Ragnarok Online going free-to-play in March

Before the holidays, Ragnarok Online announced that it would be going free-to-play sometime in early 2011; that date is now set to early March, and free gametime is being added to subscriber accounts to make sure they don’t have a lapse in their subscription.

Instead of having differences between the servers, a premium subscription model will be added, granting bonus experience, drops, upgrade rate, extended storage, reduced death penalty, and access to premium content dungeons and NPCs.

However, premium accounts will still be required to create accounts on premium servers (Valkyrie will remain unaffected), meaning that players will still have to pony up for a subscription or receive a special invitation to create a character on the current premium servers. This rule is being enforced to prevent bots.

Ragnarok Online is published by Gravity Interactive (WarpPortal), publisher of ROSE Online, Requiem, and Dragon Saga.

Ragnarok Online Gameplay Screenshot

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We will be going Free2Play in 2011. We are working out the timeline and the minute details (like our tools to handle it) currently, but it is planned to happen in the first month or 2 of 2011. We will switch to a premium subscription model, that will control:

• Bonus exp
• Bonus drops
• upgrade rate
• death penalty
• extended storage
• access to premium content NPCs
• Access to premium dungeons.
• And accesss to create characters

In reality the extra offerings will be more than it is currently, but what it won’t control is access to the game on premium servers. Everyone that thinks about this has asked almost immediately about the bot stopping, and for that we have an answer that only premium accounts can create characters on the current premium servers, thus an initial payment, or a special invitation would be needed to create a character on our current Premium servers. Valkyrie players will get an option of the premium account as well, but you can create a few characters on Valk without an initial purchase; thus Valkyrie is still a free server.