Deep thoughts in RO.
It’s been a long time since I actually saw people gather together in a party and play this game together, at least in the server Iris1, running at the english version of Malaysia-RO.
Everyone bots there, to the extend that I do not dare to actually invite my friends to really play it with me — the kind where you would party up and go leveling together, not in mRO. It used to be that people are afraid of even speaking about botting when they did for fear that they would be screenshotted and game master would ban them. But now, nobody really cares — botting topics are everywhere.
To add insult to injury, the servers are so lagged nowadays that everyone is complaining that they don’t enjoy the guild wars as much as before because the lag was unbearable. Just too many turn-offs about this RO server for a long time already that I just continue botting, only logging in to play Players VS Players or guild wars. And with little new players, what’s left are the hardcore botters. (And that really means that the female heroes are getting lesser and lesser, and I couldn’t get married, LOL.)
Sad, isn’t it? How a game transformed from a perfect environment to party up and play with friends to something where you would only see robots playing on behalf of humans. All in a year’s time.
But I was proven wrong, at least for that day when I paid a visit to a certain place where it used to be very lively because a certain class would always gather and train there. Note that the previous time I went, it was barren and only filled with bots. But not this time. Towards the center of that map, there were human players there forming parties and fighting the incoming monsters, together!
Now I admit I’m incapable of putting that feeling into words. But it’s a feeling that almost all RO players who leveled together in the past would have felt. To put it simply, I was excited.
So without hesistation, I did something that I usually avoid — tanking them. I took the damage for those first jobbers who didn’t have the ability to, and let them deal damage to the monsters for experience. Though in theory I don’t gain anything from this tanking session, I actually gained back the purpose of playing the game again. The kind where you see human players who would reply to your messages and not just bots who teleport away in search of more monsters. I was dying for these little responses — I was desperate, and I still am.
Of course, if you don’t play this game, you would never understand. Ever. In some of the following screenshots, even a short sentence that went like “party please” would intrigue me. How I missed those sentences or priests waiting outside a leveling ground, setting up chatboxes asking for party to go leveling together.
Would these things come back again, ever on a large scale? How I wish.