Individual ports for Epics(except Frinteza that has a walktrought inside the dungeon)
No instanced Epics.
Full restoration of PK to its original glory. And no PK/Reputations scrolls.
No damage penality due to lvl diference between you and the mob.
No xp penality for level diference in party. You could create new toons and xp them in high lvl areas. Ofc wont be extremely fast, but faster then solo with new toon. Just as in old times.
No instances AT ALL. (or baraly the extremely necessary)
No dailys quests, you can do as many times as you can survive doing them all day long.
No vitality but better xp overall mobs and quests(no nobody can *** about their vitality beeing consumed)
Adenas drop restored to their original amounts.
Most, if not all, items tradeable.
Enchant rates of R grade same as lower grades(66% for weapons and 50% for armor, as tested by Russian Experimentarium team)
Full drops/recipes possible from every mob.
Full restoration of Seven Signs system and all related to it. Catacombs/Necropolis and Festival of Darkness. Also Dimensional Rift.
Skills made enchantable from 3rd class again.
Skill cooldown back to atk/castign speed based(Maybe?)
Dedicated/active/present(online&forums) team of bot hunters (as anyone who plays the game for more then 2 hours can easily identify any bot).
Bow critical damage modifier back to x2.0
This is what I have in mind right now. Im always thinking about how stuff was better before and how they could come back. Im gonna update this list as time goes.
Also all of this would fore sure, make me spend money again with L2.
Wonder if there would be a way to give archers 2.0 crit on PVE and still 1.5 on PVP.... giving them 2.0 on PVP again means no other class worth playing hardly.
Individual ports for Epics(except Frinteza that has a walktrought inside the dungeon)
No instanced Epics.
Full restoration of PK to its original glory. And no PK/Reputations scrolls.
No damage penality due to lvl diference between you and the mob.
No xp penality for level diference in party. You could create new toons and xp them in high lvl areas. Ofc wont be extremely fast, but faster then solo with new toon. Just as in old times.
No instances AT ALL. (or baraly the extremely necessary)
No dailys quests, you can do as many times as you can survive doing them all day long.
No vitality but better xp overall mobs and quests(no nobody can *** about their vitality beeing consumed)
Adenas drop restored to their original amounts.
Most, if not all, items tradeable.
Enchant rates of R grade same as lower grades(66% for weapons and 50% for armor, as tested by Russian Experimentarium team)
Full drops/recipes possible from every mob.
Full restoration of Seven Signs system and all related to it. Catacombs/Necropolis and Festival of Darkness. Also Dimensional Rift.
Skills made enchantable from 3rd class again.
Skill cooldown back to atk/castign speed based(Maybe?)
Dedicated/active/present(online&forums) team of bot hunters (as anyone who plays the game for more then 2 hours can easily identify any bot).
Bow critical damage modifier back to x2.0
This is what I have in mind right now. Im always thinking about how stuff was better before and how they could come back. Im gonna update this list as time goes.
Also all of this would fore sure, make me spend money again with L2.
Hmm i know one good interlude x1 rate so just download and play
Remove that Cancer button L2Store from the game. Put a fee / account / month and everything will find the way l2 to be a grate game again. For now Casino are much much better choice to lose money. I had a sever l2j just for 6 months interlude pack with top item a baium stone and ppl donate to get it from paypal. 3k us $ in 6 month . That how stupid players are. Pay and spend money to be the best in virtual world. What ever.
Basically everything handed out to everyone. After a few months of castle sieges, olys and "fun" PVPing with everyone with max level and max gear... "poof"... no competition, no excitement, boredom everywhere...
And good luck finding "Dedicated/active/present(online&forums) team of bot hunters" that are willing to work for you for free :p with employees to pay + servitors hosts + a functional website + advertise, you would definitively need some players money input on that (maybe create some "n00dles coins" for them to buy? :rolleyes: ), so aka an L2 Store with another name ;)
This is assuming that every player, including those who are now playing that mobile game totally free, would be willing to pay a subscription. Realistically speaking, in this age of free browser games many of the freeloaders would run away as soon as a monthly fee is tentatively mentioned. So to generate the revenue necessary to maintain or even update a licensed server (Netmarble is a major shareholder at NCsoft, so for them it all stays in the family) you would have to charge at least 50 dollars per month, which further reduces the number of your potential customers, which means you have to further increase the subscription fee, which further reduces the number of potential customers ...
This is assuming that every player, including those who are now playing that mobile game totally free, would be willing to pay a subscription. Realistically speaking, in this age of free browser games many of the freeloaders would run away as soon as a monthly fee is tentatively mentioned. So to generate the revenue necessary to maintain or even update a licensed server (Netmarble is a major shareholder at NCsoft, so for them it all stays in the family) you would have to charge at least 50 dollars per month, which further reduces the number of your potential customers, which means you have to further increase the subscription fee, which further reduces the number of potential customers ...
Long story short - it's not doable :)
Oh look a dead horse! Hand me my stick. I should really just make a post I can copy paste for these reply's.
Everyone knows the L2 store has to generate enough money to support the game.
It is the GEAR ITEMS, that CANNOT BE OBTAINED IN GAME that make the official NCwest servers on the same level as a decent private server.
The level penalty is so OP right now, that only selling vitality items in the store would still give the whales their enormous advantage that they simply must have to compete. Add in the cosmetic items and the event packages like we see today anyways, is also not a problem. I even prefer these being available for the people that cant farm 24/7.
The day the unobtainable gear items were added to the store was the day NCwest became a private server. The whole "free to play" logo should have been taken down from the website that day as well.
It CAN be fixed and L2 could be what is was, or a lot closer to it at least, but Neutron would have to do one of 2 things...
A. Add ALL gear items that exist to drop tables. Increase drop rates.
or
B. Delete all gear from the game, that cannot be obtained in the game. Increase drop rates.
Obviously "B" is an immediate fix and a good 50-100 whales would quit for 6 months or so, while "A" could take up to a few years for the servers to provide enough drops to re-balance the play.
I think you are underestimating the personnel costs. NCWest makes on average 50 million US dollars per fiscal quarter: http://boards.rochand.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=407&start=1800#p34481
That would be around 15 million per month, and since most of the staff (website, servers, support, legal, accounting ...) are multi-purpose employees who work for all titles, it doesn't really matter whether you run one Lineage 2 server or five servers for Lineage 2, Aion and Blade&Soul each - for providing a halfways professional service you need, if we subtract the money that goes to the Aion resp. B&S developers in Seoul, at least 5 million dollars per month.
And with "halfways professional" I really mean halfways. NCWest is doing a fairly good job with eliminating bots, but they are totally ignoring players who buy items, pre-leveled characters or adena. If they hired additional staff who tracks down and bans that scum, reducing the total L2 player base to about 1000 legits, those 1000 players would have to spend at least (additional personnel costs!) 5,000 dollars per month on exp runes and cosmetic items to finance the operation of their morally pure server. Even if we assume that such a server/company would attract thousands of new players, letting the player base after the initial culling swell again to 10,000, that's still at least 500 dollars per month.
And with "halfways professional" I really mean halfways. NCWest is doing a fairly good job with eliminating bots, but they are totally ignoring players who buy items, pre-leveled characters or adena. If they hired additional staff who tracks down and bans that scum, reducing the total L2 player base to about 1000 legits, those 1000 players would have to spend at least (additional personnel costs!) 5,000 dollars per month on exp runes and cosmetic items to finance the operation of their morally pure server. Even if we assume that such a server/company would attract thousands of new players, letting the player base after the initial culling swell again to 10,000, that's still at least 500 dollars per month.
The majority of farm bots are, and have always been, annoying. That being said, after a decade they just became white noise. What became intolerable was the scripted PvP automation's. NC west started doing a "halfways" job of cleaning this up with helios update, and it was immediately noticeable. I say halfway because, on Chronos at least, members of some clans (MS for sure, probably Nova too) have already hacked around and are able to script some PvP action once again.
There is not necessarily a NEED for a GM to be walking Aden 24/7. However it is pure negligence to not at the very least, keep taps on the top clans during sieges and Olympiad. As an example, if one clan holds Aden castle for years on end, contested or not, parody is gone, there might be a reason. Same thing for hero's. That's what, some 12 hours of work a week? You don't even need to hire someone to do this, just add this responsibility to an intern! Its LOL easy to spot a scripter.
NC soft is turning revenue in the millions, and the staff for NCwest isn't big
(and I certainly hope they are very well compensated), but there are only a couple of servers for them to manage. Your numbers for server pop, pertaining to how many would remain, and required cost per person to keep the revenue in status quo, seem made up out of the blue.
Lets exaggerate and make believe for a minute.
Lets say NCwest employs 10 people, at 100k a year, so $1,000,000 payroll.
Lets say building rent and utilities cost $1,000,000 a year
Lets say it cost $1,000,000 a year to maintain the servers hardware ect.
NCsoft doesn't know wtf advertising even is, so no cost there.
= $3,000,000
Lets say they maintain 4 servers
Lets use your server pop number of 1000.
(((3,000,000 / 4 servers)/1000 players))/12 months = $62.5/month (subscription or donation or NCoin)
Thats before you even start to consider that overwhelming majority of the people you banned in your speculation don't even buy Ncoin to begin with, they are circumventing the process. Logically, discouraging this behavior would increase NC profits.
NCWest employs far more than 10 people. Here are for example just the senior executives, who each have staff of their own: http://us.ncsoft.com/en/about-us/#section-executive-team
(those are all multi-purpose employees, working for all titles together)
That being said, I went to school before the pocket calculator was invented. In physics etc. we just had to do quick guestimates - getting the decimal point right was good enough when we was young. So I won't argue whether each player would have to pay 60 dollars or a few hundred dollars per month. Expecting either is totally unrealistic. People over here even balk at the subscription fee of 30 dollars that NCKorea charges for characters of lvl 85+. Nobody will pay that.
The only way to get a sizeable revenue for a video game company in this day and age is to play on the lowest instincts of their customers, running gambling events, dangling a carrot in front of their nose that 90% will never get. Then the cash will come rolling in :D
Ok, this is my 2nd log in in this forum in this month just to keep this going.
So, if they had to ask for a monthly fee of $50 minimum now a days, how in the past it was running for years with way more servers for only $15?
Ok, lets say that the updated price would be $20 for our current time versus the 15$ of 10 years ago. What changed? Higher server/connection prices? Higher employee salaries?
We know that the development team has come from 200 around GoD to 30(if I recall well the numbers you metioned here or Rochand).
Whats driving the line of when its profitable or not? I only see higher profit estimates, not really operational costs.
Its this new trend to minimize costs and maximize profits thast going around for way too log. Only delivering worse services at higher prices.
In the past there were more players, so the load was distributed on more shoulders. The hardware cost for more servers to accomodate those players is negligible in comparison to the personnel costs :)
The reduction from 200 developers to 14 (plus 12 for the overseas version) (http://lineage2.power.plaync.com/wiki/%EC%A0%9C%EC%9E%91%EC%A7%84) concerns only Lineage 2. But at the same time NCWest has around 100 developers (plus some administrative staff) in their Iron Tiger Mobile Studio who so far have not yet developed one single mobile game: http://us.ncsoft.com/en/about-us/#ncsoft_west_unveils_iron_tiger_studios
Those 100 people must all be paid out of the 15 million that NCWest makes per month, while they are not contributing anything to that revenue. In addition to that, NCKorea has been hiring 8 pages of mobile game developers. The number of job advertisements has in the meantime shrunk to 5 which means they must already have found quite a few: https://recruit.ncsoft.net/korean/careers/adoptionsection.aspx
When that hiring process is completed (the last application periods end on June 30) there will again be more than 100 developers (8 pages x 15 advertisements per page) who work and draw a salary for a year or two without generating any revenue. You can be sure that NCWest will be required to contribute a bit to that financial load.
For everybody:
It is a widespread misunderstanding that by purchasing NCoins you are supporting Lineage 2. By purchasing NCoins you are supporting the development of new mobile games, like back in 2011 our monthly subscriptions (and those of the Aion players) went into developing WildStar and NCWest (called NC Interactive in those days) was operating at a quarterly loss of 5 million dollars: http://global.ncsoft.com/global/ir/quarterly.aspx
(the report for 1Q 2012)
n00dles, I am assuming that if you owned a licensed L2 server you won't invest into the development of other games, and I am sure you also won't divert funds for financing your private baseball team (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC_Dinos), trying to justify that in front of the shareholders as "advertisement". But even if you just want to fix the existing bugs, you will need a considerable number of developers. Just look at our Wednesday maintenance notices - it takes literally weeks to fix simple typos. Now imagine the effort that goes into reworking daily quests into repeateable quests and adjusting their rewards :)