RF Online Diary #1
Written by Lydia Graslie on 9/5/2006 for
PC
More On:
RF Online
Day 1: I Have a Game I Cannot Stop Paying For
Sometime back in, oh, April, I got an MMO to review.
"Huh," I thought in my continuously running inner monologue, "an MMO. I've never played one of those before." I pondered this. What about the other players? What were they like? Would I be competent? Would I be accepted? Would I be bitterly shunned and scorned from prestigious raids, or would I finally transcend into gaming nirvana with the aid of players from around the world? Curious, I installed it and booted it up for the first time. It didn't work. "Damn," I sulked. "All of those good adjectives wasted".
A month went by, and I was billed for my subscription.
"What is this?!" I demanded. "I'm a journalist, I don't pay for things!" Irate in my sense of self-entitlement, I scoured the website for a link that would aid me in explaining why I shouldn't have to pay for my subscription. I found none. Eventually, I forgot about it. Except when reviewing my bank statement, and somehow sorting stuff out with Codemasters sank to the bottom of my to-do list. Then my computer died, and all of my cloudy aspirations were cast into the darkness of uncertainty that is a hard drive failure, being billed all the while through PayPal for a game I could not run.
Fast forward to two weeks ago, after waging a 3 month war with two replaced hard drives, I had finally beaten the machine elves back into satisfactory submission. Finally possessing a working computer was weird, and I spent a good portion of my day running diagnostic programs compulsively to make sure that there wasn't something icky that had slipped through the radar. Having run full system scans for literally the 23rd time that day, I cautiously started installing programs. First simple stuff, like Firefox. I saw that it ran, and it was good. Then I installed more complex things, like iTunes. I saw that this also worked, and it was good. Delighted, I picked up the closest game at hand that I hadn't played and installed it. It ran.
Its name was RF Online.
And it was good.
Day 2: The Beautiful People
The next day after "real" work I back to my abode to kick back, relax, and sort through this new game. I dredged up my old account information, installed patches, and logged on to the water server. It was time to create a new character.
I had three choices for races. The Bellato, a diminutive race with white hair. They were good at a little bit of magic, a little bit of physical prowess, and a ton of mechanical skills. Also, some of them piloted robots. Robots were cool, but I wasn't sure I wanted to use one. The Accretia were cyborg-y tough genderless Spartan things, and although they were pretty powerful I thought they were ugly. So that was out. That left the Cora, the ueber-religious elf-types who are characterized by their spell-casters. Spells were good. And the Cora are pretty. So I went with Cora.
There are also a couple different classes within each race. The Cora have Rangers, Spiritualists, Specialists, and Warriors. I created Dora, a female Ranger character (bows and guns, light on defense, heavy on HP), and set out to explore(a).
Moving around in Cora Headquarters was confusing. There were all kinds of flashy lights and swirling portals and pretty colors. Sort of like a Tolkien stoner trip. I had just begun to wrap my head around all the clicky system when I was accosted by one of the top 30 ranked Cora players on my server.
"DORA!!!!!!!!!" He screamed. "TAKE ME ON A MAGICAL ADVENTURE!!!!!!"
...Say what now?
I was totally floored. I had been putzing around n00bville for five minutes and I was already being called upon as a guide, and in all caps. Huh. I edged away, not really wanting to get into a "magical adventure" with somebody I didn't know. Said player followed me around, insisting on an adventure.
"But I am a shameless n00b. I don't know where anything is." I half-pleaded.
"You're the explorer!" He asserted. "You lead the way!"
I finally agreed, and after a few false starts of running up and down ramps that really led nowhere I managed to lead my party of two out into a forest. Hey, this was sweet. I found the monsters! In ROSE Online, only easy monsters were to be found for miles around, so I should be fine just wandering into the woods, right? I was fairly self-assured as I headed towards a monster titled "Lizard".
Wrong.
Lizard dealt me 450+ hit points of damage in one fell swoop. For a level one, that’s 1.5x instant death. Dora jerked backwards, sagged, and finally face planted in the dirt, the camera lazily drifting around her corpse. What the hell was that? I wondered. I was dead and I hadn't even had time to use my dinky little bow. After watching Dora's remains rotate for a while I clicked revive.
I arrived back at the portal, sans my party member. I couldn't find my way over to the pots dealer, much less find a non-NPC. There was no in-game reference for me to use to figure out how to find a player, follow, shout, or add friends, among other things. In desperation I began going through the entire alphabet of backslash commands and was somewhere around /j when I sat back in my chair and sighed.
"That wasn't a very good adventure." My erstwhile party member messaged.
Since I hadn't figured out how to use private messaging yet either, I could only nod moodily to myself and contemplate my initial, dismal failure.
Day 3: Kindness FTW
Day 3 went a lot better than day 2. Through trial and error I learned most of the things that had had me frustrated from the day before, such as navigation, chat commands, messaging(turned out its case sensitive) and trading. I took some ribbing for my totally hardcore name by other players but I took it in stride.
This was the day that I learned about buffing, skills and also macros. Utilizing them helped me out a ton. Buffing made attacking easier, my one skill made it faster, and macros made it less stressful to take on tougher monsters without having to always keep an eye on my HP gauge. Not the monsters had been all that tough, after my run-in with the Lizard the day before I'd learned how to use the colored circles around the name to gauge a monster's strength and avoid any more insta-death. I roved the newbie areas, happily picking up and selling newbie armors and weapons in preparation for the next phase.
Since I had purposely spent most of my teen levels away from other players to get a better, unbiased view on the game, it lent me more time to observe how players interacted with each other. One thing I found right away was that the maximum benefit comes to those players that work very well as a team. Players that partied well came back to HQ richer, stronger, and were usually more friendly to hapless noobs like me than the lone high powered characters that disappeared for hours on end, only to come back to base, sell loot, say something inflammatory, and disappear again. These were the players that were out consistently at the Chip Wars (more on these later), were the ones relaying messages about members of enemy races that were camping a portal, offering encouragement to other players during the grind (more on that later too), answering noob questions, etc.
After a couple days of getting a pretty good handle on what was going on in our little Cora corner I decided it was time to lay on the charm and make some friends. But first I would buy pots. I was doing some quick mental math at the vendor when a couple guild members came up behind me.
"Nice name." A level 39ish warrior behind me commented.
"Thanks!" I said, the possible sarcasm sailing over my head. "I like it." A couple members of the same guild (You know who you are :) had also come over to observe.
We ended up chatting for a while, and I forget about what, but the subject came around to stupid questions.
"I have a stupid question." I said. "Do we ever get any real pants in this game? I'm level 16 and all I've seen so far are ass-less chaps." Which is quite true. The Cora women are, in the lower levels at least, the most provocatively dressed. By far.
They thought this was funny, which was cool, but I was kinda serious. They assured me that costumes, and in fact everything got a lot better after level 30, the first class change, and even more after level 40, which was the second class change. I was heartened by this somewhat, as I was starting to hit the grind and was wondering what I would have to look forward to in later levels. They put up with all of my pestering, and even invited me to join their guild. I accepted, because they were nice.
And now, they are a little bit famous.
(Hi Guys!)
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.
About Author
Lydia Graslie is a crazy English/Math double major and a glutton for punishment at BHSU, which is located in scenic Middle-of-Nowhere. Her age is the product of two consecutive numbers with a sum less than 30. She can often be found reading old-school science fiction novels and pestering professors with bizarre physics questions, such as "Why do rocks make that ploosh noise when you throw them into deep water?" and "How much force does it take to throw a sewing needle through a pane of glass?". Lydia kinda looks like a librarian but has picked up too many swear words and uses them too effectively to ever be one.
A fairly recent comer to the world of console gaming, Lydia's first real system was a PS1. Video games were for boys when she was a tyke. That all changed when she swiped a cousins N64 for a weekend and was quickly sucked in. She got a Playstation for Christmas and caught up fairly quickly to her peers, and now enjoys friendly competition with friends who have been gaming since they were just out of diapers. Playstation is her favorite console, primarily because the controller is far more symmetrical button-wise than other recent systems.
Lydia specializes in action platformers, her favorites being the Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank series. She's also pretty good at DDR and enjoys a good space drama, such as Xenosaga or Star Ocean. However she's not too big on violent games and owns only one title rated higher than Teen. Games with wicked social commentary and moral conflicts delight her immeasurably. P.S. Barbie has the intellectual depth of a bag of microwave pork rinds. View Profile
