do not get this game

spacegh0st

i have played this game for 7 months now, and i can honestly say if anyone is thinking about getting this game that they should not. before i go on for anyone who says i've been playin for so long that it'd be hypocritical to tell others to not get it, but i got a free year subscription from work back in april. i've been playing this long because of the great friends i've met, and because of the potential we all thought this game had.

the biggest problem lies within the different companies that control ryl. gamasoft apparently owns the engine, and youxiland apparently developes the game based on the engine. planetwide games [pwg] then distributes this as the NA client. it's hard to tell exactly who does what tho, as they never actually explain it. there's basically no way to properly contact youxiland or gamasoft unless you are very fluent in korean, even then i don't think you'd get a response. pwg cannot even properly get results from them.

the game engine itself has been plagued by a memory leak that predates ryl: pote. there are numerous other bugs that cause crashes in the game not related to the memory leak. these crashes are not clean, they can and will corrupt your driver files. the coding of the game is so inefficient that it will also overheat your computer, quite possibly permanently ruining some/all of your hardware. people would go to the ryl: pote forums and talk about losing hardware only to have gm's say that it was the user's fault. [yeah i'm sure that's the case when half-life 2 at max settings didn't ruin my gfx card, yet this game did with all effects off and low quality textures enabled.] they even said the routine crashes were the users fault; it took them 5 months to start admitting that the game has serious programming errors.

serious coding problems might lead you to believe that only gamasoft and youxiland are to blame, but pwg has proven its own tendency to make bad decisions. the most recent patch had an ENORMOUS flaw in that the game would basically let you redo quests infinately after a certain amount of quests had been completed. this was reported by alpha by several testers, but was completely IGNORED. so the ryl community set out to do the new quests as there were very few quests before this point, but then ran into a brick wall. people attempted to contact gms to see what was wrong. there weren't any on at all. i've talked to gms personally and it was made clear that they did not want to sign on their gm char at all, as they themselves didn't even know what the alpha testers posted in the forums. this led to 90% of the game basically exploiting the quests, whether they knew it or not. players tried to figure out what was going on, because as usual a gm had posted in the forums 'the quests aren't bugged, it must be you.' the next day the server goes down to 'fix' issues with the quests. guess what?? the repeatable quest bug was not touched whatsoever. this further led players to believe they had done something wrong while doing the quests, and there was no indication to not attempt to redo any quests. pwg made the brilliant move of releasing this patch late wednesday night, so by the time the community seriously needed help it was the weekend, and all in house staff were at home off the clock. by the time monday came around it was already too late.

so about 40% of the game got banned, with an additional 10-15% quitting. some quit because they saw the lack of foresight in releasing this patch and had finally had enough with pwg's promises, some left because their good friends / opponents left. even more have left due to the punishments pwg handed out. they were not fair and balanced. some who were personally instructed by gms to repeat the quests lost levels, skill levels, gold, and fame. people even lost levels and gold that they had BEFORE the patch. saying the way pwg has handled this situation was unprofessional and inept is being quite generous.

this has already gotten long enough, so i'll stop. this is just a warning to those who considered picking up this game. pwg does not deserve any money with this game in the condition it's in. pwg doesn't respect the players or even their own gms [ask them if you can find em,] all they care about is money. this game still does have a lot of potential, but i doubt it'll ever be realized. i'd be shocked if they managed to plug the memory leak by spring of next year, saying nothing of the fabled underworld map and lvl 150 cap increase. it might be worth checking this game out next summer, but with a ton of great mmorpgs coming out you might as well forget about ryl: pote.