The Ragnarok Online fansite I never stopped building

The first website I ever built was for a Ragnarok Online guild. I was a teenager, the site was horrible, and I was extremely proud of it. That guild dissolved the way all guilds eventually do, but the habit it gave me turned out to have a much longer respawn timer.

Almost twenty years later I am still making websites, and one of them is still about Ragnarok.

Ice cream for game time

I started playing in 2004, when LevelUp Games brought Ragnarok Online to Brazil. It was subscription based, which is a problem when you are a kid without a credit card, so you got creative. McDonald's ran a promotion where buying an ice cream got you a card with 24 hours of game time on it. I ate a lot of ice cream that year.

The rest of it was very 2004. Magazines with tips and maps that I collected and reread. Screenshots of other people's builds. Guides written by strangers who had clearly worked something out through pure trial and error, and were passing it on for nothing. Some of that stuck with me harder than I realised at the time.

bRO closes, LatamRO opens

The Brazilian server I grew up on, bRO, finally shut down on 29 July 2026. What we have now is LatamRO, which opened its beta on 14 May 2025 and launched properly on 28 May, with Gravity running the Latin American version themselves for the first time.

A new official server means everyone starts over, and everyone immediately wants the same things: where do I level, what do I put my points into, what does this skill actually do. The reference back then was bROWiki, which Dundé had already been bringing over to LatamRO. I still open it constantly, every single time I have a quest to do in game, and for that there is nothing better. A wiki is a wiki, though. It is very good at telling you what something is, and it was never built to sit there and do your arithmetic for you.

What I wanted was the other half: tools. Things you poke at until a number comes out. So I started MeuRag, in Portuguese, for this server.

It started as a page of leveling tips

The first version was small. A page with some leveling routes, the kind of thing I would have wanted when I was twelve and lost in Payon.

Then I built a skill simulator, by hand, typing out skill names and requirements while cross-checking them against bROWiki. It was tedious in a way I found weirdly relaxing, and when it worked, people used it. So I built the next thing. Then the next.

Everything after that grew the same way: someone asks for a tool, or reports that a number is wrong, and I go and fix it. There are suggestion and bug report buttons on the site, and they stay busy. Most of what MeuRag has today exists because a player asked for it, not because I planned it.

What is on it now

The leveling guide runs from level 1 to 250 and I keep it current as best I can. Around that there is a visual simulator for how your character and equipment will actually look, a build calculator for stats and skills, a damage simulator, a dailies tracker, an MVP timer, public builds you can browse for ideas, and a market guide about what your loot is worth.

The newest one is Fabricações: eight crafting calculators, one per crafting skill, from Special Pharmacy through to Rune Crafting. It tells you what your stats will actually yield, what to buy for a batch, and what each item that came out really cost you. That one took off faster than anything else I have added.

Where the people come from

I never really promoted it. I posted on the official LatamRO Discord a handful of times, and I still post when something big goes live, and that is about the extent of the marketing. Spamming the community with my own link felt like the wrong way to earn people.

It grew anyway. About 76 percent of the traffic is organic search, mostly Google, and lately a noticeable amount arriving from ChatGPT. A few YouTubers have mentioned the site in their videos, which I only found out about after the fact. Today it sits at over 1,500 registered users and averages around 400 people a day, most of them there for the leveling guide, the simulators, or to save a build.

Nobody found this thing because I was clever about distribution. They found it because they typed a very specific question into a search box and the answer happened to be on my website.

People donate to a free website

MeuRag is free, has always been free, and is going to stay free. Despite that, people donate. Small amounts, usually. And I find that genuinely moving in a way I did not expect.

Someone playing a twenty-year-old MMO decided that a fansite made by a stranger was worth a few reais of their own money, purely because it saved them some time. That is a nicer piece of feedback than any analytics dashboard has ever given me.

Why I keep it going

The game is old and the graphics are older and none of that matters, because community software was never really about the software. Every time the server patches something, players turn up within hours expecting the calculators to be right. Being the person they expect that from is a quietly wonderful thing to be.

I intend to keep it alive for a long time. The job description has not changed much since that awful guild site: make the thing the community needs, keep it fast, keep it free, and fix it when the game moves. Some hobbies refuse to die, and I stopped trying to kill this one a while ago.

One more thing

You may have already met him. There is a small Arch Mage keeping you company on this page. He walks while you scroll, turns around and heads the other way when you scroll back up, and sits down if you leave him alone for a few seconds.

Go on, poke him.

When I rebuilt this site, I said the photo of me that ripples when you poke it would not be the only thing hiding around here. This one was far more fun to build than it had any right to be, so I am going to try to leave something in every post from now on. Some will be easier to spot than others.