I will be visiting the development team in Seoul in a few weeks and I would like to bring them questions you might have about Lineage II in general. Goddess of Destruction questions are welcome, as I know you have MANY, and I will be able to get some answers for you. However, please understand there are many details that the development team is not ready to release yet, so answers to your questions may not be revealed right away. We will select the most constructive questions you can come up with and present them to the development team in Seoul. We’ll be accepting questions until Friday, April 8 at 3:00 PM PDT.
So I did some calculations also, based on server Cadmus class count statistics.
1st, I put party needed proportions for each class:
Standard GoD 7 ppl party build: Tank, Healer, Enchanter, Summoner, 3 dd (2 archers/2 daggers/2 warriors - any combination 1/2/3).
Tank - 1/7
Warrior - 2/7
Dagger - 2/7
Mage - 3/7 (3 mages and 1 summoner for mage party)
Archer - 2/7
Summoner - 1/7 I hope summoner will be needed :) Can't put 0/7.... well you know ... :)
Enchanter - 1/7
Healer - 1/7
And for 8 ppl party with new class Bards (sws, bd, ol):
Tank - 1/8
Warrior - 2/8
Dagger - 2/8
Mage - 3/8
Archer - 2/8
Summoner - 1/8
Enchanter (wc,pp,Ins) - 1/8
Bard (sws, bd, ol) - 1/8
Healer - 1/8
2nd, I calculated
- How many all classes count should be (versus real count) to fit proportions above
- How real count fits well (in %) to needed counts.
100% - fits good,
<100% - fits bad.
>100% - too much players in one class, all of them will have to 'reroll' or use event for any other class awakening (same as reroll actually...). All other needed quantity are potential % of players of that class, who will have to REROLL forcibly, or play solo, or leave game.
As you can see 7 ppl build fits really badly... poor enchanters, 2/3 of them will never find party and have to reroll (probably tanks). Melee classes fit well (cuz there are 3 of them you can combine). Mages fits ... wel not good really. Healers - there will be twice more of them than needed. More rerolls!
And 8 ppl party, I've suggest, with bard - will solve the problem partially! Thank you for your attention, mr. Jae Hyuk Han! Too bad, you will never read this :-)
ps. Yes. I care.
Q: Did you consider that be reducing all classes to 8 that there are currently 3-4 different enchanters in a party, where should the other 2-3 go?
- What is a common day for you ?
- What is the common process for an idea ? I mean the idea state, the concretisation, the coding state, and the prod state ?
- What is the hardest thing you had to make, I mean code, and which is currently ingame ?
- Do you plan to improve one day the aerial combat system, with the use of Aerial Cannon as they already exist ingame ?
- How many people are working in the Dev team in Seoul ?
- Cookies or Brownies ?
- Do you sometime read the board from an other country (like US / Taiwan / Russian) directly ?
- Who writes the Lore ? Is it linked to the Dev team ?
- Except High Five Part 1/2/3/4 and the next GoD update, what is your prefered update ?
Q: So many players complain that the development of Lineage 2 has gone in a wrong direction and the game is gradually resembling other MMORPGs like Aion, WoW, etc... while losing its own style, atmosphere and "spirit". What is your opinion about this issue?
Let's see if any of these constructive and quite important, in light of recent events, questions get asked!
Are you aware that many L2NA/EU players use 3rd party programs, such as ZRanger, to automate PvP actions such as auto-targetting, group auto-targetting, and pot-usage, creating enormous advantages during PvP for those who use these programs?
What are you doing to stop the use of these 3rd party programs, and when can we expect to start seeing the fruits of your efforts, if any?
What feedback from the US/EU players that had not also been given by the Korean players have you acted upon in developing updates?
When/if GoD is released in Korea, and the L2NA community doesn't want it after reading up on it and the Korean players' impressions of it, will GoD still be forced upon us? Would there be any changes to the US GoD update to satisfy any of our wants and needs?
My prediction: Nothing remotely close to these questions will be asked and instead, questions about things like hairstyles, hats, and pets will be asked.
Q: Is it possible to bring a new character class into game - Bards, while increasing 7 players party size up to 8 players? Don't you think merging 6 classes into 1 will harm role playing part of game? Bard class can solve potential problems with Enchanter class become 350% more overpopulated.
Question for the devs:
The updates in the Powerbook Wikipedia appear relatively late in the day. At what time do you usually get out of the office? Do you personally feel that a regular 8 hour work day would improve your performance?
(The second question to be asked at your discretion, as the situation permits)
But the Olympiad is an important way for lvl 76 characters to obtain the Giant Codices for starting their skill enchants. Is it possible to add a link to the Olympiad Manager's dialogue screen and have a separate pre-Awakening Olympiad category, something like "1 vs. 1 Match (Awakened)" and "1 vs. 1 Match (un-Awakened)"?
If this should be too difficult/expensive to implement, could maybe Giant Codices be added to the drop lists of early S-Grade monsters like the Ketra Orcs and Varka Silenos, for example instead of the Jewel of Dusk?
Will flying be possible in the southern part of the Gracia continent? Will there be aerial monsters too? Or monsters on the surface which can be attacked in Aurabird Transformation?
Are there plans to rebuild the destroyed Starter Villages at a later point in time? Not necessarily as a place where new characters start out but as intact building complexes, as they exist in Lineage 1: http://www.lineage.com/game_guide/download_map_of_aden/
Do you take engineering students as interns at the development department so that they can get practical experience in game development? From Konkuk University and/or Ajou University? Recommended by Dr. Oh Myeong?
What are the links between the graphic aspect, the visual aspect and the game and the features ? Do you create features first, then you "draw" them, or it's the other way ?
Would it be possible to offer both skills, but in a mutually exclusive way (like Subclass Certification Skills), so that players have a choice whether they want to be a Combat Dwarf or a Commercial Dwarf?
If that should be too difficult to implement at short notice, you could maybe set the SP required to learn those two skills at a prohibitive number, so that the average player can only learn one of them but not both.
Elmar, NA + RU OFF represent way more then just 10k players.. RU OFF alone has a player base of 60+k but w/e it will be the Asian market that make or break the GoD update.
Here's a serious question from me for the Dev team: have they ever tried to google "zranger" and actually read what it means for their game ?
Our party, we playing ~2 years together, will get 4 enchanters in GoD update (Warcryer, Overlord, Swordsinger, Bladedancer). What for? Why? Why 3 players have to 'rerol' / leave / search another party? Is it role playing team play supposed to be?
1. Some people say that the developers of GoD are uglifying the graphics and simplifying the gameplay because they cannot reach the bars in the beauty and complexity of the game set by the original L2 development team. To what extent is it true?
2. Some vital skills (such as Honor of Paagrio, Flames of Invincibility, Mass Resurrection etc.) seem to be lost in the 8-class system. Are clans supposed to keep some of their members from fully converting into a GoD class, so that the clan still has access to these pre-8-class skills, or will there be another solution?
GoD questions:
1. It was said that character awakening is "optional". Does it mean that unawakened character lvl95 will still be viable in PVE/PVP/solo/party in the new end-game?
2. Current pre-awakening buff skills will still work the same on lvl95. How will current pre-awakening debuff skills work? Will they land at all, or do you expect players to stop using them? If yes, shouldn't the pre-awakening buff skills also stop working?
3. What will happen with current hybrid classes in the new system?
- will Soul Breaker loose all his melee and debuffing abilities and become a simple nuker? will he be able to use mage tattoos? what happens with rapier, will it become a mage weapon or will it be removed from the game? will all mages be able to wear light armor?
- will Maestro loose all his crafting/buffing/summoning/siege summoning abilities and become a simple warrior?
- will Overlord loose his clan buffing ability?
- will there at least be a limited option for these hybrid classes to choose which new class they want to transfer to?
4. If you have an Elven Elder subclass on a dwarf main, what racial abilities will it have? Elven or dwarven?
5. Now that kamaels are loosing all their uniqueness in classes and weapons will you allow them to choose classes from other races as subclasses?
6. What will happen with current crafting system and economy? Will end game items be craftable or drop only? Do you plan to focus on free market or bound on pickup items?
7. Will awakened characters from the same class (but different race) have the same stats?
8. Will there be an option in future to visit places that were destroyed in GoD and see them as they were? As an instance maybe?
And few "eternal" questions:
1. With the inroduction of element system, and the fact that you can only have one element on weapon, some classes which have skills/summons from more than one element type were penalized. Is it working as intended? Are there any changes planned? Do the new GoD classes have all skills with one element type or different?
Also, some transformations/summons have elemented spells while many transformations/summons (including transformations aquired through class skills) have unelemented skills, and they of course cannot be skill enchanted for element, which limits their usefulness. They will be probably be useless in GoD anyway, but there will probably be some new ones.
2. Are you aware of the number of critical damage multiplying buffs and the fact how they are stacking leading to massive amount of damage, which also causes huge discrepancy between some skills and weapons (skills that use critical damage are scaling better than the rest, weapons with higher critical rate get much more benefit from these buffs, and for some classes it is better to not use skills at all and just hit with weapon)? This has been fixed to some extent in PVP by introducing critical damage reduction buffs but still works the same in PVE.
3. Due to having no cooldown and the amount you can carry CP/QHP potion have huge impact on PVP. They increase the overall duration of PVP, which is good, but they also favor classes with high damage and low HP, and classes that are not dependant on mana. It may be an argument that those potions were put in game for dwarves (which were a bit weaker in comparison with other classes but had double weight limit) but it is not the dwarves that get the most benefits, it's classes mentioned before. Dwarves will also have the same battle power as other classes in GoD. Do you think this is balanced and how?
Don't forget, the questions panel closed today, in 5 and a half hours!
I've removed some posts that did not contain questions.
OrcZilla and Yidao, I moved your non-question discussion between each other to here (http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=215070), in case you want to continue it (it looked constructive so I didn't want to delete it, but this thread is for questions only).