Written by Top 100 Arena on 2012-05-26

1 War of Emperium

2 Private Servers

3 Unique Character Builds

4 Free Trade System

5 Hotkeyed Weapons and Armor

Like a Fine Wine

Compared to today’s games, Ragnarok Online, or RO as its players call it, is not as graphics intensive and the game mechanics are nothing when matched against games with expansions and updates. However, RO is still one of the best games to play out there, for a variety of reasons. Players of more sophisticated games should beware of knocking RO, because after all these years, it still brings in new players and still has the thrill it had when it first came out. Here are five reasons why.War of Emperium, or WoE, is the end game content for RO, and it has more staying power than a lot of other games. Most games, when you max out and have all your gear, you’re done. War of Emperium is a PvP war similar to Capture the Flag (or Tol Barad, for all you WoWers). The objective is to capture a castle, and when WoE is over and the castle is yours, you get loot from treasure chests in a secret room only the guild master can enter. The longer you hold your castle without it being taken by another guild, the more treasure chests you get, which increases your chances to get rare loot. As an end-game function, WoE provides years of fun for players, and updates make it even better as it adds gear and new strategies. WoE is always changing, and this dynamicness about it brings players back long after they max level and get all the latest gear.There are literally thousands of private RO servers out there, and to top it off, retail RO, or IRO, is free-to-play these days. Most servers have ways for you to get end-game gear easily by either donating or better yet, playing the game. Private servers also have custom options and mini-games to keep players interested long after they’ve mastered all the dungeons. Some private servers have even experimented with the admittedly glitch third job classes, drawing in even more players who want to try out the expanded skills they can achieve.These days, most games assign you your stats. Not so in RO. You raise your stats yourself, according to what you want your character to be. An example of this would be the priest class. Most priests will run as magic classes, but a truly creative player will run a priest in battle mode, with melee skills and very little magic involved. More often than not, your gear doesn’t determine your stats either, like in other games. Because of the carding system in RO, you can also personalize your weapons, armor, and accessories to taste rather than using weapons that have set stats they add to.In most games, items bind to the character that equips them. Not so in RO, which provides several possibilities. First of these is that you can have several characters who use the same gear, such as my biochemist, champion, and high priest, who are all dependent on dexterity, and as such I pass my dexterity gear back and forth between them. Secondly, you can pass gear to lower level characters to help them out, whether they are your own or belong to someone else. Lastly, you can sell this gear, even if you’ve already used it, if you decide you didn’t like it or would rather have the zeni (in-game currency) for it. This boosts the game economy far better than going to a static auction house.A major difference between RO and most other games is that in RO, you can switch out your equipment in mid-fight. This is not only good for PvE situations where you might run into monsters of different attributes, but it is excellent and very highly used in PvP situations to counter enemy attacks (obviously, many, many people do this during WoE). The variety of cards you can equip your items with make you extremely versatile, and being able to switch between these during encounters makes you even moreso.Ultimately, RO is a very old game with a lot of things going for it. It’s up to each player to find their niche in game and work with it. But just because the game is old doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the staying power of games like WoW or Tomb Raider. Give it a shot today - I recommend the Animus server but I am totally biased, as Animus is my home – and see for yourself why it is that after six years and several MMOs, I keep going back to RO!