Profile: isurus
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• • I knew the Easier leveling miracle patch was too good to be true

  • This board is nothing like l2guru. L2guru is dominated by ego-stroking. It's been that way since the beginning, even back before the community migrated from l2orphus.com. It's all about rolling entire armies solo with half a dozen 78+ buffers that are never mentioned but always assumed. In other words, 99% bullshit minus 1% of a few losers who actually have put that much time/effort/cash into the game. That's L2blah.

    But, that said, I myself am a lurker there because for every racist, homoerotic GIF, there is an insightful fact from truely experienced players that you won't find anywhere else in the english-speaking L2 community. As vulgar and ridiculous as it is, l2blah really is a wealth of information.

    
    MMORPG.com tends to focus on answering newbie questions and venting frustrations with the game.

  • Posted: 9/22/08 6:01 PM
    Lineage II
• • Who thinks the bot problem is NCsoft's fault?

  • First of all you have to understand that botting is not the problem.

    The problem is that L2's design is extremely condusive to RMT. RMT = Real Money Trade, ie. farming adena and selling it for real life currency.

    
    Botting is just a tool that the adena farmers use to collect adena to sell. Bot programs simply give adena farmers the means to control countless characters at once, maximizing the amount of adena they can farm for sale on Ebay, etc. Because of this you see temendous bot populations.

    Which is where the conflict occurs...

    As L2 is almost an entirely non-instanced game (which is a good thing), these bots clog up in-game hunting grounds in their endless pursuit of adena to sell for real money. So, real players often find that there aren't any adequate XP locations available because bots (adena farmers) have already taken them up. PKing the bots is useless because they always return (-4% means nothing when you gather XP 24 hours a day while AFK), and actually YOU get punished for going red!

    
    So who is to blame?

    The players who buy adena? L2 is a great game on many levels, but many players view its brutal, elitist economy as no more than a barrier to the "good stuff". Why spend countless hours leveling a dwarf and leaving a bloated L2 client connected with a buy/sell shop open in Giran every night when you can just drop a few dollars at Ebay on all the adena you'll ever need?

    The adena farmers (botters)? They are just making a few bucks supplying a demand. The opportunity is there, the tools are readily available, it's easy and worth the trouble, why not?

    The admin team? How many bots is it physically possible to ban per hour? How many GMs should the NAL2 team hire exclusively for banning bots? What is the false positive ratio for bans? What GM wants to get trigger happy with the ban button only to face a legion of legit, angry players who were mistakenly banned?

    All these people share some blame. Greed, laziness. But the true blame falls on the shoulders of the dev team.

    
    L2's bot epidemic is epic in scope. In what other MMO do RMTers play such a significant role in the game world? Adena farmers influence every player in every part of the game (well, at least after lv20 now in Gracia).

    They dictate market prices on everything. They completely dominate the 7signs system in every way, gouging the price of Ancient Adena and Mammon consumables. They clog up all worthwhile hunting grounds. Especially dungeons. ESPECIALLY 7signs dungeons (I swear the 7signs system was specifically engineered for RMTers). I even see them in popular "outdoors" hunting grounds, 9-man bot trains competing with archers/nukers in VoS/FoTD/IoP/etc. The adena they sell leads to ridiculously overpowered items that often reduces endgame to an escalation of "who's willing to spend more at IGN.com".

    Adena farmers have their tendrils in every aspect of the game and I blame NCsoft's dev team for deliberating pushing L2's design in a direction so susceptible to corruption.

    
    So what do we do? At this point there's no going back. Bot subscription numbers undoubtedly provide an indispensible, irreplaceable source of income that, even if NCsoft was a company of integrity, will never get cut off.

    As a player you can fight it, ignore it or give in to the dark side and buy some adena yourself. Most likely, all of the above.

  • Posted: 9/22/08 5:32 PM
    Lineage II
• • im developing a gambling problem playing this game >.<

  • +16 or no balls

  • Posted: 8/27/08 11:23 AM
    Lineage II
• • For anyone starting once the expansion hits retail, read.

  • Honestly Ephemiro you could have saved yourself all that typing if you were to just say, "Read what the damn NCPs tell you."

    
    Also I don't know what you mean by "subclassed character within the first month of playing". If you mean to imply that one can go from 1-75 in a month then you're dreaming. Might want to rephrase that.

  • Posted: 8/27/08 6:01 AM
    Lineage II
• • Most efficient way to level?

  • I grind <4 hours a day and can't keep my vitality up. I'll log on in the evenings after work and it will be level 2. A couple hours later = level 1, and usually less than 1 buff run after that back down to 0.

    It is a nice boost and I'm not complaining, but yes it was too good to be true.

  • Posted: 8/27/08 5:57 AM
    Lineage II