I first started playing this game back in 2004 and manged to get a gladiator to around lvl 55. I quit after about a year because the bots were taking over the game. Fast forward to now and I had some free time to kill and thought i might try out L2 since it had gone F2p only to find out that my account had to have been merged last year and since it hadn't all my stuff was gone. Okay, time to start fresh.
First look was kinda nice. I leveled at about 10x the speed I did back in 04 and the game was completely new. The npc buffs were a nice touch so that you didn't have to have multiple accounts just to get farming buffs. In about 5 hours of goofing around i had my first lvl 50 and thats where things start to fall apart.
Now the bad. I got 0 item drops from 1-58 and managed all of about 500g from drops. Luckily you get gear from your advancement quests up to about lvl 50. Then the gear just stops.
Next I thought to lvl a spoiler and crafter duo to see if I could get some crafting reagents to make my own gear eventually like I used to, sure do miss my old scavenger and warsmith for this, only to find out that nothing spoils. Not one mob gave me a spoil all the way up to lvl 40 on both of my dwarfs.
I understand that all the old crafting recipes are dead, so how do you make all the gear after C grade? The game I remember had a huge crafting system in place and that was where I had made alot of money on a lower lvl alt just sitting in Giran all night with material recipes in a crafting store. Now you don't see any crafting shops anywhere and the only stores I've come across are the gold seller ones advertising their sites.
I can understand the thought to combat the bots. Unfortunately you went the wrong direction entirely. As I see it the only people still playing this game are at or near lvl 100 and use anyone that tries the game out as a mentee. I was invited to clans on all my toons but no-one talked nor offered help in anyway when asked. Trade and world chats are limited to lvl 95+ so don't bother looking for help there. All websites including this one are full of outdated information. So in less than a week I am once again uninstalling Lineage 2 probably for the last time.