Gems are garbage, you are not missing anything there.
Better than RO? When you die and your weapon does not have 4 slots, it drops out?
Dude, never saw that happening on Ragnarok.
Unless you went on Nightmare PvP.
Also, I guess the topic were solved a long time ago, since this is veeeeeeery old, I guess after some time CBT 2 ended.
I’d keep my gems in storage or feed them to other gems as soon as possible, but sometimes death comes when it is not expected.
I could accept it if I died due to my own mistakes. But when my death is caused by the client freezing for a whole minute, I feel that a penalty is unjustified.
Also, I still remember the first time I died. I was around level 30 after doing as many orsha quests as I could, and working on klaipeda’s quests. Was exploring the level 20 mines, trying to get 100% map completion, when suddenly I found myself in a level 200+ map and dead instantly before I could react. Never knew about the whole gem penalty thing, and was initially quite distraught by the loss of what, to a low level player, was quite significant.
I think the death penalty should just be durability reduction on your equips. That way, it would scale appropriately according to the player’s level, since higher level gear costs more to repair.