Lineage 2: Dhevrin Posts New Community Update

Tuesday April 27

IP Bans

The IP Ban issue has been put on hold for now. From our internal information, it has been discovered that the amount of players actually connecting from Asia is quite small. I understand the perception of Asian players disturbing the NA service, but banning Asian IP addresses wouldn't solve the problem. In fact, it would be more effective to ban IPs from places like Canada and populous areas of the US :/ Thus, we are looking for more effective methods of resolving the issue.

World Servers

The commercial service will start with the 8 servers we had at the end of the open beta period. Added to the server screen will be a "Quality" button. Pressing this button will sort the servers based on a combination of ping and server density.

Monday April 26

How to transfer your Open Beta characters to Retail characters :)

1. Go to PlayNC.com and log in using your PlayNC account info
2. In the Game Management section, click the ACTIVATE button next to Lineage II.
3. You will need to enter a VALID *Retail* code. (No use trying to reenter your OB serial code)
4. Select a payment plan.
5. Follow instructions for payment.
6. Your account will be activated in a few minutes.

Open Beta sign up closed

In case you were bored and were wondering, the open beta sign up sheet has been closed, sorry :)

Missing Patch Notes

Unfortunately, there were some late additions to the Launch client patch, so no complete patch notes today, I was waiting hoping we can get it in before the end of the day, but it looks like it'll have to wait till tomorrow.

In addition, after the Open Beta service is closed, the new patch will be available on the updater on the 27th. Be sure to run your LineageII.exe executable to download the new patch and avoid the rush :)

Forum changes

With the start of commercial service, only active subscribers will be able to write to the forums. Read access will still be open to everyone.

Website service

There is a possibility that the website login function might be brought down for a short while during the black out period tomorrow. If there is, we'll be sure to notify the community.

Open Beta events

Welp, we have finished up most of the contests. The last screenshot event was fantastic, and the imaginative poses that people came up with made it a difficult decision, grats to Tygerlily :)
The drawings for top clan and level 20 occupation change will take place tomorrow in the office. Unfortunately it won't be as interesting as it sounds, since the winner will be chosen by Excel ^^;;

That's it. Hopefully we'll have some more substantial information tomorrow :)

Thursday April 22

Chronicle 1 delay

Officials much more important that I have been stating that Chronicle 1 will be delayed.

The newsletter was suppose to go out as a reminder, but apparently it came as a shock, because we did not thoroughly communicate this information. For that I apologize.

Wednesday April 21

We're seeing a lot more 3rd party software that are hiding keyloggers in the programs, so that it'll send your text log off to some email address. Again, we strongly recommend you do NOT use 3rd party software.

Only a few more days till retail launch. We're all busy, working mad hours on all sorts of details you'd think were trivial. Please bear with us and we hope to have some good news for you soon :)

Also, some future plans for the website.

The top 10 characters per server listing was very popular. So we hope to expand upon that idea sometime in the future, by listing the highest level characters, the highest PK count characters and highest (lowest?) karma point characters. We might also do something similar for clans.

These changes will not be implemented till sometime after the launch :)

One more!

Currently, the tentative start time for Retail will be 12AM EDT April 28th, which translates to 9PM PDT April 27th and 5AM GMT April 28th. Confused yet?

Where on earth did Tuesday go...

Monday April 20

Events

Top Clans of the Land and Movin' on Up selection is now OVER.

We have stopped tracking players and clans that have reached the goal to be entered into the drawing for the prizes.

For Top Clans of the Land, the prizes are: 1. $200 general gift certificate for all clan members, 2. $100 general gift certificate for all clan members. 3. $50 general gift certificate for all clan members.

For Movin' on Up: 1. Alienware system, 2. LCD monitor, 3. Nvidia video card.

More details will be posted later on.

Friday April 16, 2004

Direct Web Sales

Starting at retail launch, players will be able to purchase the Lineage II retail registration key directly from our website for a fee of $49.99 US. Credit card only. This effort is largely for our international players, and we DO NOT advise players with access to retail outlets selling Lineage II to buy direct. There is no game manual, and other items that you can find in the retail box. However, because we understand that sometimes shipping to Europe or Australia takes an awful long time and that is a pain in the butt, we are offering this service. The service will go live at around Launch and is NOT presently available so don't contact us asking how you can do this.

Character Transfers

It is STRONGLY possible this service will be offered either at the close of Open Beta or shortly after retail. Details are not finalized, so don't contact our support team asking how you can transfer characters. If it is implemented, most likely it will be for a small price, however we might offer 1 free transfer to Open Beta participants for putting up with us through the betat period. But also consider this is not a worry-free solution. If your character's name is already taken on another server, we will not be able to transfer your character to that server.

Tuesday April 13, 2004

Contest announcement

Hey, I know I said we are going to announce the 2nd week screenshot winner and the first video trailer winner today. Because of the problem we had last week with mixing up account names and character names (GIVE US YOUR ACCOUNT NAME), we're taking extra steps to make sure we have the correct people, which is taking a bit longer than anticipated. Hopefully by the end of today, or tomorrow at the latest, we can announce the winner and also show everyone the winning trailer and screenshot, and you can tell us how sucky we are at picking these things, whiners :p

Monday April 12, 2004

Pricing

The monthly subscription is $14.99, but as with all other MMOs (I think) the charge is less if you buy in bulk.

Duping again

1. There was a verifiable quest exploit with 2 certain NPCs (ahem). These NPCs have been disabled until we can get a fix in for the quest exploit, which should come in the next version of Prelude. I'm not sure if that version has a client side update, so it might be a server-side only update. IE no download.

2. We've been through a lot of claims of duping and almost all of them, we could not reproduce and the claim was fradulent, as in that player actually earned that item and claimed to have duped it

3. We are looking into other claims of duping and trying to reproduce them and track them down and fix if necessary.

It seems that the rumors are getting wildly out of hand on this, so let me again express that we are working to resolve these problems ASAP. We did have a verifiable quest exploit, and are looking into other claims. We are dubious of some claims since we found many that are false, but we are continuing to look into the matter.

If you want to let us know of possible exploits, please go through our support site. Any future duping information publicly posted on the forums will be deleted and the poster will be banned.

Tomorrow, we'll announce the second Virtual photographer and first Lineage II Director results.

Servers:
All servers are still located on the West Coast. I'll inform you when we get East Coast servers up and our plans for a European server and the like. But no ETA on this information.

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Networking

The networking issue we were facing yesterday was a problem with a bad router. It should be fixed within the hour.

Servers

Currently, all our live servers are located on the US West coast, we will be bringing up servers on the East coast soon, to accomodate our East coast and European players.

Thursday April 8th, 2004

Duping

The office is quite busy with support and QA staff working on the duping issue.

We are getting a lot of useful information from players, but it's all behind the scenes.

But lets get some things clear.

Duping is not a clear cut across the board issue. Sometimes it's a lot of smoke and mirrors, possibly players bragging about something that clearly isn't true, photoshopped screenshots, or just wild rumors. We can track where EVERY item came from. For example some players claimed they "duped" something and by looking through the database, we found that the duped item came from a MOM (hehe) drop.

We are tracking down the issues and working to resolve them as fast as possible.

Tuesday April 6th, 2004

Quick note about the contests. Or rather THE contest :)

I know that there are a lot of griping about the Strongest Man competition, that it is unfair because of server instability and the addition of new servers and over crowding.

And they are certainly valid issues. However, we knew going in there would be pitfalls, and if we had to make absolutely sure about every aspect of this, then the conclusion would have been to not have a contest at all, and that would have been unfortunate.

HOWEVER. Now the good part. For the Movin' on Up drawing, we were planning to give out an LCD monitor, a high end video card, and several smaller prizes. Instead, we've decided to change the prizes to an LCD monitor, high end video card and ANOTHER Alienware system. That's right, you heard it here first. One more Alienware system to the fray, and this one will be won based on a random drawing.

We'll need to make changes to the website to accomodate this announcement, but I thought I'd let you guys know first.

Monday April 5th, 2004

Good day to everyone!

Serial keys: The release of serial keys has been slowed down somewhat from our end , for those of you wondering. It shouldn't take a week though.

Feature discussions: We have set up a separate Wishlist forum for feature requests or discussions, please use it. Also, a lot of what's being talked about is actually already included in the next version of Lineage II, called Chronicle 1 (or possibly Chronicle 2). While we do not post Chronicle 1 information on our website because it's not released yet in North America, I would personally recommend visiting Lineage Center at: http://www.lineagecenter.com/forums/showthread.php?t=341

Lineage Center is generally very on top of news out of Korea. Great job guys ;)

Dhevrin's posts: You can always see what I'm saying on the boards by going to my profile at:
http://boards.lineage2.com/showProfile.asp?memid=39
I understand a lot of players feeling there's no NC reps on the boards. That's not true! It's just that there's a lot more players so it's easy to miss what's been said.

Saturday April 3rd, 2004

1. Character Transfer
Character transfers will not be offered during the period of the Open Beta. The GMs focus is on debugging and strengthening and improving the customer support department, and the manpower needed to provide character transfers is just not available at this time. It is something we will seriously consider after retail launch.

2. Number of servers
Yes, it seems even 5 servers is not quite enough. Fear not, after the opening of Lionna and Erica on Saturday, next week we will be bringing up several more in rapid succession. While I do not have the exact schedule, I do have the proposed names of the next 3 servers:
Gustin, Devianne, and Hindemith.

Names are subject to change, and this is no indication there will only be 3 more servers, just that if there are 3 more servers, in all likelihood these will be the names of the possible 3 servers.

3. Contest update
Next Tuesday we will announce the first winner of the Virtual Photographer contest, who will be getting a very nice digital camera. Remember, the theme of this week is "Group shots". No matter how good a screenshot you took, if it doesn't fit the theme, it will not be qualifed to win. But fear not, there are 3 more weeks and 3 more themes to shoot for.