May Chixilog pa ba? A look at my Ragnarok Online days.
I remember my Ragnarok days back in 2004. I was invited by my friends to play Ragnarok Online, it’s the biggest game out now! Dapat maglaro ka rin! Being one of the “want to be in” kids I decidedly gave it a shot. I made my first character and named it after my biggest crush in high school. Mas masarap naman maglaro na babae ang tinitignan mo diba? That’s what I said to myself. Staring at a male avatar all day is boring; not to mention the lack of bouncing bewbies. I decidedly made a female thief just because of the sole purpose; bouncing twins when in battle stance. That gave me a kick every time and was one of the major motivating factors that made me attack one monster to the next.
After 1 week as a novice, it was finally time to change my job into thief. I know I know, we didn’t have a newbie ground back then, no starting equipment and no starting money. Times were difficult and you could see parties of 8 or more novices leveling together. Back in those days, you had to pay to get into a party. Not everyone knew how to start one. The leader would most often just sit his ass in one spot and advertise a “Party dito!” chat box over his head. Parties would usually end up as flame chats. Everyone was immature and would flame and diss anyone just for the heck of it. I died a lot too. The only stat I ever raised was agility and I could flee 8 monsters at a time. Pre-comodo, flee was always 100% and there was no penalty no matter how many monsters were attacking you. The server had around 11,000 people at the time, Chaos lang ang server noon and everyone would Kill steal everyone. It was damn annoying when a high level hunter would go around the noobie fields and DS everything. Grabe yun, everyone was out for themselves.
But despite the negativities, those were the best days of Ragnarok Online. Everyone had bobo builds, everyone though second job classes were gods, Priests were rare and I always loved the sight of a dead priestess (panties anyone?), I hated hunters with a mission (I still remember you Doppelganger ; .!. to you), everyone tried to scam everyone and Sakkats were the best items evar!
I remember my first guild, Parokya ni Edbang; I paid 10k to get into that guild. Pero after 30 minutes kinick agad ako. That was freaking frustrating, yung 10k was a months worth of leveling; I was 30 then. Grabe yun, I followed the guild leader around for 3 hours. Tapos sabay pub sa gilid nya na “scammer to paki ban GM”. I always though that Blacksmiths were GM’s, I would follow one around and sabay limos. Kasi, the first character to give me zeny was a black smith, pang pots yun, 10k. Sayang saya ako noon, kasi that was the first time I had 20k nung binigyan nya ako. I spent all of that on red pots, wala pa kasing Awakes noon. Gravity was hell bent on making the gamers life difficult, and that made it fun.
May booklet ata na binenta ang LUG sa Cagayan de Oro City, or it was from a kids magazine that had the RO map and some information on characters. Soon after that I decided to make an acolyte, kasi gusto ko magheal at makatulong e. Not realizing na everyone will beg you for heals, you will run out of SP and once you do make SP everyone will beg for heals again and the process continues. Anyway, I discovered that acolytes could do business by providing teleports. Dami kasing tao sa GH noon and every ranged charater wanted to be there. So I set up shop sa lower left Prontera where everyone does business. I would ask for 1k for teleports and business was booming the first week. Unfortunately after some time may kompetensya na ako. They were offering heals and buffs AND teleports for 1k. Tae yun. So I decided na magpapalevel muna ako so that I can match their offers. So I did, everyone was at churchyard noon. There was no hunter flies then and leveling there was a breeze. I was the one who kept on spamming “GM we want BAPHOMET!” but wala talagang na spawn na Baphomet noon. Damot kasi ng mga GM hikhikhik. I did get to level 50 and went on with my business after 2 weeks of leveling, heal bombing and spamming for baphomet spawns and I went on with my “business”. Ang nakakaangas lang talaga noon is when someone pays me for a teleport everyone else jumps into the teleport. Libre sila, isa lang yung nagbabayad and I hated it. Kasi the patch that disallows teleporting on someones foot was implemented and that allowed freeloaders to reign. So what I did was, Fakaportal! I opened a portal at one spot and everyone would follow there and then cancelled and spawned a portal nearer to my costumer. It was funny to see a stream of people running from one spot to another.. Parang mga uto! haha.. But then I discovered the best thing ever! After opening a portal I would immediately run to the portal and open a chatbox; blocking everyone from getting in the portal. That was win! Ang saya saya ko noon. I would LOL so hard IRL and everyone around me sa internet cafe would be WTF!?
I never got to second job back in the day. Failing grades and constant cut classes caught up to me and my parents banned me from the internet cafe. Well that was for a few weeks, I was back online after 3 weeks but decided to stop. My conscience never allowed me to be adik mode at all. I decided to leave my story of my chixilog adventures in future posts. Let’s just say na for 6 months I never spent a single peso on load, tapos my free items pa ako! wahihiih.. I hope you had fun reading this. 
It would also be great if you added your oldest screenies sa comments! Contest/Prizes? Hmm. I’ll think about it.
here’s my email. mister.cruise@yahoo.com
Very nice and moving story, I think many people would be able to relate partially to this story.
I joined the game much later, in fact 2 years later, in 2006. It was the time when most population on my server were bots, until the premium servers, what they are called now, managed to curb bots, by “cleverly” sending them to the free version of the game. It seems “regular” bots are unlikely to pay for subscriptions, so as soon as the free accounts stopped on premiums, they all moved to Valk (free server on iRO).
I had been on Iris until last year. That’s almost 4 years of my life devoted to RO, in which I had time to make 3 transcendants, but with a lot of effort, by partying with good friends, and for the most part soloing. I must admit the game was very addictive and it definitely had some devastating impacts on my life. For one I had lost contact with many friends, because I had stopped hanging around with some of them, so I could level. The times I did go out with them I would constantly think about WoE or leveling and ended up not having fun. To a certain extent my grades had also dropped, and there was a time I actually did drop out, and to make matters worse I was incapable of holding a job because of my addiction.
It was not all sad stories though, I made a lot of friends on iRO. Some of which I’m still friends with to this day, and chat to on msn and on facebook. In fact my best friend is from iRO, even though we both no longer play and live miles away from each other we talk all the time. We have never met, but often think of it. She is gorgeous too, and we had something of an iRO relationship back 2 years ago.
We always hang around ingame, leveling, talking about stuffs, MvPing, we even WoEd together a couple of times even though we were in enemy guilds. We were like Romeo and Juliet, once I slaughtered her whole guild on my pala and she slaughtered all my guild on her sin X, but we just couldn’t kill each other so we just sat next to the Empirium and waited till we got rushed. We were like Bonny and Clyde.
We experienced a great many things, we run all over, from novice ground until the later levels of transcendency. I have many screenies, we did Bios, Nameless, Thors, brit GD, and a lot of other places regularly, and we MvPed quite a bit, Baphomet, Valkyrie Randgris, Pharaoh, etc. in fact I think we MvPed almost all of the MvP except Ifrit and the special map ones. We got the Klux too, it was many hours of great fun.
Your story reminded me of my days on iRO, and for all the bad things that came IRL, I never regret having played it. All good things must come to an end, and now even though I’m a complete different more matured and resposible guy than I was back then, sometimes I still think that RO was really the perfect reality, for me its the same experience as in the film Avatar. I was so into the game, that the game seemed more real than IRL, and I absolutely loved every bit of it, and the friendships I made there are real indeed, and I will keep for as long as I can. I have fond memories of RO, and I loved being a part of it. That’s my RO story. All the best to you!