scrap, because after all you put money in these things, and money is the engine of your business. You NEED to look at what you've made so far, look at the fact that "western game" doesn't mean a "PVPWVEYHRYHVYEWHEREPBVOWHASGLOLTROLLFAILUS" but just a slightly more dynamic gameplay, and a smaller player base, maybe.
Just this, nothing else, nothing "serious" about it. A game is a game, it must be funny, not serious.

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Atlessa

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Not sure if Warp Portal is the correct recipient for this letter.
I think it should go to Gravity...

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Wyntir

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Couldn't agree more. I have a decent amount of disposable income, but I like to feel like I'm getting my money's worth. I spent about $100 already, and with this latest patch, between the founder fiasco, the costumes, the kafra shop items to attempt to add rune slots to them.. etc... I'm not spending another cent. I'm frankly waiting for Ragnarok Online 2 has no queue to come out, and in the meantime, I might even just go back to WoW. In F2P games you expect a certain amount of P2W but this's ridiculous.

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KIyde

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I'd much rather pay to play than pay to win.

So much this.

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