Well part 1 is inviting everyone back that has been a supporter of RO. Within the day or so any account that is not suspended, and has made a subscription/Points/VAS purchase since 2004 is going to get a code emailed to them for 14 days free subscription. These codes will only work 1 time per account, but that shouldn't be a problem given the next part.

The above is how we are letting everyone back in for the holidays.
And below is the big news that many of you have already thought about.

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.