SubscribeBlue-kun and I were talking in IRC about me doing more “lol shitty mmo” posts. Earlier I was bitching about Rappelz, a Korean MMO, and the other day it was Imagine, a Japanese MMO, now it’s time to bitch about Perfect World, a Chinese MMO.
During Winter of 07 I decided to play Perfect World on the English Malaysian servers. Here’s the theme song of the Malaysian version. Every time I loaded up the client, I heard this fucking song.
Step into a not so Perfect World (1/3)
The English didn’t have a chance from the start
Perfect World’s appeal was purely graphic. Everything was shiny and there was some fairly in-depth character customization so you could make a hot elf chick but really everything besides that, and one other gimmick thing which I will get to later, game was kinda crappy. A lot of the community was corrupted by the Chinese. I guess that’s what you get for playing on the Malaysian servers but if they weren’t trying to attract English-speaking players then what is the point of even opening an English language server anyway. Hurr.
There were a lot of Chinese speakers who migrated over when the MY servers opened. They had played Perfect World before and knew what to do so any English players who didn’t have any previous knowledge had no chance against the Chinese from the start. On Delphi, the server I was on, the biggest guilds in the server’s infancy were Immortal, Espada, Memoire, Legacy, Shades and Freedom. Immo/Freedom/Legacy = Chinese, Memoire/Espada = Mixed bags (btw Memoire’s leader was some guy named Lelouchi and I would PM him saying that Schneizel is superior), and Shades = French. Many months later it became that, on the territory war map, the only 3 guilds there were Immortal, Legacy and Espada. I have no clue what the map looks like now, but 5mins on the MY forums has people bitching about Immortal, so they are probably still dominating everything and everyone. There was always this underlying thing about “uniting together instead of running off into your own cute little individual guilds because this game has no alliance system but allows for 200 people in one guild” but that got destroyed in the English community by carry over drama from previous games and shit like, “I don’t like your guild name.”
Because of all of the Chinese people, it was more common to call stuff by the Chinese terminology than the English names. In example, starting at lv 19, every 10 levels you’d get a quest with a tablet to go inside of the dungeon and do stuff. The dungeons were referred to as “FB19″ or whatever level the dungeon was. I still have no clue what the fuck FB stands for but apparently it’s some Chinese carry over term. Then when you partied with the Chinese people, at the start of the FB they’d call their rare drops. Bosses in the FB’s drop item patterns called molders which you needed to make sweet equips. So the Chinese people would call their drops based on the Chinese names, and if you said you had no clue what dropped or what you wanted, they’d randomly assign you something (it’d always be some crap item like an mdef necklace while they call the Chinese name of the 22mil+ gold axe). Like every fucking Werebeast and Warrior who ran through FB69, all of those fags wanted the Xue Sha, and Xue Sha is the only Chinese molder name I remember (English name is Blood Mafic Dual Axes) because I saw people go “MINE, MINE” about it so many times.
The Chinese also knew about all of the glitches in the game. There’s various automated events in Perfect World, one of which is a maze. When you reached the end of the maze, you’d be rewarded a sum of EXP based on how long it took you to complete the maze, and if you were the first person, you’d get a sweet accessory. Eye of the Forest Watcher or something. Normally, you’d have to run through the maze dodging monsters who 1hko you. If you got hit you’d be sent back to the very beginning so doing this was time consuming and shitty. The Chinese would edit their client files and use some method to run under the whole maze, but still get to the treasure boxes and pick up the goodies. An English player did this himself to expose the other cheaters and all of those people got banned. This caused an explosion among the Chinese, who were used to doing these things normally on the Chinese language servers and getting away with it. The Chinese continued to make alt. accounts and log in game and shout that the GM’s are dicks, this is conspiracy. Getting banned for cheating is common sense but apparently not in China. Eventually the GM’s even un-banned these people and then it was the English players’ turn to rage hard.
Perfect World is a cash shop game, and some of the items they’d sell in the cash shop were automatic HP/MP recovery tools called hierograms and hierograms were like, /r/equired for leveling. On the Malaysian servers, everything in the cash shop was cheap for Americans compared to what Malaysians would have to pay for it. This caused some culture shock when the International (read: American or rather, Actually English) version of Perfect World opened, and the pricing went by USD. 
(On the topic of the cash shop, in order to shout on whole chat you’d have to buy a trumpet from the cash shop, so when someone bought trumpets and spammed useless things, it was a sign that they were a $$$ person.)
Anyway, at level 59, Elf Priests get this skill called Recovery Array (but all of the Chinese carry overs call it zhen or bubble) which would decrease damage done and restore HP to party members in range. You’d cast it and it would automatically work though you’d be unable to move or do anything else and it’d drain MP every x seconds. Archers and Mages have similarly working skills that would do damage (though Archers took a glitch to make it work, which the Chinese knew about of course). So people would make AoE parties at spots where you’d pull mobs back towards the damage AoE’s and everyone would be healed by the Priest, etc. You’d want a Priest/Archer/Mage for their auto-AoE’s, then 3 pullers. Warriors and Werebeasts have buffs for Pdef and max HP respectively so you’d want one of each then get a random 3rd puller. You’d need hierograms for leveling efficiently in AoE parties, all of the AoE users would need MP hierogram, Mage and Priest would probably need an HP hierogram too for when they get by physical shit, the pullers would need HP hieros too because they’d be out of range most of the time.
Shouting for an AoE party though was like Rappelz dungeon party building except even more retarded because looking for a Werebeast for an AoE party is total shit. Werebeasts are that useful tank class that no one wants to fucking play because they start out slow as shit. There was also a thing about guild closeness and guild parties, so you’d want to recruit a Werebeast and then suck up to them big time.
Once you got your AoE party together you’d also need a spot to AoE at where the EXP doesn’t suck, and there was like 3? places where you can actually get non-sucky EXP, which are YKD (another Chinese carry over term, it’s a beach in an instance outside of an FB), spiders (some place up north), and at lower levels there was some peach tree hill place whatever I don’t remember. Chinese people would also put an alt. shop there with the text “THIS SPOT IS TAKEN” even if they weren’t using it. And if you took it and ignored their shop, bitch you’re getting pked the minute they get there.
In order to get the awesome pimpin’ equipment for PW, you’d do stuff like get molders from FB’s as I said previously, but the majority of the awesome shit came from the Holy Hall. Starting at level 60, you could enter the Holy Hall and use the furnaces and it was like a big ordeal to get your HH weapon because it has better attack power and it’d glow green. A++ e-penis. The Holy Hall had different modes, Single and Party mode, which would spawn different bosses. Single mode was also easier but less stuff would spawn during it and the drop rate was shittier so you’d really want to go run party mode. Killing HH bosses could take fucking forever but you needed the drops to make equipment and most HH equipment uses the lower level equipment as an ingredient to the higher level so you couldn’t sell off your lower level HH equip to get $$ to help buy the next level up.
Oh, and also related to equipment, the cash shop sold these things called Draco Pearls. There was a Pearl for each equipment rank, and you could use a Pearl of an equipment’s rank to have a 100% chance to upgrade. But in order to make a Pearl of a higher rank, you’d have to use a ridiculous amount of One Star Draco Pearls.
1 Star Pearl -- 1 one star pearls
2 Star Pearl -- 4 one star pearls
3 Star Pearl -- 10 one star pearls
4 Star Pearl -- 25 one star pearls
5 Star Pearl -- 60 one star pearls
6 Star Pearl -- 130 one star pearls
7 Star Pearl -- 215 one star pearls
8 Star Pearl -- 405 one star pearls
9 Star Pearl -- 750 one star pearls
Green Sea Pearl ( 10 Star ) -- 1370 one star pearls
Illusion Pearl ( 11 Star ) -- 2525 one star pearls
Red Blaze Pearl ( 12 Star ) -- 4645 one star pearls
Perfect World has weekly territory wars. You’d bid on lands to attack, and then at the end of the bidding period you got randomly generated times for when your war began, times which were all convenient for the Chinese player base but rarely ever convenient for actual English speakers. 
The first war when you take over the territory, assuming its unclaimed, was a PvE war where you’d have to fight monsters. I had a guild and we managed to do this, but that’s for PW Rant Part 3. After that it was GvG war where someone would bid on you to attack you. During these, territory war would end when one of the crystals breaks, so defenders would either protect their crystals or try to attack the enemy crystals, and attackers would try to break the defenders crystal. Territory war though is really only about having a bunch of high level warriors, mages and archers. The territories never reset back to the PvE so new players basically have no chance at territory war unless they join an already established guild. (By the way, I heard there are various glitches that could be used in territory war that had to do with walls. I bet the Chinese used them and got un-banned every time.) Naturally, the Chinese took over like all of the territory map. It’s like the English didn’t have much of a chance to begin with, and the Chinese people were just fucking with our heads and pretending like we had a chance by not attacking us.
When you did FB runs, you’d want to do them with tablets. For each boss, there’d be a stone and quest NPC’s would give you a tablets to use at the stones. Using tablet @ stone = Gives you a quest to kill a boss. The quest would then give you nice EXP right after you killed the boss. The EXP scales as you get higher for doing the quest, so high level players would offer to run through the FB’s with lower levels. However you’d also have to supply wine. Normally FB’s took forever and a fucking day because monsters rape you so you couldn’t go and commando in. Werefoxes and their pets were used to pull mobs 1 by 1. They’d make their pet tag a mob, then un-summon it, then re-summon it right by their side and the mob would still come charging towards the summon. The alternate option to this was to make wine in Ancient Dragon City, then give it to an old bum NPC at the start of the dungeon. He would then use Unlimited Blade Works (no, really) and like 98% of the mobs would be gone so you could run through to the bosses.
The amusement of trading in wine for UBW was like the only other good thing about the game for me. Everything else was this cesspool of “China this, China that.”
In part 2, my class, the Elf Priest, and in part 3, running a guild on this game.
nuke 
aKi 
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2949040
this encapsulates my opinions of “Perfect World” in a nutshell
also