Which is fine until you have a neutral (white and supposedly innocent) player KSing or (worse) training you repeatedly. Because if you attack him to teach him a lesson, chances are he won't fight back and let you kill him, which means you turn red. Guess what then happens? His (also white/neutral) friends, who were hidden round some bushes, come and kill you for your gear without any repercussions to them. I should add here that red players have a high chance of dropping up to 5 items including the stuff you wear/wield. And, should you try to defend yourself against the (white/neutral) gang, your reputation will get even worse.

I will let you draw your own conclusions from this system.

Edited, Thu Apr 22 11:47:26 2004

I just tried Lineage II beta...and I must say after spending all that time downloading the game, jumping through hoops to get my serial and PlayNC password, and spending over 2 hours downloading all the various patches, I was thoroughly disappointed. Granted, the graphics are great, the world is luch and vast, and the animations/audio audio aspect makes Everquest look rather weak by comparison (in regards to personal character animations). However, I think too much time was invested in the visual experience and not enough time in the actual play experience. Leveling is tedious and boring, with players having to run back to their home city every few levels to 'buy' new abilities. These new abilities are almost completely useless, as if you don't have the right equipment you still won't be able to properly advance.

You can tell a lot of people are trying Lineage after playing EverQuest, because already there are 'traders' in the various home cities, and shouts of 'WTB bow, 19k' are prevalent.

The interface is sluggish and doesn't account for the user base's familliarity with MMORPGs. EQ players beware, hotkey support is limited to say the least. Moving your character with the keyboard is sluggish and unresponsive, and the keyboard itself is unmappable, meaning players are limited to using single clicks to navigate their way through the entire game. This is fine at the early stages, but during castle seiges this can become a problem.

The apparent lack of real character balancing may be a turnoff for some players. Playing a mage at the early levels is nearly impossible. Also, there is a siginficant disparation in the number of available races in Lineage II and the number of races in other contemporary MMORPGs.

Lastly, the porting of Lineage II from an Asian market to an English speaking one is gratingly apparent. NPC text is hard to read, and many contain typos. Text wrapping is non-existant. Resizable windows are scace. Differentiating NPCs from PCs is difficult in certain cases, and also the 'con' system (determining what level a monster is by simply looking at it) is cumbersome and provides little to no real information about your chance of killing your target.

Having said all that I think that Lineage II is a very promising MMORPG. Lag is minimal even when my server of choice was at near max capacity. The graphics, again, are simply amazing and the animations have to be seen to be believed. All in all I would recommend playing Lineage II for 4-6 months and giving them a chance to work out the minor bugs that make the game harder to enjoy.

It will be interesting to see how many players stick around after the game goes live and starts charging later this month.

Edited, Sat Apr 3 20:37:44 2004

I would imagine there would be non-pvp servers, since lineage 1 has one. Also, in Lineage 1 there is a lvl limit to what PC's you can kill. I believe it was 10 lvls.