Lineage 2 Trial

[Harkon]

When L2 was first announced I have to say I was pretty stoked for the game to come out. The game looked amazing for its time. But what killed it for me was the horrible grind, especially once I saw that they started displaying levels in 1/100ths of a percentage point. The game brought back too many memories of the horrible every 5th level grind from Everquest. The grind which was so bad they had to put in that stupid blue line in addition to the yellow bar to help you measure exp.

Kudos to those who made it though the grind, from the outside those castle sieges sure looked fun. It was the journey getting there that was too much for me.

[Tbird]

Yeah, I played this game to around level 10. L2 really sucks. I don't like the fact that you turn your character into a player vendor in town because everyone's vendor in town lagged out my computer. Its also not fun to have some PK going around all the time trying to kill you at low level for leaving town. I actually bought L2 in-game currency because its pretty much required to get decent gear at low level. And everyone looks the same.

[Manatra]

Originally Posted by Awake

Uh, no. It's as PVP an MMO can ever become.

Ever heard of Planetside?

[Twobit Whore]

Old school UO was pretty PvP. You could kill people, take all their stuff and dismember them and cook their organs.

[Overdark]

Originally Posted by Twobit Whore

Old school UO was pretty PvP. You could kill people, take all their stuff and dismember them and cook their organs.

Haha, that brings back memories. One time I was playing with my (ex) girlfriend and she got PK'd. Of course she got upset, but when the guy cut up her corpse, cooked it and ate it she got hysterical. Looking back on it, it was pretty funny. Good times.

[Chanur]

Unless this game has changed since beta, it has the absolute worst pvp set up I have ever played. Nothing like killing someone and being flaged a pk, then exploding like a pinata after you are gang raped by everyone with in sight.

[Grumpy Old Fart]

That "adrenaline rush" you got in Lineage 2 PvP wasn't what you'd equate to "fun", which is generally what games are supposed to have. That "rush" was more like "those Korean fucker devs are going to make my character drop some very hard-won gear if I die".

I never bought in-game money (and never have in any online game), so I had to slave my ass off for weeks to earn the high-end gear in that damn game. I recall many *PANIC* calls from guildmates who'd been killed by NPCs and dropped their gear, which we'd have to race to recover. Hell, every once in a while you hear of some Asian gamer freak committing RL suicide because he lost his "Uber Leet Sword +11" or somesuch.

This game's PvP system is total suckage, and those recalling otherwise are almost certainly in-game currency buyers who didn't have to worry about replacing their lost gear.

This leaves aside the fact that NC-Soft in NA were the most incompetent assholes in the history of MMORPGs as regards this game. Their first "Community Rep" didn't even play the fucking game, and had never played any other MMORPG, either. I recall with glee when I got banned from the L2 forums for arguing with that pencil-dick.

[DeusEx]

I tried L2 a year or so ago and even though I have never played past lvl 20 I have to admit that it's beauty was breathtaking. I don't know where this golf course comparison comes from. It had the most natural feeling zones I've ever seen in an MMO. When you wandered from a plains like area through a forest one into swamplands the transition was very smooth and realistic. Architectural elements were absolutely stunning. While it's true that there were few customization options for the avatars, they looked great nonetheless. I've never felt that they were badly animated.

In short I still cry tears of joy when I look through my L2 screenshot folder.

Unfortunately even the newbie area was overrun with bots. Now I don't mind a little bot of RMT related activity here and there, but L2 left the feeling that it was completely controlled by bots; to that extent that I was wondering if it's meant to be played that way. The bot to actual player ratio must have been at least 20:1 there. It just felt silly to manually grind your exp and money when saw farm bot squads all around you.

[Praetor]

Originally Posted by Chanur

Unless this game has changed since beta, it has the absolute worst pvp set up I have ever played. Nothing like killing someone and being flaged a pk, then exploding like a pinata after you are gang raped by everyone with in sight.

No, you pretty much need limitations like those to keep PvP meaningful and to avoid the game becoming a complete grief/gankfest. If you hit someone you "PvP flag" for a little while; if they hit you back, they do too. Killing someone who is flagged causes no permanent penalty. Killing someone who isn't (i.e. someone who never fought back at all) does give you a karma hit, that PvP flags you and increases your chance of dropping loot, until you work it off, either by dying or by killing mobs. This means that a random level 50 player walking down the road won't turn and one-shot a random level 20 player for the hell of it, because the penalty is too harsh. But if you're willing to accept some exp loss (suiciding in a remote area to lose your karma) or have a group with you to work off the karma and protect you while you do so, then you can PK someone who doesn't fight back if they've done something to deserve it. That's part of why I like L2's PvP system. True, true "open" PvP, as in a max level player can one-shot newbies all day long with no consequence, simply isn't viable. L2 strikes what I'd consider a good balance between giving players freedom to kill other players if they choose, and griefing costly enough that people will think twice about it.

That "adrenaline rush" you got in Lineage 2 PvP wasn't what you'd equate to "fun", which is generally what games are supposed to have. That "rush" was more like "those Korean fucker devs are going to make my character drop some very hard-won gear if I die".

This game's PvP system is total suckage, and those recalling otherwise are almost certainly in-game currency buyers who didn't have to worry about replacing their lost gear.

They changed the system pretty early on so that you can't drop your weapon and have a very low odds of dropping worn gear in consenting PvP if you have zero karma. That said, it was real "risk vs. reward" as opposed to the way the term gets thrown around in WoW these days. Maybe it wasn't for you, but I'd argue that on the other hand, it works for a lot of people. The closest thing in WoW is queuing arenas when you're right on the cusp of some cutoff (these days I guess the rating threshold to buy a weapon or shoulders) or on the bubble for the Gladiator title towards the end of a season, when you know that one misstep in a game could set you back a long ways or even ruin your chances entirely. In short, victory is sweeter when you actually fear defeat.

I tried L2 a year or so ago and even though I have never played past lvl 20 I have to admit that it's beauty was breathtaking. I don't know where this golf course comparison comes from. It had the most natural feeling zones I've ever seen in an MMO. When you wandered from a plains like area through a forest one into swamplands the transition was very smooth and realistic. Architectural elements were absolutely stunning. While it's true that there were few customization options for the avatars, they looked great nonetheless. I've never felt that they were badly animated.

In short I still cry tears of joy when I look through my L2 screenshot folder.

Unfortunately even the newbie area was overrun with bots. Now I don't mind a little bot of RMT related activity here and there, but L2 left the feeling that it was completely controlled by bots; to that extent that I was wondering if it's meant to be played that way. The bot to actual player ratio must have been at least 20:1 there. It just felt silly to manually grind your exp and money when saw farm bot squads all around you.

Yeah, I really don't get the complaints about the graphical style. I remember just climbing up hills on Talking Island, one of the starting areas, and looking around at the landscape, the waterfall, etc., just admiring how pretty it was, when I first started playing. When I went back to check out the game briefly last winter, after a couple of years of WoW, I still thought it was a really visually appealing game.

But yes, your last paragraph pretty much sums up the current state of the game. And, like I said in my first post in this thread, that doesn't mean that Lineage 2's design sucks -- those issues are a reflection of horrible mismanagement that allowed the game to reach that level. They let the farmers/botters drive off all the legit players until they reached a point where they depend on the farmers for their subscription base.

[Quineloe]

What Praetor actually meant to say about Lineage 2 Karma system is pretty simple:

If you want to kill someone and he refuses to PVP you (it works just like a /duel!) and you kill him anyways, you gain Karma. When you gain Karma, you turn into a treasure chest and you will attract dozens of players because red players usually explode into lots of loot when killed. Now the true fun starts, if someone attacks a red player, he DOES NOT FLAG FOR PVP. So if the Red player defends himself because he doesn't want to die or keep his equipment, he will gain MORE karma. And it's not the same amount of Karma per kill.
First kill is like 400, third kill already a few thousand. 10 kills and you've easily racked up a million karma points. In order to lose a million karma, you have to die. About a hundred times, or two hundred times (if you killed 11 players in self defense)
A lineage 2 death is 10% exp gone IIRC, so you're looking at 10 (or 20) levels lost by dieing through it.
Killing a monster takes away 4 karma. So to work off one player kill you have to kill a hundred monsters. Let's say you have this strange group of friends helping you you can get a kill every 15 seconds in dungeon areas with high respawn. Good luck getting there though, remember the treasure chest? Guess where people hang out. You head to a dungeon as a red and you'll attract at least 20 players going after your loot. But for sake of argument, you can work off the Karma of ONE kill in roughly half an hour. Half an hour during which AT ANY TIME someone might walk into you and see you as the treasure chest that you are. Even if you're down to ONE point of Karma, he will remain White while attacking you, so if you kill him in self-defense, you'll gain 2000 Karma. 2 hours work getting that rid and you can bet that he'll tell his friends about the treasure chest waiting to be raped.

Now let's talk about your friends protecting you. How exactly do they do that? Since your attackers stay WHITE, your friends would have to turn red themselves to protect you. They can just stand by and harrass people, in hope of not scoring a killing blow.
99% of all PVP time I've seen in Lineage is sabre rattling because nobody is doing the first strike. I've seen groups of 20+ each facing each other off, throwing insults and whatnot with the stronger groups tanks repeatedly flagging PVP on the weaker group while the weaker group refuses to fight back, bringing decoy level 1 players into the fray to tempt the members of the stronger group into 1-hit kills that turn them red (I shit you not, this is L2 pvp) so they can SWARM on them, KILL them with assist trains and when they die, everyone SPAMS the loot hotkey. I've seen level 1 characters in highlevel dungeons that are there so someone might accidently oneshot them and go red. They can easily be there because monster agro is completly random anyways and doesn't scale with level. Stay at safe spots and your level 1 is perfectly safe. You also don't see player levels so you can't tell what level someone really is.

So you go red, best you find a friend and have him kill you the 2-3 times it takes to drop Karma from a single PK and hope that nobody finds you before he does, because if someone does there's a good chance it's GAME OVER for you because your most valuable items were just spilled on the floor and unless you buy ingame currency for $$$ you can't afford to replace them.

[Ossoi]

Originally Posted by Quineloe

've seen level 1 characters in highlevel dungeons that are there so someone might accidently oneshot them and go red. They can easily be there because monster agro is completly random anyways and doesn't scale with level. Stay at safe spots and your level 1 is perfectly safe. You also don't see player levels so you can't tell what level someone really is.

I am 99% certain that isnt true and a low level character has a larger aggro radius than an equal level player to the mob, but it has been 3 years since I played..

Regardless though you obviously didn't read my first post in this thread and you come across like someone that got burnt by L2 PvP, ie dropped their new sword, and is still bitter 3 years later. Your quote "strange group of friends helping you" yeah its called a guild, ever heard of it?

Mass PK wasn't a smart career choice as in the way UO PK's describe it, ie PK all day long and profit, but select PK of entire groups to lock down levelling spots was definitely viable, wish I still had the screenshots of my all red groups working our way through Antharas' Lair. The point of the PK is to deny/discourage rival clans from levelling at the best xp spots in the game, since you're controlling where they xp and how fast you're giving yourself and your allies a levelling advantage which means if anyone wants to come after you to get your items, chances are they're going to be too low level to work through the mobs between you and them, unless they bring 50 people, which did happen occasionally.

Yeah we lost a few items of loot here and there, but again thats where a guild comes in to help replace it.

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Ossoi

I am 99% certain that isnt true and a low level character has a larger aggro radius than an equal level player to the mob, but it has been 3 years since I played..

You're wrong. You've never seen Level 1s in Cruma Tower?
And most monsters are passive anyways, even in dungeons. Besides, agro is still random. If a red mob spawns in a group of 20, it will most likely go for someone who has business being there and then will get downbursted by everyone.

Regardless though you obviously didn't read my first post in this thread and you come across like someone that got burnt by L2 PvP, ie dropped their new sword, and is still bitter 3 years later. Your quote "strange group of friends helping you" yeah its called a guild, ever heard of it?

Yes I've heard of it. As I explained, there is SHIT your guild can do once you've racked up 10k karma besides kill you for a few levels worth of exp. You convineantly ignored this.
And just to be clear on this, I never dropped a weapon. However dropping your chest + legs is just as crippling and easily possible.

If your enemies were too incompetent to take advantage of your group being all red it's their own fault.

What I forgot to mention is that many stun and CC effects don't work on white targets, so your all-red group is handicapped when defending itself against white players too! And you still won these fights? Wow, your enemies truely sucked.

[Mahes]

God I cannot count the number of posts I posted begging the North American Devs to change the ruleset allowing a red player to defend himself without losing karma. If they had implemented that into the game, it would have been much different.

[Grumpy Old Fart]

Quineloe is 100% correct, and this argument all circles back to what I and others had originally posted. If you're a little shy on gaming ethics and don't mind buying the in-game currency from the hordes of rang rangs that control each server, you might have some fun in this game. *EVERY* other MMORPG out today is vastly more entertaining, however, so I'd wonder what the hell you were smoking if you did play it. I'm in the same "hideously bored" state as many of the rest of you gamers (currently playing: Oblivion, Wizardy 8, The Witcher), and I wouldn't even dream of playing Lineage 2 again.

[Awake]

Quineloe, I don't consider that a feat. I was level 70 mid-C1. Did I waste a lot of my time into this game? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes. Was it a good game? Yup.

Edit: I was lucky, though. Me and several friends came from EverQuest to play Lineage 2 - so we already had our own balanced (stacked) group ready to go.