Hello,
I'm an old player (talking beta, before launch of L2, original Bartz server). You know, the ones that still have our retail L2 disk box and all the memories it instills just looking at it. Like most people I leave and come back when nostalgia bites. And it bites a little harder for people like me, who remember the very first castle sieges. The formation of clans, the fight vs aggressive adena farmers, politics, power plays you name it. The world was a different & far more hostile place then it is today. Alot of us had a second subscription for a buffer/healer, because party finder didn't exist back then. You would sit at a popular spot and shout your class level in the hopes of finding someone that would leave their party so you could join.
Fast forward a few years, c4 alot of us quit for newer titles. Call it burn out, boredom, but for some reason we always come back sooner or later. The Goddess of Destruction expansion was both the death of the original game & a slap in the face to those of us that grinded ENDLESS hours on top floors of TOI, in the dragonvalley cave donut/heart, who helped support the server with our most important asset, our time. That sense of accomplishment was shot dead when you can literally level to 85 in a day.
Negative points aside, I could understand GoD, it was a needed life vest for a title that was for a lack of better word, "dead". But it was more of a layer over the original game then a game of itself. Too many useless lower class skills, relics of it's past it tried to bury but could not. It added alot of good things, stuff that should have been there years before.
fast forward some more, classic server.. sadly I cant bring myself to grind like that anymore, it makes me physically sick to start over.
Lets move forward one final time. This new aden server promised a different experience. Fast leveling, simpler designs, streamlining everything. I figured hey, why not give it a fair shot, maybe i'll make some new friends along the way. I sit here today feeling like Aden is just the embodiment of GoD all over again, but its way worse, at least GoD had it's own soul. This auto-leveling thing is just a glorified botting feature. The lack of drops & adena is a real let down. There is no sense of accomplishment leveling up, no new world to explore, no new lore, not even a new voice dialog on any npc. But worse of all, its an MMO where you see tons of people, but interact with no-one. This game server rewards you for not playing, something that is a big no-no.
In short - whatever vision you had for Aden, I don't buy into it. I know sooner rather than later the freebies will dry up and i'll be stuck shelling out cash to have what you basically gave me for free the day before. I'm guessing this is probably the last hurrah for a title that was supposed to have 12 expansions but ended up with alot more.
Maybe the saddest thing is leaving without a bang, just a whisper in the wind.
