Suggestions for server, please read and comment

L1.5 Discussions
1

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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

5 Likes
2

In regards to the gear, here’s an idea : Give us the ability to unlock a level 30 piece of gear (through ollecting items dropped from hunting) and enable us to level it to 35, or 40. With worthwhile stat boost on those items.

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100% agree with you Frosty.
Even though i’m not an end game player, I feel like spinning the wheel is the only way of getting good items.
I’m one of those mages that switched to melee, I choose Mage for lvling faster, and found out its not anymore the case.
Making Mage a Mage and SP Items Viable would be nice.

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4

well i haven been playing l15 for a while now and i agree with what frosty say, even tho i am not an end game yet still some of those apply to me like t5 an been a mage never pull drops aswell magic is useless beside heal and immune and ab. But again i like this game an that is why i am still playing it but we need excitement. an i appreciate all the work you do but yes please read the comments and lets us know what you think thanks. injection :slight_smile:

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5

Also agree. i spend most of my time sitting in town waiting on hard snowmen or sky to be up inbetween boss spawns and after dailys there is little to do other then grind. which can be boring after a while. DM deffs needs a rework been saying this since day 1. it brings all players together weak and strong maybe unlock all dm’s lvl cap and make every one have a theme or certian boss that spawns. its something great about live lineage that i miss very much. and yes mages need a rework as well. some how t5 mage is doing less then me at t3 same gear. while they are the fastest lvling till t3. after that they drop off hard… as for drops i also agree some are just to hard to get. even more so with just event items we need ways of working towards these items giving us also something to do. cheers

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6

I agree with most of what Frosty said. However, I do think that the highest grade gear should be very difficult to obtain. Maybe not quite as difficult as it is now.

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.1. sky castle is a perfect example of a server wide boss/pvp thing. Only problem is less than a handful of people actually do it which leads to either no pvp or one sided pvp. Making a new daily event isn’t going to change much aside from more people doing it at first since it’s new, then dying off and it being back to the way it is now. Having an event once or twice a week in a safety zone where all levels can participate would be ideal, you could even make the event start an hour later every time so that it becomes fairer for people in different time zones. Seeing how no one ever sieges, and a lot of the castles are owned by alt clans. Having some new ultimate castle which grants increased exp/sxp for the week would be awesome. Maybe 20% more or something, but it would cause all the clans to give it a shot for the bonus.

I like the battleground idea, everyone is given the same items to use somehow, or you can’t use items above S grade in that area etc. Normal pots(no x pots or braves), normal siege like original l1(for the most part), normal arrows etc. I think that would be a fun event everyone could participate in, and you can make it for the “ultimate castle” for the exp/sxp buff.

.2. Sad but true, anything less than s80 is pretty much a waste of time to craft. S grade can be decent if you have the mats already, but new players aren’t going to farm those mats as it will probably take too long. Making S grade mats easier to get should help out any newer players before they can afford s80. (which if they donate a couple 10’s can already afford). The drop rate seems fine for the most part, it’s more that multiple people are getting the drops so not one person has enough of the mats, and no one wants to sell their mats because everyone wants the same items(Dragon X items).

.3. I have 500+ MR and cancel works what seems 100% of the time on me, at that point it doesn’t matter if mages do a little less damage since the canceled person can’t fight back without using AB(which a non mage won’t have). And cancel is like a 1 second cooldown so there’s zero chance for a non mage vs a mage just from that. I have noticed a magic crit with the frosty’s x snowball, I don’t play mage so idk if that’s common. I’ve seen mages do plenty of dmg, although I don’t know what gear they have in comparison.

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8

we just need use able magic crit items… atm its essence hyr or lightsaber…
need a weapon thats some what easy to obtain and has magic crit on it,. the difference between a lvl 20 epic zaj staff with essence gear. and use hyr its about 100k on me at T3. the stats are some what the same apart from the 40 magic crit hyr has… epic zaj staff needs some magic crit or something. as for cancel works alright 50/50 on people with 500mr any more then that its like 0%

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9

I’m still relatively new, but I agree particularly with points 2 and 3. Drops seem to be extremely unforgiving, and this is especially true for weaker players who can’t even hunt bosses yet. The absolute best items should be rare, sure, but when even mediocre items are so rare/expensive that new players have no reasonable way of ever attaining them (due to being unable to find anything of value themselves to sell/trade) there’s a bit of an issue. I’ve heard some bosses only spawn once a week or so, which is also a bit of a drag - killing bosses is one of the most enjoyable parts of Lineage - mindless grinding can be done in any RPG. “Class balance” also seems to favor one or two very specific playstyles, and it seems like eventually all players will be forced to adopt these playstyles or intentionally gimp themselves. These things are what are most likely to scare off new players such as myself, but it should also be considered that even for the stronger players, unavailability of gear and pigeonholing of playstyles are major concerns.

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10 
 On Frosty's #4 I would like to add about unfinished.  Will we ever know what small dragon eggs do, hopefully evolve hatchlings?  I know many players would like to see that since these pets have become very hungry.  Also, yellow ballons and other event items that seem to have no use.  Thank you Zajako on all your hard work, love the server and most of the people. :stuck_out_tongue:
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11

I’m Atilian, and I agree with this message. Vote Atilian for office.

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12

I will post a long broken down reply to this tomorrow. However I have to say that, nothing you guys have requested has fallen on deaf ears. I’m a one man team who also has a family. And this post you are making trying to demand updates and changes leveraging the rest of the server against me, during the time period that I’m required to be busy with family is quite a major frustration for me. What’s worse is several of your points you are trying to make, are things that I have mentioned are in the works already to you in personal comversations in the past. This kind of post is not appreciated when I’m trying to enjoy my holidays and I worked really hard to provide events for you guys to enjoy the holidays during this same time.

To everyone else (not frosty), I know it’s easy to see posts like this and jump on the YES WE NEED\WANT these things bandwagon, It’s also easy to say, this game was originally nothing but grind and has come a LONG way in making things fun and not boring. I’ve always strived to make things feel less grindy and more fun, and always will, but the heart of this game is the grind and we all know and love that.

I’m closing this thread until my reply tomorrow breaking down each point as well as the news post announcing my plans for the first quarter of the year.

Good Luck,
Have Fun,
GM Zajako

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As the post is ridiculously long and broken into parts, I’ll be breaking my response up into multiple posts to keep it clean.

#Reply to Frosty’s Post Part #1:

“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.”

I already talked with you previously about after the clan gear system for battlegrounds is finished, I’ll be redoing deathmatch to utilize this system and at that point boosting the rewards greatly.

“It’s been proven that there are many strong players and alliances on this game, no one single person will dominate every time.”

Actually, if the system were not using battlegrounds, it would get to the point where one person or clan would dominate it 99% of the time until they get bored of it or obtained all the items from it that they wanted. This is what the history of this server has clearly shown me. Using the battlegrounds gear would make it a much fairer fight for everyone and this is direction I’m going with. It should also make everything a lot more fun and make the challenge of the deathmatches pretty much be like old school L1.

"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. "

Thank you, however, people still complained about the drops or about it being unfair. Also this is something that requires me to actively run, its not something that can be automated very easily while maintining the fun. The closest thing to it would be the Full Battleground system that I’ve been designing for the past 2 years. Crazy Spawns: Check, Awesome Drops: Check, Mixed in PvP: Check! Anyways, more details about that will be posted soon.

“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.”

As a person who is at the top of the food chain, of course it is hard for you to see reason to get stronger. You can solo things that usually takes 2-3 people minimum if they can do it at all. I understand that and have always tried to keep raising the bar, however I also have to balance by adding content for the lower and mid levels too.

“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.”

People who are grinding in instances/safety zones are paying GC to do so. I think that earns them the right to do so safely. (To be clear, you said grinding. Doing the dailies for the free amount is hardly grinding.) As far as that being the reason people get bored or quit, I highly doubt that.

"The Arena is another example, something that appears to have been hugely popular has gone by the wayside. "

The arena was never hugely popular. It was a lot of fun when I manually ran it, just like the spawn event you mentioned earlier. Then I automated the process and after that it fell to the wayside and was only really played to farm stuff to craft dolls. It was mostly people not enjoying it at all and just doing the bare minimum to make it look like they were not farming as to avoid trouble.

“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.”

A lot of hard work was put into it like 5 years ago. But it was fun work. I have considered improving the rewards however, this would require the pvp to be balanced and fair for everyone. Thus after I implement the battlegrounds system I plan to create an arena designed for battleground gear with better rewards.

“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.”

As you stated, we have talked about it and as I told you back then, with the battleground system it should be much more fun again. Also previously stated is the rewards being greatly boosted as well as dynamics to declaring attack on castles and holding multiple castles. For everyone else, what I mean by declaring attack on castles is I have imagined a system where you can declare an attack on a castle on a non seige day and this starts a timer for a certain number of hours and sends out notifications to the holding clan letting them know that an attack will happen when the timer ends. This makes seige time very dynamic and not just once a week. As for the making people want to fight over it, I have plans to change the Tax systems to make it so the people owning the castle can boost the rewards for their clan while pissing off the rest of the server. Or make the server love them at the expense of their boosts.

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#Reply to Frosty’s Post #2

“Drops. I know you feel good items drop too much. Many of us disagree.”

If everything dropped often enough, no one would craft. Why bother crafting when you can just farm the drop. Also, the market depends on the rarity of the items. If the items drop too often no one can sell them and no one wants to buy them. If we had a player base with thousands of active people at any given time, we could get away with higher drop rates, but we don’t have that. Drop rarity is also something that made us all keep playing L1 for as long as we did when Live was up. It is what makes items feel earned and makes them deserve the respect and value that they hold. I have done drop rates for 6 years now with this server and I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing with the balance I have established.

“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.”

While yes, new stronger items come out over time, I also have to release items that are not stronger to keep things enjoyable and exciting for lower and mid ranged level/geared players. As far as the old grades being crap, thats completely false. There are many NG and S grade items that are very good and actively used by even high level players. Also there is the whole de-leveling process from tiering and reapering where these old grades become very important for getting back up to the higher grades. While yes there are now ways to make this time period shorter or even gone, not everyone has these items or have them maxed out.

“At this point everyone is in S80 and X gear. With limited room to improve.”

You are not everyone. There are many people who have been struggling to get S80 gears and X gears. Very few people can actually say they have limited room to improve.

“Many of the improvements we CAN make are to vala/fafu/lindvior gears, which basically is impossible.”

Also incorrect, I’ve seen many vala and fafu gears crafted from bottles. There is a reason people are always buying and selling the scales and bottles. The only exception is the Lindvior gears which currently ARE impossible to craft as the npc hasn’t been put into the game for them yet.

“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.”

Going by the drop rates on the full items, yes, its extremely rare, thats the point of the crafts where the mats are all very high percentages with the possibility of multiple of the mats to drop as well.

“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.”

So your suggestion is to make crafting entirely pointless as well as make it so only the few people who can solo a dragon will ever get to hunt it. Basically you are thinking for yourself, you want to kill the dragons hourly, which you would do until you have crafted/got full drops for everything and sold enough of them to not need GC anymore, then you’ll be bored again and want me to ruin another part of the game.

“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.”

Crazy gears like the dragon gears are supposed to feel like they are unobtainable. This makes it so that when someone obtains it, it is epic/legendary to them and they are very excitated about it. As someone who has crafted dragon stuff by farming the mats, you should know that it is worth the time and effort put into farming it.

“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.”

I’m always working on adding new things to the server, something like a new set of gear is an undertaking that all in all pisses off more of the server than it makes happy. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say my time would be better spent fixing and adding stats/procs to the gear thats already in the game.

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#Reply to Frosty’s Post Part #3

“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.”

Really this can be summed up as your opinions on how things are for the classes for you. Each class does have its strengths and weaknesses and not everyone goes through with the same feelings as you do. Melee people complain about how easily mages level. Mages complain about well… everything. Archers complain about melee’s damage and mages aoe. The truth of it all is each class has had its ups and downs. None of them are perfectly balanced however each of them have their advantages and disadvanges. Also when people play a class the right way it does better than people who don’t really know how to play their class. Another major difference is gear as well. For example Knights are very slow to level up, for years they have complained that they are the worst class. With very few spells, lack of aoe, lack of bow boosts etc, they are forced to single target their way through each level. However when they reach X grade and obtain an X grade pole arm or 2hs they become very strong. Mages on the other hand go the opposite way, they are very fast at leveling and blaze through levels but they don’t do as well against single targets. One major thing that you fail to understand about MR though is that the difference between 600MR and 60000000MR is 0. MR is a trigger, if it succeeds it makes your damage be reduced by 50%. If it fails your damage is 100%. To complain about MR is the same as complaining about HardSkin for archers or Damaging weapons for knights. As for mages pulling drops, this is also completely wrong. I’ve seen mages out damage every other class by spamming Vamp Touch while meleeing with decent weapons, then pulling the drop, while not using a single potion. While the other classes were spamming mats and pots to stay alive and getting no drops.

With that said, the balance is not perfect by far. It does need a lot of work, I won’t say it doesn’t. But the issues you are complaining about are really not nessisarly the problem and the balance is not as game breaking as you claim it to be.

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#Reply to Frosty’s Post #4

“Finish things that are incomplete There are things that are 90% done, they just need the finishing touches.”

I am one person, I try my best to juggle tasks for this server, often working 80+ hours a week on this server. Majority of those hours at less than minimum wage. I have to constantly change “hats” so to speak for each of the different types of jobs it takes to run a game like this. Simply switching from programming to making a post on the message boards requires me to completley change the way my brain is thinking to type out a post, then from there I have to switch to the social networking job to make posts on twitter/facebook/etc to make sure everyone knows about the post and so on. While it may sound easy to switch gears like that, it isn’t. Here is a short list of the different job titles that a company would have to do what I alone do here.

Lead Programmer, Community Manager, Social Marketing, Network Engineer, Game Designer, Graphic Artist, Web Software Engineer, Admistration Software Engineer

There are actually many more than that, but I stopped at 8 to make it clear that I do what all other game companies have teams of people doing. I have made many friends in the game development field who have been working for major companies and they are all shocked that I actually am able to do what I do.

So while yes, idealy it would be nice if everything were finished, I also have to know when to move to the next thing and hope I get a chance to go back and finish the other things. I have to constantly shift my priorities and this causes things to sometimes be partially released.

“Tier 5 - Ultras? Skills? I worked my ass off to get T5 and thusfar a waste of time.”

The reason T5 skills have not been released yet is due to Event Season. Shifting of priorities, I must ensure events are relases so everyone can enjoy them before I can work on something that only a few people would enjoy.
As for Ultras, I’m not sure what you mean… Maybe the Elixir tokens for going T5, if thats what you mean, those are not being delivered as a different currency to get Omega Elixirs will be given instead. Now that event season is over, the next priority is T5 Skills and Omega Elixirs.

“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.”

This is also something that I will be getting to this month. As I told you 2 months ago its waiting for when I get the chance to.

“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.”

Epic Antharas was only put in the game to be a place holder, which is why he is actually regular antharas with a different name. The Assassin Boss, there is nothing wrong with him, He is as he was designed. You’re beating a dead horse. I can’t say enough that I am just one person, I do my best and I have to keep things interesting for everyone not just you or the few people who are at the top. The donation event items are ALWAYS finished before they are obtainable from the drawing, so bringing that up is just you complaining because you wanted to test them.