Cliffhanger?

Back at college I immediately got pointed on the fact that I forgot to add one of the most important L2 community groups: Brazilians. I will add this as soon as I can.

My excuses for forgetting about them.

Credits

I wrote this story because of several things. At first, I though it would be nice to show the outside world how the community of Lineage 2 works. Then, I noticed that one of my favorite players, Bryan, has his own blog he uses to express himself. I decided that it would be a perfect way to publish my experiences. And as last, some people persuaded me to write down my experiences.

Therefore, here I will mention those that played an important part.

 

– Directly involved –

Bryan – for being the one to put me to this.

DarkWarrior – for involving me in all these private servers and for being an awesome friend.

Bartje – for all the precious help given with the private servers.

Senate – for being the only Greek with the capabilities necessary to be a GM.

Sweetz – for being a great server admin, and my biggest discovery yet.

Andreas – for being such a great supporter of my stories, and for being with me in the early days of Lineage 2.

Baman – for being such a great supporter of my stories.

Kaiserpingvin – for showing me that knowledge is awesome.

 

– Indirectly involved –

Lithuanian players – for being a great subject to write about.

Russian players – for being a great subject to write about.

Polish players – for being a great subject to write about, and for being the least troublesome players.

Greek players – for being a great subject to write about.

IwAnNaPvP – for being one of those more intelligent Greek players that pulled me through these experiences.

Gosu – for sharing his experiences.

 

– Special mentions –

Anthoinette – for being my awesome sexy girlfriend, and for typing chapter 2 while I was telling my tales.

Lineage 2 – for being a great game back in the days.

 

 

 

 

R.I.P

Lineage 2

2004 – 2006

Epilogue

This concludes my list of Lineage 2’s most annoying people. I know that I have offended much people with this blog, and all I can say about it is: Grow up for god sake, you should learn from this instead of blindly raging on your keyboard till you have enough insults to submit in a comment on my blog. The negative comments I have received so far were perfect examples of how you should not behave.

Putting that aside, the analysis I have performed were taken in general. Every group of people, especially the larger ones, are bound to have exceptions. I have before stated this, alongside with the fact that it’s nearly impossible to determine one’s nationality, without asking for it, when they have a higher intellect. My experience does not lie,  these results have derived from the bigger servers. All the players I mentioned are still playing the game, and it’s likely that you can identify these behaviors in your game experience as well, you’ll never know, they are everywhere on the internet.

As for me, I still have a fantasy book to finish and publish online, I’m in standby mode for an L2 server (god knows what will happen), and I’m doing my best to get into game development myself when I’m done with my assessments. If you find it necessary to add me on MSN, you could best try sending me a PM on http://forum.fusionl2.com.

Chapter 4

We’re reaching the ending stages of my analysis. I know it’s a bummer for you, my dear readers, but don’t worry, there is still much to be done for me.

Now then, time for the last group of people I have laid my eyes on the past years. Greek players are most similar to Lithuanian ones. They show the most typical alpha male behavior ever, and they are the toughest players to satisfy. Some even consider it an impossible task, and therefore don’t even try it. I can’t blame them, I have tried so myself and gave up on it as well. The opinions of Greek players individually conflict a lot with each other. Which is awkward, since regular people would not find something negative if they find it positive, but it seems this is possible with Greeks. For example, when I was busy configuring the latest server I have been on, I started researching opinions. It seemed that all Greek players necessarily did not want custom armors, but they did require the epic armor set. Implementing the epic armor set would require ignoring their first wish, and not implementing epic armor sets would require ignoring their second wish. Eventually, due to serious problems with in game balance, we have decided not to implement them, causing a large rage on the forums which I have deleted as soon as I was aware of it. Knowing Greek players are impossible to satisfy, the inevitable question appeared: “What the hell should we do with this?”. After a debate, we quickly realized that the only answer to this question was also the most obvious one as well: “Nothing”. The best thing to do is to simply ignore all the moaning you get on the forums, MSN, emails and TeamSpeak.

Greeks are also known for their most annoying alpha male behavior, just like the Lithuanians, only in this case, everyone is the alpha male. For Greeks, it’s highly required for them to have a large advantage such as overpowered armor sets (note: epic armor set), or a considerable larger force than the enemy players. It is considered both ‘pro’ and ‘pwnage’ if you state the obvious by killing a single player with a party consisting of at least 5 players (a full 9 player party makes it it look better though). And, of course, when you have been killed by such an overwhelming party, the reactions you may expect range from

“axoaxooaxoaxoxoaoaxoaxaaxaxoa”

to the most annoying

“lolololol, you is noob”.

But it doesn’t stop there, one of my staffmembers even heard:

“hhauahuauhau, you are is a slow!”

This also concludes the Greek morals.

The dedication of Greeks is mediocre, but most annoying. Greeks often seek help with administrators and game masters regardless of what their problem is. Whenever something goes wrong that has barely or no consequences, they often ask an administrator or a game master to fix it and they often even try to gain an item from it as well. They are all about gear and weapons since they lack the skills to gain the advantage from a class by playing it well. In fact, they let the endless hunt for gear take part of their real life. Lots of Greeks can be found back in large groups at internet cafes. They let the game integrate this much in their life that they even express their in game feelings at real people. For example, I once received an email from two Greek parents. Their son had run away from home and I was asked if I knew of his whereabouts or his motives. I had to send them an email back explaining that their son lost gear to a friend and that they both got into a fight, etc etc, the usual drama. They weren’t glad about it, of course, but luckily they were understanding enough not to blame it on me.

Greeks also lack the intelligence to make sense (not surprising after my previous paragraph). Sure, this is an easy target to throw words at, but I wouldn’t have done so if it weren’t this extreme. For example, one of my favorite players got caught in a discussion with a Greek player once. The Greek was incapable of identifying his own immaturities and started throwing out everything he got, immediately exposing his emotional instability. The regular player stated that he was acting like, I quote,

“a raging monkey flinging his own feces throughout the room”.

This brilliant comparison was not taken positively by the Greek player, nor did he learn from it, as he immediately replied with:

“[nickname], I hope ur family die from counser”.

Not only doesn’t this come close to something as argument, it also indicates what kind of person he was dealing with. It was then pretty obvious that this Greek player had not learned from the situation and kept on insulting everybody with the most immature things for the most immature reason, which was none.

So we now know that they are impossible to satisfy, that they are emotionally instable, and that they have impulsive urges to show this to everyone. That already is enough reason not to like these players, however, there is more. Somewhere in the middle of this story I dropped the alpha male part to explain their emotional disorders in detail, now I will explain their aggressive behaviors as alpha male.

Greeks are not capable of ventilating their dislikes in normal ways, it always has to include violence. If that wasn’t enough, they also ventilate their boredom and enthusiasm through the same way. A Greek player once explained me how

” [nickname] wakes up next to his dad and think ‘hum, let’s buy Counter Strike so I can own people!’. “.

The quote up here shows how much he was capable of determining what kind of player he encountered. Sure, it was a suggestive way to call it, but when you closely look at his text, you read that he understood how this alpha male behavior is running through the Greece gaming community.

This concludes the last chapter. It’s pretty obvious that soon there will be a comment made by someone that finds it necesary to prove how right my analysis was.

~ End of Chapter 4

Chapter 3

Before I’m going to continue my story, I’d first like to take a look back in the past. I’ve talked about the fact how low the level of intelligence is with this certain group of people. Well are we lucky! This group  of people have found my blog, only to provide me and you, my dear reader, the undeniable evidence of how idiotic they really are. My bet is that they will not be capable of proving the opposite of my analysis unless they finally grow up or start using their brains more than what it takes to repeatedly spam F1 and F2.

That’s that. Now let me pick up where I left. After the depressing story of the Russians, I will now process the analysis of an entirely different group: the Polish. Polish players are, in my point of view, pretty neutral in the regular environments. That does not make them less tough to handle though, because as I’ve stated before, Polish players don’t appreciate a lot of things different from the original Lineage 2. Now now, I know what you’re thinking, but this discovery does not merely limit itself to custom weapons and armors. No, they are even capable of considering support as abuse unless it is absolutely necessary. For example, whenever a player is not capable of logging in regardless of the server status, they might consider contacting a game master or administrator. But whenever a player is not capable of finishing a quest due to a bug, they just abort the quest and restart it entirely rather than asking a game master to help them put things straight. Should you, as administrator or game master, be happy about a Polish player base or not? That’s a tough question. Exactly like the Lithuanians, they also know their downsides that lead back to their primate ancestors, but they show these sides much less, unless the situation provokes it. This doesn’t sound too bad, but in fact is something that will kill your player base if you pay too much attention to it. Where Polish players do not have a problem farming for 24 hours straight, other more sane players will die of boredom and look up an other server with higher rates. You may notice that it’s kind of impossible to keep both the Polish and regular players happy. On the other hand, it was impossible to keep any of the mentioned group happy alongside with the regular players in the first place.

Polish players act differently from Lithuanians and Russians when they are aggressive. They seem to find words less important than deeds, which does not necessarily mean they won’t call you “kurwa” or something along those lines. Polish players are the most dedicated to the game, and luckily it’s not very likely to see them use exploits or other unfair advantages. Less fortunate is how easy they are to anger while you’re in fact trying to do something nice for them. Polish players are best left on other servers along with a lot of other Polish players where a Polish administrator does nothing to improve the game.

It’s unexpected, but I don’t have much left to say about them, really. Don’t worry though, next chapter will be about the Greek players, and it’s pretty obvious that I won’t be able to compress such a story under a 1000 words.

~ End of Chapter 3

EDIT: Exhibit B – Read the comment box down below.

Chapter 2

Now having explained the characteristics of Lithuanian players, you know now the basic behavior pattern of any Lineage 2 player different from a regular one. The behavior patterns of all these different nationalities inherit a lot of properties from the Lithuanians. At least in my case it’s the other nationalities that have inherited parts of this behavior pattern. Others may have experienced in a different order.

Players often think that the fault lies with the administrator, not performing their job correctly. This is entirely correct, however, it is a given that we not do our job correctly since it’s impossible to satisfy all these different players from all these different countries. For example, it is entirely impossible to satisfy a Greek player whereas Polish players absolutely do not appreciate any changes made or any support that is not extremely urgent.  Having that said, it may be save to say that it’s dangerous to house different players of different nationalities in a single server, however, some exceptions are present with players that have a higher intelligence. Notable is that on first sight it is nearly impossible to determine which country these players are from. So all together, it’s a level of intellect that make these players awful to play with, and it seems their nationality determines the amount of annoyance they cause.

After my encounters with Lithuanian players, which caused the server to close, Dark Warrior and I decided to open a new server. This community was a magnet for a whole collection of different nationalities, which was, at first, the Russians. The Russians did not differ from the Lithuanians much, they inherited all of the properties of their behavior and added something on top of that. It seems that the moral of the Russians was completely in the wrong place. Players, game masters, administrators and everyone else directly or indirectly connected to the server could always count on Russian insults here or there. Analyzing this behavior pattern became boring very quickly, since they apparently did not know any other words than ” Lox”, which apparently is Russian for gay. This lack of creativity only persisted in their dictionary as they were creative enough, or should I say persistent enough, to completely annihilate any rivalry they had including hacking. Luckily the majority of the Russians were too numb to even know what the word means.

But before I’m jumping to conclusions, let’s first analyze the additional behavior they show. Russians seem, next to Polish players, one of the most dedicated players there are. It is very common to see a player being logged in and playing actively for 24 hours or sometimes a little more. This unhealthy habit may be the cause of their aggressiveness as they spend way to much time on their character and preventing other players from developing as far as they do. An example of their aggressiveness is as following (Note: even though this did not happen on my own server, it was a highlight on the news). Two Russians clans were rivals of each other and over time they have developed extreme hatred for each other. One day the two enemy clans decided to look each other up in real life. The results: several heavily injured and one death. The most unlucky person of this incident happened to be one of the clan leaders. Because of this (Note: the alpha male behavior) the “winning” clan felt the urge to call, email and mail the mother and daughter of the clan leader stating  how much they’ve owned their sibling and that they would soon come back to come get his little sister as well. I’m lucky to state that this did not happen on our server. For us, the worst case scenario was where rivaling clans collected money which they eventually used to hire a hacker which would cause severe damage on both the rival clan and our server. This did not develop into serious trouble since my intelligence network informed me early enough about these developments.

Even though this is a mediocre explanation, it is pretty much obvious that Russians players are the most aggressive ones. This is nothing for them to be proud of, however, since their lack of intelligence makes them equally dangerous as well as harmless as the Lithuanians. Where they lack the numbers compared to the Lithuanians they are strong in their superior willpower.

Russians in today’s global Lineage 2 community don’t form extremely big threats anymore as they have all moved to their own servers, which are completely in Russian making us incapable to join them. Which doesn’t matter one bit, because I don’t see why I or any other more developed person would want to.

 

~ End of Chapter 2.

EDIT: Exhibit A – read the comment box down below.

Chapter 1

So what was the cause of these Lithuanian players to mess up the awesome and enormous community we had? Most of the server administrators on other servers blame the players too quickly, causing the players to feel discriminated and blame the staff of the server to be corrupt. That process is as old as the world itself, so my professional view on this case doesn’t allow me to draw such drastic conclusions. I have taken every aspect and behavior pattern into consideration, only to come to an even more offensive, or rather degrading, conclusion that would certainly get me on the bottom of the list in the player’s top 100 of favorite server administrators. I have established a conversation in the most neutral and passive way I could with a handful of these Lithuanian players. (I must not forget to mention the help I have gotten from certain Lithuanian players that translated for me whenever necessary, seriously, thank you guys) After communicating with these players, I immediately noticed the things that made us different from them, causing annoyance to occur and dirty rivalry to grow. The behavior pattern of these players were very primitive, as if they were somewhere around the age of 13, while physically having ages ranging from 16 to 30. “Why would 30 year old people act like that?” you would ask. Unfortunately, I am unable to answer this question yet.

What I can tell you, however, the effects of this primitive animal-like behavior. Because the combination of stupidity in an animal-like community and more intelligent players that want to play this game have shown destructive side effects on the player base. The regular players aren’t only annoyed by the idiotic behavior of these people, they also feel like they don’t belong there because of the overwhelming numbers these Lithuanian players came with. The primitive behavior that we currently see with monkeys seemed to have taken over the digital world they played in. I assume that you, dear reader, would like a closer look into the behavior of the Lithuanians in their digital life.

That’s exactly what I intend to process now in this paragraph. The Lithuanians behave, like I said before, very primitively. The best way to explain this in a bright way is to compare them with their mirror image: Monkeys. These players seem to have the urge to prove themselves in front of the rest of their group, just like the alpha male does with monkeys. These impressions are received with great enthusiasm by the group, and the alpha male of the group is once again victorious for the day. The victims of these acts react different to the situation, depending on the type of player. Where the regular player is annoyed and quits the server, the Lithuanian players (or those with comparable intellect) call their own alpha male and rivalry has begun. If the victim itself however, is an alpha male himself, a short but repetitive process starts. It first starts off with a continuous stream of insults directed at each other, it does not take long before this process spreads out on the forums. After this has occurred, both parties seem to be incapable of identifying their own lack of maturity and both moral and reason are thrown overboard. The only thing that can put a halt to this is when both parties are removed from the server, however, this is only a local solution since both parties will duke it out for many months to come on any other server they find. There is another aspect of their appearance that indicates their low level of intellect though.

The quality of the input they offer to the defeat of their rival is this low, that it nearly seems unreal how childish Lithuanian players really are. The only thing they seem capable of is destroying other players exclusively when they have a great advantage over their opponent. If the situation does not meet this requirement, the player(s) in question  will either run away while throwing around insults, or simply log off followed by an intense forum session where the entire world apparently has to know how much their rival sucks.

The current Lineage 2 player base knows more nationalities however, and these will be explained further. The Lithuanians are probably the most simple ones. Other nationalities have progressed more, yet, still fail to get their hands on some maturity. The advancements they made have negative influence in both short and long periods of time, and also have their effects on other people both directly and indirectly related to them (which is a big disappointment to administrators and game masters of course).

 

~ End of Chapter 1

Prologue

I started Lineage 2 on a private server back in the days of Chronicle 1 on a private low-rate server called ‘Escapeserver’. This was about 4 or 5 years ago. In there, the development of the game went alongside with the progress of the players. Players that were way ahead of others often had a tough time gaining new equipment, not only because the information behind it was simply unknown, but also because certain armors weren’t working yet. The staff of Escapeserver had a hard time fixing the bugs since they were pretty much the only decent private server around with a staff that was capable of modifying server files. There still was respect for administrators and game masters, and the mentality was so pure that you can’t imagine if you haven’t experienced it. It was more than regular for everyone to speak regular English, and players had the ability to understand inconvenience caused by others, because at that time, players didn’t had the urge to cause severe harm to each other merely for the fact that they were other players. Player versus player battles were fair, and neither winner or loser ever felt they had to insult their opponent. Those, together with the fact that the player base counted about 2000, were my experiences.

This was my first impression of the game, it was so good that it kept me hooked for 4 to 5 years, hoping that I’d maybe ever hit a server like that again. Anyhow, I played together with a friend of mine, which I will call by his nickname: DarkWarrior. We both were Human Warriors, and we both wanted to become the server’s best Gladiator, or at least somewhere near it. He was first to reach the second class change, and I never made it to become Gladiator. While that’s a bummer, I never felt guilty or ‘newbish’, I didn’t have to, tons of other players had the same problem, everybody was new to the game anyways.

Over time, it became too linear to kill thousands of NPC’s to gain certain titles, equipment or other things that were obtainable. Exactly on the right moment, DarkWarrior pointed me on another server where he became a game master. It was a medium rate server called ‘K3rb3r0s’, they ran Chronicle 1 as well, and for us it seemed a very fluent gameplay. What seemed a less exciting thing is that the administrator had no idea who he had for staff, so there were game masters around that misused their privileges a lot, being disadvantageous to other players. Meanwhile, beyond my awareness, DarkWarrior started communicating with a certain player that nicknamed himself Versuvio. It wasn’t for long or Versuvio gave it a go and started trying to run his own private server. Not long after, VersuvioL2 became a fact, and it was known as world’s first Chronicle 1 PVP server with 10.000x rates. I applied to become a game master, and thanks to a good word from DarkWarrior I was put on a try-out position. Time flew by and we discovered that the Versuvio staff had good communication with each other, and a certain bond grew among the guys. Versuvio had to reformat the server, causing all player data to be gone. After this wipe, I was given the most privileged builder level, and the days as unknowing player were over for me.

Somewhere along the way of becoming bigger and bigger, nationalities started to grow as well, yet, while we first didn’t notice it, it now became very obvious as the in-game chat box started to become flooded with messages that I couldn’t read. Later we found out that it’s Lithuanian, and not late after, a complete wave of Lithuanian registrants came to the server. Our popular regular players quit playing on our server, and as they disappeared, so did the moral of the other players, causing an infinite loop of decreasing quality in the player base. As if that wasn’t the worst part, the mentality of these players was horrible. Random mass murdering, global insults and a low intelect killed what was left of the quality player base. Lithuanian players became known as the most ignorant fuck-ups in Lineage 2, but they were merely the first ones to start the process of Lineage 2 going downhill. The mindless spam we know today such as:

xaxaxaxaxxaxxaa

and the all known:

Iam stay not party but lamer come and debuff versuvio buffer buff

all originated from these periods. After a certain time, it was Versuvio’s wise call to pull the plug and store this project in the fridge for a while.

This was my history, this was the base of my Lineage 2 knowledge before I started doing serious administration tasks. It consisted of a lot of in-game knowledge, improved communicative skills, and hatred towards Lithuanian players.

Intro

Let me start off with a short introduction. I’m a dutch student on a college that is directed at computers, my level of education contains elements derived from university. My hobbies are done on the computer and at the firing range. On the internet people call me Chavez, and as Chavez, I had responsibilities on a certain hobby, which was Lineage 2.

In my days as both Game Master and Server Administrator I have seen approximately a total of a million people come by, this on about 8 to 10 servers. During those days, which range from Chronicle 1 to Interlude, I have experienced a lot of notable events which I will write down here, therefore you may consider this entire blog as a true story.

My story of 4 years of Lineage 2 will be public for everyone reading this blog. I’ll be fair and square, those that feel offended may press ALT+F4 (which is a secret cheat code for runescape to get money!).

Blog

Most of the current readers might not be capable of understanding the reason behind this blog, and frankly, I don’t even care. This is different from my mentality about a year ago, and this blog serves as an explanation for this change of behavior. However, don’t expect any attention whoring, blind flames or personal hatred on this blog. The stories written on this website are far from that. I will prohibit myself from making such pointless remarks and focus merely on the point of view of admins. This because of the mere fun of it.

That also means that I will not bind any value to negative comments made on this blog. I will simply ignore them as it merely indicates you fail to see what this blog serves for. Having that said, I have now created a solid base on which I can start writing stories and at the same time increase my writing skills. Make sure you have read and understood this. You did? Perfect, let’s get going.