While I love the dark artwork & atmosphere, the new skills, the cut scenes, and the instances, playing L2 is just nearly impossible.
So much work was put into all those expansions, but neglect and bad business practice destroy it.
I used to hunt in MOS, it's quite a large dungeon as well as the Imperial Tomb. I tested many of the older and new areas on my way up. The results are disturbing.
MOS and the Tomb as well as many other locations where never updated to the new "UBER exp". They are essentially worthless as they are significantly inferior to new locations. Unless you absolutely need these weaker mobs you shouldn't hunt them.
(Upper MOS rooms where completely covered in bots also) a dead environment with no players.
The swamp is overcrowded (only a few real players) and parties at 85 are nearly non existent. You also can't do Ketra, Silenos, Argos, Mines, etc etc.
There is a new enemy in the game. At least with the Paid accounts the company wasn't working on ways to exploit the game. Whether it's the cost of items, the absurd amounts of exp boost, the drops rates, etc....
The company becomes an opposing force willing to sacrifice the value of game play to make a few dollars instead of having any integrity or long term goals.
PVP is not only broken in balance /dmg/heroes/gear as it always was, now it's more useless than ever. With game breaking mechanics like 0 exp loss, exploiting the inability to de level it's just a disaster.
They also wouldn't restore accounts from the past that didn't transfer on their deadlines. I understand them not wanting to go through the hassle and leaving them open. However, at the same time they burned customers (in this case who paid for multiple accounts for years).
It's a dying game with a questionable future. You can stack on worrying about how much further it can go in this state. I find it both difficult and depressing to play a game I really wanted to play.
After reading through the posts, whether it's one issue or another, everything just seems down hill. And it's not about the age or the game, or lack of content. It's mostly related to NCsoft making it nearly impossible.