bumping! over 8.5 Years online

Ye, the site is down... Sad. Also curious why it closed

From what I have been able to gleam from reading pages and pages at other forums, it was simply corruption and a non willingness to wipe. Apparently he refused to bow to peer pressure. But certain players he kissed their asses.

Also on his forums he appeared to become power hungry and would ban peoples accounts when they asked about updates. Or questioned in a polite way why something was being done.

Plus certain things in game became so corrupt like Olympiad that people stopped going.

He made updates no one wanted. What they needed was certain horrendous bugs fixed.

So you could say it was a lot of things.

Personally I think he just got tired of the people he tried to make happy. Would be nice to hear his side.

I really enjoyed playing there. Some of his ideas where brilliant. But even I got tired of the constant market manipulations shoved down our throats for the good of the server. When you put in years of work and find something changed that cuts into your profits, it tends to frustrate players greatly.

I know this response is VERY late, but Balls was put in a very bad position, he is a very good person and the Balls I knew would never allow corruption. I just wanted to let you guys know what actually happened from everything I saw, I was Reaper, or Reaper91 etc, at the time I was the Head GM and things were going pretty well overall, I was the one that created the tattoo's and many other additions that were not in the normal game and Balls helped me with implementing them to fit the server so they were not overpowered, we also had many other cool things that we were working on such completely novel Raid Bosses that ALOT of time was put into. Also, I was working on several new recipes to add to the game that were NOT easy to make but added new Jewelery and several other things. As well, we had several new quests in the work that were entirely createed by Balls and I with unique rewards, the problem we were working toward was making their rewards and quests balanced but also quite difficult, personally I wanted these quests and recipes to be rewarding but with variety of different levels of difficulty depending on the caliber of the reward for completing them. Unfortunately, before the balancing, fine tuning, and test (mock battles) against the new raid bosses could be completed my health took a turn for the worse which at first landed me in the hospital, and once released, which left me bedridden for several months and was unable to help Balls in the way I wish I could have if I wasn't sick. Which left Balls by himself with one other admin that was still pretty new to the role. So, all the weight of the entire server suddenly and without much warning landed on his shoulders (with a bit of help from the new GM). So, I just wanted to clarify, Balls does not deserve to be called corrupt or anything else like that, he did the best he could in a nearly impossible situation. I'am sorry that L2EQ's slide downward was majorly assisted by my absense, even if there was really nothing I could do about it, I wish I could have done something to help.

Thanks for reading if you took the time, I just couldn't stand all of it being blamed on Balls when he is truly a good person and tried his best.
-Former Head GM Reaper91