Today I was bored, so I decided to go out and spoil on a lowbie twink spoiler. I ventured out into the world and realised something.
Monsters do not spoil or drop anything anymore, not like they used to. I am used to gettings tons of crap spoils and drops of varies types that I would earn money on by selling in the NPC shop. But I got nothing.
Low level spots, high level spots... you get nothing. You might do hardcore AOE in cemetery and end up with 1 mellalic fiber after one hour.
What is the meaning of this, really?
**Why did you more or less remove drops and spoils from monsters (high and low)? Or lower the chance so much it's hardly worth doing?
** Drop runes, you lower drop chance and introduce drop runes?
I am not amused.
The drop runes are a scam. For practical purposes a drop rate of 0.01 is exactly the same as 0.02, i.e. zero. Monsters don't drop anything, no matter how much money you spend on runes or Prestige Packs.
The reason for this is that the developers are subscribing to Pol Pot's dictum that you only get a stable society when everybody is equally poor. As long as you stick to PvE, the Immortal/Requiem equipment you get with Mentee Diplomas or via the Nursery instance will last you all the way to lvl 99, and with the Steel Door Guild Coins from the Kekropus quests you can even equip subclasses when your Path to Awakening stuff has evaporated. If you want better equipment, this is a sign of greed and you must be punished - by getting tortured to death. If you disapprove of the Red Khmer and their policies, or of NCWest's refusal to delete the accounts of players who have accumulated their riches by illegitimate means (which would be an alternate way to remove excess wealth from the servers), I could for example recommend World of Warcraft, where it is apparently possible to gear up just fine via raid boss drops.
That being said, you might want to check what iMist writes here:
http://boards.rochand.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=1219&start=10#p25260
In addition to the outrage on the Russian forums about the reduced drop rates making the game unplayable since Lindvior, there has been a quiet exodus of players over there, which has led to the number of online players having dropped to only 800~1000 per server during prime time. The big bug fix update (
http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=264904&page=2#31) we are getting in March might include the Russian changes to the game economy. If not, you can always emigrate to one of their servers :)