Katastrophe

Suggestions for removing barriers that prevent Lineage 2 from becoming the most popular / profitable MMO. With some tweaks, there is no reason this shouldn't be competing in the top-3 most popular MMOs of 2023. If you were able to bring back the millions of players that are currently exiled on illegal servers, making 10x to 100x the profits from this game should be very easy. Improved communication. NCWest should post a community letter every 3 to 6 months to discuss the priorities, what you are currently working on, and your vision for the near future and in the next year or two. Players' questions and concerns in the forums should be answered on a priority basis. Increase availability of gear for low to mid-level gear. Bloody and Dark stones are probably the most urgent that need to be made more available. Crystal of Dawn, PI scrolls, Forgotten Spellbooks, Elcyum, Star Signs, and Artifacts are other examples. Maybe add some of these drops to Storm Isle and Crisis. The biggest hurdle to having more players is how long and expensive it is to get decent enough gear to solo even at levels 105 to 110. High-level gear parity with Korean servers. There is no need for such austerity measures as we see in NCWest. Level 120+ players should be able to obtain top-level gear. Even the richest players only have a few top items at best. Even if someone had the money, it often takes years to be able to find all the items you need for sale, for example dragon claws or Zariche blood. The ability to change classes or convert weapons and armors should be permanent features and not linked to the Red Libra event. Instead of Chaos essences, you should be able to change to any class. Quality of Life class swap: swapping classes not being affected by the item limit was requested by NCWest long ago. I hope when NC Korea makes this available, that we'll get it shortly after. Actually listen to players this time. This is probably the 10th post like this I write since 2004. Everytime NCWest asks for feedback, they end up ignoring the players. Hopefully this time will be different. Maybe it's my inner Charlie Brown hoping Lucy won't take the ball away this time. Expectations: Within 1-2 weeks, you should post a list of the actions you will take to address the issues, with a target date by which you will report back on each one. For example, "Will investigate ways to make Bloody and Dark weapon/armor stones more available. Will have a proposed solution in 30 days." Then 30 days later, you report back "In the next update, we will be add bloody and dark weapon/armor stones to the droplist in Storm Isle. Expected date is Mid-March 2023.". Make those commitments, and meet or exceed them, and you will regain the trust of players, and the community will rebuild. Ignore the players, and more players will leave, along with the revenue you used to make from them. One positive note: When I came back, I was able to gear an Eviscerator for 200-300$ for gear + 50$/month for runes/prestige. With this I was able to get to level 110 in a short amount of time, which is better than how the game was 2 years ago when they made even the blazing swamp monsters impossible to kill in exalted gear. Biggest challenge will be the 250-500$ of ncoins needed to buy an R110 bloody armor set.

If the rates are the same as before, for a Dragon Rind Dragon Shirt, you need an average of 19 scrolls to get +3, 93 for +4, and 926 for +5. This is using a LUC value of 0. Having higher LUC (race/class with higher base LUC, such as dwarven FS, +15 LUC tattoos, +++LUC gear, etc.) definitely helps a bit, although that was nerfed a few years back, where even 100+ LUC only made a small difference.

In the months where we had Greedy Treasure Chests, I was only ever able to open two. Top clans would setup bots everywhere to detect them, and bring their "killing toons" to pk nearby players and kill the chest. A few of the issues of that past system which made it bad for the average player: Chests were too high level for the zone they were in, so a regular player would take 5-10 minutes to kill their chest. Lv 120 chests in lv 110 zones, for example. Chests were public, so bots/PKers were the only ones to benefit. What would work better is if they reworked the Aden Chests to include the drops from the Greedy Treasure Chest in that drop table.

@Y2J I watched your two videos and the cropping on both is bad (cutting off some essential parts) and the YouTube end card you put blocks the results panels. Once you improve those two things it'll be more helpful. As for the Venusta boxes, as someone who opens over 75 a week (3 toons doing dailies), I'd say that's about what should be expected.

The only classes that do ok-ish without gear are Maestro (lv 106+) and Eviscerators because of the 1/3 damage skills. Every other class needs a good amount of gear to be viable. Yul has a very steep curve where it takes significant investment before it becomes a top class. But once you reach that threshold, nothing can even come close to comparing. I switched to Yul on my main during the last Red Libra because I finally have enough gear to pull it off. Since the latest patch, however, I decided to level 2 archer + 1 iss mentees. Other than a set of octavis jewels for one archer, I used only free gear on these. The latest update made things much worse for free players since they yet again increased the damage and defense of field monsters. Paulina gear is no longer sufficient in Blazing Swamp, you will die many times to mobs before finishing the first 40k quest. You will also likely run out of soulshots between exalted quests since your damage is nerfed and you need more attacks/soulshots to kill those 40k mobs. In Exalted 1 gear, you will get demolished in Coal mines. By the time you get Exalted 2 gear, you will still need a healer or iss to spam heals to keep you alive in Coal Mines. By the time you reach 105 and would normally move out of Blazing Swamp, you will likely not be strong enough to solo in Hellbound, let alone SV or AI. The only positive thing about this update is the honesty: life is miserable as soon as you hit 99 instead of giving false hope until 105+.

The solution isn't that hard if you understand the real issue: clans abusing game mechanics to trigger wars vs afk players. The problem is many classes have AoE damage skills that flag back automatically. Tyrrs, sigels, isses are prime examples. Take that away, and there's no reason for the < 14 clan rules anymore. All: Target / damage everyone and everything. Chaotic: Target / damage monsters and red players. Enemies: Target / damage monsters, players at war against your clan, or red/purple players that are not in your clan/alliance/party. Monsters: Target / damage monsters only.

When most of the players were already struggling with level-appropriate content (including players who spent in the 2k-5k$ range), increasing the difficulty of many hunting zones was yet again the last thing this server needed, and will likely cost you a LOT of players once again. Other than a handful of players (about 55 characters lv 117+, and a few more in the 114-116 range), the bulk of the players are level 110-113 and are struggling against level 105/107 content. I'm also not talking about free to play players, or parties with DDs in in exalted. This is players who spent in the 2k-5k$ range with over a trillion worth of gear and have all their "basic gear" covered (+12 limited weapon, +10 or better cloak, radiant circlet, dragon rind leather shirt, top-grade book with +4 artifacts, +6 angel jewelry, some lv 5 / greater jewels, etc.). Level 110 instances should be doable by a reasonably-geared lv 110 party. By 112, it should start feeling a bit easy. Currently, that's true of some 105 level instances (for example Baylor and Nightmare Kamaloka), but others like Forest of Mirrors is seeing some lv 112 parties struggle. Level 110 instances are mostly done if you have a few 113-115 DDs with 10s of thousands of gear to carry the rest of the pt. Your solution? Increase the difficulty of the content to ensure even less players are able to kill things of their level. As far as newbies go, introducing the blessed exalted pack was a good start, but boosting the mobs in Blazing Swamp so players in Paulina gear frequently die is only making things worse for new players. The Einhassad store solved many gear acquisition issues in other regions by providing necessary gear to get started. The fact you haven't included that feature here yet is a slap in the face to the players. Players expect this to happen, and we expect it to happen very soon. The Neutral Zone area was a good attempt to bring something to do for people in the 107-110 range. Unfortunately it is the ONLY area in this game worth hunting into, so the 20 or so hunted spots are being contested by the entire server. I mentioned this many times before, but this game does not provide enough incentives for doing high level content. Players can either hunt in the Neutral Zone, or they can go kill in Ketra/Varka where monsters are many times stronger, only to provide very slightly more exp/kill, and drop less adena. The same happens if you compare any other hunting zone. As a rule of thumb, higher level content does not give enough rewards for the difficulty/risk. The solution is simple: rebalance Ketra/Varka and other party zones so they are as worth it to do as Neutral Zone is. Just like last time, I suspect you will ignore feedback and continue ruining the game. But just like last time, if you listen to some of us, you can very easily bring back 100k+ players who will each spend large amounts of money if you make this game more playable to the masses. Many players would pay 20$-50$ a month if it meant seeing constant improvement. But as it stands, most of us are 500$-1000$ away from our next upgrade. Lastly, as a rule of thumb, many players are happy to invest in order to become better at killing content. Where they start grumbling and quitting is when they have to spend more than they're comfortable with just to keep hunting at the same spaces they've already been hunting for 10+ years with less rewards than they used to get. Or you can continue your austerity policies and see how much money you can squeeze out of the 1k or so paying customers, losing a chunk of players every update.

Agreed, if the runes came boxed so we could open them up at our leisure, it would be a lot less spit in the faces of those of us who buy runes, but by making them open immediately, it's rewarding free players disproportionately. Also it's way past time for you to bring the Einhassad store fully, enchant rates, and item rates of other regions. It's 2021, and most of our big spenders are less geared than casual players in other servers. Our casual players are geared for 2018 content at best. Greedy chests should be brought back in as drops, not mobs. Or make them proportionally strong to mobs from the area they spawn in (i.e. 1 skill crit should kill it), making it inefficient to farm them with bots.

@Juji this is a very weak position by both sides. Don't report it as a bug, don't ask if it "works as intended", ask for the functionality to be changed because it is hindering players. Simple solution: change the inventory / warehouse increases from being bound to your class, and bind it to the character instead. Include that increase to 80% increase. Also include +inventory slots from equipment (like belts). Also make it so no-trade items do not count towards the limit. Simple changes like those should not take more than a few days to code and would save hours of work weekly for most players. And ultimately you should try to reduce the down time between "fun".

Event NPC

@Juji@Hime I gotta say this update makes the previous update look good. I used to solo fine in FoW/Sel Mahum pre-update, and had to BSOE within 2 minutes in FoS. That's with somewhere in the range of 300-400b worth of gear. I shouldn't have a hard time hunting monsters of my level with that gear. If it's an attempt to make support classes useful again (I'm sure some Tanks/Healers will be happy of being needed again), that's semi-understandable, however once again an update is going to slow our XP down tremendously. I hope you will (quickly) do something like you did last time with the herbs + monthly extra upgrades (agathions, etc.) to help boost us up. Also, the cookies can't be auto-used without putting them in a macro which is annoying.

No reason to renew my XP rune for now, let's see what next week brings. That Lara's event is just a waste of bytes.

Byebye xp event! On the good news server lag should be gone when 90%+ of the players quit again. We need some permanent fixes to all the issues, not just intermittent events that come and go.

The problem is Varka and Ketra only affect a very small percentage of players that are high enough to go there and is creating an even bigger gap between the "haves" and "have-nots" of the server. Nothing has been fixed as of yet for 95% of the population. People who can AoE those areas are progressing 100s of times faster than people who don't. You see people go from 111 to 112 faster than most people can go from 108 to 109. There are a lot of great events which is making the game playable for now, but band-aid solutions only work IF they are working on a long-term plan, which I hope they still are, even though we haven't heard anything of it yet. Many of us suggested 1000s of ways to make this game better. Unless many of those are applied, some day the events will run out, and the game will return to its same unplayable state. Many other games and software companies have a product owner who will give updates of what the team is working on and reassure the players that things will be improving. NCSoft/NCWest remains silent, so I don't blame people for expecting the worse, because NCSoft gives no indication to the contrary. It's been over a month since they asked for our feedback, we haven't heard anything back to see if/what they plan to do with those suggestions.

Thank you for extending the xp one more week!