Lineage 2 Aden
Olympia Brackin
I'm an old player (talking beta, before launch of L2, original Bartz server). You know, the ones that still have our retail L2 disk box and all the memories it instills just looking at it. Like most people I leave and come back when nostalgia bites. And it bites a little harder for people like me, who remember the very first castle sieges. The formation of clans, the fight vs aggressive adena farmers, politics, power plays you name it. The world was a different & far more hostile place then it is today. Alot of us had a second subscription for a buffer/healer, because party finder didn't exist back then. You would sit at a popular spot and shout your class level in the hopes of finding someone that would leave their party so you could join.
Fast forward a few years, c4 alot of us quit for newer titles. Call it burn out, boredom, but for some reason we always come back sooner or later. The Goddess of Destruction expansion was both the death of the original game & a slap in the face to those of us that grinded ENDLESS hours on top floors of TOI, in the dragonvalley cave donut/heart, who helped support the server with our most important asset, our time. That sense of accomplishment was shot dead when you can literally level to 85 in a day.
Negative points aside, I could understand GoD, it was a needed life vest for a title that was for a lack of better word, "dead". But it was more of a layer over the original game then a game of itself. Too many useless lower class skills, relics of it's past it tried to bury but could not. It added alot of good things, stuff that should have been there years before.
fast forward some more, classic server.. sadly I cant bring myself to grind like that anymore, it makes me physically sick to start over.
Lets move forward one final time. This new aden server promised a different experience. Fast leveling, simpler designs, streamlining everything. I figured hey, why not give it a fair shot, maybe i'll make some new friends along the way. I sit here today feeling like Aden is just the embodiment of GoD all over again, but its way worse, at least GoD had it's own soul. This auto-leveling thing is just a glorified botting feature. The lack of drops & adena is a real let down. There is no sense of accomplishment leveling up, no new world to explore, no new lore, not even a new voice dialog on any npc. But worse of all, its an MMO where you see tons of people, but interact with no-one. This game server rewards you for not playing, something that is a big no-no.
In short - whatever vision you had for Aden, I don't buy into it. I know sooner rather than later the freebies will dry up and i'll be stuck shelling out cash to have what you basically gave me for free the day before. I'm guessing this is probably the last hurrah for a title that was supposed to have 12 expansions but ended up with alot more.
In terms of "Lineage II", this is it. There is nothing new beyond this in development. Aden will be supported for a few more years to come, and there will be updates to Aden over that course of time. But there is nothing else beyond Aden.
Time goes by and things evolve, games evolve and even you evolved. Like a pokemon. And as the time move forward you cannot do anything but to look at the past and sigh, reviving those memories that made you happy. It's like falling in love with a band! You love how they sound...you love their songs, the lyrics! The feelings! But then the band release a new album and the genre changes. It's not what you used to love. And you have 2 choices. Get stuck in their previous songs and quit listening to their future releases or just understand that the band you love is still there, somewhere, but it had to change.
Now let's for a moment ignore the GOD servers that started really bad, they wanted to improve the game, they wanted to bring some fresh air into the game we loved! And they failed. Ok so, keep this in mind. As the patches moved on they tried to fix their mistakes and classes were split again and started to be back to their "unique original form". The classes started to be more and more fun to play and way more contents getting into the game with new lore!
Classic servers tried to get players to join back using their nostalgia. But statistics are talking loud: they failed yet again. Why? Cause Classic had nothing of classic.
At the very start on EU servers you had a 100% nostalgia feeling with those 'hardcore' settings and p2p. Paying for each one of the accounts, slow XP with ur pt, crafting and spoiling! And let's not forget the NA start! Daaaam the crowd!
And now one last step. Essence or, for the new guys, Aden. And alternative server where you can see the "what if" of the GOD. What would happen if we were not going to get awakening at 85? Well, we're gonna figure it out! But...we probably wont.
Cause all the 3 projects were doomed and are doomed to fail as they share 1, disruptive, mechanics: p2w abuse.
Now, do you remember when i early told ya "They wanted to bring fresh air into the game, but failed"? Ok so this is it, all over again, for all their projects. And i'm not talking about NCWest eh, they are publishers. I mean the NCKorea. The reason why they turned the game into a legit afk-to-play is cause as you said, people is no longer willing to spend months grinding to get 1 level. This, is an helpfull feature. There's no longer a gap (at least on XP) between legits and not.
Problem is they are making you pay a lot to allow you to even XP, as you can see on Aden servers. You said there's no drops nor adena. I can tell you that you are wrong. I'm dropping tons of C/B armors and i dropped so far 3 weapons C myself. I managed to get 1 full plate set and 1 divine robe set from full drops + several no-set boots/gloves/helms. Also an Avadon leather armor. As for the adenas, so far i farmed probably over 30kk adenas (but i wasted them on items so rip).
This is it, sadly. The reason why you can't see the point of this game anymore is cause you're looking from the wrong point.
Auto hunt to help you level up and farm while you do other stuffs. A game where you gotta spend lots of moneys to keep XPing and gearing up to get on top. A game where you can do anything on your own, no time to waste with parties.
This is the goal of the Aden version. F2P but P2P. Later on the P2P will turn into heavy P2W.
Look at the Awakening servers: P2W is so insane that classes are perfectly balanced now. They all oneshot each others.
I got the same feeling as Deathcoil. I did play Aden from day 1 and until today I literaly dropped 1 Dgr Boots. In this game is no future for players who want to play for free. No chance of grinding (without Shaya you run out of shots, spirit ore, zen). Its turned from beautiful MMO world to a moneymaking machine for NCSoft. This way the player numbers will keep falling, and when you finaly decide to let people play freely, just to have someone on the server, there will be no one to give you another chance for this P2W.
I just wanna play 1 char for fun. I don't have 150$/month to spend on a game, I rather spend it on my children. If this makes me a lazy person then so be it. Iam a casual player and don't support bot farms.
Theres probably more productive methods of progressing, but I've found to work for me is to burn the free daily sayas/buffs in a HIIT active play session @ 690xp/300adena, then switch to a lower intensity style for the rest of the day @200xp/90adena. (longer unattended sessions at lower costs/lower risk)
When your running with sayas grace its XP300-500%/Adena100%Loot100% , so the main bonus is the Xp rush (esp if you use gusts/storms) and higher adena drop. But Sayas grace doesnt seem to have any loot drop advantage over sayas will.
(I also found that it seems you can save your gusts/storms for when you proc the "sayas will maintained" freebies for 1-4 hrs and use them without draining the 100% extra grace (as it drains no grace) but you still get the 200-300% bonus.)
PPl have been saying nothing drops, but I have seen about the same drop rates as the original game, I see players getting b weapons worth several mil drop in the rooms right beside me, and have gotten a few armor and jewelry drops myself.
(It feels almost like the old days where a party hunts in a prime location for a few hrs and gets a drop worth 100k-10mil, which gets sold and the adena shared out. Only this time you solo auto hunt that party. Go to work/sleep for hrs, and come back later to find the drops waiting in your bag.)
this is where ( i believe) you are wrong, the L2 keeps on progressing, its the liver servers, what most of us remember has evolved, we are in the 4th out of 6 dragons from the Lore and L2 has at least 7-10 years more.
Classic and Aden are just remakes for people wanting something to resemble what used to be a good game.