Discussion Be careful buying projects

['Baggos']

Hello everyone,
 

Unfortunately, both Lineage II and the maxcheaters forum for this particular game have seen a significant decline in recent years.

I would like to write two things regarding your purchases on l2jpacks at this time. You must be very careful when looking for a developer or a user to sell or collaborate with you as a developer on the project you want to use to open a server. There are very few trustworthy individuals left who also have the experience to give you what you want. I receive many messages that people have fallen victim, not only from here on maxcheaters, but also from Discord.
Do not message old users who are no longer active because they may easily have an old project on hand that they will sell to you as "the best". It may have been one of the "best" in its time, but without updates, the best now becomes the worst.

Pay attention to your purchases and actively consult individuals from this forum who have the reputation that shows they are trustworthy. We are now in 2024, and projects like jfrozen really are not worth your time. They have stopped receiving updates for many years, and you will find yourself fixing A, only to encounter a problem with B, and then C, and so on. Projects without updates really do not deserve any of your time. This has always been true!
 

I want to thank maxcheaters, which has helped me since 2010 to evolve into a user who, self-taught with the help of this forum, works alone on jpacks. I want to give my respect to jacis, who still works on the project and keeps Interlude alive. Also, much respect to the users who help for free in the help sections and those who still share codes and guides.

Best regards to everyone, and be careful what you buy and from whom!

btw, I'm no  longer active user to jpacks. Do not message me, I can't help you, and thank for your trust.

[Tryskell]

It's the whole MMO genre which is in decline, playerbase left for other "short matches like" games (PUBG, etc).

I personally don't recommend projects which :

• don't allow to edit sources, making you a puppet to the project owner's will to backdoor your face ;
• force you to use some sort of auth server - even if it's easy to remove, it's imho poor approach for security and the sort of ppl adding backdoors as ultimate, hidden security ;
• permanently spit on other projects/owners - it often means they aren't confident in their own packs or will have a childish behavior towards you ;
• use a base pack and claim it's their work - if one lie is found, how much others ?
• reuse shared customs without even trying to optimize it - which generally means lazyness and copy-paste ability, but nothing helpful in case a real problem happens ;
• don't go deep in the refactors, or don't touch "touchy" files such as geoengine/movement/... - which means if a real problem happens, you will have to pay someone else.

In any case, before paying someone, you should :

• make some search regarding the dude on forums, to see how he talks/his reputation/his posts ;
• get opinion from different places/forums/ppl regarding the dude ;
• see if the dude is known under different names, which should be an instant redflag since it means he is probably banned ;
• request at least one self-made code exemple (being public or not, generally decent developers also publically share), which could be checked by other ppls if you suck at Java ;
• clearly doubt the dude if he says he is the best or seems too cocky.

About payment :

• you should use a middleman if you fear anything. It's costy (generally 20% ? I don't know prices), but it will be safe. After few transactions with the same guy, you can probably stop to use one.
• you should pay when the tests are done and you don't see more issues. If the dude is normally brained, he let you test on his test server, you test everything, you say it's ok, you pay, he gives you the code. If another problem is found after transaction, well there are 2 schools : dev is really friendly and will fix for free, or dev considered you said it was ok, and you pay for untested stuff. On that matter it really depends about the dude himself.

I also personally don't recommend any BR as developer - even if nowadays, it's one of the biggest L2 community. That's my own personal experience, and I would like it differs, but really, I didn't meet (did I ?) a single, decent, enjoyable, friendly, non-scammy BR developer on my 12y of aCis. You will be deceived in 90% of cases, all their custom packs are rebranded packs with copy-pasted customs. Please, BR community, make me wrong and be finally an enjoyable piece of humanity. Thank you in advance !

(About my pack, ty for the kind words, you will get your payment in the end of the month - 0.001% of total profits, 100.000€, as always ?)

Edited March 3 by Tryskell

['Baggos']

@Tryskell I completely agree with what you said(I don't have an opinion on BR users, so I can't say I agree or disagree), and thank you for providing all this information to protect users. I've never liked it when scammers target people who don't know the basics, and it still upsets me when I hear that they fall victim.

Of course, I expect my payment, no good deed goes unpaid. 
(Unfortunately, I see everyone talking about aCis everywhere, but no one came out to thank those who work to keep Interlude as clean and as stable as possible.)

Edited March 5 by 'Baggos'

[Trance]

I continue to receive pms from individuals purchasing packs, which I then analyze. Among these, I've encountered instances of what is purported to be a "Lucera source," which is essentially an older version of aCis with the packages renamed to Lucera. Additionally, there are cases where individuals send me peculiar packs claiming to be aCis, and so on. This indicates a significant prevalence of scams in the market. People seem to prefer private conversations over public forums, which poses a risk, particularly for inexperienced server owners seeking a better l2j pack.

@Tryskell,  I've noticed some promising commits recently, although I'm not actively using it. Still, I'm keeping a close eye on it.

[TheDarknessFear]

I don't really see the point of purchasing a ready-to-open l2j project just to open a server which someone will have no clue how reacts to various situations. The best thing to do is, go with a project that has support from their core developers (acis or lucera etc) and work from there to create your customs. I agree that working with developers (if you're not one yourself) can be tricky and risky. Therefore building your own project with a ready base is more fun and will help you understand your server better. Ready packs has huge risks (bugs, backdoors, wrong and edited files) etc. Also, using a pack that has support from it's core developers gives you the opportunity to have an open discussion on their forums, report bugs, making the project better for all of us, not just for yourself. Thoughts?

[littlejo]

It's not only the packs you may buy, you should be careful on developers you wanna work with, for example I was searching on fiverr, found a (new) guy there, since the others were taking their time to answer, we chat about some bug-tasks that is left on my project, we made a deal on 60$, gave him the half and he disappeared. It's not the money, but folks should be careful, cause if I was so stupid to ask him fix everything and give him like 400$, that could be sad.
His name in Discord is Sammysmalley0