[TaZ]

PsychoPigeon, on 05 June 2011 - 02:47 PM, said:

Lineage really were not considered successful, the main player base were on private servers. I did forget about EVE and EQ though so that's 3, DAoC population dried up fast.

Not sure what kind of drugs your on, but Lineage2 .. while it were at its top, had over 1 million western subscribers, and more than twice that in the asian regions.

Compared to the numbers wow hit, thats notthing yes. But by your definition you say, that there were more than 3 million active people on private servers?. I highly doubt that. And i have a feeling you missed out of most of what L2 had to offer, by going F2P Private server. So in general you never played the game?

[Zul]

In honesty, the game has to worth $15 a month. I believe Arche Age will be worth it and we all know why, but I just came back from playing Swtor, so at the moment I'm a little bias because on a company that spent so much money making the game, comes down and charges $15 a month and hardly fixes bugs, updates content, or responds to inquiries. (Damn auto responses)

Most MMO's are like that too. Takes forever to fix a bug and update content within the game, or they come out and charge you for expansions at the price, or close to, of a whole game.

We all know Arche Age already has awesome content from CBT4.. and it seems they are trying to reach beyond the normal MMO experience, but for me, as long as they fix bugs and update content regularly, then it is well in the range of $15 a month.

[Miyafuji]

I'm not afraid about bots I know they will exist in some form, more or less annoying. I'm afraid of the company itself willingly allowing blotters in to harvest more money because otherwise you will have no resources tu run or further expand the game. Or do you want to buy the expansions. No. I want mouthy fee and free expansions.

This exactly happened to L2 with NCsost tolerating and inviting masses of bots. For that whole reason, the game had much bigger population on unofficial servers then on those maintained by NCsoft. It got completely ruined by the company over time.

[Trancend]

I vote P2P ofcourse..

Some F2P MMO's have a tendency of getting unballanced and dying when the CS ppl have high lvl's and gear.
One example is perfect world..

Maby having it P2P in the beginning, and when the player base gets lower and game becomes older they can maket it F2P like they did with D&D.
Annyways i will still pay for this

PS:(sorry for my bad spelling/grammar)

Trancend

[TaZ]

Miyafuji, on 28 March 2012 - 11:15 AM, said:

I'm not afraid about bots I know they will exist in some form, more or less annoying. I'm afraid of the company itself willingly allowing blotters in to harvest more money because otherwise you will have no resources tu run or further expand the game. Or do you want to buy the expansions. No. I want mouthy fee and free expansions.

This exactly happened to L2 with NCsost tolerating and inviting masses of bots. For that whole reason, the game had much bigger population on unofficial servers then on those maintained by NCsoft. It got completely ruined by the company over time.

i never found a unofficial server with the population nearly of what we saw on Bartz !

did you ever have 1000+ vs 1000+ man sieges on private servers?

did you ever have multiple sieges on multiple castles involving over 5000+ people fighting in different spots and castles ?
no .. all you got was a no fee, fast high level game, with higher drop rates! and there were ALOT of botters on private servers, running with their own parties useing L2W ... not caring if they got banned, not caring for anything. But lets not count those. They were on both Public and Private servers!

I do agree, ncsoft didnt do enough to get rid of botters, to an extend, where i think they support botting, and i belive they were partly behind the creation of L2Walker etc.

[LlexX]

Trancend, on 29 March 2012 - 06:40 PM, said:

Maby having it P2P in the beginning, and when the player base gets lower and game becomes older they can maket it F2P like they did with D&D.
Annyways i will still pay for this

Yeah that would work. But first in case of player base drop while P2P, merge a few servers, then after a while when it has been dropped drastically make it F2P.


@Lineage
Yeah officially it was a P2P game, but cmon people, it were the private servers which kept the game reputation alive and they were mostly free, and some of them even better organised then the official servers.

[Ryuuboruz]

I think people freak out with spending 10-20 dollars a month which costs less than one movie ticket + drink/food. People always want an excuse to get free things and it might be ok for downloading or torrenting, but not for a game. I know they will make it p2p and that's the best way to have it, if you want a long lasting prosperous game.

[Miyafuji]

TaZ, on 29 March 2012 - 07:32 PM, said:

i never found a unofficial server with the population nearly of what we saw on Bartz !

did you ever have 1000+ vs 1000+ man sieges on private servers?

did you ever have multiple sieges on multiple castles involving over 5000+ people fighting in different spots and castles ?
no .. all you got was a no fee, fast high level game, with higher drop rates! and there were ALOT of botters on private servers, running with their own parties useing L2W ... not caring if they got banned, not caring for anything. But lets not count those. They were on both Public and Private servers!

I do agree, ncsoft didnt do enough to get rid of botters, to an extend, where i think they support botting, and i belive they were partly behind the creation of L2Walker etc.

You did not understand at all. The good free servers, which were off course minority, were a way better then the reatils because if the simple fact that economy was not driven by bots. People play there for various reasons.

I can name a couple of great servers. The old L2 extreme, the whole DEX netwrok, then the Russian one the Abyss network, and finally place where I played, Dragon network, but there were others like L2 paradize, the AzureL2, etc... The good servers were based on C1 and later C4 leaked filed with some upgrades and modifications. All the bad free servers were based on the java emulators which were really terrible. On DN we had the game modified, with custom sub-stacks, etc. We had better game then Ncsoft ever provided. We had 400vs400 sieges back then but the same time, we were the 2nd smallest server in the network because most of the people wanted to play on higher rates so....

Really... I just told this to clarify what I mean, that most of the population on retail servers was bot-driven and there were places that offered much better gameplay, and that NCsoft completely ruined own game, by relying on black market and bots more then on own players.

[avatar12]

This thread is still here? Hey miyafuji.

[Cavarath]

Some things dont get old.

[shmuli]

Miyafuji, on 30 March 2012 - 08:40 AM, said:

You did not understand at all. The good free servers, which were off course minority, were a way better then the reatils because if the simple fact that economy was not driven by bots. People play there for various reasons.

I can name a couple of great servers. The old L2 extreme, the whole DEX netwrok, then the Russian one the Abyss network, and finally place where I played, Dragon network, but there were others like L2 paradize, the AzureL2, etc... The good servers were based on C1 and later C4 leaked filed with some upgrades and modifications. All the bad free servers were based on the java emulators which were really terrible. On DN we had the game modified, with custom sub-stacks, etc. We had better game then Ncsoft ever provided. We had 400vs400 sieges back then but the same time, we were the 2nd smallest server in the network because most of the people wanted to play on higher rates so....

Really... I just told this to clarify what I mean, that most of the population on retail servers was bot-driven and there were places that offered much better gameplay, and that NCsoft completely ruined own game, by relying on black market and bots more then on own players.

I agree 100% with everything you said and my l2 playing trajectory was similar to yours. In fact Private Servers probably kept me on retail longer than I had should have.

I want to add however that while I do think think Botters/Gold farmers ruined the economy and eventually the game as a whole, Western audiences could never adjust to the brutal korean style grind. For me this is my favorite style of persistant open world types. However, I think this type of game was doomed to fail from the begining in it's inheritantly "flawed" eastern ideology which is maybe why it was not sustainable in the Western Market. This doesn't mean the game was/is bad, but I think rather speaks volumes about the simplicity/corrosion of western ideology. Our inability to sit still, desire for instant gratification/short sightedness versus the more patient long term goal and group oriented/slow paced culture of asia. A casual players inability to solo/level without a group or better yet getting griefed/pked(god i miss this game) is in direct opposition to the individuality and "uniqueness" we preach in the U.S. The social communal aspect of the game is simply too "conformist." Everyone wanted to be leaders(why there were so many clans) and not enough wanted to take orders which was required to win sieges.

Western Players have an OBSESSION with end game, being the highest level with the best gear(all reasons to bot). The time it took to acquire these things were of no interest, and this obsession was too insurmountable for them to relax and enjoy the game. A huge problem in the U.S currently is the self entitlement of our youth. Evidence across the nation shows kids put in less work in school yet they all think they deserve A's and think they are "A" students.

As George Carlin once brilliantly satired "everyones special and everyones a winner. Tommy got eighth place? Congratulations Tommy your the eight winner!"

Im just thinking out loud here but I think the popularity of Private Servers(most had accelerated rates/easy access to gear) is a direct reflection of Western Ideology/Instant gratification. While I have no doubt that a few Private Servers were better than retail, and that also NC West did a shit job of enforcing policies, games like l2 cannot hold "fringe" players with it's slim variety of gameplay(can't blame them game was released over 8 years ago) but more importantly the ideology of the gameplay. In the case of Private Servers they could not be sustainable for long periods of time because of the variety of types players as accomidated by a HUGE number of private servers. l2 is a concious investment of your time and not for the impatient(reason to bot) or faint hearted.(xp loss)

All this being said some of my best friends on Retail were "casuals" who managed to have a blast being "neutral". In addition bots should have been kicked and banned, there should have been way fewer servers, and nc west could have been substantially better. Despite all this however, L2 model/grind is not viable for sustaining 1-2 million players over a LONG PERIOD of time, especially on smaller fringe servers. While Sieghardt and Bartz pushed through,(although not without hitches and still had gold farmer run economies)the games population declined heavily at the end of c1 and again at c2. The game has left a void in my "gamer side" ever since 2006 when I quit. I have not gamed seriously or even casually in 6 years as all attempts/games are just terrible in comparison, I think the old saying goes "none even hold a candle" to Lineage 2.

[Miyafuji]

The biggest issue of L2 was not only the exp curve, but the ratio of how economy worked. Aka if you used soulshots to make your attacks powerful, you did spend more money on those then you gathered from drops. And without the soulshots you were just ridiculously weak, even in the perfect party things were awful. Only the bots did not care, they could have been as ineffective as they wanted to, as long as they produced results and when they reached certain levels they were sold on black market. The economy was dependent on bots, without then it would just not work. And that was on all servers, including the Korean ones. The first affairs of some GM being kicked because she actually banned bots instead of silencing those who complain came from Korea. The game was fundamentally broken and Ncosft did it on purpose to ear ridiculous amouth of money which they did. Because bots bought and maintained so many accounts, much more then real players did.

As you mentioned the issues of Western society, I agree, it is pretty broken and much incompatible with this kind of game (even if it worked), but again, I say you must never aim the game for everyone. Just make it not broken like L2 was and it will find its audience even on unmodified servers. All what people like me want is a fair game, without exploits, cheaters, bots and with good support and that's it.

As it comes to US young people, well guys you know my opinion, I think that country is sick beyond curing and our prime goal should be to prevent such a disease spearing elsewhere, and let it consume itself in its greed, arrogance and hypocrisy. How can you help a people that cannot openly think and see own situation, you basically can't. Trying to do that is like delivering donation to African countries in form of power plants, solar panels, etc. You come there after year and you see they use the solar panels as a rain cover and such, you it takes generations to fix a mentality, and if you cannot help it, do not try to.

[Ryuuboruz]

Miyafuji, on 31 March 2012 - 09:59 AM, said:

As it comes to US young people, well guys you know my opinion, I think that country is sick beyond curing and our prime goal should be to prevent such a disease spearing elsewhere, and let it consume itself in its greed, arrogance and hypocrisy. How can you help a people that cannot openly think and see own situation, you basically can't. Trying to do that is like delivering donation to African countries in form of power plants, solar panels, etc. You come there after year and you see they use the solar panels as a rain cover and such, you it takes generations to fix a mentality, and if you cannot help it, do not try to.

You know not all Americans are like that and when I become president i'll make sure that the young people are raised properly. (Lul) I say we still deserve the game and as said before in these forums, I think XLGAMES needs to try and release the game in Europe/Americas. It will not happen so I hope they do find a sponsor that doesn't change the game. ;\

[TaZ]

@Miyafuji
We regulary had 100vs100 400vsXXX clashes on Bartz. when i were on L2x i were rarely seeing that, i did see alot of people haveing multiple chars wiht L2W to bennefit their group thou, i saw alot more OverLords than i did in any other battle, i saw alot more buffbots on the private servers, than you did int he real game. And yet you try and compare a Private game, with less players, and say it have more. To a Pay 2 Play, .. your a very confusing person.

But i take it you proberly joined L2 late, and never got above lvl 50 ? never passed the city of giran on bartz, or played on one of the less populated servers?
If thats the case then i understand your view, otherwise, your view is very biased, and you talk about a game, wich you never really played!

[Agony]

l think for this game wil be good P2P server~!!

[Miyafuji]

TaZ, on 05 April 2012 - 03:07 AM, said:

@Miyafuji
We regulary had 100vs100 400vsXXX clashes on Bartz. when i were on L2x i were rarely seeing that, i did see alot of people haveing multiple chars wiht L2W to bennefit their group thou, i saw alot more OverLords than i did in any other battle, i saw alot more buffbots on the private servers, than you did int he real game. And yet you try and compare a Private game, with less players, and say it have more. To a Pay 2 Play, .. your a very confusing person.

But i take it you proberly joined L2 late, and never got above lvl 50 ? never passed the city of giran on bartz, or played on one of the less populated servers?
If thats the case then i understand your view, otherwise, your view is very biased, and you talk about a game, wich you never really played!

Never playewd on retails servers because they, for reasons I told before, suxxed,I also told before I played on Dragon network, reached 78 and 100% which was max in these days C4, in summer 2007 our guild had 6 heroes and we had 2 castles, one with alt-clan. So what is your point? that you played completely elsewhere and gained different experiences? Yeah, but that doesn't make me less right. Retail servers were bot infested playground, the whole economy was based on it. Ncosft destroyed own game by that, and off course in due time by upgrades that were undermining the core features of the game, the stuff why people loved it. Sorry that on the servers you chose as alternative, L2W was working as well, that's really bad and I wouldn't stay there for more then a month if the administration would refuse to do something with it.