Zaj, it seems lately a lot of players have been struggling with boredom in the game. I think you’ve seen this due to lower population numbers, and less players actually playing even when they are logged in. I think this is due to frustration and boredom on our part. This post is not meant to be negative, but as suggestions on things that may help the server. I see a lot of players talking in game with negative attitudes, including myself, mostly because we feel our complaints/suggestions are justified, but fall on deaf ears. You have a solid group of players that are dedicated and play often, but I can speak for multiple people that say we are bored & turn to other things to fill our free time. Here are a list of things I feel need some work / things I have gathered from other players.
-
We need something to engage the server as a whole – I’m talking about events that happen daily. Not instances where we go hide in our corner and grind, things that pull people together. Things that promote teamwork and PVP. Agree or not this game thrives on PVP. A perfect example of this would be re-working the deathmatch. Change the mobs, make it difficult, and give us a good boss spawn or two at the end. Have several of these a day. People will log in and battle it out for their chance to fight to the end. It’s been proven that there are many strong players and alliances on this game, no one single person will dominate every time. Your spawn event a few weeks back before thanksgiving was epic. People loved it, drops were worthwhile, and the pvp element at the end was great. Give us a reason to get stronger! Why do we spend all day grinding, if there is no purpose? Sure, to get stronger, but players thrive on competition and being stronger then the next guy. Thats what lineage is all about. By having us grind in instances and safety zones, you are removing that element from the game. This leads to boredom and eventually guys leaving. The Arena is another example, something that appears to have been hugely popular has gone by the wayside. It looks like you have a lot of hard work tied up into this. Have you considered improving the rewards? maybe people would start playing it again. Seiges, I know we’ve talked about this a lot. We need a worthwhile siege. You’ve mentioned implementing the battlegrounds system where we all use similar gear to level the playing field. Whatever you decide, we need ONE castle to battle for (more often than once a week) with GREAT rewards (adena, GC, Exp/Sxp/damage boost), where guys will make it a point to be on and fight for it.
-
Drops. I know you feel good items drop too much. Many of us disagree. The natural progression of the game, any game, is for items to get better as time goes on. An example of this is NG, B, A, S gear. It’s all crap now, when at one time im sure it was good stuff. At this point everyone is in S80 and X gear. With limited room to improve. Many of the improvements we CAN make are to vala/fafu/lindvior gears, which basically is impossible. You need to be lucky enough to be on at the right time for the spawn, once in 24-36 hours and the drop rates are horrible. At a .001% chance of a drop on per X item, at one spawn per day, is one drop in every 280 years. If you add up all the dragons, with all their items (9 total items), you will get one drop every 31 years. My suggestion is increase these drop chances significantly, decrease the chance of souls to drop, and increase the boss spawns to several times a day. Hell once an hour gives us something to look foward to. If everyone has an item, I understand it loses all of its value. But they way things are going now, players feel they will never get these, and lose motivation. Work on some new gear for players to work towards, which they can get from grinding. Not from a 1 in 100,000 odds chance. I think this server is ready for the next round of gear and hunting ground for people to work towards.
-
Balance of classes. This is a hard one to figure out, no doubt. After playing mage for a year and basically having the best set up possible, I learned mage is horrible end game. MR on mobs and bosses is too high. A melee player less geared than I would come up and kill a boss I had been working on for 10 minutes, in 5 seconds, and take all the drops. Talk about disheartening. If you can’t beat them, join them, which I did. I’m telling you on behalf of the guys that currently play mage, they are getting screwed. We need to lower MR on mobs and bosses, and implement magic crits (same as melee crits) where they have a shot of doing large chunks of damage. Any boss (even high HP low regen), mages have ZERO percent chance of pulling drops. They simply do not do enough damage. All of the good hunting grounds now AoE is not effective, making a mages ability to be the fastest leveling class no longer true. Everyone spends half of their time as reaper anyway, with aoe spells. PvP wise, landing debuffs can be very difficult, which is should be. Again, mages need the crit damage to even have a chance at killing another player.
-
Finish things that are incomplete There are things that are 90% done, they just need the finishing touches. Tier 5 - Ultras? Skills? I worked my ass off to get T5 and thusfar a waste of time. Thebes drops from bosses - Not worthwhile and not complete. Considering the time to gather mats to craft them. You can easily make temple more worthwhile to hunt by making these items as good as they SHOULD be. Lindvior items, donation event items. Not complete yet. Epic Antharas, doesnt even drop soul, no gear available yet. Zaj assasin boss, 1 in 1,000 chance to drop edo with no other drops. Legendary Zaj 2hs. The list goes on. Refined soul ore - at this point we are all beyond the need to use that stuff.
You have a loyal group of players who love the game and are very passionate about our server. If you guys agree/disagree with these ideas I would love to hear what you have to say. See you in-game,
Frosty