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!

I'm good losing in PvP versus a well-geared player (I know not everyone is, but a lot of us are). Where I cringe is not being able to do much PvE content with 50b-100b worth of gear each on my 108 dd and 109 iss.

The herbs will hopefully make the game "mostly playable" again, but doesn't solve a few of the other major issues, for example too few mobs for the number of players. I've been thinking of it lately, and I think the biggest issue is the bulk of players are within a 5 level range of each other. Back in the olde days, you had 100s of players in newbie zones, 100s in the Dion / Cruma Tower area, 100s around Giran / Death Pass, a bunch more around Oren/IT/HV, and 100s more around Aden. Also add a few 100 more in catacombs / necros. Right now too much space is being taken up by a mostly useless lv 1-85 questline. This should be stream-lined one step more as a single room (for example reuse the Rim Kamaloka room) where you have 1 npc in the middle, you talk to it, and you get the next wave of monsters. Then you can redo all these newbie zones as lv 105-110 zones. I'm sure most of us would even be tolerant if you went the "lazy" way and for example copied the Silent Valley mobs to hunting zones like Valley of Saints, Forsaken Plains, and Outlaw Forest, for example. Bonus points if you actually leveled up the original mobs of those areas to add diversity. Split Swamp of Screams into two sections: high level (115 mobs on top of the hill) and low level (108 mobs in the bottom). Keep the feature where everyone gets ported back to the entrance. Also make it a siege zone to encourage PvP. Basically turn it into a lucrative place for PvE but where you have to defend yourself either physically or politically. Also, as was mentioned many times, we need a way to gear up to at least decent levels with what we obtain in-game. Using a modest budget (say 50-100$ a month?) should be enough to actually feel "strong". Whales can keep being overpowered, I have no issue about that incentive to pay "more". But the game has to remain at least enjoyable by everyone, no matter the budget. We play a game to escape the austerity measures of the "real world". Take Diablo II / Diablo III, Path of Exile, etc. The longer you play, the more powerful you feel. In L2, a patch comes along and makes everyone feel like weaklings again. We didn't play the game for 16 years to struggle against covid-infected murder wasp Elpies. Bring some quality of life back into the game. For example, the dual class system is absolutely destroyed by the inventory limit vs the number of useless items we need to carry around. Having a limit of 184 items on both dual and main class doesn't help me if I have 119 items on me and the game prevents me from switching. I have to ship out everything on me to another player in order to change, and actually have to manage the no-trade items to fall without the low inventory requirement to change classes. I'd probably pay 20$ USD to increase my BASE inventory from 84ish to 125, and probably 50$ to bring it up to 200 BASE inventory. Same thing with the warehouse. I can understand that memory was expensive 16 years ago, but it makes absolutely no sense with the number of non-tradable items we have to have such limited warehouses. And let's face it, especially with the warehouse, which you access at most a few times per day, it shouldn't add that much traffic/processing to your database over the period of a month to actually slow things down. I'm sure a LOT of players would be willing to pay for a good increase to both. Let's face it, a Letter event with 12 distinct no-trade letter stacks taking up space in your inventory plus a bunch of no-trade rewards would be a LOT more enjoyable if we actually had room to store them comfortably. I also don't see why the letters and so many rewards had to be no-trade. Even more insulting when you get bsps in a melee, or soulshots on a nuker.

I doubt it'll result in substantive change (it never has in the past), but lets play along for fun. As a product owner in real life, let me put on my product owner hat and give some suggestions on how I would resolve some of the issues. 1a. Hunting Zones Situation: For my level (108 Maestro + 109 DoomCryer), SV would be the ideal spot for hunting, as it would be for probably 500-1000 other players. Because there are only a dozen or so spots, we have to go to the next spot, Tanor, which is also packed. Alligator? No spots either. FoM? No spots. Basically after I'm done wasting 30-60 mins looking for spots, I end up in Isle of Prayer which has yellow mobs to my DD. Before the 2x xp event and dragon weapon event, I made around 50t-75t per day. With event I was making 130-150t. With new update, I made 25t with a dragon weapon. Thats 10t for IT + 3.6t for Castilla 110, and hunting all day. My XP rune is expiring tonight, I will not be renewing it unless things change. Also cancelled my prestige rune. Its just not worth it. Action items: Add more hunting spots for level 105-110. Roll back the change to SoS level. 1b. Raid Bosses Raids are something fun to do with your clan, something to break the monotony of afk grinding all day. By making them too high even for the highest players, you removed all end-game content from 100% of players. Action items: Bring back the raid bosses to their previous level. The lv 116 bosses rarely got killed, but those could've been a stretch goal for a clan to reach in the near future. At least keep the stretch goals realistic, and keep plenty of content for the majority of players. 1c. Party Experience Currently there is no incentive for bringing support classes (healers, tanks, and isses) except for the few instances where you absolutely need them. Increase the pt xp bonus to add about 90% xp more per member, to encourage people to bring full parties. If I can make 2b xp per kill solo or 1.8b with a pt full of clannies, I'd be happy to make a full pt. 2. Augment System Augmenting items from anywhere is nice. Having to go to the blacksmith to remove it makes it redundant. Augmenting armor adds a bit extra bonus. Requiring an item that hasn't dropped in a long time in the recipe is ridiculous. Action Items: Allow us to remove augments from anywhere. The role-play experience of going to an NPC for this was fine 16-years ago, with the latest updates there is no role-playing elements left. Remove Energy of Destruction from the Armor Augment Stone recipe. Or make it easy to obtain these items. 3. Item Changes Adding sigils/shields to every class doesn't really add anything to the game. Level 4 seed bracelet and augmenting books is to rich for my blood, don't know much about either, and I'm 100s of billions away from caring about them. 4. Skill Changes While a lot of people were jealous that Maestros could solo yellow mobs, the kill speed (1 mob per 12 to 18 seconds depending if skill mastery triggered on Last Attack) meant you would do so very slowly. I felt that made up for the fast that we kill green and white mobs slowly even with very respectable gear. Action Item: Remove the level damage penalty for everyone. If you are strong enough to handle an area / mob, you should be allowed to hunt there. Re-balance stats such as accuracy/evasion/attack/defense to achieve this purpose the right way. 5. Other Changes The player experience of going from level 1 through 105ish is fine with the exalted gear, etc. However the level 106-113 game play is unfinished. When we get a new clan member and help them reach 105, we eventually need to have the awkward conversation that unless they can spend 200-500$ to get some gear and magically make it to lv 108+, they can't join mid-level content (party dailies in Aden, IT, etc.) unless one of our higher level members who can solo that content runs them through, and they contribute nothing and just try not to die too often. Action Items: People should be able to get enough gear to do content of their level using in-game functions (i.e. hunting mobs for adena/drops). That means you should be able to obtain R99 gear around 105, and r110 gear by 108/110, using only things obtained by playing. Either bring back SoS or increase the regular mob experience to make up for it. People need to feel they are progressing towards something. Introduce some non-trade easier-to-obtain versions of some of the better items. For example killing a field boss could give a 5% chance to everyone who killed it to receive a non-trade epic. This makes it feasible for people to gear up with perseverance, while not affecting the economy because the tradeable epics will retain their value. Events Events created by NCWest are too expensive. It takes 200-500$ at the very minimum just to have a playable character for mid-level content. Then a few 1000$ if you want to reach level 110+ content. Many events have items that would statistically cost over 100k$ to obtain. Its not unusual to spend 100$ on an event and obtain nothing. While it is not legally required to post the odds in North America, it should be an ethical consideration taken by NCSoft. For random chests, there are too many worthless items. If you're going to pay 1-5$ for a chest, getting yet another useless rose is just a slap in the face. When 80-90% of the items you receive are a slap in the face, its not encouraging to keep going. Also there are too many items from evens that cannot be traded or have an expiry date. Letters are currently not tradeable, making it harder to complete words, and allowing lower level players to sell their letters. Then many rewards are non-tradeable and completely useless, like our clan leader receiving 3 spiritshot packs on his archer. Drastic changes Merge Isses + Tyrrs + Tanks with a stance to go from dd mode into tank mode (with at most a 20% p.atk penalty while in tank mode). Merge Healer and Nuker classes where you can change stances from one mode to the other, similar to inquisitor mode, but by turning into a full nuker. These changes would give the same leveling ability to support classes as the other classes. Quality of Life Melee attack lag and the JuJu agathion spam should have been made a much higher priority. These are the nagging things that drive people insane for no good reason. Bottom Line While whales are definitely lucrative, don't forget the power of numbers. If you improve the game and make it popular again (FF XIV is an example who achieved this), you could easilly be raking in 10x or even 100x more revenue from L2 even by lowering the ncoin costs and making the game more accessible / fun.

The major problem with this update and many other previous updates is they are mandatory, and quite frankly NCSoft isn't nearly pushing themselves even nearly hard enough. This update is free in parts because lets face it, its worth 0$ to most of us. If they sold the updates as an additional purchase in the 20-50$ range, maybe they'd sell a few copies to nukers this time around, but most everyone else would say "No thanks, I like the previous version better". I understand NCSoft Korea is using an agile approach where they're releasing incremental releases very frequently, and they bundle a bunch of these up as updates for the international version, but they are still severely lacking in vision, and that to me signals a very bad product owner/manager. One who does not seem to understand the game enough to have a long term vision, so he's looking at a series of quick 1-2 week fixes. Lets take a look at the features from a USER/PLAYER point of view: Hunting Zone Changes: Most of these are unnecessary and unwanted. Augmentation System Renewal: Who decided to add an ingredient that no longer exists in the recipe??? Item Changes: New stats for R110 Sigil/Shield were much needed. Skill Changes: Sigil/Shield changes are weird and don't really make sense. New dualclass certifications are fine. Changes to Tyrr confusion are good. System Changes: Class ranking will be fun, bonuses not really worth it. UI & Other Changes: Bunch of minor changes, some nice QoL improvements. Undocumented changes: no mention of the 1/3 Maestro and Eviscerator skill, I'm hoping it means we won't be getting it (yet? ever?) Maestros do not need a nerf vs yellow. Sure, they can kill yellow mobs in 12-18 seconds with 1/3 kills and last attack, but they also kill white mobs and sometimes even green mobs at the same speed, because they lack the power that other classes do, so this was a good compromise. The AoE classes can kill 20+ mobs in the time we kill one, so the balance is still very much in their favor even before this nerf. Against pink / red mobs I would agree, but whatever was done for Last Attack I believe is a good benchmark of what should be done to the 1/3 skill. On the flip side, the xp nerf is pretty severe, so you rarely see Maestros solo pink/red mobs anyway, other than on a dare. I was able to kill mobs in DV at lv 107, but it just wasn't worth the trouble of hitting a mob for 2 minutes that would crit me for over half of my hp.

Red Libra will happen if/when they can get it to work. Latest estimate is end of summer, but they've been failing at getting it working for a few months already, so I wouldn't hold my breath out too much. Likewise for a Heine fishing event, the dev team in Korea said this event is no longer supported, so NCWest would have to get creative if they want to bring it back here.

As much as I hate touching regedit, this fixed it for me, thanks! Background info: I had been playing for months without issues, but one accidental alt-enter later and my UI scaling settings in Windows was no longer working, and the game was completely unplayable in window mode with a 4k resolution. I deleted the registry key you mentioned, and now everything is back to normal.

Not in the past few years. At first marks were not affected by m.atk, so most wynns were using bows to boost summon damage. Then they added a skill to boost retributer p.atk on wynn, but SAs + jewelry + other gear can be somewhat different between a p.atk and an m.atk build, so you have to choose which one you'll be mediocre at and which one to completely suck at.

The cake is a lie!

Other than that annoying first stage of Octavis, summoners are quite meh. The first update when we could awaken they were quite good at farming, great at olymp, and so-so in mass PvP. Ever since then pet damage got nerfed 3-4 times to the point they are nearly annoyances now. In order to somewhat compensate, marks have become a bit more powerful, so now you need nuker gear instead of the traditional bow wynners, which makes your pets even weaker, because your gear will be focused on increased casting damage. Their AoE options are slow and weak. That makes them a very bad class at farming XP and leveling up. You either kill slow in AoE, or you switch to marks + summon attack and it takes you too long to kill the mobs. Even my 99 archer or 103 nuker would be able to kill an entire group of monsters faster than my 104 summoner would be able to kill 1 single mob. I understand the concept of flavour-of-the-month, but some of us spent over a decade level up and gearing characters to see it rendered useless by a patch. I parked my 104 summoner to reroll a new class. The last day I played it, I got kicked out of the lobby of 5 coal parties in a row with a kind note of "we are looking for an AoE DD".