Epiquin

What do those have to do with anything...? I was bringing up an example of a game where linear progression is not "the game". NCSoft in a multitude of interviews mentioned that they will continue adding levels, gear and skills because they believe that's what adds content to an MMORPG. In contrast, EVE Online endgame is as soon as you log in. It is not explicitly said, but you can go anywhere and be part of a group and be useful from something like 7 hours of play. CCP doesn't add shit just litter the game with more glitter and gloss like NCSoft. They add stuff that's needed. Almost all EVE Online elements were present in L2 about in C4. Because even though L2 always had its endgame and Time To Death, it was extremely slow for the majority, and clans in general would operate over a large band of levels (there were always some clans that competed over lvl 40-50, lvl 50-60, 60-74, etc) so the game felt full, populated and alive. There were things to do, achieve and compete over. Now with private servers increased progression speed, there is no competition over these level bands because we don't stay at those levels for any significant amount of time... So why the fuck are we going through them at all? There is no content in them, its just a time sink. I'm not a fan of wasting time (and playing games is not time waste, its the time I allocate for entertainment). And yet someone keeps arguing that "if you don't level up there is nothing to do". Yeah? Well make something to do thats not going through C, B and A. Don't just fuel the development stagnation further. You don't think it's a pathetic game design where you have to NASCAR your way to max level... and then what? Either gank low levels or wait for others to catch up? Even worse, be at risk of realising that the server sucks? Like the last is far too common - you spend 1 day, 3 days maybe a week to get to point where you can compete with other people and realise how trash the server is cos you run into some shit damage that can't break CP pots and perma mana pots with some douchebag brings a Bishop alt and perma heals cos the heal to damage ratio is like 10-20x... A bad design is a bad design. You can't argue that it is needed. If you need to sink players time find another way. Thats not excuse for not putting the majority of people at end game WHERE ALL THE FUN IS HAPPENING.

I am real. A lot of people are. Thats why server die in a month. Even those that have the whole "hey spend a week to lvl up for 1 hour of figuring out why this server sucks" journey mode. EVE online doesn't have a lvling system at all. You don't even get SP for farming mobs. Game is alive for more than L2 and even has regular news articles about it. Because EVE online was engineered. Private L2 servers are just copy/paste with no thinking and expecting things to turn out ok just cos. Players move on. It's dev choice to move on as well or stroke their cock trying to figure out why the Journey doesn't work anymore. Probably because it's boring. There is nothing to do in L2 because everything in it is finite and only a matter of time. Gaining gear? Just get enough adena and its yours. A certain skill? Just grind enough mobs and its yours. When everything is finite there is a clear stagnation point - a time when nothing else is needed. We've been there is a thousand times. We all know it occurs. We need a server where that doesn't occur, i.e. a server with a proper asset economy. Economy isn't just money/adena/currency.

Largely disparate opinions. People keep recalling "normal L2". I don't see the appeal of normal. The common argument was that NCsoft knew what they were doing (with class balance, content, etc), which is bullshit. The game was designed for the korean audience that is so downright retarded because fundamentally dumb things like gender bias exists in the East. NCSoft even admitted in their interviews that the whole class structure was designed around it. Honestly, who wants to play the fkn NASCAR race to level 85 still? Going through level 1-70 for 9999th time over the last 10 years is not downright miserable and agonising yet? What do you achieve by making people lvling/gear up in a week as opposed to lvling/gear up in an hour? Maybe dinosaurs should do what they do best - stay dead. Not the communities fault that "devs" keep releasing same shit over and over. As if fkn rebirth hasn't been done a million times before. Or PvP "rewards" that are downright exploitable. Or virtually any form of "events". The community is far smarter than you believe it is. There was a GM once on infinitel2 that would force TvT events because people would never play the objective, calling the players stupid and incapable of working as a team. The reality was playing objectives in CTF/DOM was worth less than simply walking around kill everything that moved. You need incentive before motivation. Tired of lvling up on every 1000x server I see just to get to lvl 85 for the millionth time. Been there done that...

Not enough info. "We have uni degrees" is not a pitch - your uni degree is not the service/product that's being provided. Its the server. Saying something like "Server is unique" is again just liptalk. Tell us what you did differently and stop holding back. No point in being paranoid cos L2 is dead and no one is going to copy your server any time soon.

There is plenty more bullshit, but this stood out the most. Just one more pro config change server.

+10 is just the threshold for the least headaches. You can do more and balance it around that, but why? I'm not expecting anyone to do something difficult for sakes of demonstrating that they can do something difficult. That's not the point of my rant. I'm just saying that if you do something you should justify it's existence within the global scheme of your server. Maybe you want to do +500 with the purpose of it being a grind - fine. Its great that you explain what purpose it has - it to be a grind. I might not agree but now I know that you have a vision of how it will work out and it may sound somewhat convincing. Which is why I am saying that low/mid/PvP [chronicle] is a poor indication of anything. Mid and Lows are not exempt from PvP. And PvP-rates do not guarantee PvP. Quite frankly the opposite - a recent trend is to sit inside towns and wait for oly or events. Which is like the bottom line of PvP quality in this game considering that we used to fight over fkn mob spawns and drops. Hence my concern is - what will you do to address the growing problems? If its a PvP server, how will you ensure that people don't stay inside towns? How will you encourage open world PvP without the hand holding that events provide? How will you propose players generate conflict out of principles and not because the OLY manager said "Ok I matched you 2 guys - one is blue and the other one is red, you hate each other so you should fight each other". You are asking the wrong questions. At least at this time. As you said you can adapt any system to virtually any chronicle. Chronicle and rates is like the last thing I look at when I join. My only advice is when and if you make your server and post the advert - keep the advert short. Don't copy paste the fucking config file into the OP like all those stupid kids lol, where they show if they activated the fkn kratei cube or whatnot. Like those god forgotten things that are broken. It just diverts the focus and confuses people and then I have to scroll 6 pages on a 15 inch screen to see the full post. i'm just expecting someone to make an intelligent server for gods sake. If it's a PvP server and I have to start in Elven village and lvl up on gremlins - its a shit server. If it's a mid-rate and when I open a teleporter it gives my 1000 locations for where I could go - its a shit server. This is an MMO and if I have 1000 locations to go on a 100 player server that means outside of town I see no one. You wouldn't believe how often I log on a server and lvl0-75 is single player hack and slash campaign. Poor design = bad server. There is no other way to look at it.

Don't care about chronicle, as long as the client is made available. Feacleturds: As long as someone doesn't go and say "hey we made an innovative breakthrough: we made +17 weapons with dynamics chance" bullshit feature. There has to be something to do on server. I don't like NASCAR race to the top. So before you do anything, ask yourself if there is any reason to make players level up; we've played the game for half a decade. Im sure everyone knows by now what D, C and B grade is like. Nobody cares anymore. If it adds nothing to the game - remove it. Same to everything. If I see MP pots sold for 1 adena with 1000x rates I trash the server. Thats just poor design. If the cost of consumables is trivial then there is no point in making them consumable in the first place. There is no significant economy circulating around them so if you don't intend to make the sustainability of MP, HP potions and in general all consumable nontrivial - have the player spawn with them on creation and make them infinite in count. Changing shit in config is not development. I enjoy playing on servers where it can be see that something was done that wasn't trivial. All this +10 or +16 bullshit - doesn't mean shit. You can't argue that it does either, not until you show the fkn calculations. When has anyone ever justified the extra HP melee classes would get over ranged classes by demonstrating that that proportion would have been lost in the time it took to reach a ranged class due to the incoming DPS. The answer is no one. Everyone just goes "This skill is used slightly too often in comparison to other skills so we will just nerf it by 30%" with no real understanding why that amount exactly. People just throw numbers around. People just throw random "features" around. Bollocks.

Rates and chronicle are not features. Try again in 1 year.

Cool. I don't mean to be offensive, but how do you imagine it will look and sound like from a 3rd POV? Also, just because server are keep getting made doesn't mean the community is alive. Development is stagnated. People who can do things have no vision. People who have vision cannot do things. Neither can work together because of the third type - assholes that make servers for donations. This causes a huge sense of distrust between the former two.

Meh. New areas look interesting but the rest is just NCKorea catering to korean farmers and PVErs.

Is this meant to be important? In a server with 50 people everyone must be important then.

No Not enough information. Don't care about chronicle.

Special feature lol. Anyway, think about what it limits and what are the consequences that brings to the modern playstyle. Everyone always wants fullbuff. If its low -rate, will you put NPC buffer? If not, people need either alts (you can't, because no dualbox) or have other people play dedicated support. In worst case for 1 DD/Tank you need 2-3 classes. Your generic prophecy class, then SWS and BD. Arguably, these could support a whole party, so 6 other people. My point being, you'd need to organise a constant party that is tight knit and the 3 support play always on prime time. If one of them isn't online the party falls apart. Just 1/3 people not online inhibits at best 1 other person and at worst 6 others. Now correlate that to how most people play. Would you yourself want to rely on 3 people? Or would you want to be 1 of those 3 people, constantly support people like a puppydog on a leash? Having to be online frequently, knowing that if you are not you are letting people down? Then imagine to compensate you have more players to play support and act as reserve. What happens when the previous 9 people are in constant party, and you are left with X reserve support players. What do they do? There is a lot of psychological nuances. TL;DR it would be frustrating if it doesn't reach a lot of players to actually facilitate a healthy class distribution and hence cause proper interaction and allow for proper parties. This is not a problem in NCKorea because they have a working party matching system and no discrimination against randoms. They invite anyone and damn right everyone provided there is a slot open and the class is needed. In the western community you need trust. And if everyone trusts everyone else, then there is no conflict. And if there is no conflict why fkn play L2? To farm mobs for 3 months? You are not focusing on the right things. Dualbox is not a problem. Power snowball is. 1 group of people that is best organised joining server and no one to oppose them. That's what needs a counter.

Advertising what...? All servers are shit and all you need is to look in private server subforum. Top sites are bad anyway. You are too late to the party. This might have worked 3 years ago.

Are you serious? L2 should be reduced further to a point where the game can play itself...?

Good effort. Might be wasted.

For it to work you have to be there before NCsoft. Evaluate your situation - you will never achieve the quality that NCsoft can simply because they have everything to make it happen tomorrow. Probably as easy as flicking a switch for NCsoft. You need to write a whole buttload of shit. Assuming hypothetically that you do get there first, I imagine there will be people who will, as always, play the NASCAR game - commit and invest enough time to get to the top before everyone else. Those people will stay for a long time, unless the server ends up with nothing to do. The rest will measure the difficulty of getting to a level where they can compete VS older players, against the quality of your work and the opportunity to start all over from scratch on NCsoft servers. This is NOT a threshold problem - people have different standards, so some will leave some won't. Maybe an analytical model will tell you exactly how many, but fk that. If people leave its bad no matter how many. Your problem here is that NCsoft is F2P as well. Basically you have few bargaining chips. Your only novelty is getting there first, before NCwest. Not a full prediction, but quite qualitative. My completely controversial advice? NCsoft are hitting the right spot, but they have no clue that they are. If they did, they would have done this ages ago. Matter of fact is NCsoft is simply trying to go back in time and hope for the best. Instead, you should reroute your efforts into doing something that no one else will. You are already set on a path on doing something unordinary. Like yourself said that if dumb random with interlude serbers are surviving months, you have the opportunity to get away with something even crazier. Go back to basics and make any and all changes necessary - client mod, asset deletion, whatever. There is a lot of rubbish in L2. Clean it up. I am setting up on justifying a custom server. You already want a completely arbitrary client. Why stop there? NCSoft will do what please Korea. West players will follow because their only choice is to follow, or quit. You are in the position to give them choice. A game that makes more sense.

...so what if the main currency is adena? How will you give it value? By putting shitloads of stuff to buy for adena? Cos that's not what gives currency value. And McBigmac is spot on - for 5 years now people come to this forum asking to practically design a server for them.

You think if you do what people tell you to do you will get many players? I don't understand how people think like this. Is there a diff between 30x to 40x? If it is its minimal. Private L2 server can be divided into low, mid, high rate + random changes + "chronicle". The last only matters if you are not willing to do a set of changes. You can always use new client with old skills. But basically, all kinds servers exist now. So when you open server, somewhere you compete with someone. Population is low as is on almost all servers except a very few. And you want to open a new server which will dilute it even more.

...why not make thread in preview forum and see if it is popular?

Next thread - what must do to maek donations fast and many?

That ambiguous thread titles are cancer to the internet. Stop making vague thread titles. Thread titles are not cartoonish +18 browser flash games masquerading as porn sites by saying "I await you my king...?"

I would like to say

You and a 100 other people Seeing as its 2014 and threads like this still pop-up.

Sounds arbitrary - open a server and people will magically "enjoy" the game. No offense, but you sound like a capitalist. As in you have no idea why things work the way they work and simply look for supply -> demand opportunity to cash in to. 1) If you are asking a chronicle just shows that you have no intent on figuring things out, will simply launch a server with config changes in rates and such, and take it for granted. The L2 pack does not define a gametype. The pack should depend on your intent (what you want to do) and how easy it is to develop the features you want (depends on dev opinion) 2) You could take a safe bet and use L2jserver... why not? Cos it has bugs? Do you know of the personally? You mentioned L2Gold and L2Pride - sounds like you follow the hype train. 3) Earnings from what? Donations? 4) L2 is not dead in population. But innovation has stopped. I do not understand how people not see the problem with this - L2 retail is FREE. Any other L2 flavour can be largely divided into 3 sub groups - low rate, mid rate, high rate. Thats 3 servers. We have 100+. They are not unique. They are just cash grab servers. Something you will roll into doing automatically whether you want it or not because you have not established wtf you want to do. Whether it is worth "investing" (implies you want to get something back, contradicting money not being an issue) depends entirely on how brave you are. Understand that by opening a 20x server, you don't just compete with another 20x server. You compete with 10x,15x,25x,30x,40x and so on. Because these marginal difference are bullshit. You should also consider how people play. A lot of remaining players are risk-averse. They stay in town and if you engage them out of town by attacking first they will roll over like docile puppies and die. Then call you bad names (noob). A lot of PvP is very explicit (events, oly). TL;DR Ask yourself what you want your server to be like. If you can't do it - don't open it. Anything less than ideal is a waste of your time, money, waste of everyone elses time and MXCs advert forums space. Avoid thinking that you will make an enjoyable server with simply changing config. And avoid thinking that you can add a bunch of cool features and the server will be magically awesome. L2RvB closed up after 2 hours of launch because of geodata issues, patch problems, event spawn coords, event spawn task not rotating spawns, no streamlining (30mins to get into action).