Oh Lineage 2, how I love to hate you

[Falconeer]

Nerf you forgot the green text. Green it or I'll green you in the head to bring you back to your senses!

[Nerf]

Totally serious, want a link to walker? I've got about 6 different versions.

[Koyasha]

Reading this thread made me start playing Lineage II again, and I'm actually having fun at it this go around, basically because I managed to hook up with a good clan - at least, good as in 'friendly and helpful', not 'owns 5 castles and pwns everyone on the server'.  Oh, and because I didn't play a Dark Elf main this time so their running isn't driving me crazy.

I'm starting to understand the prevalence of botting, at least.  Some classes (hello, Prophet) seem to be designed to do nothing but buff the group periodically.  Looking at the level 70-80 spell lists of the healer/buffer classes, they seem to have almost entirely passive roles in combat, except for the two that still have effective heals at that point.

[Falconeer]

Heh Koyasha...

I wanted to make a new post about L2 for some time now but couldn't find enough motivations. I'll use your as a trampoline then.
I finally completed the Class Change (a joke, a joke! that should be illegal! It's dehumanizing to do three stupid LONG quests like those to just get your final class... at level 40.. after DAYS of /played!!!) and I am now a level 42 Gladiator, so while still lightyears away from the coregame, I know a few things more about this monstruosity called Lineage 2.

I could talk, again, about what works and what not, what's peculiar and should be cloned (Olympiad, Manor system) and what has just been cloned in (Instances, Keeps) from other games. Anyone cares? Everyone knows that. And everyone knows that Lineage 2, no matter what, isn't by no means a great MMORPG.

But I think that beyond its merits and demerits there's some kind of bizarre originality in L2 that makes it quite unique and hypnotic.
The ridicolous speed at which you mow through mobs, the flashing lights of clashing swords and soulshots, the incredible (still unsurpassed 4 years later) characters graphics and the amazing weapons and clothing arts, the robotic, metallic, essential interface, the unearthly background and animal sounds, the enigmatically smiling and beautifully painted NPCs, the looping bits of music...

I'd say L2 is the coldest and more subtly original online world I've ever touched, it can make you feel lonely like nothing else while you mechanically whack for hours in the dangerous (xp loss) deeps of a dungeon, and there's something unsettling and addictive in it that keeps vibrating in your bowels like a subsonic bassline on a frequency too low to be clearly perceived.

Don't get me wrong. It's not healthy and most people are luckily and totally immune to it, but I can't stop to find L2 totally fascinating in a morbid way.
Everyone in Asia cloned it thousands of times, but no one cloned its extraterrestrial nature.

[Falconeer]

Some idiots still hit "quote" instead of "modify" after 1287 posts.

[Soukyan]

Heh Koyasha...

I wanted to make a new post about L2 for some time now but couldn't find enough motivations. I'll use your as a trampoline then.
I finally completed the Class Change (a joke, a joke! that should be illegal! It's dehumanizing to do three stupid LONG quests like those to just get your final class... at level 40.. after DAYS of /played!!!) and I am now a level 42 Gladiator, so while still lightyears away from the coregame, I know a few things more about this monstruosity called Lineage 2.

I could talk, again, about what works and what not, what's peculiar and should be cloned (Olympiad, Manor system) and what has just been cloned in (Instances, Keeps) from other games. Anyone cares? Everyone knows that. And everyone knows that Lineage 2, no matter what, isn't by no means a great MMORPG.

But I think that beyond its merits and demerits there's some kind of bizarre originality in L2 that makes it quite unique and hypnotic.
The ridicolous speed at which you mow through mobs, the flashing lights of clashing swords and soulshots, the incredible (still unsurpassed 4 years later) characters graphics and the amazing weapons and clothing arts, the robotic, metallic, essential interface, the unearthly background and animal sounds, the enigmatically smiling and beautifully painted NPCs, the looping bits of music...

I'd say L2 is the coldest and more subtly original online world I've ever touched, it can make you feel lonely like nothing else while you mechanically whack for hours in the dangerous (xp loss) deeps of a dungeon, and there's something unsettling and addictive in it that keeps vibrating in your bowels like a subsonic bassline on a frequency too low to be clearly perceived.

Don't get me wrong. It's not healthy and most people are luckily and totally immune to it, but I can't stop to find L2 totally fascinating in a morbid way.
Everyone in Asia cloned it thousands of times, but no one cloned its extraterrestrial nature.

I can understand what you're saying as I played it for several months and lacked the words that you just put to it for explanation. The more I look at Aion, the more interested I become in it. It looks like it could be very close to L2 in several respects, and I could definitely see playing it for a few months. Hopefully there'll be a North American beta at some point.

[Koyasha]

Yeah, a lot of things about L2 are really neat, it's just they don't seem to do them well.  It's like they have a great idea, work it up a little more than halfway to ready, throw it in the game, and never touch it again.  Like the Grand Olympiad...great idea, but from what I'm told it gets rigged a lot by people that get their friends to go in and lose for them so they can become Heroes.  And while they have controls that prevent clans from holding too many castles or becoming too big, people get around that by having alt clans hold the castles, they just use their mains to crush resistance and such.

I'm told the Korean servers work much better, due to higher population.  L2 doesn't work well with the low populations on NA servers, and I'm of the opinion that if they did a few server merges, things would be better because there would be too many people at the top end to work out alliances and mega-clans that control most of the server's castles and such.

[Falconeer]

If what you say is true then for once the Euros get the sweetest candies: our two servers are always always always on HEAVY load.
Still, I am too low level to confirm it.

[Koyasha]

One quick indication is Dawn and Dusk.  If Dawn ALWAYS wins, then there's basically no competition for the castle owning clans for one reason or another.  If the vast majority of the high levels are in a single alliance that owns all the castles, they want Dawn to win every time, and if there's not enough organized competition, there's nothing anyone can do about it, because they save up millions upon millions of seal stones for a rainy day (or sometimes, I'm told, they buy adena and just buy out the entire seal stone market if it looks like someone is putting up a fight for Dusk) and turn them in if it looks like Dusk has a chance to win that week.

If there's enough ubers that the castle-owning clans are outnumbered by non-castle owners, then it gets a lot more difficult for them to lock down the Seven Signs, because of course, if Dusk wins, the non-castle owners get big advantages on their next sieges, so all the non-castle owners are working hard to make sure Dusk wins.  Usually non-castle owners have less organization (again, from what I'm told) because the castle owners tend to coordinate at least enough so that they can agree on when and how to turn in large numbers of seal stones in order to keep Dawn victorious.  The game design overall seems very dependent on the idea of a lot of people competing for a limited number of resources, and without the large number of people it doesn't work too well.

The Grand Olympiad is the same - if the number of Noblesse competing is high enough, it would be difficult to get matches with people who are willing to lose for you, but if 90% of the ubers in the server are part of the same alliance, then they can make agreements in order to shut out the few who are not part of their alliance.  On Lionna, there's only 6 heroes that are not in the B0SS alliance, which is the one that has basically gained control of the server.

[damijin]

The game design overall seems very dependent on the idea of a lot of people competing for a limited number of resources, and without the large number of people it doesn't work too well.

It did, in prelude and Chronicle 1 (and C2 on some servers), but after that the expansions to the game size made the world too large for most NA servers. There was a conflict between adding more content (which everyone loves yaaaaaaay), and destroying the game balance. Korean servers were unfortunately nearly twice the population of the NA ones, which means they didnt realize quite what they were doing to us over here when they made those calls in Seoul.

Thailand, Taiwan, and Japanese versions of L2 were all similarly screwed by these calls. Those versions all got server transfers before NCNA was willing to consider it. Honestly, they needed mergers a looong time ago to save that game.

[Cryo]

That's the major concern about the game in NA. It was designed with the Korean market in mind, and we have nowhere near the same number of players on our servers.

Imagine the same game with the LFG panel filled with parties, hunting spots filled with people everywhere, 100+ nobles participating in olympiad everyday (there's actually an in-game option which shows the names of all the people registered in olympiad only when there are 100+ participating... don't think we will ever have an use for it in NA), Dawn vs Dusk actually fighting every 2 weeks, large number of alliances fighting for castles, economy not screwed up by bots... And I'm not even getting into the PvP / politics part.

That's a whole new game. Sometimes I wish I could speak Korean...  When I think about it I'm already enjoying the game despite all the flaws it has here in NA, I would have a blast playing on Korean servers.

Time to book some Korean lessons... 

[Falconeer]

But you are NCsoft EU, Cryo, so you should be able to help me here.
Aren't the Euro server closer to that? They are always on HEAVY population, so if they are not, still being HEAVY, something must be really broken somewhere.

[Cryo]

To be honest with you I never played on the Euro servers so I don't know what the situation looks like on them. I *suppose* it would be much closer of what I'm describing above than any of the other NA servers.

The L2 team is based in Austin so I don't really have any info about the max capacity of the servers, CCU and such numbers (not like I'd be allowed to say anything anyway  ). I don't know if our hardware architecture is the same as the Korean one, and if we can support the same amount of players on one given server.

I really wish I could play on Korean servers just to check out the difference. But it's not gonna happen anytime soon unfortunately. 

[Draegan]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmYZ2WCSjP0

The internet is serious business.

[Falconeer]

New "free expansion" today (Hellbound, the 8th in 4 years) and, most important and somehow shocking, a new Euro server. The third. In the age of shrinking and merging servers, they are expanding.

http://www.lineage2.com/archive/2008/02/server_transfer_1.html

Server Transfer Update, and New European Server Announcement

The server transfers to Teon and Franz this week have been so popular that the activity has put both servers near their maximum player capacity. We regret to announce that we will be suspending both of these servers as available transfer locations for the time being. All server transfers that were queued to Teon and Franz prior to 5:30 PM Central Time on February 19, 2008 will go through. Purchased server transfers that had not yet been queued will not be able to be queued until the Teon and Franz servers are available again. Please keep in mind that this does not necessarily mean that Teon and Franz will be forever closed off to transfers. This also doesn’t affect the gender change, name change, and character server transfer services on and to the rest of our servers.

It is very important to us that the current Teon and Franz communities have the best possible experience. We also understand the need and desire for our European players to be able to play on a European server. We will be closely monitoring the server performance on Teon and Franz to evaluate whether they can handle more players and how soon we can reactivate the transfers to them again.

We also have some exciting news to announce! Last week, we mentioned that we were currently discussing the possibilities of a new European server. The players on Teon and Franz and the rest of our European player community made it very clear to us that there is a great need for a new European server. We listened to you feedback, and have made that a priority. We're very happy to announce that this decision has been finalized, and the new European server will be coming this year! We will continue to strive for the best experience possible for our Lineage II community.

Please stay tuned for more details, and thank you all for you patience as we grow and evolve with the recent and future changes.

[damijin]

Related to that, as someone who still has many friends who play: The euro server are what's keeping L2 going. Teon is the biggest server with the best PvP and the largest playerbase. Even Bartz, the historically most important server is relatively underpopulated by comparison. I hear Franz is doing well, and many people are stoked for Luna.

The European servers are so popular, that now that server transfers are activated, Americans are trying very hard to shift to the Euro servers. Most of my remaining Gustin clan jumped ship to Teon (where ironically, many of our enemies from several years ago had fled after suffering defeat in a very intense war).


What does this mean? I know that Gustin is relatively DEAD. The economy is shot, and the clans still on the server are weak and sparse. I suspect the same is probably true of all servers other than the Europeans, Bartz, and possibly Sieghardt and Kain.

Interestingly though, rather than close the weakened underpopulated servers, NCsoft has decided to leave them open with the ability to transfer at will between the servers. This allows some servers to take a decidedly more casual tone, while others are bursting at the seams with PvP at every turn. Although you would have to be a rather proficient player who is familiar with the community to pick a server at this point and know what you're going to get, I find it an interesting way to handle things. Why force every server to be big? Some people would rather hang out in the unpopulated ones where they have the opportunity to join a castle owning clan or become the hero for their class.

All in all, I think things are being handled very well -- and many people who were growing tired of the game are becoming reinvigorated by the recent changes. Bravo NCsoft, bout time!

[rk47]

There must be something about Europeans that make them more tolerant to grind. I used to grind like crazy but never could keep such level of optimism. After 2 sieges that burned away 1 month of grinding exp without a trace, I decided to hop on a WoW beta and sold the account off while my European clan mates told me to 'Wait till the next siege, mate! We'll surely nick it!' 

[damijin]

I started playing on Luna -- Eastern Europe and Russia are out in FULL FORCE. The clans that have reached level 3 are mostly Russian, a few Romanian, 1 Czech, and some from private servers who migrated.

Speaking of server populations earlier, heres a breakdown:

http://l2stat.gang-clan.ru/index_en.php?server_id=0

Teon, Franz, Luna are all Euro. Bartz is server #1, the rest are... well, dead.