The Progression of Ragnarok Online

You may have heard of this MMORPG, it was the first Korean MMOG to make it big outside of South Korea. It's name is Ragnarok Online, and fits in the time frame between first and second generation MMOGs, making it almost guide less (no quest chains, minimal tutorials), and very "grindy". Do note this is a historical post, as Ragnarok Online recently went through a "renewal" and much of this information was changed.

Sometimes known as Lagnarok Online, Final Fantasy Tactics Online  , or that game with cute sprites with 3D backgrounds.

The speed at which characters leveled had to do with many different things: which class the player was, how good their gear was, how much they were able to spend on supplies, what their stats were, what their player skill build was, and if they wanted to play solo or in a party. We shall select the cookie cutter build INT/DEX Wizard build that I know best... since I remade that same character about 4 times over the course of a year.

You create your character, name it Bob the Magical Wizard, you pop into the world, and are promptly dropped into the Novice Tutorial grounds. The class progression always starts you at the Novice class, which has only one passive skill that gives you basic abilities (using emotions, sitting, creating parties, opening storage, class changing). This is a mediocre part of the game, as a future Mage you started your character with 9 points in INT, 9 in DEX, and the rest in either LUK or AGI, and are restricted to do melee damage with a character that has only 1 STR. No worries, it's cake, a bit slower than someone who would make a Thief or Swordsman, but cake. It would take about an hour or two to reach job level 10 (RO splits levels into Base levels and Job levels, base levels give stat points, job levels give skill points). It's time to leave the tutorial zone, and go into the clueless grind that is RO.

The game will throw you into the town of your choice, and you must finish the class change quest to change into a Mage. Once you class change into a Mage, then it is time to shine. At the beginning both the Mage and Archer class have it easy levelling as they both have powerful ranged attacks, and can get away killing monsters without ever getting hit. It also helps that there are quite a few monsters that don't move at all, and as a Mage all you have to do is stand there and drop magic on them from a distance, so the monsters never retaliate. Levelling at this point is fast, and quite enjoyable. Stats wise the Mage would pump INT, and not invest in any other stats, skill wise the Mage can get defensive skills like Fire Wall which allows them to fight moving monsters, or some disabling magic like Frost Diver which freezes and immobilizes monsters when it succeeds. The levelling soon becomes slow though, since in general the EXP needed to level goes up in bursts every 5 levels, and soon even strong monsters would give less than 0.01% of your total EXP. Once the Mage reaches either job level 40 or 50 (or any number in between) they change class change to Wizard. At this time the Mage has probably maxed out their INT at 99, and are now working on pumping DEX, which increases cast speed.

When the Mage class changes to Wizard the job level is reset to 1, but they keep all their Mage skills. Since the job level is reset, getting the first few job levels is very quick and easy, and accessing new powerful Wizard skills opens up many new ways to level. The monst powerful skill Storm Gust can almost be used as a blanket all AoE damage spell, and also disables monsters by freezing them. Levelling in a party now becomes very viable, and the speed of gaining job levels is very quick, while base levels are not as quick, since base level is not reset when class changing. Once Bob the Magical Wizard reaches a high base level (90+) the EXP required to gain a level increases drastically, almost quadratically. By this time the Wizard would have already maxed their job level at 50, and will painstakingly need to take hours, either solo or in a party, to gain a tiny bit of exp. To put it in perspective the easiest monster to solo is a Sting which gives 4081 base EXP, and at level 91 the Wizard needs 11,649,960 EXP to gain a level, so 2855 Stings equals one level. One Sting would take about 30 seconds to kill and maybe 15 seconds to find another one on average, so about 35 and a half hours of grinding for a level. It gets even worse after the player reaches base level 95 as shown in the chart below:

The last level from 98-99 takes 99,999,998 EXP, a 72% increase from the EXP required from 97-98. There is no wonder why the first person to reach level 99 on RO was a botter... seriously. 

 It also does not help that if a player dies they lose 1% of their maximum EXP, which can be hours and hours of play time if they are at a high level. This game can be very soul crushing, but also very rewarding, as much of the stats work quadratically just like EXP progression.

The stats all progress linearly until they hit a break point, where the stat would jump up quadratically. These break points happen for STR ever 10 points (DEX if you're an Archer/Hunter), and INT every 5 and 7 points for maximum and minimum damage and gives a bonus of x^2 damage, where x is Stat/Stat Break Point. More graphs (from iROWiki):

So from this progression, it is no wonder why the developers decided to overhaul the whole entire game, and attempted to change all these formulas to a linear progression. If they had kept going the way they had players  would be completely over-powered, and the game would be either one-shot them or you get one shot. The developers actually continued the trend for a few years, and the end-game guild siege called War of Emperium was pretty much a one shot fest. It wasn't until recently that they changed the whole system to accommodate growth for the game, though the game is over a decade old, so the developers may have not foreseen this at the start.

Personally I think that a logarithmic growth, or any sort of progression with diminishing returns would have been better for the progression of the game. This would of allowed for long time growth, and also encouraged players to mix around their stats rather than remaking their character if they messed up their stats and missed a bonus break point. Diminishing returns would mean that the lower stats would give good benefits, but adding too much may not be as desirable, and let the player decide which other benefits they could work on, or simply just add to the already very high stat.

The "renewal" of Ragnarok Online actually changed many of the resources to increase linearly, with 1 INT meaning 1.5 MATK, and 1 STR equals 1 ATK (though there is a bonus...but let's not get into that). Playing the game with these new mechanics does reduce the importance of stats quite a lot, and allows for the game to pump out new content that would of been completely unbalancing using the old progression, such as gear that gives +4 INT, when back in the day +2 INT was a giant boost to damage if it hit a break point.

In the end the renewal system did what I wanted, the progression of the game is much more linear, even the levelling is quite linear now. The only problem that still unbalances the game is the racial and elemental resistances, and the use of consumables to recovery health, but one might say it is what makes the game unique. None the less, the game will continue to stack these gear resistances, until it will reach a point where one resistance in particular: Demi-Human resistance which also encompasses other players in PvP, will reach 100%. This will cause every player, if they wear these gears, to do no damage to any other player, making PvP unplayable. These resistances should be looked into and reduced along with damage in the game, since the game right now, to offset these huge stacked resistances simply gives players skills that have massive damage multipliers (100000%+ sometimes). The developers should of scaled the resistances so they were much smaller to begin with, maybe starting with only small gains like 1% or 5%, rather than huge gains like 30% and 10%. The developers could also just removes these entirely, but this would take away from the game, since it was always a crucial part of the usefulness of gears.