Having played both games to cap, over 2 years of sro and over a year of PW, I would say PW is a lot better.
Graphics: [ Edge to SRO on skills, Perfect World on landscape ]
Silkroad has much better looking skills, especially the warlock class. The warlock class on Perfect World consists of a werefox/venomancer that rarely ever uses the warlock abilities and just straight out nukes in pvp when necessary. The cleric animations and wizard animations on Silkroad are amazing compared to the Perfect World counterpart. Though flashy skills are good eye candy, one can't help but notice Perfect World's awesome landscapes. The ground, trees, water, and cities look awesome and are WAY better than Silkroads. Silkroad had constantinople going for them, but no one ever stood there for longer than a day due to the fact that you out leveled it in an afternoon. On the highest settings, Perfect world looks prettier than Silkroad. Silkroads bloom sucks, Perfect World's 'soften' is almost as bad. Final note, skills go to SRO and everything else goes to Perfect world.
Customer Support: [ Edge to Perfect World ]
Nonexistant on SRO. No one can argue that. Perfect World's costumer support is decent during typical west coast working hours. My paypal transaction was taking too long so I talked to GM directly and they fixed it in a couple of minutes. GM's regularly hold events and give out prizes whilst speaking on global/world chat. Over the past year that I've played Perfect World, GM activities have declined though, which in part is a good thing because they usually gathered at events outside of a safe zone where player killing occured, which is completely understandable because of the PK server i played on.
Community: [ Edge to Perfect World ]
Unless you are Arabic or Turkish, it's a little difficult grasping the silkroad community. Chances are if you are reading this, you don't pertain to either of those two communities. Perfect World International is based in California with some outside non-english speaking counties IP banned. When you get killed or kill someone, there will be flames in complete english. There are quite a bit of Serbians that play and unless they are speaking to eachother in town, you will rarely see a conversation that isn't in full English.
Aside from a language barrier, Silkroad players always seemed like complete douchebags unless you made an effort to actually talk to the man behind the bot. Chances are you probably just had to accept the fact that you were going to get KSed like it or not unless you switched grinding locations. Perfect World has an older community with quite a bit of people holding real jobs, thus sounding a bit more educated and polite. You will find there are younger people playing the game too, but it's easier getting to their good side considering language barriers are almost non existant. Scammers, Goldbuyers, Botters, etc on Perfect World dont exist really since they get instantly banned when caught.
Quests: [Edge to ...neither ]
Quests are just quests. Whether it involves killing a certain mob 50 times or picking up an item that a monster drops, it's all just generally boring. Perfect World does have a seperate inventory for quest items though (quest items automatically go there). Silkroad has the auto-pickup pet which is a huge bonus. There are a lot more travel quests in Perfect World that take advantage of the game's flying mechanism early in the game, but as you level and get to new areas, teleporting becomes much more convenient and the quests just become a nuisance.
Grinding: [Edge to SRO]
Prior to the Euro update, SRO grinding completely sucked. Hand grinding on sro was actually fun when in a Euro party. Though there were massive amounts of bots, if you could find a spot where you could party up with real people it got really fun, and the bots would die if they ever came across your party mob (or waste tons of pots if chinese). Grinding on Perfect World got so boring that most of the players eventually just stopped grinding and resorted to a daily quest that takes 10 minutes to do and gives you 10% of your level EVERY DAY. This was a feature put in by Perfect World to appeal to more casual gamers. If you were hardcore at leveling in perfect world, you could party up with a group of 7 players and just AFK level. Archers and Wizards had skills that would stay on until the user cancelled them , so they could afk in a spot for an hour with the skill on while other party members lured monsters to them. Instant AFK exp for everyone but the lurers, but really expensive. Level 1-100 in Perfect world is like lvl 1-75 on SRO in terms of exp. In SRO you could 1shot monsters on a regular basis, even as a non-damaging strength build. In Perfect World, even the strongest magic dealing powerhouses have trouble one shotting mobs, and most average casting classes will take 3 shots to kill a same level monster. Strength based characters take an entire combo which makes grinding pretty slow and boring to the point where you stop using skills and just autohit everything out of boredom. The highest EXp boost from an item you will get on Perfect World is 50% exp boost for 1 hour.
Character Customization: [Massive Edge to Perfect World]
SRO had like 5 sliders to choose boob size and fatness. Perfect World has a very detailed customization feature where you could make ur nose the way you wanted, how big your brow ridge, jaw line, eye width and length, forehead shape, hip size, etc. You could easily take an hour or two customizing your character. Silkroad clothing additions were terrible at best, while Perfect World has as of right now 35 different clothing sets, gloves, pants, shoes, skirts, shirts and dresses. Each clothing item can be color changed using ingame color pigment. Add 20 different flying and land mounts and there is a huge variety of ways to customize your ingame appearance.
Mechanisms : [ Edge to Perfect World ]
Perfect World allows jumping, swimming, and flying. If you are male, you can carry a female in your arms and take her anywhere. You can even share mounts with your lover or whatever..Silkroad is a lot more fast paced than Perfect World. Grass Walk is a godsend. There are no moving speed buffs on Perfect World unless you are an archer, and even then you are still moving as slow as a Silkroad player absolutely naked buffless. Fact of the matter is Perfect World moves slow as shit. Going from Silkroad to Perfect World takes a lot of adjustment time and patience, especially if you were robe/garm on SRO. Flying from one corner of the map to the other takes about an hour with regular wings, and about half an hour with maxed upgraded wings.
PVP : [ Edge to Perfect World ]
Silkroad PVP was fun if you could find it, and I'm not takling about standing outside of a town wearing a cape and Farking around for 5 hours, that's dueling. I'm talking about actual job vs job pvp. The silkroad map is too huge for the amount of people that actually job on a day to day basis. There are too many item mall whores that use res scrolls and the premium+attack and defense scrolls and zerk scrolls completely obliterate jobbing for casual gamers. Perfect World pvp requires a bit of skill considering its open world, meaning you can kill anyone at any time anywhere, whether it be on land, in the water or in the air. When you kill someone, you are flagged much like Silkroad's murder status, except on Perfect World you are ranked based on that and the more you kill the more badass you look. People actually fear a red name, on SRO no one feared murders because it was never an open world pvp game to begin with, so if you ever went red name you would have an entire horde of players going after you, even lvl 50s when you are at cap.
The fortress war system is a lot better on Silkroad than on Perfect World. Silkroad's fortress map is more intricate, the fortress is a lot bigger and there are various choke points. It is also alliance vs alliance, making it a much tougher and enjoyable battle. Perfect World territory war is very linear, think of it as a box with one base in one corner and another base in the opposite corner and a line connecting the two. That's basically the map and the war consists of who can push the hardest and destroy the enemys headquarters first. Perfect World's war did have flying through, so not only did you have to worry about the fight on land but the one over your head. Still, that is not enough to beat SRO's fortress war.
Mini pvp events on both games are just about equal. Though I don't know if SRO still has capture the flag, that's probably the most fun I ever had in that game when it actually worked. It worked 90% of the time, when it didnt i was pretty let down for the next hour. Perfect World has a dragon temple raider where you are ported to a different map that is completely underwater and you and your party have to work together to dig chests on the ocean floor that contain expensive items. Problem is that there are loads of people wanting them too so it turns into a pvp-fest. Like capture the flag, was fun but got old after a while.
While SRO had a much better war system (not to mention guild wars,cant do that on PW), the edge goes to PWI because pvp is open world, can be done on land, water, and in the air, and is much more easily accessible.
Overall Gameplay:
Perfect World is just painfully slow for those that arent dedicated to it. The first time anyone played Silkroad, I'm sure they got the 'wow' factor. I know I couldn't stop playing, the game was decent paced and killing monsters was a breeze. Perfect World's monsters have way too much HP and requires loads of skills to kill.
Killing time was easier on Silkroad due to Unique Spawn hunting and cape pvping outside a town.
On perfect world, unless you want to pvp there isn't really much to do at endgame. That's assuming you farmed all your gear in all the game's dungeons. But I guess there wasn't much to do endgame SRO either. Both games are decent but I must say PW was a better time spent IMO. There's a reason why most ex-WoW players went there upon US Server release.
Either way I quit both SRO and PW, free to play games eventually destroy themselves and end up being the biggest waste of time. After playing both SRO and PW, I can honestly say I've lost more money than I've gained lol, especially SRO. Premium wtf.
I dropped a good 200 on premiums for SRO til I realised it wasnt worth it.
I dropped 90 on PW for a cash shop mount, flying mount, some globals, fashion, experience scrolls, and refining orbs. Afer that I just used the ingame system where you can convert your ingame coins to $$. (You can buy everything thats on the item mall with ingame coins)
Anyway, on to Aion. Hopefully its better than both those games. Open Beta sucked since i didnt feel like leveling and I basically lived for all of 5 seconds in every pvp fight due to being 10 lvls lower than everyone.
