Tool_of_Society

Good that was an incredibly dumb change (the original chaotic characters no longer dropping anything) that showed a shocking lack of awareness about the game and it's players...

It'll be even more fun once the bot owner starts using gank alts in that level range with +15 weapons so that players who grab the buff will be just as vulnerable as if they didn't even have the buff. They already gank regular players who dare to do the quest without the buff. Since PKers will no longer drop gear they can just overgear a PK alt within 10 levels of those questing there so the buff will be irrelevant...

Also because it would require ncsoft to actually invest a tiny amount of money into their playbase.... Can't have that when players are nothing more than lemons to them.....

Well Ncsoft's biggest cash cow is the mobile market so I'm not surprised they are trying to pull the same ridiculous price crap here.. Pkers no longer dropping items will kill what's left of this game. There's absolutely no downside to PKing at this point. BUT hey we got a cast time finally on TP... all of two seconds..... yeah totally makes up for everything else or something. Gank alts are already a problem and this just makes it vastly worse. It's now inevitable that the top geared people will start using their gear on their gank alts. I'm done spending money on this game now as it's probably only a matter of time before I can't level because of Pkers running around with +15 weapons and +10 armor and such... The ruins of agony botter is going to love the drop change. Now they can even gank the players who grab the blessing from the GK. Just toss a good ol +10 weapon on a character that is barely within ten levels of the people doing that quest and completely clear house for their bots... Meanwhile the GMs go " " because there are none to deal with these problems..

Well it's not Ncsoft's side of things as I've been connected on all accounts from downtime to downtime straight for a few weeks now. I live a bit south of the datacenter that hosts Lineage 2..

Yup and god help you if you're trying to level a clan up with some friends because getting blood crystals for skills is almost impossible. You have to spend days/weeks watching the markets carefully just so you can buy one or two... My clan has all kinds of CRP but we can't spend any of it because we don't have the blood crystals and since the main place to get them is on lockdown we're left trying to buy leftovers at wildly inflated prices. It's stupid almost as stupid as the cloth problem... EDIT : Anyone actually having any luck getting the blood crystals from the clan arena? It's supposed to drop from the box at some chance but we've not seen one.

The only singular way to get blood crystals is via killing NPCs during the gludio siege. So unless you're a major clan you're screwed... Dumb idea on their part and one of MANY they've had during this "classic"...

There were multiple tests done and screenshots galore showing that even with VIP 4 our drop rate (and adena amount per drop) was below the EU classic. Granted they have increased drops some since then but it hasn't been enough to bring parity.

Wow you weren't kidding. I went to check it out and there's clearly someone running a whole bunch of kameal bots one per spawn with two buff bots running around buffing everything. I found one spot that wasn't taken so I started working on the quest (I'm checking out the new player experience). Within a relatively short time a kameal showed up and shortly afterwards a red level 60 ES showed up and killed me and only the non bots.. Talking island has a similar situation but with pony bots instead of kameals.. It's sad because just removing instant teleports while in combat would fix so many problems with this game beyond the PK issue. Hell I'm down for a complete removal of the teleportation system because you know this is supposed to be "classic" not "live with less p2w". The halfway fix would be adding a cast timer to the teleport option with GateKeepers giving instant teleports. They could also just make it so reds and people in combat cannot teleport... All kinds of options and none of them will be taken. It's not like our classic is the first time this crap has happened. There's already examples of people using perma reds to completely control leveling. those examples are now considered dead servers for that reason.

1. I live pretty close to the servers that run lineage 2. All my clients stay connected from down time to downtime. Over the last few months I've only had a few disconnects and those were caused by my internet connection provider not the servers. Spoil rates are meh at best =/ Having instant teleportation in combat in general is dumb and breaks the game. Toss in the silly powerful magnus and you get all kinds of bad dumb things...

Well as you said "took it too far" That was actually in the back of my mind when I was typing my post out. At least they won't have 10+ skills that aren't even learned because SP is so freaking terrible still. Fortunately I'm finally into mostly level 60s skills on my level 78s.....Thanks to NCsoft replacing the cake xp/sp event with XP scrolls because suddenly giving SP was just too OP.... I was going to save the scrolls to replace XP losses in PVP but that obviously wasn't viable thanks to NCsoft removing the scrolls... So use it or lose it..

Man I am so glad I dropped the warsmith from my party last year. Was only really worth bringing because it could carry a bunch of shots and make more. I had originally thought the WS would get the weapon/armor buffs of old but when I realized that wasn't happening the last useful aspect of the class was gone. So once again crafting dwards are screwed and spoiler dwarfs are of marginal value. I just met a legitimate new player yesterday and the poor sap has only recently upgraded to a D grade weapon. When he asked how to make adena I didn't have the heart to tell him he was about to get fcked over hard by the newest patch. RIP new players.... I don't get why the base price couldn't of been 8 for the new shots. 1 shot for ng/d two for C (I've been buying 14/15 adena C shots since last year), 5 shots for b and so on.. Would of had the same results and newbies wouldn't be utterly screwed. This patch ensures that there will be NO new blood into the game. I would love to get a chance to talk to the moron(s) who decided the price for those shots. Not even getting into the other stupidity..

I'd prefer a leaned down skill set than a bunch of useless skills.

NG and d grade will be vastly more expensive. Anything from C grade and down will not be worth using once that patch hits live.

So NG and D grade are no longer financially viable to use shots at all. So they are just straight up giving up on having any new players at this point... C grade shot prices are increased by 47% screwing over any decently leveled non bot using players. "totally worth it" because B grade and up don't see a massive increase in price like the lower grades so the botters/whales will be fine. Between this and the removal of level based grade limits I'm not even sure why you're bothering with grades anymore. It's almost like Ncsoft doesn't remember the backlash when they homogenized all the classes in GOD. Clearly they'd rather we all play the same classes with the same skills and the same armor/weapons. Variation is difficult to balance so why bother when dev time can be better spent making more mobile games for record profits or P2W events.. Every time I spend money on this game to support it's development I end up regretting it within 48 hours....

I seriously hope that's not right. It would figure though that Ncsoft would increase adena drops by 20% and then increase shot cost by +50%. One step forward two backwards and people will applaud them for this crap.. Remember when they added the achievement statues and then removed them because the vast majority of winners had blatant bot names? Well here we go again except this time the bots will get buffs to help the botters bot even better.....

I was definitely suffering some nerd rage at having to relog in so much. I was only running 9 at most during that time so that x3 would of broke me as a person I've heard lots of bad and very little positive about cox cable. Hopefully that move will get you hooked up properly.

It takes me about 5 hours to drive to Dallas where the datacenter is. So I have very few hops between my systems and the server. The only time I've D/ced in the last couple months was when my internet service went down for some maintenance. I leave 10 characters logged from server maintenance to server maintenance every week for the last few months (9 in a party farming 1 selling). Not a single character has D/Ced. I've even managed to get things setup so that the game client doesn't crash after 3 days (memory leaks). Most likely the D/C issues are related to the internet providers between you and Ncsoft. If you're in europe the packets have to move quite a distance and each hop is a potential dropping point. It's also possibly machine related but that's a much lower chance of being the problem. You're going to need to do a lot of tracerts and such to figure out the weak spot in the chain. Once identified you might be able to find a way around it via a VPN or something. That's not true at all. Losing a few packets can cause some to none of the game clients to D/C. For several months my cable internet provider had a problem with some of their equipment that serviced my area. What that means is I had from 0-30% packet loss at their first bit of equipment (I use my own modem). When the problem first started I would have 1% packet loss at times. The loss would come in bunches of 2-3 packets then back to >10ms pings. Sometimes that was sufficient to cause some of the characters to disconnect other times I only noticed because movement on click was delayed a second. So my point is I've seen first hand that lineage 2 can sometimes be affected by a few packets being lost and other times not affected at all. Sometimes the disconnections would plague one character or even one machine. What you're describing is packet loss. I experienced the same thing when my internet provider was having issues. That would be the delay of a second or so I mentioned in the prior paragraph. I bought a killawatt some months ago to see how much power I was using. Power is a bit expensive here so I was trying to cut back in usage (power = heat too). With the approaching of +90 degree Texas summer days I decided I needed to lessen the amount of heat being generated and electricity being used. Each of my main "gaming" machines were pulling about 215 watts from the wall with 3 clients. The SFF business i5 3470 machines with 8 gb ddr3 and radeon hd7570s (1gb gddr5) were pulling under 90 watts each when running 3 clients (massive drop in watts used). So I'm using three of them now for around 270 watts total for 10 clients. The SFF business machines also release less heat so the air conditioner isn't running nearly as much. It made a noticeable difference in my monthly electrical bill.

A good company (especially one that has generated good will) will have no issues making money without resorting to pay to win in a free game. NCsoft is lazy and greed driven. More attention is paid to next quarters profit than any sort of long term plan that would result in greater income in the future. This shortsightedness is why the company is doing so relatively poorly despite having many opportunities to be a dominate company in it's field. Their big cash cow are mobile games which takes the RMT to the extreme. The latest data I can find shows their mobile division making more money than all the pc games combined.

Well what server you play on certainly matters as some are vastly more populated than others. My experience on my server is that the lower level areas have few gankers. They tend to stick to the areas that have concentrated numbers of targets like OB/AC/FT/cruma/etc. The real problem came on in the 70s when I started running into magnus PKers riding around on their mount critting for silly damage. The blessing will not help you (they tend to be around 77 for magnus). Being above their level matters only in that you have a little more time to try to escape. Because you're not going to chase down a summoner that is on a mount 2000 distance away while their pet is just smashing you. I'm glad you're enjoying the game and the experience. The game certainly needs fresh blood. So I don't mean to come across as mean or condescending when I say that level 35 is just the beginning of the experience in this game. You will see things very differently as you level up and gain experiences in this game.

I like that your solution is to level up another character to higher level then I am so I can level up to a higher level than I am while dealing with PKers every 30 minutes. The PKer doesn't even need a party return as all they have to do is click once to vanish instantly to safety. If they want to be cheap then they can just teleport to a low pop area then scroll. EDIT : I also don't consider "wait for more pay to win so you can resist those magnus better" to be a viable solution.

Oh my god we actually agree on something. I would absolutely love your changes. It's just stupid/unfair/unbalanced that Summoners are the only class that can apply DPS while mounted. No one should be able to DPS while riding away on a mount.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to claim here. I can run over 6 lineage 2 game clients on a $70 (USD) machine I bought off ebay. So it's not like running a few stores in game means you cannot play the game or others. There's a glut of intel/amd machines in china because a lot of desktops/laptops end up there to be "recycled". So if I lived in china a room full of boxes to run whatever would be fairly cheap. There's a few videos on youtube showing some of these bot farms in operation. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some or most of the gold seller spam are from scammers looking for CC numbers to steal from.

Yeah this is going to kill the game and ncsoft won't even care because they are too busy trying to move into the mobile market for even more sweet RMT $$$$... This was obvious too if you paid any attention to the EU classic servers where a specific group of people have taken over the higher level areas with PKs to charge people for the ability to level. There are too many vastly superior games out there for Ncsoft to pull their usual bullcrap here and survive like they have in the past.

Yes it's part of the game and it's outright stupid. People have a right to complain on the forums about something broken in the game even if it is "part of the game"..