User blog:ZeroTigress/Penalty

Ragnarok Online's Renewal update brought a lot of changes to the game in order to make it comparable to modern MMORPGs. Among the changes implemented were an EXP penalty and a drop rate penalty. The concept behind the penalties is to encourage players to not linger around low level areas once they've leveled up high enough. But the inherent problem with that is that the monsters were not modernized for such a system to be viable. A lot of materials needed for crafting and such at higher levels drop from lower level monsters. In addition, players were being punished for being able to take down stronger monsters whereas in pre-Renewal they received the full EXP from higher level monsters.

Although the iRO community successfully voiced their call for the removal of the drop penalty, the EXP penalty remained in the game despite some players still being hesitant about the system. Of course, this wouldn't have been too much of an issue if the developers at kRO had bothered to make sure official servers received proper leveling content alongside the new level caps. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case and it's snowballed into a bigger problem the more kRO keeps the official servers behind in updates. Players were restricted in leveling options, which gave rise to Gramps TIs that have dominated the game since.

Seeing this, I decided to propose the idea of removing the EXP penalty in the recent Tiki Tuesday thread, which would solve some of the leveling issues that are currently prominent in iRO. CM Oda of iRO seems to agree (around 9:58 in the video) that it is something that RO players did not like in general and acknowledges that players abstain from playing RO because of it. I certainly hope they succeed in convincing kRO to remove the EXP penalty from iRO because it would bring it one step closer to being the game it was before.