Lineage 2 Trial

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by Teljair

L2 is eazy mode now, noobs.

Way to insult like a true low grade troll, and not explain...

[Draegan]

You have to be asian to like L2. Or you can but a masochist like Teljair. If you enjoy cutting yourself L2 might be the place for you.

[Grumpy Old Fart]

If you don't plan on coughing up your credit card number to buy the in-game currency from the rang rangs that control every server, you're just wasting your time.

Even the high quality Dark Elf boob bounce and High Elf panty shots won't keep you entertained for more than a day or two in this thing.

If you're really curious to check it out (I mean, I endured the pain of a whole week of Vanguard, just to "check it out"), there are tons of free servers for L2 around with faster XP, phatter/easier lewt, etc.

[kasey]

the 4000x xp/adena free servers are fun, and while you are at it you can try rose online and other stuff for free too :P

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Zindan

L2 doesn't become a real grind until 50ish now though. You can get buffed by npcs in town until the 40's or so, and mobs drop little potions that will heal you up instantly, regen your mana instantly, give you attack haste and movement haste. So its not nearly as bad as it used to be.

So do you or do you not still run around for hours, autoattacking mobs that are no challenge at all to you (despite being 5 levels higher) until they fall dead, loot and then run to the next mob? It's all you do, no matter how much they improve it. You grind, grind and grind. Then you grind some more. When you're done grinding, you go to town, unload, load and then head out for more grinding. Then you grind more and a bit more. Then you get a mandatory class quest which requires you to run all over the fucking world for the better part of an entire evening, then you get to grind more.

It doesn't matter that you have fancy movement buffs now or downtime removed by potions. It's still gameplay about as good as in a fucking Flashgame RPG.

[Awake]

Let's face reality: Cheating at L2 = Winning at L2. Thats not good for a game so heavily based on competition.

When someone comes onto a Battlefield 2142 server and uses hacks, yeah it sucks, but the game will be reset in 30 minutes anyway. In L2, the cheaters just keep acumulating power, as they have done for years now. When NC Austin bans a character that does nothing. People work together in L2 to cheat it. If one gets banned, the group of cheaters has accumulated many resources to come back from it. Simply bot up a new toon, and gear it using the ill gotten gains. Bottom line: L2 punishes anyone that plays legit, and hands extreme rewards to anyone who cheats.

IMO L2 is one of the best games ever made (I have been gaming for a long time, and yeah I actually believe this!). But NC Austin has proven entirely ineffective in dealing with the cheating issues over many years. And now, nearly everyone but the cheaters have quit the game on the American servers. Massive, colossal, failure.

Pro's:
- Only real open PvP MMO.
- Extremely well designed, it has no peer. (unchecked cheating has undermined the design)
- True persistent world, (mostly) non-instanced.
- Best graphics in any MMO, past/present/foreseeable future.
- A real challenge, this game is hard, you will need years to master it.
- Free updates twice a year. Great updates to balance and new areas are consistently well done.

Con's:
- Cheating is the smartest way to advance.
- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.
- Economy requires you to ebay eventually, unless you bot.
- Worst community, everyone is an asshole, including me.
- Fairly high system requirements, getting worse every time they update the game.
- The game is too hard, nearly everyone that starts... quits within 3 weeks.
- Desolate newbie areas. A new player finds a 15 to 1 bot to human ratio.

Conclusion:
The best MMO available. Wow, that's sad.

[Hachima]

Pros: Some of the best botting software for any MMO out there

[Believe]

How can it be 'one of the best games ever made' with those cons?

[OneofOne]

My buddies and I all tried this out a while ago. If you enjoy a game in which you are always having to deal with botted players killing all the mobs, or paying entrance fees to farmers for the privledge of going into dungeons, this game will be a great fit for you.

The game is controlled and run by the farmers and adena sellers. Which is unfortunate, because I rather liked it otherwise.

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Awake

Pro's:
- Only real open PvP MMO.

Wrong. It's as carebear as it gets.

- Extremely well designed, it has no peer. (unchecked cheating has undermined the design)

What is that even supposed to mean?

- True persistent world, (mostly) non-instanced.

This is entirely a matter of opinion and hardly gameplay related.

- Best graphics in any MMO, past/present/foreseeable future.

That is so full of shit I don't even know where to begin. Characters look "ok", but they are not animated at all. They don't even blink. Oh and they all look the same - fat surprise with only 5 different hair style, 2 different faces and 2 different haircolors.
L2 the Clone Chronicle is a better title.
The world is also incredibly boring. It's basically one huge golf course with monsters randomly thrown on the ground.

- A real challenge, this game is hard, you will need years to master it.

excuse me, what exactly is supposed to be hard about this game? When you only have 3-4 abilities with 2 of them being highly situational...

- Free updates twice a year. Great updates to balance and new areas are consistently well done.

more of the same shit twice a year you mean.

My conclusion:
Lineage2 is a shitty game with mindnumbingly boring grindPVE, the most stupid world PVP system ever, infested with bots and farmers, the economy is actually BASED on the US-$ and poor graphics.

[Praetor]

I actually agree with Awake here. Granted L2 was my first MMO, so I have a soft spot for it even though I only played for like a half a year (that said, it was the "good" time to play, before things really went to shit).

The game does get a lot of things right. Most of the "cons" on Awake's list are things that went wrong with how the game was administered, especially in the US, and not with how it was designed.

It does have real, meaningful open PvP. You have territorial skirmishes between leveling groups to control prime hunting grounds, clan wars that cause world PvP to break out when people from warring clans encounter each other, and then of course the large wars over castles and such that the game advertises. You can gank newbies, but the penalties for doing so are harsh so it's not something that's done lightly.

The world feels dangerous, because there is real "risk" if you get in over your head somewhere. Gathering a bunch of friends and going to a high-level or dangerous place to exp, getting great exp/drops but also knowing that we were one bad pull away from death (exp loss and potentially dropping a valuable item or two), is a feeling you just don't replicate with the current generation of major MMOs.

The economy is complex, and by specifically eschewing a central "auction house" and instead having player shops be stalls that you could browse, you had real opportunities to score great deals if you really knew a given market, or to arbitrage (when you don't have a central AH, and travel is a real issue, taking time or a fair bit of gold/adena to teleport elsewhere, you can have meaningful price differences on certain commodities based solely on location). And money really matters. Your character's net worth is as much a reflection of his power as your experience level, pretty much.

The problem is that a lot of these systems require a certain critical mass to function properly. Territorial wars only work if there are more players than the territory can comfortably accommodate. A class that gives up combat ability in exchange for the ability to be fabulously wealthy via crafting (and thus theoretically always better-geared than non-crafters/gatherers, and thus equal or superior to them) only works if you don't have rampant farming/RMT.

And NCAustin did, in fact, pretty much dispense with any pretense of really caring about botters, farmers, and adena-sellers. Whether it was farmer groups taking over dungeon rooms (the basis for the popularization of "rang rang," btw) or new players going in any starting town seeing an endless zerg of level 5 dwarves named "zbhxzhxuhe" or "cutebaby04" suiciding themselves on town guards so that they could remain a proper level to farm low-level mobs for drops, the issue was just so blatant that it was impossible to miss unless it was completely intentional. This wasn't a huge game with 200 servers like WoW. This was a game with, initially, three servers, then six, then eight I think, with active populations, but hardly some endless sprawl.

Part of the "fun" of the game was being able to really see tangible results in terms of your character's power and in PvP. You spend a weekend grinding exp and gathering crafting mats with a few clanmates, and you come out of it with a competitive advantage over others who didn't do that. You have a better weapon than them, you hit harder, you're more powerful, etc. Your group of friends becomes more attractive to alliances looking to bolster their ranks so that they can control more territory, conquer more castles, and become wealthier and therefore even stronger. And so forth.

And all of that goes out the window the moment you can go online and buy all of that with your credit card. But NC allowed that to happen, and perhaps approved entirely of it -- who knows? (At some point I imagine they must have realized that their a massive portion, if not a majority, of their subscription fees were coming from farmers, and at that point, how can you really crack down on the people who are keeping your game fiscally viable?) And so today, you have incredible inflation, a game that pretty much assumes that everyone will hit up IGE in short order if they want even a slight hope of being competitive, and a game where a majority of the innovative mechanics go unused either because of lacking critical mass or because there's simply no incentive to participate in them when you could just buy the rewards with your IGE money.

But Lineage II is/was a beautiful game, and for all its flaws, I do think it has a number of features that I wish contemporary developers would try to emulate. It's just important to remember that how you maintain and support your game can be as important as how you design it.

Quick thought experiment: Imagine if in WoW, Blizzard had never addressed the old instance cascading loopholes, and had shown minimal effort to crack down on things like WoWGlider or on blatant RMT sellers/farmers. Imagine that after a year or two, you had groups of farmers entrenched on every server, rolling over instance IDs 24/7 and offering trips through raid zones for fixed cash fees, paid through a website (log onto IGE.com, look up TK raids on your server, find one with vacancies at a time you can make, enter your credit card number, and get carried through the zone to loot any epics that you want). Imagine similar groups abusing the arena system on a large scale via 6am point-feeding, again offering to sell rating/points. Imagine most zones with unattended bots running overnight grinding gold/exp/crafting mats. Imagine every spot where you might farm the primals you need to craft your gear being overrun 24/7 with bots that make it completely impossible for you to farm them yourself, forcing you to turn to the AH to buy them, only to find them sold for prices that essentially require you to buy gold online. How fun does that sound?

All of those things are or were possible in World of Warcraft. They aren't "design" issues. They're management and support issues. Blizzard did not allow those things to happen to their game. NCSoft did. Simple as that.

[Quineloe]

It does have real, meaningful open PvP. You have territorial skirmishes between leveling groups to control prime hunting grounds,

Yes, you had a bunch of highlevels in Cruma tower that PKed anyone that entered it through the portal before they could even finish loading.
That's not PVP.

[Algol Devilstar]

Hey if you are not hardcore enough for that PvP, don't play!1







kidding!

[Praetor]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

Yes, you had a bunch of highlevels in Cruma tower that PKed anyone that entered it through the portal before they could even finish loading.
That's not PVP.

I disagree -- it completely is. First off, at what point in time was that your experience? Maybe long after release when farmers had taken over Cruma and their high-level "enforcers" killed people who got in the way, but that was never my experience there.

Anyway, the point is that there are consequences to PKing someone like that, much less doing it repeatedly. It makes your character a target for anyone stronger than you, because you're a walking loot pinata if they can score a kill. It wasn't something that was done wantonly. If you took off all your gear and banked it, then you were harmless despite level differences. And if you didn't, then you'd drop it all if you ever ran into anyone stronger than you.

In any event, the point of that sort of conflict is to promote politics and make alliances and interactions meaningful. Yeah, a solo player trying to go to some contested hunting spot is going to be bullied around. Join a clan or major alliance, and people who don't know you will leave you be because they know that there will be consequences for attacking a member of a powerful clan (or, of course, others who otherwise might've ignored you might come after you for that same reason). Or go hunt somewhere safer, albeit less efficient. I don't play EVE, but isn't the basic concept pretty similar with how PvP works there? Or just in gangs historically? You join them for protection, because it's a harsh world out there.

"Real" PvP isn't necessarily something you do for "fun," though the dueling arenas in L2 were always crowded and popular. It can and should be something you do for a reason, with consequences, risk, and real excitement. Ganking a random guy leveling, or queuing for a BG in WoW, obviously gives nothing of the sort. You don't pause for a moment and ask yourself, before attacking someone you see out in the field, "Hmm, do I really want to do this?" and you certainly don't have a little adrenaline rush as you do so, because it's a completely meaningless encounter. The greatest potential for PvP is as a social tool, as a form of player-created and player-driven content.

Isn't that exactly what people always rave about when it comes to Eve? A lot of the mechanics of that game and the nuts-and-bolts don't appeal to me, so I haven't play it, but from hearing and reading stories from those who do play it, it seems like essentially the same underlying principle.

[Hachima]

I think the biggest turn off for me was the horrible wanna be WASD system and having to resort to point click movement.