The RoM Rollercoaster

Note: wrote this a couple of weeks ago, and felt that it gave some insight into RoM and thus might as well post now.

Playing a free MMO is kind of like riding a rollercoaster inspired by a yo-yo on speed. Over the past few weeks my experience of RoM has been all over the place, ranging from great moments, to appallingly awful moments, until it ends up pretty depressing at the time of writing. Right now I am sitting in my player house, as I have been for the past 10 hours, doing absolutely nothing for a stupid reason. But lets not get ahead of ourselves...

Right now I am sitting at 45/35, and only 5 levels away from reaching the level cap in a free MMO for the first time, and in any MMO for the second time. Once again, a lot of time was spent grinding out monotonous daily quests in order to level, occasionally sped up by the quick burst of new quests offered as I hit a new level. I did a run of Mystic Altar with some guildmates which is a 45 instance, and that was quite fun, but aside from that most of my time has been taken up just trying to hit the level cap. When I hit 45 on my Scout I moved into the next zone called Ravenfall which has mobs level 46+.

I did a couple of quests before running into an empty zone, got disconnected, and found out I was dead when I logged back in. Death in RoM means a 5% xp debt (5% of the total amount you need to reach the next level) and just one death is extremely annoying. When I logged in the next morning I died twice more due to an elite mob which I hadn't seen and some glitchy healing spells. Not long later after that I died a fourth time, and that's when I decided to level my priest.

Because of the new elite 35/35 abilities the P/S combination has become one of the best healers in the game and I plan to have a go at it. I bought some good gear cheaply off the AH and gave it to my priest and set off on my merry way. As I was trying to get my 20/20 elite ability for my Priest I realized that there was one item that I needed which wasn't on the AH. I asked my guild if any of them had any, and one guys says he can get me one if I help him out. Turns out he had been pking a bit of late and had bad reputation. This means that he was unable to go near cities as the guards would kill him. According to him if I pked a couple of people and got my rep down then we would be able to kill each other and together get our rep back up. (As killing pkers gives you good rep) Unfortunately this didn't work out leaving me with -125 rep with no way to get rid of it other then wait.

Turns out it takes 20 minutes to gain 1 rep point and you also have to be logged on. Great. So that's what I'm doing now, sitting by myself and waiting for my rep to reset. This pk system is truly terrible and I can't understand why anyone would willingly go through this, because it nearly pushed me to quit. I gotta go study now. :P