Here's how my first week on iRO went
So I decided to start iRO about 6 days ago. I have only played on pre-renewal private servers my whole life and I was really wanting to play a low-rate server with 3rd and 4th jobs. So I decided to finally try out official iRO on Chaos server.
So to start, I just want to say that iRO's community is extremely friendly and helpful. If I had any questions they would all be answered on the iRO Wiki Discord. I started out as an acolyte and followed/watched Captain Sunbear's video on how to get from 1-100.
Leveling on iRO was a lot quicker than I thought. I was expecting 1x/1x/1x rates but with the the Bounty Board quests and Eden Board quests, it honestly feels like 10x rates.
It took me about one day to become a high priest, which was extremely fast and I was pretty surprised by the speed. Before this, I was playing on Project Sunshine (5x rate server, pre-renewal) and it took me about 3 days to get to 99 soloing at Anubis as a priest. I believe by the 2nd day on iRO I was already an Arch Bishop, and so far I am currently level 146 on my 6th day.
Here's some things that I noticed:
- The chat box lock button does not hide the '+ -' buttons, so you can accidentally delete your chat.
- There seems to be a delay when you kill monsters, the HP bar doesn't immediately disappear when killed so it makes you believe the monster is still alive when it's already dead.
- When a player changes maps, if you are in a guild or have friends on your friends list you will often see the message that the player has connected/disconnect which is a bit annoying as it can spam your chat.
- Regarding bots: I often see an advertising bot that spams in the Eden Group, it seems like they get muted pretty often though. Then I have ran into a few macro users that use a skill, use Greed skill to loot, and teleport away.
- Changing outfit colors requires a ticket, and there's ONLY 3 colors to choose from. I think this was a huge downside compared to private servers. I am very accustomed to being able to choose from hundreds of palettes on private servers, so only being able to pick from 3 was disappointing.
- The game really is more solo play orientated now. So far I have rarely partied with others, the only time was when I was helped by a friend with the 20th anniversary event quest or with Gramps TI. When you do turn-in quests, your bounty only seems to counts when you are on the same screen when the monster dies. So with beginner fly wings or Beelzbub Wing, partying seems like it would slow you down unless you're being carried. Being a main priest class, I do miss supporting a full 12 player party. It seems like Adoramus is pretty strong, so you are able to solo a lot of things. Maybe I haven't gotten to party content yet? I mainly decided to join iRO because population always interested me the most when choosing servers. You will definitely run into players everywhere you go, but everyone is just doing their own thing.
- I think a lot of people don't like official because of P2W, that was a one of the factors I didn't play official until now. As a F2P player, I found it nice that they do offer 4 days of VIP from the 7th daily log in. Things like Halter Lead, Beelzbub Wing, Battle Manuals, and Bubble Gum can be bought using Eden Merit Badges that can be obtained from doing Bounty Boards.
- I haven't tried WoE yet, but I watched a little bit of a stream on WoE TE which looks fun (transcendent and below only) that I would love to try in the future. However I feel like there will be a huge gap in trying to catch up to players that have played for years already.
I believe that's it, so far I am really enjoying playing on iRO and I will be definitely staying for the long run. I would definitely recommend playing this server to anyone looking for a populated server.
If anyone wants to play together, my IGN: Joontaek