I love MMOs. Back in a day I was in every beta test and while paying sub and sometimes even buying the game was quite often out of my capabilities I still played a lot of MMOs. One of the main issues was the time consumption, which lead to me skipping a few years in single player games history and partially made me stop with MMOs. I just wanted to catch up with some other games and preferred to not lose touch with single player games and tried to touch grass some more, getting my life in the right place. Sometimes I could return to some of the MMOs of my past to scratch the itch for a bit, but I never felt like genre should be changed in any way to accommodate people like me with limited time. That feeling of going full degenerate mode grinding some levels or farming some resources, especially when done together with some friends is great. Being able to skip a few days of grinding, because you are busy, but then to go crazy during the weekend, grabbing some snacks and just diving in for a massive session, because you have time now. Flexing some rare item or mount that everyone knows is rare, getting ahead of competition with the power of grind and by getting lucky, getting the build going and optimizing your farm.
All that was always amazing to experience in Ragnarok Online, game that I love returning to whenever there is a new server in regions with decent ping. But RO also has probably one of the worst publishers on the market, which over the years lead to steady implementation of some of the most predatory and ridiculous systems. Ragnarok Online is a pretty old MMO at this point, but they also created a whole lot of other games in the universe, sharing the name and aimed at the same audience, all of them are mobile first. Mobile gaming, especially in Asia, is pretty bad with monetization, very aggressive with game design done with profit first, fun second approach in mind. Every new Ragnarok game I’ve seen and tried (just a couple) has all those mobile game problems with game design. Ragnarok Origins was even quite fun, except for the fact you couldn’t farm for more than two hours and you didn’t even need to farm – autohunt will do that for you, you only focus on doing same boring dailies. You do manually some of the fun things too, but mostly chores, grinding mobs, you know, main attraction in Ragnarok Online is delegated to your legal bot. You also have gacha elements and all the cool cosmetics are in that gacha, not in the boss rewards of course.
But I mean most of it was localized on mobile, OG Ragnarok Online on PC had it’s own issues, like insane microtransactions giving serious advantage to those who spend and having mechanisms that promote massive investments and whaling. They of course added gacha/lootboxes and even tried to dabble into some blockchain shenanigans with OG RO (and NFTs with newer mobile games too, multiple even). At least core game was more or less the same no matter what for over 20 years.
It seems like it’s changing now though, because the upcoming server of OG Ragnarok Online already has the Autohunt implemented. Many official servers struggle with bots and currency sellers that these bots supply (same story with many MMOs nowadays) and it seems like just giving everyone a legal bot is one of their solutions. Autohunting and limitations on the mob grind also put everyone closer to equal opportunities to level and gear up by ingame means, so those who grind their credit card against the microtransaction store are getting ahead of those who put their time and skill into it easier. Oh yeah and this server supposed to be subscription only, but also with microtransactions available and non-cosmetic ones too of course.
Ragnarok Online subreddit seemingly now full of bots and/or community managers, trying to shill this new server and shift the negative perception, but there are some people who actually support autohunting. Mostly it’s people going “I love Ragnarok Online, but I’m now older and too busy to grind, so autohunt is great”, some justify credit card swiping the same way. Friend is playing one of the modern mobile-first Ragnarok games and his group of 5 people can get wiped by one whale, so I guess that’s the kind of gameplay busy adult people prefer? Not being able to do some meaningful play session of over two hours, because you run out of stamina and can’t get XP/loot or get penalized hard?
I think if you don’t have enough time for an MMO, then you just play something else, not even necessarily single player, some MMOs do respect your time and even some grindy ones you can play slowly. Not everything is a competition, just play at your own pace and enjoy playing the game, not watching the game play itself.
I’m just personally afraid of this trend becoming popular and successful, especially since Korean MMOs tend to adopt those predatory systems from their “colleagues”. Sure it’s alright to have such games on the market if they have an audience, but when they make their next big official international server like this it’s a big red flag. Sad to see my childhood game going down this path, but private servers exist and some are even customizing the game a lot nowadays for those who are tired of the same stuff for over 20 years. Also good thing SpiritVale exists now, that is scratching that Ragnarok Online itch good for me, but that’s a topic for another post. Feel free to share your opinion on autoplay and other mechanics in comments!