Why pay to play WoW every month when you can try a free MMORPG? Silk road is a free game that allows you to form your own style of character with many weapons and equipment, many quests to be done, guilds, trade-runs, and more features and functions being added all the time. The latest European expansion to the game offers another chunk of map, more weapons, quests, everything else, and lead into more expansions to come.

Another update expected in May 2008 will offer more equipment and yet another section of map, to the already huge world!

So what exactly do you do? Well whatever ya want really. If you're a guild master you will try to compete for top guild. Hold guild wars where you fight and battle members of other guilds, take hold of fortresses and so on.

Once you hit level 20 you can take one of three jobs. Trader, Hunter, or Thief.

A traders job is to purchase items from one city and deliver them to another to be sold for a high profit. A hunter's job is to protect the trader from monsters and thieves. The thieves job of course is to kill the trader, steal the loot, and sell the items for %100 profit.

Balance changes are made to the game to keep aspects fair, developers inspect the servers weekly to keep things running smoothly.. special items and other characters are available to purchase with "Silk" which costs real money, but offers nice additions to the game. You can buy animals to collect loot for you or even to help you attack.

The game offers many skills for you to attain and level at your own will. For example if you build a Chinese character, you can choose between blades, glaive, or bow for a weapon. You can also choose ice, lightning, or fire for skills. You can even mix these skills as well. If you want to benefit from some of the lightning skills, feel free to level it up as you wish, while still maxing out your fire skills to deal massive damage. European characters offer more types of characters, and run off a different skill set from Chinese. Europeans offer warrior type characters, rogue, mage, warlock, cleric, and bard. All of which can also be combined as you like.

Completing quests will give you EXP, SP (Skill Points) Gold, items, weapons, all depending on the quest. And will give direction with the game.

The Level cap right now in the game is level 90, but is very hard to reach. This level cap is also occasionally upgraded with game updates.

There are many servers to log on to and play,  however characters are non-transferable. Whatever server you create your character on, is the server you must play on to continue that character.
Though there are many servers it can be difficult to log on to play, but with some searching you can find programs to help you log on faster. Just find the right time of day to log on and you'll be fine, don't give up!

Silk road is an excellent FREE MMORPG, check it out at www.silkroadonline.net

NOTE: This post is shortened from the original version available at my blog, unknownwarrior33.blogspot.com
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I'm not saying video games never lead to real violence. If you live in such conditions; because of your environment, your age, mental disabilities, etc.; that murder seems like a viable option, video games might just be the driving force that lead you to action. But that's a very different message than the one people like Jack Thompson are sending. These people want us to believe that video games can turn any normal, well-behaved person into a murderer, and they are always the first media target after a young person commits murder or suicide. I've played all the Grand Theft Auto games, Silent Scope, Red Steel, the Mortal Kombat series, Doom (including levels designed by one of the Columbine shooters), Quake, and even Night Trap. However, of all the kids at my high school, I am probably the LEAST likely to ever shoot anyone. You can't look at video games as a universal evil; they only factor into violence in rare, specific cases in which they are not the main culprits anyway.

If Jack Thompson and other "crusaders" want to stop youth violence, they need to stop looking at the easy target of video games and start improving living conditions. If regular citizens want to protect their kids from violence at school, they should teach their kids not to mistreat others. Getting rid of violent video games might help a little bit, but improving people's lives will stop the raw emotions that inspire the violence in the first place.

Gravity, www.gravity.co.kr, is well known for successful MMORPGs such as Ragnarok Online and ROSE Online are currently developing the sequel to Ragnarok Online, Ragnarok Online 2. The first was and still is very popular with a record of more than 700,000 concurrent players all around the world.

Some of the new features of the sequel are:

-Daring profession system that can not be seen from any other MMORPG.
-3 different races that have not only different appearance

s but a totally different concept and growth system.
-Cute and attractive characters created using realistic lights of full 3D
-Community system that has been advanced to the limit.
-Special system that enables users to create there own combat system and make/grow their own weapon.
-Many quests that are equipped with well constructed narratives

No time-frame is given for the release date but, from a trailer a while back, it said "Winter" so hopefully we should be seeing an open beta for this game not too far away.

Please visit the website for more information, screenshots and trailers.