Recently, Community Manager Laura Genender had the chance to ask a number of questions to Jae-Hyuk Han, the Lead Game Designer for Lineage 2 and Adan Davidson, the Producer of Lineage 2 in North America and Europe.

MMORPG.com:

How do you feel about Hero capabilities? Do you think they are overpowered, underpowered, or just right?

Jae-Hyuk Han:

I think it is just right. Skills and weapons for Heroes are privileges that "common" people cannot have. Hero weapons will remain as one of the best features in the game in the future.

Click here to read the whole interview here.

You can also view our exclusive screenshots here.

Very nice article. I only played Lineage 2 a few years back, and only for a day or so, then quit (and went to everyone's favorite game: WoW). Now that I quit WoW after 2 and a half years of selling my soul, I'm going to look into Lineage 2(Or EQ2).



And that Dark Elf has some sick armor :)

If L2 had a PvE only server, I'd try it.  Open PvP isn't my thing.

Let's face reality: Cheating at L2 = Winning at L2.   Thats not good for a game so heavily based on competition.

When someone comes onto a Battlefield 2142 server and uses hacks, yeah it sucks, but the game will be reset in 30 minutes anyway.  In L2, the cheaters just keep acumulating power, as they have done for 3 years now.  When NC Austin bans a character that does nothing.  People work together in L2 to cheat it.  If one gets baned, the group of cheaters has accumulated many resources to come back from it.  Simply bot up a new toon, and gear it using the ill gotten gains.  Bottom line: L2 punishes anyone that plays legit, and hands extreme rewards to anyone who cheats. 

IMO L2 is the best game ever made (I have been gaming for 20 years, and yeah i actually believe this!).  But NC Austin has proven entirely ineffective in dealing with the cheating issues over a 3 year period.  And now, nearly everyone but the cheaters have quit the game on the American servers.  Massive, colossal, failure. 

Pro's:
-  Only real open PvP MMO.
- Extremely well designed, it has no peer. (unchecked cheating has undermined the design)
- True persistent world, (mostly) non-instanced.
- Best graphics in any MMO, past/present/foreseeable future.
- A real challenge, this game is hard, you will need years to master it.
- Free updates twice a year.  Great updates to balance and new areas are consistently well done.

Con's:
- Cheating is the smartest way to advance.
- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.
- Economy requires you to ebay eventually, unless you bot.
- Worst community, everyone is an asshole, including me.
- Fairly high system requirements, getting worse every time they update the game.
- The game is too hard, nearly everyone that starts...  quits within 3 weeks.
- Desolate newbie areas.  A new player finds a 15 to 1 bot to human ratio.

Conclusion:
The best MMO available. Wow, thats -_-ing sad.

Originally posted by hadubnano

- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.

That's simply speculation, and as far as I know, false. Several of my cheater friends have tried to pay money or sexual favors to NCsoft employees in return for being unbanned and have been turned down.

They're not the most efficient team in the business, but they're not as corrupt as some people would claim. GMSilver is a total badass.

Lineage 2 is definitely my favorite MMO but I am not returning back until Fortresses come. I want to enjoy the PvP without having to compete with those who have more time than me because technically, L2 is a grindfest.. I hope fortresses come in either Interlude or T1. Hopefully the fortresses can be seiged based on limits of levels or something to make it so more can gain access to the fun PvP that L2 has.

Originally posted by hadubnano
Let's face reality: Cheating at L2 = Winning at L2.   Thats not good for a game so heavily based on competition.

When someone comes onto a Battlefield 2142 server and uses hacks, yeah it sucks, but the game will be reset in 30 minutes anyway.  In L2, the cheaters just keep acumulating power, as they have done for 3 years now.  When NC Austin bans a character that does nothing.  People work together in L2 to cheat it.  If one gets baned, the group of cheaters has accumulated many resources to come back from it.  Simply bot up a new toon, and gear it using the ill gotten gains.  Bottom line: L2 punishes anyone that plays legit, and hands extreme rewards to anyone who cheats. 

IMO L2 is the best game ever made (I have been gaming for 20 years, and yeah i actually believe this!).  But NC Austin has proven entirely ineffective in dealing with the cheating issues over a 3 year period.  And now, nearly everyone but the cheaters have quit the game on the American servers.  Massive, colossal, failure. 

Pro's:
-  Only real open PvP MMO.
- Extremely well designed, it has no peer. (unchecked cheating has undermined the design)
- True persistent world, (mostly) non-instanced.
- Best graphics in any MMO, past/present/foreseeable future.
- A real challenge, this game is hard, you will need years to master it.
- Free updates twice a year.  Great updates to balance and new areas are consistently well done.

Con's:
- Cheating is the smartest way to advance.
- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.
- Economy requires you to ebay eventually, unless you bot.
- Worst community, everyone is an asshole, including me.
- Fairly high system requirements, getting worse every time they update the game.
- The game is too hard, nearly everyone that starts...  quits within 3 weeks.
- Desolate newbie areas.  A new player finds a 15 to 1 bot to human ratio.

Conclusion:
The best MMO available. Wow, thats -_-ing sad.

Agree with you on everything there

I agree, shockingly, that this was a good interview, better than most in terms of response. I have to hand it to the Lineage 2 team, they deliver very consistent view and development process when it comes to their game. The new race idea my be a spawn of WoW, but the game itself is an open world. You are free to go anywhere you like if you can avoid aggro (and good luck on that). Plus I agree with the above poster that the graphics were very well done. Honestly, an art direction that is rare in this space. Yet, the grind is still the grind, and that is what pushed me away from this game. The bots never bothered me, and I found a truly decent and multi-national community after a month of playing on Kain. No bugs, little lag, decent community (not the best as a whole). I am looking forward to seeing if they come up with ideas to shorten the trip a little in the future.

Good interview though =).

It is pretty sad that such a good game has been ruined by cheaters.  They really should have started cracking down in beta when it was evident that people were going to bot and bork the economy, levelling, etc.

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Originally posted by hadubnano Con's: - Cheating is the smartest way to advance. - "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players. - Economy requires you to ebay eventually, unless you bot. - Worst community, everyone is an asshole, including me. - Fairly high system requirements, getting worse every time they update the game. - The game is too hard, nearly everyone that starts... quits within 3 weeks. - Desolate newbie areas. A new player finds a 15 to 1 bot to human ratio.

---

I have to disagree with some of these points. I've been playing since OB, gotten two characters to 70+, plus multiple other alts between 40 and 65. And in all this time, I've never once botted or purchased in-game assets with real life money. It is more than possible to play this game without botting or ebaying. I will also mention that I've been in some of the biggest pvp clans/allies on the server too, before anyone says you have to ebay in order to really be competitive. And I am not a hardcore, 5+ hours a day player either, so it's not just that I've poured my life into the game, because I haven't.

I would also disagree about the community being full of assholes. I am actually quite sweet. But seriously, the community is the #1 reason that people stick with this game. Long after you're sick of the grind, you keep playing because of the friends you've made. In fact, I recently had about 4 friends who quit the game over a year ago to play WoW, return to L2. What was their reason for coming back? The people.

Originally posted by Listof

 

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Originally posted by hadubnano Con's: - Cheating is the smartest way to advance. - "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players. - Economy requires you to ebay eventually, unless you bot. - Worst community, everyone is an asshole, including me. - Fairly high system requirements, getting worse every time they update the game. - The game is too hard, nearly everyone that starts... quits within 3 weeks. - Desolate newbie areas. A new player finds a 15 to 1 bot to human ratio.

---

 

I have to disagree with some of these points. I've been playing since OB, gotten two characters to 70+, plus multiple other alts between 40 and 65. And in all this time, I've never once botted or purchased in-game assets with real life money. It is more than possible to play this game without botting or ebaying. I will also mention that I've been in some of the biggest pvp clans/allies on the server too, before anyone says you have to ebay in order to really be competitive. And I am not a hardcore, 5+ hours a day player either, so it's not just that I've poured my life into the game, because I haven't.

I would also disagree about the community being full of assholes. I am actually quite sweet. But seriously, the community is the #1 reason that people stick with this game. Long after you're sick of the grind, you keep playing because of the friends you've made. In fact, I recently had about 4 friends who quit the game over a year ago to play WoW, return to L2. What was their reason for coming back? The people.

I agree with you Listof,

Does L2 have problems? Sure it does. Worse community? Not by a long shot. WoW and GW hold that rank. I played for a long time and honestly it was one of the best MMO community experiences I ever had. Do people buy currency and bot? Yup. I don't think anyone will argue that point. But do people in WoW buy currecy? Yuppers. You can buy currency on any one of those 200+ servers on either side, how do you think its getting there, magic?

I played L2 for about a year. Yeah its tough, yes, the economy is hard, yes the grind is hard...but its not about reaching endgame and doing raids or battlegrounds, yes higher level but you don't need to be level cap to do anything.

L2 is a very misunderstood game in the western market. One thing you can see is its continued growth over the last few years. When I started playing they had something like 65k subs last year, now they are up around 105-110k. That says alot right there.

Anyway, like any other MMO, its a matter of taste. L2 will continue to improve and grow. You guys who hate it will still hate it here for whatever stereotyped reason.    

I've always wanted to try this game, but I don't like open pvp.  Now if they had pve or pve + limited pvp, I would give it a try.

And cheaters?  Yeah, any time you have a virtual environment that is competitive there will be cheaters.  I haven't played a single competitive online game where there wasn't cheaters.  The wierd thing is, when you talk to a cheater, some of them will say, yeah i cheat, and others will type up a page explaining and rationalizing in depth how cheating is not cheating at all. 

Seriously,  rofl

The answer for the war against botters / 3rd party users.

They only ban people who don't pay them for the program / non farmers, as you see farmers run around constantly and when they announce the mass ban of people , its never farmers, its allways real players with walker , never a farmer, funny enough, and hwo can you tell that you might ask me.

Check the Adena prices when they announce that they have banned 100.000 users like he says now, like shit they have , adena prices still as cheap as ½ year ago, maybe 5 dollars more expensive for 100m adena.


Christ , Davidson , go hang your self.

I wish i was a NCsoft employee so i could unban all female players in exchange for sexual favors

Originally posted by damijin

Originally posted by hadubnano

- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.

That's simply speculation, and as far as I know, false. Several of my cheater friends have tried to pay money or sexual favors to NCsoft employees in return for being unbanned and have been turned down.

They're not the most efficient team in the business, but they're not as corrupt as some people would claim. GMSilver is a total badass.

I was glad to see the topic of bots copme up,but i can tell you as a 2x player of this game,he is a lier.Although WOW has the lagest quantity of cheats and RMT sales ,this game  has the most obvious cheating i have ever seen.The bots and cheating going on is so out in the open for even a noob to notice,there is no way in hell this guy is is telling the truth.I have seen several articles on real life threats and beatings based on this game over in asian communities.The bots literally run in and out of the cities,back n forth to the farming spots.Players are using cheats to run multiple clients,so they can have healers to aid there hacked out PVP.This game should have been buried a long time ago,but i think koreans take this game very seriously over there and alot of them are making there life/living offf rmt sales of this game.

Although there was nothing wrong with this interview,id like to see ALOT more intensity brought into the interviews and force out the topic of CHEATING onto a much higher level.Although this game is basically a korean community ,it's games like these that bring out the many cheat programs that soon become a part of north americanized games.If this guy that was interviwed truly has a heart for his product and game ,he would be much animated about the cheating in this game,as is he just came across as a sheer out lier.

I might also add,that i was pleasantly surprised to see others posting under this topic about cheating,because frankly i didnt think many cared about the cheating in this game.

Sure there is cheating in Lineage 2. You would be hard pressed to find a game that doesn't have cheaters. But like all games, there are people who play by the rules. It's just the ideas behind the game that brings the perfect atmosphere for those who wish to cheat and have the money to spend to do so. It's a persistant world (very well done I might add) where it's impossible to hide your character to cheat. This is why it's most obvious in Lineage 2, because they can't hide. In WoW and other games they hide in Instances. Does this let NCSoft off the hook? No. But it also allows players to report and eventually ban bots. NCSoft has been very strict in what they considered a bot, because of this it was easy for bots to work around these. A good example is why the ?gmlist command doesn't list any GM's anymore. The bot programs would type this command on startup and make a database for all GM's and automatically log off when the GM came. There is ALOT LESS bots than there were prior to November of last year. Either it has to do with the botters having enough adena stockpiled up, or it has to do with farming adena is not an efficient tactic for them (raid bosses/market/quests/manor being more productive). I'm not sure how prices have been affected online but in game prices drastically changed when bot bannings happened. Which is a clear sign NCSoft does something RIGHT.

Now the best thing about this article is they introducted new light onto new information about the future, including a new race.

Some people posting here said they wanted to try L2 but didn't like the concept of open PvP. I can say from my experience, if you don't want PvP, it's very easy to avoid. You can join clans whom are not focused primarily on PvP and aren't at war with half the server. You can level up in the Dimensional Rift where you have no fear of anyone killing you. There are also enough high level dungeons and zones that it is rare you'll need to fight someone over an exp spot. If you like the game and are not into PvP it's still something you should try out because the PvP system in Lineage 2 is very well done, especially after recent changes.

Originally posted by damijin

Originally posted by hadubnano

- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.

That's simply speculation, and as far as I know, false. Several of my cheater friends have tried to pay money or sexual favors to NCsoft employees in return for being unbanned and have been turned down.

They're not the most efficient team in the business, but they're not as corrupt as some people would claim. GMSilver is a total badass.

Well about your friends.

I had the same problem since i had 1 account banned, but i had a few friends who could speak the farmer language, they made a nice tighty email to NCsoft about it was a whole misunderstanding and bla bla , wupti within a week of getting in touch with the right CSR handling the case, unbanned.

Even tho my SWS was caught using L2Walker.

The cheating looks so obvious because there is no instances.

Compared to WoW gold farming, "hackers", botters are just as many, but just not as obvious. Like someone else stated it, if you play in a virtual enviroment you will have cheaters. Sly cheaters usually don't get caught. Get over it and realize it. If you can't stand the thought of your competition cheating, don't play multiplayer games, even ones in real life.

Now after saying that, yep L2 does have serious problems. But, when I play other MMO's I feel the game design on those aren't as good, even if they claim to be better. L2's largest downfall in my opinion is the required amount of time needed to level and get gear, this time should seriously be cut practically in half, so people can get to the "goodies" of the game. Maybe play a few characters and still be competitive and to close the gap between the cheaters and the "non-cheaters".

Can't beat the art of L2. Can't be the epic size of sieges and boss raids. The seamless world. And of course what made me choose L2 in the first place, free expansion packs!

Best game, and was the most popular in the world before WoW. I don't play wow because I don't like the graphics, the large amounts of instances, the community (although there is sometimes a gem in the rubble), plus I don't want to be with the "masses" and join the new "online sensation" known as The World of Warcraft.

I have to agree about botting. It does suck, but there isn't much you can do about it. I used to play on Bartz and was pretty much a purist when it came to not botting or buying adena online. I gotta say that I kinda felt like a minority among the masses. I think it's pretty easy for someone to cave in and end up buying adena on ebay or ige or something in that game, not that every single person does, but A LOT do. Do to my play style, I was near lvl 75 and still using B grade, and don't get me wrong, there isn't anything wrong with that, as a matter of fact if everyone were legit it would be normal, but I would be lying if I said it didn't get to me. I think that a lot of people who don't cheat the system feel distraught near the end game.

I'm not sure if they're still there, but in Bartz we had a huge alliance of adena farmers mostly comprised of nukers that would systematically take down pretty much every raid boss whenever it spawned. Doing so allowed them to take the drops, sell them off at a retarded price only to sell the earnings over ebay, ige, etc. to the players (in some cases I would bet to the very person who bought the item from them in the first place) and it would just go around in a circle. They were pretty much the enemy of everyone and it wouldn't do much of anything to try and hinder their routine. Even if you win the battle, it doesn't amount to much in the war, because they just keep doing what they were doing. Yes, this hurt the economy bad, but it wasn't just them. The people who bought the adena from them are just as responsible as they are for supplying it IMO. Some would probably argue that it's the only way to keep pace with everyone else, but if there weren't such a huge demand for it, don't you think the economy wold be a bit more stable? Ya, I don't think there is gonna be any way to tell now, and botting, buying game currency online, etc will probably never go away, I'm just pissed to see such a great game reduced to this because most of my friends are gone now which is the ultimate reason why I don't play anymore. When your friends leave, there isn't much reason to stay either, at least for me.

Originally posted by kwai

Originally posted by damijin

Originally posted by hadubnano

- "Anti-cheating" tactics by NCAustin have been subverted by GM's being paid off by players.

That's simply speculation, and as far as I know, false. Several of my cheater friends have tried to pay money or sexual favors to NCsoft employees in return for being unbanned and have been turned down.

They're not the most efficient team in the business, but they're not as corrupt as some people would claim. GMSilver is a total badass.

Well about your friends.

I had the same problem since i had 1 account banned, but i had a few friends who could speak the farmer language, they made a nice tighty email to NCsoft about it was a whole misunderstanding and bla bla , wupti within a week of getting in touch with the right CSR handling the case, unbanned.

Even tho my SWS was caught using L2Walker.

Mm, I was (half) joking about the bribes. It depends on the circumstance of your ban, whether they've had problems with you in the past, and other factors, I'd imagine. I know several people who were banned and unbanned in Chronicle 3. More recently, I knew someone who drove all the way to the Austin, TX NCSoft HQ to ask to have his account unbanned (a tactic that worked for several people in C3), and he was turned down.

I think they got a lot more serious about preserving the community in C5, and even if the farmer bots who make their living by cheating are unbeatable, I think they have made GREAT strides in stopping players from botting to gain their levels, and the community is doing a lot better because of it.

They have a long way to go, but as someone who played from Open Beta they have made huge improvements in the community and the cheating situation in the past few months.