Epiquin

If someone is marketing a server as PvP, and you have to level up in it - I ignore it immediately. It's either proof that the dev is garbage enough not to be able to remove the grind or just generally doesn't know what he is doing. As tryskell stated - there simply needs to be a significantly different metagame to the original, vanilla arms race that was manifested through leveling and grinding for gear. These concepts are dated. Very old and largely unimportant. Sure acquiring gear could be tied in with some delayed activity for economical purposes, but in the same light acquiring has to be countered with losing gear otherwise you lead into stagnation where everyone has everything. But leveling in PvP server is stupid, especially since a lot of key class skills are tied to higher levels, and ultimately define the class. On the flip side, I'd consider a server that offered all class skills immediately even if the character has not reached the skill learn levels. In general though, most PvP servers follow into the same trap as any other strictly PvP game - there is no reason to fight beyond the small, little local arena conflict that you have, such as a match. Sure there needs to be an outlet for general fighting, impersonal and maybe sport-like combat. But for serious PvP servers there needs to be persistent needs for things like clan wars. Nobody has given players any significant reasons to fight each other. Beyond printing custom currency on kill and oversaturating the market with bullshit... Disagree - EVEOnline does not regularly have item content updates. There isn't always the new best thing to aim for, and PvP is still common. The games only fault is that PvP is not easy to jump into, but that's a consequence of the aged community just as much as that is a problem in L2. There is definitely stagnation, and no doubt it's caused by high rates. But NEW gear and armor do not necessarily drive conflict. It drives an arms race and is just as dangerous to have because it leads to snowballing (where one side keeps winning) and fatigue for losers who eventually give up and quit.

You do understand that there is a term called "Assymetric Balance", right? Ultimately there is no inherent reason why class X should lose 100% of the time against class Y. I'm not even suggesting that within the scope of L2 specifically. It just makes 0 sense gameplay wise. It isn't an enjoyable experience, it ticks a red flag for that class when it boils down to class options and choice, which is especially important since picking a class is a commitment that you will have to stick with or else risk losing time spent on progressing the character. The method through which a Summoner beats a Titan might not, and should not, be the same as the way a Titan beats a Summoner, and if this is the case the game can still be considered balanced. A summoner might try to kite out a Titan and chip away at his health where as the Titan might look for a way to pin down the Summoner and burst through whatever EHP he has before the enemy deploys all of his toys. Regardless, L2 doesn't allow for this level of ambiguity because at the end of the day it's all about chances. There are too few "trickshot" abilities in the game available to all classes that can change the tide of the fight if used in the key moment. L2 has since it's beginning been a DPS race game. Whoever can apply more damage than the enemy wins (the obvious exclusion to the rule being heals). That's the imbalance, elements like Critical Chance, Evasion, debuff chance - things that are outside of player control during a fight and is instead tied to background stats attached to gear. It's worth noting that NCsoft has always prioritized PvE since that is the main demand in Korea.

Sounds like you are just very tenacious and tolerant.

I want to agree about the farmzones, but I think it was slightly more motivated than simply arbitrarily forcing people out. L2 map is big, but areas for particular level brackets are limited, as well as certain drops are limited to certain areas. So clans, in order to further their own agendas tried to rid of randoms getting in their way. But now, if you open a server, the player density is so low that there is no real need to fight over farm spots. I'm taking a huge leap in logic, but I think most victims just think its lame when someone tries to force them out of a farmzone, because there are no principles that warrant that kind of behaviour. In the former case - you could bargain and negotiate with "landowners", say you will leave, or just generally get the "hint", and like you say, either take matters into your own hands, or just live and learn from the experience. Now, it's not really about owning and securing a farmspot - it's just about causing pain for the victim. Personally it doesn't bother me, I've been playing EVE for so long that griefing is pretty trivial to me. But I can see how someone who is more casual is likely to just get frustrated. I can agree that there need to be more game changing mechanics that let people tamper with the gameworld, creating those memorable moments.

I think these are important questions. People frequently give some abstract/vague reason as to why they don't start playing, ex. "nothing unique". But what makes you stay? Community? Relaxed atmosphere? Or a lot of moment-to-moment action? and many opportunities? (trade, scam, steal, political opportunities) When do you assume the server is dying and why? For ex. in InfiniteL2 I noticed a trend that server needed to wipe a lot - players started to notice when someone has high grade gear and prevents everyone else from getting there (by killing them, obviously), so they stop playing and wait for a wipe.

You want much PvP without caring it's populated. You want PvP but not instant... Sounds like you are the kid.

Every server, (java especially) has shit implementation for these skills. They keep coding them like Siege Golem skills - can only attack doors and is single target. Swoop Cannon skills are meant to attack in area where cannon ball land. Problem is, when used in dev mode cannon ball always fly in the same direction with a straight path. It's meant to fly in a parabolic trajectory, and detect when collide with geodata. I am wondering if anyone is aware of a client packet or something that maybe calculate the flight path on client and then sends collision data back to server. It doesn't seem like it would make sense to make these calculations server side, and even if you did, you'd still have to send client packet for path trajectory. Anyone know how to change it?

Yes those are the lines that I change. But everytime I run the client the game puts me into first person, not 3rd person like L2, and SV, NV, PV commands don't work. I'd rather not download a new client, but its useful to know this isn't common. I guess something must be wrong with the install.

No ideas at all?

I used L2FileEdit to decode the l2.ini, changed the lines and such. But then when I launch the game it puts me in first person view, can't move, the SV,NV, and PV commands don't work. Any ideas?

I don't understand the point of your statement. Nothing what you said is exactly news. None of this demonstrates that uncertainty is mandatory. If in mass scale PvP uncertainty is not a deciding factor due to close-to-instant death, then 100% certainty wouldn't be a deciding factor either, for the same reason. It's just a byproduct of archaic design. Koreans like all the luck jibba jabba and to blame it all on destiny or karma nonsense. On the flip side, it is an easier design. After all, if you went with 100% certainty then who and how decides how long things like stun should last to keep it balanced? Same people who "calculated" how much excess HP a melee class should have in order to compensate them for the lack of range that the kiters get?

I don't see how these relate. If people have to farm first then PvP later, the risk of them saying the server is boring after they get the items is still there. It's not like farming for 1-2 days or even a week suddenly makes PvP any better. It's "Lean" gameplay - you streamline the entry barrier for PvP by removing the typical ritual of having to farm gear. Other nuances with "farm first PvP later" scheme are: 1) People start at different times. People who start first might establish an opinion that the server/balance/PvP sucks, and start leaving, or badmouthing the server. People who start later, will hear this and lose confidence. The problem here is that the latter might only be in the process of attaining gear and would have lost time grinding for it without actually using it. 2) Grinding is monotonous. If it's a PvP server, it's intuitive to assume that the focus will revolve around fighting other people. Grinding for gear just detracts from this. 3) Enchantment is random and gives people random entry barriers. Someone might take a day to enchant items because they are lucky and someone else ends up doing it for weeks. It sounds like if people complain that they got all the items and there is nothing to do, then they didn't come to PvP, but came to farm. Then the server is probably just not for them. This means the error is not in developer design, but in the player's decision. If people want to PvP for reputation, why is farm such an important aspect? Just log onto an instant PvP server, beat everyone and make a "reputation" for yourself. Think the obvious misinformation here is that simply beating opponents in PvP doesn't make a reputation. If the server focuses on PvP alone then doing something everyone else is doing is not very reputable... Ergo fighting for reputation on a PvP server is just a delusion... More so when the outcome of a fight is determined by all the random crap like crits, debuff success/fail, etc...

Ok, but the medium through which you uphold your bargain can't just be empty words and the air you breath out. A bargain is secured by, what is a contractual term, consideration. 800 people joined after you advertised a lot. But 800 people won't continue to stay if you keep advertising. What you are describing is herd mentality. It's like a pandemic, one, two or three people start leaving and it spreads quickly and sometimes even morphs into distrust and lack of confidence that the server will survive. It's obviously natural if you exhaust the things that people can participate in. But none of this devalues the importance of having good features.

YOUR OPINION IS VERY MUCH APPRECIATED AND WE CARE DEEPLY ABOUT YOUR CONCERNS beep

I think this is an important subject, considering how old this game is. MMORPGs have become notorious for being games, that, on the face of it, are just fetch-quests and monster mashing. Character strength disparity due to levels, gear, "upgrades" and sometimes donations have proliferated at a huge pace until recently the media has been stating that the MMO genre is actually dying. L2 doesn't have much player skill error margins. Usually a fight was won and lostby who failed which debuff, who didn't get the crits necessary to win the DPS exchange, loads of random variables and more. History has demonstrated that "high-rate" PvP servers are difficult to sustain because they have poor player retention. It used to be that there was a demand for a version of L2 that was stripped from the "leveling up/gearing up" ritual and focused solely on combat, as a means to test player skill and inspire sportsmanship (which translated to the popularity of Olympiad and Events). Until somewhat less recently players have been commenting that "there is not much to do on a PvP server". Which is odd, because there isn't much to do in a majority of PvP centric games, but people still play them. To draw a parallel, compare High rate PvP servers to popular shooters. Both offer flexible drop-in / drop-out gameplay where you can join and leave at your leisure. Both offer the majority of the content with no time barriers (such as leveling up / gearing up). The difference is that shooters offer a large margin of error for opponents to exploit - trickery, strategy and skill are rampant. L2 remains a numbers game. In the former case there is always room for personal improvement. In the latter, I think our perception of the game grew and matured to the point where we could easily see who would win. On low, mid (and to lesser extent high) rate server, politics and drama have dried out with the growing witch-hunt to stamp out all possible ways to grief, spy, scam and steal. Game has become very stale. There have also been different opinions in regards to the format of PvP servers. Some say grind first PvP later is better for "reputation". Others prefer grind as a you PvP (rewards for success). It would appear L2 doesn't have much going for it, because despite the popular attempts at removing "all bad mechanics", little effort was put into adding "good mechanics", which was even met with resistance, since apparently "custom is bad" notion is also very popular. So, if you play, what part of L2 do you find fun? Social involvement of raiding /attack type raidbosses? Olympiad? ( Cos playing an MMO solo makes loads of sense :P ). Do you PK enough or are people as risk averse as a high-school cheerleader laying still in bed out of pity and never fight back?

That's implying that correlation equals causation. Abundance and lack of players is just a symptom and reaction to your design and decisions. Since players are not a herd of hamsters, you can't actually just spontaneously put 1000 players into a server and contain them. Ergo, I don't see how it can be argued that features are not an appropriate criteria for a good enough server. It definitely is a prerequisite - you should aim to offer players something that would cause them to join. A promise that there will be loads of players might work for some, but can equally not work for others, so it's just a shot in the dark; this further secures the importance of adding correct features. To elaborate, I am not talking about features like custom gear and rebirth, which offer nothing for retention and just end up being filler gameplay content that runs its course... A one trick pony, pretty much.

...like what? People need to stop being paranoid of somebody else stealing ideas... Game is half dead and I doubt anyone cares what your idea is until they see it in action. Right now is a critical time to act, because while the population is dying and the server option is being further diluted with shitty copy/pasta serbers with minor config tweeks, there is a dormant population of ex-L2 players on social media sites that would prolly funnel into a server with huge numbers if it was "good enough". Sandbox? L2 doesn't really have many compelling mechanics that would allow for this. Most intuitive action in L2 is select a target and hit a variety of shortcuts to deal damage/heal/debuff. PvP? Die out fast for obvious reason (lack of engaging long term economy, objectives, ambiguous error margins for skillful PvP)

Right, but if you intend to actually hit D Trump's head, the chance to miss won't be governed by luck or chance. You are a seasoned adventurer after all, fighting reanimated skeletons, ghosts, lizardmen, and all sorts of nasty dark gipsy magic spawns. If you do miss, it's likely because he did something that allowed him to dodge it. I guess for the time and decade L2 was made, it was acceptable. Hardware and software limitations likely limited the options for player interaction. But now it just feels like it's left in to cater to bad players and act as a pillow to compensate for their poor performance. "Let's just throw in a random crit or two for the guy to make it feel like he can win". Which would have been ok, if crits weren't so extreme in recent meta.

Odd you'd say that, considering how many random things there are in L2 (hit chance, critical chance, skill rate success, enchant success, craft chance, etc) Functionally, L2 isn't that much different from WoW.

Ar all quests fixdeds? ver important Must be 100% not 99% only 100% quests

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I agree, but what's "special" anyway? At it's core, or principle, what feature in the late private server L2 innovation was special? If it's server functionality (such as a new pack, new way to handle things,etc), players wouldn't care, because it's in the background. If it's just a feature that nobody ever saw anywhere, that doesn't strictly make it better or even desirable. It just offers the owner a monopoly over the feature, whose value is debatable, since if it's not copied then it's likely not popular anyway. Rebirth was done millions of times, and isn't that great of a mechanic. Custom gear is receiving tons of bad light. High-rate server die for obvious reason. This game is too old to try and capitalise on low-rate servers due to the singularity point, where there is one group ahead of everyone else and competing against becomes an unwinnable bet. InfiniteL2 had dodgeball xD which is about the most innovative use of packets and ingame mechanics to make a pretty fun event. Pandora-Project was another faction L2 server, that tried to do loads of special stuff. They were functionally challenging, and they had demand, but the server never went out of beta. A modern emerging threat to games is the growing awareness that there isn't really much to play for. In MMOs we desire drama and conflict that stems out of our human principles, but then when things get tough, people start crying about how the game is unfair and biased towards a particular side of the conflict, etc. Players are rarely open-minded, so the gameplay feedback loop returns that the game should be dumbed down and then you end up with nothing to do.

I liked InfiniteL2 Faction server. It had it's charm. Wasn't thematically biased like GvE with only few races being able to join a particular side. Problem was, and always is in a lot of other server, economy. I say it a lot, not to sound like a smartass, but generally because trading is the second most common PvP interaction after combat. Having a shit economy just ensures the server dies quickly since trading/economy is the primary medium through which wealth redistribution is manifested. But Im glad to know there are people who don't want to shove retail bullshit down the players throats. I'd suggest stripping L2 and going back to basics. Fewer skills, less stuff to grind for, etc. Permadeath server sound cool, but you'd have to estimate how many players it would attract, and measure that against how much interaction you expect between each of them. Then think about how you cut down on the areas they can visit. I don't think it would work well - the first primal intuition in L2 is too kill someone, something. Unless you cannot distinguish NPCs from players, there will be a huge bias between the priority of the two for a potential aggressor. I think the primary issue is that there doesn't seem anything to do in L2. With all the carebearness brought by the kiddos from everywhere like russia, brazil and greece who finally figured out the L2 private servers exist, the gameplay has been largely stripped of many opportunities. The game has been reduced to sport where "everything is supposed to be fair". Evidenced by the huge hard-on for olympiad (cos 1v1 is balanced ja ja a ja ajj, right?) and the buckets of tears for cancels, steals, loot stealing, full drop gear, etc. Also all the remaining L2 community is making dying in a video game sound like some muslim haram, lol. "OMG OVERPOWERED CLASS PLZS GM BALANCE SERBER". Just one more of the issues - people are so used to complaining, that it has become a political tool. If players don't get what they want (which obviously conflicts with what OTHER players want), they just boycott the server, and leave for servers where they DO get what they want.

The best chronicle is the one you can develop for. If I had to be make a completely custom server I'd choose GoD for the assets. If I had to make a more mainstream server I would pick HF or Epilogue. The jump in gameplay is quite radical in HF, with all melee classes receiving rushes.

Don't want a server that focuses on rates. Don't really want a server that focuses on open world - nobody can do shit to make it interesting anyway. Maybe a 1 area that open world but only with some interesting dynamics. Like only 1 mob drops something valuable, all others drop nothing, and you have to find it. No SOE or /escape in this area. The items that you pick up in the area can drop from you too to encourage PvP, so it's a challenge to 1) find the mob and kill it 2) secure the drop from other players. Would like a server that was made intelligently - a serious look at ingame economy, not some "hey we'll add tons of currency and shit will get better becauseTM", a serious look at reason for interplayer conflict outside of olympiad. This obviously tells you nothing, because you are just another guy who will open a server with some shitty config changes.