*real*savormix

Look at official servers: 50 quests in total between all game modes (live/classic/etc), updates removing items by the thousands and so on. On the other side, Microsoft is relentless in making sure the older clients would no longer run on Win10. No matter how many workarounds you do for your chronicle/il/gf/hf client, MS will always come back and make it stop working, once again (hf should still work, but it is only a matter of time) after a major update (while still making sure all previous workarounds cannot work). Obviously, I am dramatizing, but the continuous improvement will render all old(er) L2 clients unusable eventually, which will leave us with a game that has (at that time) ~1-3 quests, 10-20 items, 1 race, 2 classes, etc. if NC is not stopped.

And yet, even in this day, halfway into 2020, the l2 java emulator still executes auto-attacks in a completely incorrect fashion. I mean, I could understand if some special skill, like those signet-consuming ones was half-done, but this is a feature that is used nearly every fucking second of server's uptime, and typically at least hundreds of times. The completely flawed implementation does pile up you know. L2J is a failure at L2 emulation. all it does is allow people to try to create their own MMO based on some client, similarly to WoW emulators.

Not only that, but in latest L2 live and L2 classic updates, content is being straight removed (not reworked) left and right. Soon there will be no content left at all. Very true.

I know that you are talking about p servers, but the main people who are paying NCWest (and NCTaiwan) are actually botmasters. So I would expect a similar thing in p servers as well.

@LordPanic you seem so intent on saving L2 and/or its community, even though you yourself admit that the people currently playing on p servers do not really care. They would play MUO, Aion, BDO, CabalO or whatever shit as long as they can connect there with their preinstalled L2 client. Like literally, I could start a MUO server, perhaps one of the old ones, e.g. 0.97d, slap a NetPro-based traffic translator between it and the internet, advertise it as L2 server and BAM - I would see people in Lorencia/Dungeon/Lost Tower/etc., while they would see TI/Elven Ruins/ToI and think they are playing L2. The attacks would be a bit strange, but anyone used to how fundamentally broken the standard attacks are in l2j will not care; perhaps a bit tougher with skills and classes, but hell, these people don't care as long as you can have PvP - and the karma system (and Phonomania on the other side) map quite nicely to one another. In other words, you will not save the community as the community does not care one bit about L2. @etherian yes: Prelude BETA leak (336 client) the three C1 leaks (the english one needed throwing out the trash) C4 rpgclub GF (also needed throwing out the trash) GD Ertheia Extenders are good as they tackle common exploits (that are well known due to how horribly outdated the leaked files are) and server crashes. Everything else that an extender does, is cancer (unless you yourself specifically need that in your custom gameplay). As for the client packets, that is easy, as explained above. I can disguise a MUO server as a L2 server (even the latest LIVE/CLASSIC/BLOODY version), so what? It is still MUO that players would be actually playing. Not L2, no matter how much advertisements would claim otherwise. In other words, just because I would make MUO server work with IL client, that will not magically make me have a REAL IL private server.

Many people suggested to stay in C1 or C4 over time, look where that got them. As I said, NC will not stop and L2 is no longer the game you remember. And don't get me started on IL servers. IL private servers did not exist at any point in time, just like C2, C3, C5, etc. Just like a C1 server acting like C3 is not even close to C3, so is GF or C4 acting as IL not even close. Let me just remind you that monster AI was finally normalized at around Gracia. Before there were major changes to both AI (monster behavior) and spawns between updates. If you play IL you clearly can just go play the newest "L2 classic", which has nothing to do with L2 anymore (it was quite promising at the start though), and act like it is exactly like the old days. No grade penalty, no drops from monsters, no manor, etc. etc. The sooner NC drops L2 the easier it will be to recover the damage they have already done. Plus, you don't need to worry about private servers - it is mostly bots that are online there.

Finally someone who agrees with the main point I was trying to make

You can work on an extender if you intend to have a throwaway project or if you want to commit to a specific version. Otherwise you MUST go the way @MasterToma did, simply RE and create equivalent source code. Which, if you aim for an extender, is something you actively avoid. And this choice will come and kick your ass very hard later on. Let's be real, the C2 and C3 private servers were NOT C2 and NOT C3. They were just disguised C1 servers, that's why it was such a shock to people who went on to play on official servers in C3 to discover their private server experience was worthless in REAL C3 (client versions 555, 557, 560).

I see some people in this thread have been developing for so long they are completely out of touch with reality. After the first few chronicles (prelude notincluded due to reasons), namely C1-C3, it became completely natural for players, especially clans, demand kickbacks and/or otherwise extort server admins. I do remember what happened to all admins who thought they will not become corrupt - and this is in the times where 600-1k online (incl. bots and shops obviously) was not too uncommon - the clans simply blocked access to all high level hunting grounds by PKing everyone for an entire evening or two and then left. The result was very simple: 200 players online, which are all bots/shops. When those shops came back and saw that everyone left, they also left. GG Currently, you also have no chance if you do not give kickbacks. That's the main reason why among most popular and/or well advertised servers you ONLY see those that do kickbacks, on a smaller or larger scale.

My sincere suggestion to everyone is to just let go. Let's not forget that aside from the private server part, NC is actively working to give L2 a bad name and has more broken "free" gameplay where you won't even have basic equipment unless you start paying loads of money than all of the p servers combined. THE best idea for everyone is just to let L2 die, so that NC can finally put it in a grave and STOP the mad crusade. They are aiming to remove 97%+ of all content from L2 - just look at the recent mass deletions - the game will be left with 1k items in total, 5 quests (3 of which are dailies/weeklies), etc. Just stop helping NC promote L2. The sooner it dies, the better state it will be in to pick up by all of us once NC buries it.

L2 is not really dead. NC now has it as a re-re-re-re-reanimated puppet, which is neither L2, nor L3, nor L2-Classic, an abomination that would better be dead than in its current, worse than vegetative state. I will not speculate if NC is into necromancy, but they will still carry L2 (name) over to 2030 at least, even if @ 2 servers in Korea. They know that with everything else than L1 failing worse and worse (MxM pls) as years go by, if they shut down L2 or Aion, both trash tier games by now, the players will not transfer to any of their other games. Personally, I knew I had to let L2 rest in peace, and so I let go. NC is treating L2 worse than a lab rat, it is clear they have no vision, no people and no money for this, but still continue.

Should have joined the early days. Current L2, classic or not has become an abomination, don't spend any time on it. Soon you will need to buy a subscription (with real money) that gives you 3 tickets to spin a wheel where you can win a 1 hour of game time at a rate of ~0%, with extra tickets sold for real money. If you thought pay-to-win was bad, the current state is halfway to pay-to-gamble-to-play, where you must constantly gamble real money (not adena) just to be allowed to login.

They are doing maintenances twice per day this week (btw, classic servers are not affected as much). This reminds me of private server owners who know neither what they are doing nor what they are supposed to do.

I am investigating just how annoying would it be to RE the different launchers (turns out that when KR stole TW's launcher (NC Launcher S) and called it "NCLauncher 2", they also changed things related to auth) and keep the token logic generation up-to-date, but don't expect an ETA on this, especially since doing NCL "S" is twice as useful as NCL "R" that NA uses. Obviously, the ServerList method would provide significantly less information; no build dates, for example. Also, fuck L2on, not so smart now that they don't have someone to ask to add their IP to AdminIP config.

Live: Prelude to War (reuses Fafurion splash) Classic: SoE Aden: Aden, forced as default lobby International protocol 196. Not too bad, but I'm already playing on a Jin Kamael for nearly a month now. Kys NCw.

They need a new client for that, the UI came with Prelude of War (LIVE) / Aden / ClassicAden client. NCwest has already failed to catch up with PoW as well, so their only chance is the next update after PoW.

If you remove one letter and change another one, the server name becomes Gay. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA On a more serious note, ClassicAden should reach EU sometime this year. As for NA, they are a lost cause. They failed to do Fafurion/SoE in time, now they have already failed to do PoW/Aden in time. Failing to catch up with more than one major update in a row, as most of us ex l2j developers know, is essentially a death sentence for a project. And even if NCwest decides to just say "whoops, we had this heavily modded Seven Sings downgrade, but now we will take a clean latest international build and do a few minor changes and release it", that's also a death sentence, since that will singlehandedly kill the current status quo in NA. And they do need a ClassicAden client compatible server build, which (according to NCJuji, who is a confirmed compulsive liar, so you decide whether to believe it) they do not have anywhere near ready.

This is the pinnacle of Lineage II evolution. They embraced it, that the only kind of player that plays L2 is a player that doesn't. Welcome to a bot-only game.

Taiwan will be getting the 'Aden' (Bloody Classic) server on 2019-02-27, along with Prelude of War update for standard classic (the part where all class transfer quests, all level 20- quests and also some other quests are removed). The 'Aden' server will be free to play, so if you want some hands-on experience, this is your chance. Please note that a lot has changed since the original Bloody Classic was released. Namely, the NPC buffers were replaced by all classes getting a large amount of self buffs (that cost truckloads of SP, and you can't really get the SP for them until you hit an XP wall at higher/highest levels).

And yet people emulating PS, PS2 or even software like MS DOS go really far to implement even subtle undocumented features simply to make it work like the real thing. So that you wouldn't fire up an application, work with it like normal, then suddenly you try to use a lesser known feature and BAM, the OS (and/or the application) is dead. In L2 emulators I see so many people who keep talking that l2j is an emulator, yet all they want is to make their own MMO rather than make l2 work (at least comparably). Also, who needs sources when the entire thing is just stuffed with stackguard macros - you know the vast majority of the function inputs and outputs; MSVCRT also makes the C++ collections easy to RE, so what more do you need? Guidance on how to RE the C++ input/output routines?

Well, you've got a very bold claim in your signature. And every time blame starts getting shifted, I remember just how glad I am to have moved to tool development rather than serverpack stuff. I mean, I am playing full international Fafurion/SoE build IN ENGLISH for 1.5 months now while Innova/NCwest/GameCoast suck on a hard cock (koreans are "busy" "preparing" their builds - sorry, but this is an epic joke). Back on topic: Personally, I never saw a decent working inzone raid in l2j, since it always ends up being easier (usually) or harder and of a different dynamic than in l2off. Prime examples are Balok and Epic Tauti. REAL Epic Tauti you can defeat either because you have super DPS (and can advance stages before tauti can cast a skill), or by being lucky, because in l2off it can hide skill casts and also cast two skills in parallel (yes, these are long-standing bugs, I'll give you that). If in L2J you can always see what Epic Tauti is casting, that makes the entire raid just a walk in the park. And sorry, but just watching some Epic Tauti videos will not be enough to make it work the same way.

These two statements directly contradict each other. The issue with l2j is that it doesn't serialize the game logic, like anywhere at all. Movement = completely isolated from the rest of the game logic and working on its own with no ability to get returned value guarantees between two method calls; HP/MP/CP = fully concurrent getters/setters, same about inventory and so on and on and on. So obviously, you cannot just take code from retail 'as is' (which is designed to run on a separate, designated game logic thread which doesn't exist in l2j) - still that doesn't mean the code is wrong or cannot be used. Only the l2j cancer has to be removed/reworked. And yeah, if 50k sequential invocations of getCurrentHp [within a method of an AI script] can return different values, you are fucked no matter if you use l2off code or try to figure out things from playtesting or videos. Just saying.

Nice job, you're nailing it.

I agree. On a more realistic note, I have no clue what the OP expects. It is known that if you report the real player count, people will start leaving the "deserted" server, so you will have less and less players every day until the server actually becomes deserted. Of course, this only applies to private servers since nobody cares about them. Official servers can stay in their vegetative state for years but players will never go for a mass exodus just because the online count is low.

Well, as you may have heard, ingame botting (nexttarget based) was added to Bloody Classic and is constantly being improved at the moment. For example, you can set up the skills/items you want to use, whether you want to auto-pickup. On death, you can see a certain amount of hits (who did each hit, was it standard attack or skill, how much damage was dealt) and what items did you drop on death, so you could easily know who was trying to stop you from botting and take revenge on them (or, alternatively, see who really killed you in siege mass pvp).