[Crono]

A lot of current "Valikorlians" aren't really even Valikorlians at heart. They claim they don't want a level up/"battle" system because it ruins roleplaying and whatnot, but what they don't realize is that when Valikorlia was revived in 2002, that's exactly what it had. It had a level up system and it had a way to hit other players (even though pking was illegal).

In 2003 Val was at it's prime, constantly battling with Era for second place on the playerlist, sometimes even grabbing first. It had a great level up system, first of it's kind on any playerworld in it's time, it had a nice and original gui, and it still had some RPing. Some may say that Val2003 killed RPing because everyone was either a newb or too busy leveling up, but honestly it wasn't really even that bad.

The current generation of players (on Val of course) are mostly midbies who probably started playing Valikorlia in 2004. They wouldn't understand how important it is to actually draw players to the server even if very little of the players are actually willing to RP. The problem in 2003 was that RPing wasn't really heavily encouraged or enforced. I blame this on the overworld. When Val got rid of the overworld and introduced the worldmap (2004), RP began to pick up again. I know that the level-up system was removed when the worldmap was introduced but I do truly believe the worldmap played a bigger role in encouraging RPing than the removal of the level-up system.

In my opinion (obviously) Val needs to re-introduce the level up system and introduce some kind of battle system to give the server the RPG element it needs. Valikorlia is not and never was supposed to be purely text based. New players are not a bad thing, if Val increased it's active playerbase by 40-50 players and only 15 of them RP it's still more RP activity which should be welcomed.