aguy

Very nice and passionate effort. Good luck.

Did you get demoted by the admins ?

I'm not really sure. But I believe, we must make that 3 hours time they have count. Cause that's all they have, from the time the kids sleep till they have to sleep. It should be 3 hours of gaming packed with everything they could do 20 years ago in a 12 hours game session. What we know for sure: The veteran can't wait 1 hour for Baium. He has to get in, get invited, boom mass PVP in like 10 minutes. If he has to wait 1 hour for the whole clan to assemble, we already wasted 33% of his precious time. The veteran doesnt want to farm. He has done it in 1000 different servers, its a chore now, not an interesting activity. Maybe half an hour of farming and that's it. Give him a daily 30 minute drop rate boost so as he farms efficiently and for short and nobody can outfarm him because of more free time. The veteran doesnt need the clan drama. He has enough from the wife. He's here to relax. No scams, no betrayals, no GM drama. It has to feel like holidays. Filter out all the drama hotspots away from him. The veteran already knows how to PVP good. We must make sure we give him something new, new mechanics, new goals he never did before. Perhaps reward social interactions instead of button smashing. That's what I roughtly think, do you guys have any other ideas ?

I recently found a facebook group of Greek Lineage 2 players, which gave me insight on what players really want from a server and why they can't find it nowadays. We've all seen players praise the "old era" and how old servers were better, while nowadays they can't find a "decent" server to play. Most 30+ years old players, are hoping from server to server, staying for two weaks, not getting the thrill they used to get and move to the next one. After that, they blame the GM corruption, the superdonators, the setup, the money hungry admins, the auto-farm, adrenaline, the fakebots and god knows what else. Then two days later, they proceed to post screenshots they surprisingly kept from twenty years ago, from a "great" server they played in their youth with friends and clan and proceed to ponder on why the old days cant come back due to todays servers being terrible. Now here's a hard truth. The screenshots don't agree on a single or a dozen of "great" servers from the past. The screenshots the players so religiously kept as holy artifacts for so many years in their hard-drive, are from a variety of servers. Stable, moneygrabs, lowrates, highrates, customs, vanillas, bot-protected, bot-allowed and generally any type of server you can imagine. What this tells us is three things: 1) Players DID have fun. The would not keep these screenshots for so many years if they didnt think them a precious proof of the fun they had when they were young. 2) It was never the server. I've seen screenshots of players playing in lowly populated, crappy, full of exploits code servers, but they had the greatest time of their life. 3) They can't find the fun today. But the servers have gotten better, not worse, quality has gone up in general even if there are more servers. So we end up with hundreds of veterans telling stories in a facebook group while waiting for the next great server to kick that itch in them, which usually never arrives. Why, I told to myself. How can these players boast that 15 years ago, they stayed at antharas lair bridge for 12 hours straight hunting Pitans, to get 3% of EXP and then come boast about it ? Why spamming clicks and F1 for 12 hours was fun then and not fun today ? I believe the answer is challenge and validation. The 15 years old did something that for his age and standards and his small view of the world was challenging. And there were people around, in his party, or in his clan to validate it. The community knows, it knows that it happened cause his friends can validate it, his clan could see it. The community today is gone though, the old friends scattered and who validates it ? A screenshot. A screenshot that says that "it happened" and a screenshot that shows the team standing right there, with our hero, a proof that people saw it. So the players exist. But we just can't seem to get them to spend the three hours of free time they have after tucking the kids in bed, in our server. We can't seem to give them the enjoyment they were having 15 years ago, which they proudly post daily in facebook and reading other player stories for three hours in facebook instead of playing the game. They will donate though. But that pricy donation of their hard earned money doesnt keep them online. They still crawl back to facebook or hop on to another server that opened last week. I believe we are in uncharted waters. Its the first time in history, we are dealing with the veteran MMO adult who is no more at his gaming prime, and no game theory or game psychologist has cracked this riddle. A couple of scientific papers believe that the 15 years old brain was still learning, still underdeveloped and memories made during development are the ones that stick, the ones that produce the more dopamine. It does have some value I believe. They also claim that a teenager or young man who has not yet explored and understood the vastness of the world, is going to get hooked easier in a vast open world game that craves for his exploration and discovery. They do seem valid points. And if they are taken for granded, they can explain perfectly why veterans can't find that old lost joy again in any server they try nowadays. It's not the servers that changed, its them. They have gone through adulthood and you only go through this only once. So if these theories stand 100%, then the situation is irreversible, nothing can happen. But are these theories correct ? I did believe so for long. But then I joined another facebook group. One with adult greek men discussing their military years (it's mandatory in Greece to enlist to the military). And they were telling stories and posting screenshots from military exercises, the friends they made there, a cold night patrol of the biggest military camps, riding on a Leopard II tank and many more. Now ... where have I seen this familiar behavior, did I tell to myself ? Well, in Lineage 2 facebook group. So the scientific claim is invalidated. If the 20+ years old can find the same amusement in a 2 hour EXP and adena grind, the same way he found amusement on a 3 hour boring sleepless patrol at military and have the patience to screenshot them both and keep them for so many years, then the theory is wrong. And keep in mind, the 30+ years old player, doesn't want to grind for 3 hours again at Pitan Bridge, thus auto-farm. Neither does he want to go to the army again. The brain has not aged, it has not lost its hunger for something memorable, it simply won't want to repeat something that is challening no more and won't want to repeat it if there's noone around to validate that it happened. What we are missing in modern Lineage 2 is twofold then: A challenging environment and a community to validate it. This challenge can't be time-oriented. It would be unfair. The 30+ years old has no time to spend grinding for hours to gain the recognition as a teenager can do. Besides this challenge has been eaten alive by bots. Getting 3% of EXP on a winter night, is something a bot can do, it proves no achievement, it deserves no validation. Years ago, not having spent 12 hours grinding but having the time to do it, was the challenge. And your friend who was with you in that party helping wtih the buffs and the heals, was the one that can prove it happened. With his words then, with his presence in your screenshot nowadays. Yet what server owners have failed to do consistently nowadays is find challenges for 30+ years old servers. They keep providing a product made for the millenial teenager who now has transformed to someone else. And what's hilarious is they find pride in it, pride in giving players a lowrate vanilla, hard-farming server. This quest is gone guys, done. The modern player has done this hundreds of times, he has proven to everyone but most importantly to HIMSELF, that he can do it. This is no challenge anymore, this is a chore. So how do we challenge the modern adult time-limited player ? I really dont know. Had I known, I'd make a server. I made one for myself. I filled it with many advanced custom features, with a full alive AI / LLM fake player population that makes clans, wars, pvp, team activities. But it didnt work. I played it, nothing felt as it should. But I have some principles I believe must stand in order for this to be achievable: The player must be challenged, period. The game must be difficult, not through repetition though. The challenge nowadays is not the teenager being able to play for 12 hours, skipping school, hidding it from mom, in order to get his "first money", his 3% EXP, his 100.000 Adena and his first doom plate armor. The adult has done this countless of times, with his job, his salary, his newly bought car. Others should be there to see it and talk about it. It's not enough to buy a great car if you dont have relatives talking about it, or putting your girlfriend in it, or driving it for others to see, or going to a trip with it. We must find a way to make people talk about it. Same way people talk about DVP twenty years after that dramatic story. Maybe we need to reward the spread of social info, who knows. What all the veteran screenshots say is that "here I was, here I did it, here they saw it", my friends, my party, my clan, the enemies. And since they saw it, it happened, its socially proofed. I hope I did not bore you and that this serves as a prelude to more creative people who can crack the riddle of the modern Lineage 2 veteran, who's still around, still talking, still hungry to fight. Cause it's the eye of the tiger, it's the thrill of the fight, but somewhere in this past decade, we turned him into a kitty with no might.

Can I suggest some things. I'm not experienced with 3D graphics but I have the belief that they are easily implemented with high impact: Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion : Can this be added for mesh/objects (not npc/players cause it might be too tough on performance). Volumetric Fog / Gods Rays : Going through trees or local structures / meshes such as ruins, this will look amazing. Depth of Field : I'm not sure if this is going to look good, but when you target a player, make the game focus on that layer of distance ?

The lighting is much better than default L2 lighting engine or is it my idea ? Also adding post-proc shaders not supported by NCSoft, is it ok to do or considered violation ? Cause since NCSoft released, shading has improved by ... leaps.

badass, and I see you rotate the skillsets that can go in the bar, nice !! By the way, how easy is it to port this to H5 when its finished ?

The mobile app is awesome. Elfo you are doing huge leaps for the community. What I would suggest for mobile is a modified targeting and skill casting ability. You could put the main 4-5 skills in a circular bar like Honor Of Kings / LoL Wild Rift that is accessible from the thumb of the right hand. For targeting you could have an on-screen list with the "most valuable targets" for each player. Client could automatically pick. Targets your party leader has, targets with low HP, squishy targets, top 10 of them by proximity so as a player can pick them with left hand thumb and do skills with right hand thumb. Movement should also be done with a thumb moving like the games I described. Have it emit move to location packets periodically when the left hand thumb is moving the "joystick".

Very nice progress. At some point you will need the bots to travel long distances. Geodata and A* path finding on it won't be suitable. They will exhaust budget and memory/cpu. I think the human bot was hitting this ceiling that's why it couldn't find the bridge. aCis has recently made a low granularity geo Pathfinder that can help. One approach I did successfully and you can do is to replace geodata with 3D nav mesh for bots and use the Detour algorithm for pathfinding. This will give you very cheap long distance path finding.

How's it going ? Any new progress ? Let me send you some motivation. These are all AI bots using DeepSeek V4 Flash for socials:

Well it's up to the owner of the project to decide. If he feels modifications might be the gray area of the law, his project his rules who are we to judge. Anyhow its very remarkable that in about a week he has done such substantial work that eglobal needed years and 70 devs to do.

It's about what impact you make and where they have jurisdiction. E-Global is a single cluster of servers, if Fermata succeeds, it will be the main client of L2 private server scenery, which is much broader than a single server. And since its EU residency project and not Russia, laws are stricter. The issue though is what is considered derivative work. If I look at a mesh and design one myself with more details, could this be called derivative work ?

I wish there was a way to upscale the meshes in L2, some sort of AI maybe that can take these low poly and make them beautiful. That would make the game so much more awesome.

I'm just another guy pulling opinions out of AI's ass. Right so ... The AI called you an asshole with a huge fragile ego ? That's a new one, who'd have thought they trained LLMs on your personality. At least if tha admins decide to punish us both for insults and rule violations, my alibi is that my insults are AI generate slop not technically mine. Yours on the other hand, are originally crafted. Blame's on you Now back on serious topic. I never blamed L2JMobius. Quite the contrary, I'm saying that it's a very good pack and frankly most private compile-only packs secretly leech aCis and Mobius. And yes they make claims they can't back and are simply hiding behind obfuscated compiled jars, which once deobfuscated and decompiled, are quite obvious that have nothing new, they are reselling open source with a pricetag. There was a guy some months ago that was selling vanilla L2JMobius as a private pack lol. You probably confuse me with someone else, cause you revived a years old topic and I simply followed along.

The pack is very good. A lot of private paid packs dont have the optimizations and fixes that L2JMobius has. Take that from someone that considers both Mobius and Galagard, assholes with massive fragile egos.