We haven't heard a lot of news from Lineage II since their recent Freya expansion, but apparently the game has hit a rocky patch. Associate producer "Moxie" informed the players on Wednesday that the NA and EU servers would be merging to just one per region.
This merge is being done "in order to promote a healthy and competitive environment, as well as to offer a better overall experience." Currently, Lineage II has five North American and three European servers, which will be boiled down to only two by the end of this month. The team is accepting nominations for the new server names until September 14th and will hold a vote thereafter to determine the winners.
As merges always create an organizational headache, NCsoft is still figuring out the details of exactly how and when this will happen. However, Moxie said that the team will be deleting any character under level 20 that has not logged into the game in more than one year, and if a player has more than seven characters across all of the servers, he or she will only be allowed to keep the seven highest in terms of experience.
[Thanks Riz!]
Reader Comments (8)
Posted: Sep 10th 2010 8:11PM Higurashi said
I have no idea if this is going to be a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm interested to see how it all plays out. I'm kind of looking forward to it, I've never been actively playing a game during a server merge before.
My only issue is that I already have 7 characters, so I won't be able to make any more now unless I pay for a second account. I'm crossing my fingers, hoping that everything goes well.
My only issue is that I already have 7 characters, so I won't be able to make any more now unless I pay for a second account. I'm crossing my fingers, hoping that everything goes well.
Posted: Sep 10th 2010 8:16PM Nadril said
They're really hurting on subs that much?
Pretty interesting news though I think. Hopefully it helps since a dead L2 server is no fun at all.
Pretty interesting news though I think. Hopefully it helps since a dead L2 server is no fun at all.
Posted: Sep 10th 2010 9:27PM (Unverified) said
This is pretty good news, having one server per region would defiantly boost the ability to do a lot of large PvP and such. I might retry the live server once the merge happens to just see the "newish" server popularity.
Posted: Sep 10th 2010 8:37PM (Unverified) said
Isn't lineage 2 a huge chunk of NCsoft's revenue?
Posted: Sep 10th 2010 8:45PM (Unverified) said
Not in North America or Europe. L2 is (was?) a big part of their revenue stream in Korea, but it never did exceptionally well in the western world.
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Posted: Sep 10th 2010 11:17PM ChromeBallz said
Lineage 2 in the West has had, at it's peak, about 70k subscribers. The servers have always felt a bit empty. I can only imagine that they're down to less than 20k given the merge.
However, this won't save Lineage 2 in the West, it will kill it. When the servers have been merged they will be flooded with bots, and given NCSoft's general policy of ignoring actual bots and banning legit players in L2, you can see this as a sign to just give up on the game alltogether.
Too bad. The game mechanics are sound and it has a rather deep economic system. If NCSoft would have put a little more effort into the translation L2 could easily have ~300k subscribers in Europe and the US.
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However, this won't save Lineage 2 in the West, it will kill it. When the servers have been merged they will be flooded with bots, and given NCSoft's general policy of ignoring actual bots and banning legit players in L2, you can see this as a sign to just give up on the game alltogether.
Too bad. The game mechanics are sound and it has a rather deep economic system. If NCSoft would have put a little more effort into the translation L2 could easily have ~300k subscribers in Europe and the US.
Posted: Sep 11th 2010 3:52AM Kalec said
I think I just got a virus ? maybe just me
Posted: Sep 11th 2010 9:45AM (Unverified) said
LOL Why would you click that link? Need some detox?







