Writing this with my merchant window trading some of expensive cards that I got, which already says a lot about state of things. Week was full of grind and almost all the time I’m awake Ragnarok was on in one way or another, mostly with me playing.
So how does it feel playing it now and how it goes for me from streaming perspective, let’s see…
First of all I’m having a blast, game is super addicting after all the years and time I played, that’s the most important thing for me really and it makes me happy to be excited about it that much. Zero mechanics revamping a lot of things in the classic game actually feels great, it’s almost as if I’m playing a new game, I’m again excited to re-explore many things because they all feel different in a way, but still familiar. Playing now is a lot more pleasant, because pace of the game is a lot faster in terms of how you develop your character, more proactive now with less downtime and it feels great, even though I always appreciated slow process of getting your levels and equipment before, but I’ll be honest it’s a good memory, but going through it again and again is not fun at all. So overall this particular version of Ragnarok Online feels very good, it has some things that I would prefer a bit differently, fast pace also kinda creates situations where we had capped characters 2 days in and it is a bit scary from longevity perspective, but well those super fast leveling people were always around, so that’s not new and at least regular casual player like me can enjoy a bit of faster progression.
Now about streaming RO and that was a big surprise for me honestly, but streams are going great! First of all I was surprised by the amount of people willing to join me on Russian server, we got HolySnipz from community to create a little patch to translate some of the stuff, but it’s still a lot of Russian and majority of community don’t speak English, but a lot of community people still are enjoying it, Trizze streaming it too all the time, it really feels good to see so much interest and enthusiasm. But another thing about it that surprises me a lot is that many people had no experience with the game before and they were willing to try it or at least they enjoyed watching it – that was quite surprising for me and a good sign for the game, I really hope we will get something “new” about Ragnarok and not mobile games. Another little discovery was that even more people would be trying it and excited about it when EU server launches with same mechanics, which is possible, since it’s same publisher and last server they opened here they opened in EU after too. So with EU release I’ll be going in again most likely and probably joining creator program and all that stuff, trying to produce more interesting content and maybe working with publishers on some collabs and getting some goodies for community. Hope it will be after some time though, gonna keep some of the hype and not burn out for it, that’s the only thing I’m afraid off, because usually after satisfying my nostalgic itch I just sorta forget about the game for a few years, but I hope it will be better and I’ll return for some more quality content.
So yeah, overall, I’m really happy with how everything is going and planning to binge RO some more, will be returning some variety elements slowly more and more, but while I’m enjoying it so much I want to embrace it and go ham. Hope you will enjoy it or will be fine waiting a bit for more of my regular variety stuff, I appreciate the fact that no one is complaining about me being stuck with games, but there was one person asking “what are you playing, it says variety, but I only see this game”, was someone new though and it was when I played RO for like 3 days only, so I don’t know what people expect from variety, guess I’ll need to do another thoughts post about “types” of streamers and expectations from them.