pRO EP 19: Fall of Valhalla

Attention Citizens of Valhalla: After a thorough investigation on the 6th yr anniversary exploit, a rollback will be implemented on June 2, 11am. There will be no item compensation for “lost” items but ROK Points will be reimbursed. Thank you!

— LU Announcement on the Valhalla Server, 22:25 June 1 2008

Valhalla has never been so quiet. 

Doomsday is imminent. As the moment of that I am typing this post, LU is now preparing for a full server rollback — but I’d rather prefer the more correct term “wipeout” â€” of all Zeny, in-game items, and, as rumours say, experience.

I could describe this event in many ways. LU is now acting in self-destruct mode out of panic or like a God unleashing his wrath on unbelieving sinful people — akin to Noah’s arc. This could also be part of the anniversary event where the server is finally trancending, rebirthing in, just like the server’s name, Valhalla; from Level 99 back to Level 1.

Yes this is what’s happening. By 11:00, LU GM’s would start wiping out all Valhalla characters’ items, Zeny, and, probably experience.

What a nice way to celebrate pRO’s 6^th year of existence — destruction.

happy 6th aniv daw eh =))

sisirain n ung pRO… 6yrs n daw kc =))

—  Mai from Ragnaboards

But remember that a wipeout without experience rollback is possible.

From a programmer’s perspective, it’s not impossible. It should be relatively easy for anyone with the proper training. Only problem is, I don’t think anyone at LU has the proper training, so they’re relying on existing scripts/code provided to them by Gravity to get the job done.

— icedagger from Ragnaboards

So to people who are reading this and are still clueless on what I’m talking about. Here’s the thing. Just this week, LU GM’s thought that it would be a great idea to have an event for it’s 6^th year anniversary. And that event is the Festival.

The Festival mechanics are simple; a character of your account will talk to the Festival NPC near the Prontera Central Fountain, you’d pick a dungeon destination, and then you’d go to that dungeon, and find the Festival NPC placed deep in that dungeon, and after successfully finding her, you’d receive tickets which you can use to redeem in-game items, which are foods, white potions and rental items.

Now if you’re playing Ragnarok Valhalla just this week, you would have noticed that there is a great influx of Novices walking around Prontera, mainly from the South portion of the City to its Central Fountain. We’ll identify them as “Noobish Abusers”. These fucking idiotic noobs have found that what is categorised by LU as the hardest dungeon to travel to is practically the easiest one. That is the 1F of the Aldebaran Clock Tower. We’ll that is compared to other “easy” destinations like the Izlude Dungeon where you’d have to go to Level 4 and be mobbed painfully by Mermans, and only get 1 ticket for your troubles. This is nothing compared to the Aldebaran destination where you’d only have to go to the 1F of the Aldebaran Clock Tower, which is the place where you go first when you actually enter the Tower, and — take note â€” that the Quest NPC is located on the center of the map, and guess what the portal where you enter is on the center of the map.

So in practicality, that really is the easiest dungeon destination of all, even for noobs â€” this is since most of the time you’ll not even encounter a single monster on the 1F. And remember that these so-called hard maps return 5 tickets.

And now with these 5 tickets you could use them to redeem 20 pieces of foods which sell to an NPC at a very high price. With a Level 10 Overcharge, you’d have 1,240,000z in an instant!

I know this is so unfair as we, legitimate players, spend months earning a million â€” that is without the help of buy-and-selling elites.

Also remember that an account could create as much as 9 novices, and, if all your novices in 1 account do the quest, raise 11,160,000z in just an hour.

And you could repeat this quest as much as you like as long as you’d have a different character everytime, and, whenever that the account is full, a different account every nine characters.

Of course, we could not take out the fact that these noobs are not actually noobs but real game players who have friends to transfer their money to â€” that is the money from your noobish novice â€” and give the money to your main character later on.

In many ways, this is bad because this would have a huge impact to the server’s economy. As .:: dn6abz ::. of Ragnaboards explains, this would result in everyone being millionaires, billionaires even, and with this no one would have to trade stuffs anymore because everyone’s rich already, and with no one trading people would be forced to buy ROK Points to buy in-game items.

So it’s not purely true that this is all bad for LU since more people buying load means more people giving, throwing their money away to LU. It’s just the bad publicity that pushed LU to do this “solution”.

Also it may not be purely true that this would stop trading all together but it will surely slow it down and lower the value of your Zeny, meaning no items would be sold for 1,000z ea a few months after this since a thousand zeny equals no zeny; jellopies could even have the price of 100,000z ea.

People have requested a rollback while others requested other solutions such as:

• having a Level requirement for the quest so that noobish novices won’t have access to it.
• having the foods and other items redeemed from the quest havethe selling price of 0z.
• having the quest removed all together.

All these suggested solutions aim to stop further abuses but it cannot be denied that the damage has already been done, and it is certain that your Zeny’s buying power would go down by the days and the hours — think about price hikes everyday, if not, every other day.

This is a rally on the Prontera Streets protesting against the wipeout. I have never seen this much people in Valhalla act as one ever since I have played pRO.

The following picture is how the Marketplace looks like a few hours before the wipeout. With people discouraged, there are only ~30 people online, and almost no one selling stuffs.

A rollback seems to be the only solution for LU but do we, non-abusing players, Citizens of Valhalla, have to suffer the stupidity of LU and the noobs?

Credits:

• all people aforementioned
• this thread (You’d have to be log-inned to view the thread.) 

As of this moment, there has been no official LU announcement about there course of action besides the single announcement they made yesterday.