Tool_of_Society

Right now it's pretty much impossible for a true solo player to survive. Without buffs leveling is slow and painful because NCsoft couldn't give us pets which the real classic had. Then they "normalize" shots which screwed the dwarfs AND anyone using NG, D and C grade by making them pay more per shot. That pretty much destroyed the market for anything below B grade. Granted on TI the market was pretty slim but it was still there prior. The only reason B grade hasn't been destroyed is because A grade is so stupid expensive to unseal. Meanwhile my clan has been working for months just to get the blood crystals for one clan skill. At this rate we might get all the clan skills in 40 years. Alas I'm drifting from the subject of how it's dumb to be a true solo player in this game. Shot costs are prohibitively expensive so much that even though I'm running a full party solo I still can only afford to put shots on one character if I want to save anything for the A grade fantasy. Prior to this change I was able to run shots on two characters.. Speaking of drops I've seen a very statistical significant drop in "whole" drops. With two full parties running 24/7 the only whole drop I've had since the patch was a zubeii boot. Which of course is almost useless as no one wants any of the zubei sets =/ Right now you'll make more adena leveling/grinding in the low 60s than you will at your high 70s. God help you once you hit the 80s and realize everything wrecks your non OE gear and you realize you have nowhere to really level/grind... That's why I have my main group and a secondary group. The secondary group exists solely to try to fund the costs on my main group... It's silly. Meanwhile I'm wondering why am I even putting up with this crap?

Yes it was removed as a game design decision. NcSoft has been removing game content for a while so it's not a surprise they would start removing chat windows and other useful aspects of the UI too. Can't have people having fun or a usable UI can we?

The naivete is cute. Could you give us a hint what "joining the servers" is even supposed to mean? You can try to limit the accounts to 1 per PC but you will never succeed. Not without making the game basically unplayable for everyone. I played from day one of classic up until looping macros with 9 PCs of which 6 were small form factor business machines I bought for $50-70 delivered off ebay. I controlled them via USB numkey pads which you can get cheap off amazon. Want to get a population going? Well basically it's too late as NcSoft as dcked every opportunity for this game to grow. NcSoft (korea) is far too interested in short term quarterly income to care about the long term health of their games. This has been the standard for the company for a very long time. With their current addiction to mobile gaming It'll only get worse for the PC side of things. That's why I refuse to buy any NcSoft game and I only play L2 because of the nostalgia. If they put some real effort into banning the obvious bot farms like in RoA and made it so live players had a means to upgrade their gear via in game work then maybe the game would start to grow some. Maybe change the 8x stuff to not two shot my doom wearing tank etc..This version of classic is a shell of what real classic was. Most of the content that existed during the real classic era has been removed. Things that gave the "little" people something to do like Fortresses, the manor system, or the Ancient adena seven sign stuff. Pets were a thing that sucked up hours upon hours of my time in classic but those were removed too (would also allow solo players to level successfully). They even removed soul crystal leveling thus removing another source of income for the "little people".. Now the final insults came in the latest patch where they tried to make classic into a mobile game for no apparent reason. The last of the people I have been playing with quit leaving me to watch xp bars very very slowly creep up while deleting stacks of drops that are now utterly worthless. I have two accounts dedicated to just vending and despite that constant effort I sold very few mats to players. I ended up selling the mats to the NPC the day before the patch. I sold about 200m in coal, cokes, suede, metallic fiber, ore, etc. talking like 300k stems alone. All that because no one was buying materials prior to the change and no one is buying now. My guess is because recipes are stupid rare and since A grade is ridiculously expensive to unseal no one wants to craft them... Anyway I'm on a a bit of a rant right now because I'm still salty from the stupidity of the last patch. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep playing at this rate as there's really no point because I know the next changes will just make everything worse as history repeats itself with Ncsoft.

Because it's been part of the game for +16 years? Because they can't stop it even if they wanted to?

It's either your connection or a hop between you and the servers. I suffered from a similar problem with one character dropping etc as stated here. The cause was some faulty equipment that would cause packets to randomly drop. Once my ISP replaced the equipment I no longer suffered from random packet loss and I have been able to stay connected 24/7 since. You should do some tracerts and ping -t to see where you're losing packets. OP's problem got worse with more accounts on because his connection was already struggling with one client. BTW I live a bit south of the datacenter where the server's are housed and I have no issues with 20 clients running 24/7. Granted post nerfs and stupidity that number has gone down some as i"m definitely less committed to this game. Still no problems staying connected.

Intentional "game balance decision". Balance in what way? I dunno maybe the non botters were doing too well and we needed to be smacked down. I'd love to hear some of the justifications and reasoning behind these "game balance decisions" they made in this last "patch".. Personally I would of preferred they just removed all the drops so I don't have useless junk clogging my bags which are tedious to delete. Cause no one is buying the mats because no one is crafting. A grade crafting is silly expensive and getting it unsealed adds a tremendous expense on top so everyone is just sitting on B grade (with a few exceptions) while the major botters are rolling A grade. I heard they added S grade into the game but I wouldn't know because I can't even afford an A grade item.... The dwarf class serves no purpose now and should be removed or revamped into a pure DPS class. None of the "perks" for having a dwarf in party that existed prior made it through the "game balance decisions" we've seen over the last year. Leaving the dwarf classes as nothing more than an inferior dps.

Just using them will stop a character that was moving towards a far off left click.

LOL at warden and Blizzard's failed attempts at stopping bots with automated systems. AI is getting pretty good at doing a variety of tasks but they have limitations. "Scripts" for chugging CP pots and radar were the big PVP things I'm not aware of anyone actually using a bot to pvp as bots are pretty dumb when it comes to target selection in such a scenario. Sony Microsoft and valve have spent quite a lot of time and money trying to build AI systems to catch cheaters and while they have made progress the technology is still very limited in it's abilities. Used to be able to use the skill once click the ground and then the macro would auto cast in that same spot every loop. It's been several years since I played on live so I'm not sure if it's still possible. if you play with it a bit I bet you'll find out.

Lol that's news to me. When playing classic lineage 2 almost 16 years ago I had no problem affording shots and upgrades while leveling. This is supposed to be "classic" lineage 2 and classically shots were affordable and even required for normal leveling. To try to claim they were for PVP only is to try to rewrite 16 years of history that stands contrary to your assertions... oooh wait you're making a parody post my bad that punch line at the end kind of gave me a chuckle thanks. Oh don't worry I'm sure they'll unify spirit shots and soul shots into just "shots" that require 100 adena per swing. Maybe they'll just straight up charge us adena per swing and do away with shots in general as a game balance decision. I'd still like to be able to change my dwarf's class to something useful...

AUtohunt doesn't exactly take priority over macros. While autohunt does try to attack while the buff macro is cycling it doesn't interrupt the macro and all the buffs and delay will occur. If you want to select targets without moving then you do what you had to do prior to autohunt being added to the game. I grinded for a few years on live with just looping macros. I didn't realize you could use macros with autohunt like that for at least a month after autohunt was introduced. My parties were running fine prior and I never needed to do what you're doing. Your clarification helped greatly for me to understand what you were talking about.

Hey can you ask the devs to add a check box or option to turn off looting of mats and other worthless crap? Litterly 99.999% of drops are now absolutely worthless and are just clogging my inventory. It's annoying to have to throw this crap away because I don't want to miss out on that 0.005% weapon or armor drop chance... Kind of super glad to hear that major parts of my "new" UI rant was just the result of mere incompetence on the developer's part and not intentional design decisions. On the flip side this is an extremely bad sign as I discovered these problems within 20 second of logging into the game. Either they are doing no QC at all or they just don't care..

I'm using autohunt with looping macros fine. Just hit autohunt then right click the macro. Buff macros with delay can get kind of wonky with autohunt but it works still.

Of course and I doubt any of them actually play the game based off their horrible UI "update"... They would probably be surprised to learn that buffers used the spirit shots. Heck at low levels I used spirit shots on anything I nuked with because it was by far more cost effective most of the time. It's the only thing new players to the game could hope to afford and that was when drops were actually worth something even if that worth was only a little... I love how their intentional design choices for "balance" have led to a state of the game where playing a dwarf class of any kind is a bad idea and the botters/cheaters prevail... EDIT : Did you get a chance to ask them to add back in vital game play aspects of the UI like the ability to see debuffs on your target? Or maybe right click on name to block? or increasing the thickness of the CP bar beyond a couple pixels so it's actually useful for seeing in combat? Frankly the UI is so terrible I'd rather they revert to the prior one or at least what Live has. I would love to hear their explanation for removing/breaking such basic aspects of the UI. Is the goal to push people to live or to push classic into a crappy mobile game?

1. Yup no starter weapon only a set of generic duals and the hope you find something useful. 2. Yup you're screwed trying to support yourself as a newbie player. In real classic you could afford shorts and upgrades as you leveled but not in this classic. You just joined at a bad time too as the last patch just killed your only hope as a newbie to make money. What I mean by that is almost all the drops for you as a newbie are now completely worthless. Litterly anything other than weapon/armor and scroll drops now have absolutely no value. I do wish I had an option to just not loot mat drops because they aren't even worth my time to throw away.... 3. RoA is absolutely packed and sometimes the botter gets overly protective of their spots via magnus based Pkers. Get the blessing of protection from the gatekeeper and try to find a slow spot off in the corners or up hills etc. Just take a good run around there are some spawns out of the way that can be missed. Getting that quest done can be a real nightmare though without someone to PK the bots their protectors out.. 4. B is basically the highest viable tier right now thanks to the astronomical costs of clothes required to unseal A grade items. So people are over upgrading B to try to compensate. There has always been some C grade sets that are useful even at high levels. D and NG are effectively nonexistent now. Tyrant will chew through shots so I'm not sure if you'll ever be able to afford to use them with the current game settings. You might want to consider making a second account for a buffer so leveling isn't quite so painful. People seem to prefer prophet and blade dancer as buffers for "soloing". PP for buffs/heal BD for dps more buffs and eventually the vampiric song.

Oh man and for some reason sitting is like high grade aggro in this game...

Well if you didn't go to town and depending on where you were leveling that's possible. Every time I hit a town I was spammed by the same group that has been spamming for months now. Which is why within minutes of the new patch going live I posted on these forums that we needed right click to block/report back in. It's important because you give the false impression that Ncsoft achieved something against the spammers for a week when they didn't. Don't give them credit for something they didn't do as things are bad enough as is.

Oh and can I get a refund for spoil crush? it's utterly useless now and is inferior dps...

The monster name color change needs to be reverted. Right now it is utterly useless as white mobs can mean 40% of the normal XP rate and no drops or outright death..The change has made the color thing utterly useless and I still don't know why NcSoft spent time and money to do this.. They would of achieved essentially the same effect by just removing it completely. There are so many things in this patch that I cannot understand the logic behind it. Some of it can be explained by NcSoft trying to push L2 classic to a mobile platform or shared development but some things like the monster name color change make absolutely no sense from any angle. I would love to hear some of the justifications for some of these terrible design choices. Thanks to the mats change I'm now looking at barely affording shots on one character a week. Somehow I'm supposed to be saving up to buy clothes so I can do something with this A gear I have in storage....Meanwhile just as before the change no one is buying mats. Probably because the bottleneck for crafting are the recipes and those have always been rare in comparison. This has been exacerbated by all the direct and indirect nerfs of the dwarf classes over the last year. I'm debating on replacing my Fortune seeker because no matter how much it seeks fortune it will never find it now. The only reason I haven't already started working on a replacement is because I just can't justify the effort or money (for runes) required to do so considering how terrible the current state of the game is. I'm having a hard time staying interested in this game when I think that more of this stupidity is inevitable... When summer rolls around and I start having to pay a bit extra in electrical costs for A/C I'll definitely be strongly considering cutting back on my gaming.

The spam never left TI or giran dunno what/where you were playing.

God that would be a decent start on repairing the crap UI they gave us. I've never seen an UI pushed through like this before. Not only does it have less functionality but it is worse at presenting information while presenting less information... I just can't believe it made it into the game it's so bad... For examples of it presenting information poorly I would start with the CP bar. It's so tiny I'm pretty sure you can't even see it on a phone (which is what the UI seems designed for). You can't tell what character you're playing at a glance either. The system window is gone so now damage/heal/etc information is buried in chat. For examples of presenting less information I'd point to the inability to see what debuffs you have landed on your target in PVE and PVP. I guess technically the name thing should be in this category. Less functionality in you can't right click to block or report people anymore. You can't mark targets for people in your party. You can't even assist people in your party. They removed useful click short cuts such as action or macro. I could fill those examples out if I started actually collecting notes on all the stuff this UI does poorly but I think the point is there already.

Yes the UI itself is still a big ol steaming pile of a turd that is an actual regression in design...

Indeed NcWest has been on life support for some time financially.. NcSoft is making more off mobile games than everything else combined by a long shot. So why would they invest money into a game that gives small returns when they can just crank out another crap mobile game and hit the jackpot?

I really do think more people should be thanking Juji for at least getting us this. This is a huge step as I don't recall any other major change being reverted on the NA servers exclusively in the past. At least do a quick thanks click

The UI itself is terrible. You can't right click to block or report now. You can't even see the debuffs on your target so either you spam debuffs or just use it once and pray... The CP bar is tiny and almost useless.. No ability to mark targets like every other MMORPG in existence. No system info wiindow so now chat window is spammed with crap. It is so bad they HAD to of been trying to make it worse because my god this was a lot of failure otherwise. Whoever pushed for this design and whoever approved it should be fired or moved to a new position because they have no idea what they are doing...

A few months ago on giran I was actually still selling some B grade mats occasionally. Just before the patch I sold over 800 blue wolf (avadon wasn't moving at all and most doom wouldn't either) mats to the NPC because no one was buying them even at barely above NPC value. On TI I couldn't get those same mats to move for many months now at all regardless of the price so I dumped them too. TI's B grade crafting market died much MUUUUCH earlier than Girans. I don't know about the two small servers as I never bothered to play on them and from what I hear crafting has been nonexistent for +6 months.