Ragnarok LATAM Launches - Warts, In-Game Currencies and All

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On 28 May 2025, Gravity noted the launch of Ragnarok Online América Latina (LATAM), which was launched for players of Ragnarok around the Latin America region, including translations in Portuguese, Spanish, and English. There have already been streamers and others playing the server before launch as a part of its Open Beta phase, with the server running Episode 14.2, which includes Guild Wars, Bifrost Tower, Pyramid Nightmare Mode and all the requisite features 14.2 comes with.

In order to try and hook new players, Gravity have opted to create various incentives at launch to try and get people playing and staying on the server, as well as to try and woo guilds into staying on the server. There's a system where you receive a token every 3 hours you play which can be exchanged for relatively useful items and an incentive for logging in every day which is exchanged for a variety of costume-type and healing items,all of which if not used will be deleted in July.

There is also a special event in which a "king poring" is spawned somewhere in Geffen or Payon Fields, and killing it will grant a guaranteed drop of Emperium, and a roulette which is conducted via the website, usable up to 15 times, which seems like a relatively blatant giveaway to incentivise new players to join.

The Joy-Coin grift

Now that the relativelty benign stuff is out of the way, I think I feel I should make a call to action for players in the Latin American region. Demand that Gravity use a real-money system and scrap Joy Coins. In the European Ragnarok counterparts, all of the purchases are shown in the currency that the user used to top up, and the price for items is set in real money. Sadly, people of LATAM, equally deserving of clear and fair transactions, aren't considered with quite the same equanimity -- what could perhaps be humorously referred to as a kind of Joy Coin grift towards anti-consumer practices.

Joy Coins may make it easier for Gravity given that there are multiple countries which are using the server, however, convenience to a company's operations is nothing in comparison to protecting the rights of people, whatever the country. Using in-game currencies is in my opinion, and, let's be honest, a dishonest way of obscuring how much something costs so that it's harder for the player to see how good a deal they are getting.

And this is great for Gravity, but for the players, they're doomed to have to, with each transaction, check the rough cost in their local currency for the item they want to buy, and this isn't the first time companies have pulled this kind of anti-player tactic.

Players of RO LATAM should demand that Gravity ensure that the cost of items is shown in-game for the item they are about to purchase so they know if they're getting a good deal or not. In the opinion of this author, Joy Coins are bullshit.

Reddit and Facebook users vent their spleens

In other related complaints, there seem to be a decent amount of people scattered across the RO diaspora that do have reasons to complain, and most of these relate to lag on the server but from players joining from Europe and Asia, which aren't the service's target region, and are geographically distant. It does seem that players in Latin America do have some grounds to complain given that in this age of easily-scaled server infrastructure, many players when trying to log in got "service unavailable", which for most RO players was a rite of passage if they've ever played private servers, the naughty little scamps.

Not to undermine their grievances however, it is a relatively trivial thing to perform these days in the age of cloud gaming, however, we have to bear in mind that AEGIS, Ragnarok's server software was written long before the age of scaling and cloud infrastructure and could be said that ironically is not quite as resiliant or scalable as some of its private counterparts. Nevertheless maybe Gravity could have planned to scale up their infrastructure a little to take into consideration the spike of players that would gravitate towards the service at launch, from all geographical areas

In conclusion

Despite the requisite amount of bitching, this is really all to say -- same old, same old. Even though there are paid items, at a first glance they don't appear to be completely pay-to-win, at least from my perspective. If I'm wrong on this, please feel free to correct me in the comments. Most likely since it's a Gravity server, there's going to be somewhat of a constant update in content and it has more of a chance to be a well-run server, but like all ventures -- without adequate good governance and people running the game who understand it, they cannot last for long.

Here's hoping that Gravity remove the Joy Coin nonsense and focus on providing a game which is of value to its players and is of good value for money.

All opinions expressed in this article belong to its author and do not reflect the opinion(s) of ROPP, Ragnarok Wiki, or other affiliated authors.

References

• Gnjoylatam.com. (2025). Ragnarök Online Latin America. [online] Available at: https://ro.gnjoylatam.com/en/event/launch/gameevent [Accessed 1 Jun. 2025]. (https://archive.is/wip/50qM7)
• Gnjoylatam.com. (2025). Ragnarök Online Latin America. [online] Available at: https://ro.gnjoylatam.com/en/event/launch/gmevent [Accessed 1 Jun. 2025]. (https://archive.is/wip/6rDE6)
• Gnjoylatam.com. (2025). Ragnarök Online Latin America. [online] Available at: https://ro.gnjoylatam.com/en/event/launch/roulette [Accessed 1 Jun. 2025]. (https://archive.is/wip/Hyfb5)

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