Due to the wide popularity of Valkyrie, Ragnarok Online PH’s newest free-to-play server, numerous players intending to GAME the system tried to employ the usual bot-dominance over the server. Too bad for them, Level Up Philippines raised their anti-bot ordinances up a notch.

To those who haven’t been up to speed with what’s happening, after a bit of bot-throttling from Level-Up which ended up in massive disconnections from thousands of botted accounts, Valkyrie’s server, under the stress of thousands of incoming connections went down for several hours.

Read up on LU’s official statement on the stability of the server if you’re interested.

LU is also, set to launch a new free-to-play server called Valhala with the same settings as Valkyrie. Thor players will find themselves migrated to Valhala on it’s opening date of November 30. Characters moved this way will KEEP their current levels and any items their character/s is carrying in their inventory and items in Kafra Storages and Merchant Carts will NOT be transferred. A heavy trade-off I think.

Now my take on the issue:

While some people will appreciate the new F2P service, if you stop and think about it, LUG is trying too handle too many problems at the same time.

Bot throttling has always been possible, but if you look at it closely, LU is milking the market. Players may think that they’re getting what they pay for when botting but they still don’t realize that it’s simply the other way around. Without a doubt, botters are LU’s lifeblood.

Valkyrie and Valhalla are both doomed from the start on a number of reasons:

1. LU has no experience with the Free-2-Play market. Even when they’ve been swallowed up by E-games, the largest F2P distributor in the Phil, they still have no clue as to how the F2P market plays thus all their efforts will be in vain
2. RO was meant to be a P2P game which takes out the probability of implementing a “Premium Service” can be seen in RF, Hellgate and other MMOs. I’ve tweaked several private servers to see how the game works and I still have no clue as to how to implement a similar service. Even if they do manage do get one such running, they’ll be in a lot of trouble with Gravity due to licensing. As far as I can remember, only localization is allowed to be implemented by a licensed distubutor and little else.
3. RO players are stuck with the mindset of botting is a good way of playing MMOs. While I’ll agree with SOME of their reasons for running a program that’ll play your character for you, it beats the whole point of playing the game. Still, even with that obvious fact, 15K botters flocked to Valkyrie and in two weeks time brought the server down for several emergency maintainance. it’s sort of like a Digg effect but it’s much worse since bots are usually configured to have persistent logging.

Think Level-Up still has a chance to change?