miahi wrote: I tried to play NCWest Giran a bit, but it's truly cancerous. Not to mention the situation presented on the forums is really depressing.
The game/server doesn't look dead, but it's really so difficult to do anything that it's not worth it, considering the advantage that you can get by paying(all the exp bonus from vip4, runes, scrolls, adena from adena sellers, etc.).
And since any other decent private is mostly crowded with russians, i guess there isnt any decent place to play.
Yeah I completely agree, that VIP system is outright bullshit. The thing is that you have to pay a lot of money to actually keep it on your account too. I remember it was like $30 outright and then a constant $10 per month in order to keep it or something like that.
And people still buy it because progression is too slow otherwise. Absolute bullshit monetization method.
GraciaFinal wrote: someone deleted my comment, i will not write for 10 minutes again... classic is grindfest. all we really need is na/eu/ru off opening c3 c4 c6 maybe gracia servers each, and let people choose where to play.... game is dead since kamaels and atributes. not even mention that fiasco with goddes.
Wasn't me, perhaps the comment wasn't submitted properly?
And I agree with you, a retail server with the old C6 or Gracia would be really nice, even subscription-based like Skelth.
The problem however is that it's clear NCSoft doesn't even remotely care about the players, and I think they never did considering how much they profited over the botting issue in the old days and took little action against them for so long.
And this started translating into the private server scene too, look at how many bullshit donation-based servers open and then close a few months later after they cash in and the players leave. And I don't accept the 'it's the community's fault because they get to the endgame then leave' bullshit, you have servers like Dawn which are a testament of how untrue that statement is.
Right now a proper low-mid rate (10-15x) classic server without donations and full buff + good files would be an absolute bomb, Lionna's current server has some good files that were also on l2classic.ws and l2zaken but they kept the silly donations. It's unbelievable how such good files are going to shit because of greed.
Brick wrote: The majority of private servers seem to die rather fast and all of them are made to generate quick money.
Exactly this. The funny part is that it's the main reason the game looks like it's dying. Private servers have always propelled L2 far higher than what retail could have ever achieve, precisely because they lacked the same greed and fixed the things which retail did wrong.
Now we have the same greed in the private server scene:
- equipment donations which monopolize the economy to a few top clans, while the regular players are forced to join them or wear dicks as equipment
- unbelievably poorly thought topzone websites which encourage vote rewards for servers to stay in the top
These 2 things make sure that low quality servers can stay on top of the rankings while actual good servers get drowned by the lack of votes because they don't want to tarnish the gameplay with something as silly as vote rewards. L2Dawn wasn't even remotely in the top spots, and iirc neither was L2Shrine when its population was higher.
If only we had a good topzone where actual quality servers would get promoted instead of the servers with the best vote rewards.
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This is an MMO which functions extremely well with 1k players per world, that's a very low player floor. PvP servers can survive with a few hundred players and be considered healthy. 
It would help a lot if PMfun somehow got hands on some kind of Classic database though, which is hip these days and the information regarding drops is hard to come by...
