Launching Details

Have you heard we are going Live on May 16th! It’s not too late to do a little last-minute Beta testing. Our marketing campaigns are drawing attention and we’re excited about the results thus far. New players are starting to fill our ranks and in discord.  If you’re someone who saw us on an ad or vote site,  Hello and welcome! Speaking of voting - if you like what L2Toggle is about, please consider voting for us. You can find links in the footnote of this post or directly on our site (https://lineage2toggle.com/).

Premium Account (PA)

You can purchase a premium account (PA) for a single game account at 10 Coin of Life (CoL) per month per in-game account. However, the best value is to purchase a Premium Master Account (PMA) at 100 CoL per month and up to 20 accounts will be premium and all characters under that Master Account will be premium. Your account status can be found under ALT-B and the Home Tab and Premium accounts in-game can be purchased here. 

As you can see,  a premium account boosts XP, SP, Adena, Item drops, spoil, and quest drop rate by 30%. 

Other Benefits of a Premium account. Buffs from ALT-B last 3 hours instead of 2 and additional buffs are available with this account such as summon, warsmith, and combo resist buffs. 

Vitality

Vitality has been reworked. Vitality will remain a constant boost of 50% no matter the vitality level. In addition to boosting XP by 50%, it will also boost SP, adena, item drops, spoil rate, and quest item drops. No more leveling faster than drops. Click Alt B to see your boosted state. 

Vitality Only bonus

The benefits of both Premium and Vitality stack for an 80% boost combined. 

History

History feature is something extra to remind you of some of the events you and your characters been through. As you can see in the image below we have a few ideas already in mind, but we would really like to hear if you have something in-mind.

Please note, as it is right now, history is private and can only be visible by Master Account. We might have some other options in the future.

Vote

Please consider voting and testing if you get rewards in-game using .voterewards command. Cheers

• Hopzone
• L2Network
• L2TopZone

Buffer Evolution

Lineage2Toggle desires to deliver a retail-like High-Five experience, while at the same time creating something extra special and fun. Our development team continues having numerous discussions about our buffer system. Our guiding principles with buffer development include: make sure every class is still relevant, maintain class balance, make leveling and party design more fun, and create something unique. 

Initial plans: 

One thought was to limit the buffs available through the ALT-B buffer. However, we thought this would greatly limit the types of players who could enjoy Lineage2Toggle. While Lineage2Toggle is a bot friendly server, we recognize not everyone wants to play or has the ability to run a full party of 9 bots.

Another discussion was to create a combo buffer system. Our vision was to limit the number of standard support characters required. For example, a standard melee party usually has a Bishop, Warcryer, Bladedancer, Swordsinger, and sometimes a recharger like an Elven Elder or Shilien Elder. With the standard support set-up, a melee party has 4-5 open slots and if a spoiler is desired then 3-4 flexible slots.  

How would this combo buffer system work? The Prophet, Elven Elder, Shilien Elder, and Warcryer would share all buffs up to and including prophecies such as Chant of Victory, Prophecy of Fire, etc. None of these classes would gain the Overlord’s clan buffs. We figured if you wanted to buff a whole clan you should level an Overlord. The Blade Dancer and Sword Singer would share all songs and dances. 

Buffer Classes would still maintain some distinctions by not sharing skills, such as Stigma of Shilen, Hex, Recharge unless the retail game allowed them to obtain another buffer classes’s skills.  Additional distinctions become more apparent after the 3rd class change as classes would not share buffs that require a forgotten scroll.  The skills include but are not limited to: Counter Critical, Dance of Berserker, Song of Purification, Lord of Vampire, Blessing of Eva, and Great Fury to name a few. Another distinction we contemplated was limiting skill enchantment to only the skills a character came with originally.

We were very excited about these possibilities! Now a melee party could require fewer support characters such as a Bladedancer or Swordsinger, a Warcryer or recharger, and a Bishop. Potentially this party set-up allows for 3 support characters and 6 damage dealer slots to fill how you choose.  

Unintended consequences:

As we continued exploring this idea, we discovered it became more and more complex. How will these changes affect class balance? How will we shut off extra buffs in the Olympiad? How will we handle summoners with their summon party buffs, such as Blessing of Queen, Gift of Seraphim, etc?  Will combo buffers get the Warsmith buffs?  How will we be able to handle and manage the skill tree for the Overlord, Warcryer, Prophet, Elevn Elder, Shilien Elder, Bladedancer, and Swordsinger? 

We quickly realized this workload and concept was more than we could commit to at this time. Every buffing class will need every other buffing class’s buffs added to their skill tree.That alone is a massive amount of work and development. 

Current Plans:

We decided to provide an expanded NPC buffer through the ALT-B Buffer. Starting at level 1 it provides all basic buffs, Prophecies such as Chant of Victory, and Combo Buffs such as Improved Movement which will all last for 2 hours. Buffs from the NPC buffer will be free through level 40. At level 41 they cost 1,000 adena each.

 Premium accounts will enjoy extra buffs such as Warsmith, Cat, Unicorn, Combined Resist Buffs and a 3 hour buff duration.

Buffs from Forgotten Scrolls such as counter critical, dance of berserker, etc. are unavailable from the NPC Buffer. 

Custom buff schemes can be made in ALT-B. You can name your custom buff schemes and choose whether to buff yourself or the whole party with that buff scheme. 

Note about premium accounts here. You can have a premium master account where all 20 accounts will be premium, or choose individual accounts to be premium. If the buff scheme on a premium account has premium buffs and buffs his party mates who do not have a premium account, they will not get the premium buffs nor will they get the 3 hour duration. Only the premium accounts in the party will get the premium buffs and 3 hour duration. All other accounts will have the standard ALT-B buffs and 2 hour duration. 

We hope this helps keep every class relevant, allow flexible party design, maintain more game balance, and help your Lineage2Toggle experience be more fun! 

Do you have thoughts about the buffing system? Join the discussion at our forum. We’d love to hear from you. 

For now, I’ll leave you with this quote from Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, “I'll be back when the week is new. And I'll have more ideas for you. And you'll have things you'll want to talk about. I will, too.”

Alpha Reborn
 

It came to our attention this week that new server source files were available. After @Mantosh and @FrostIce reviewed them we found a drastic improvement in server stability, resource management, and features. We then had a very difficult choice to make:  To use the new server files, or stay with our current tested setup. Because of our commitment to provide you, the players, the best L2 experience possible, we decided to implement the new server files into our build.  While most of our features transferred over effortlessly, there are some challenges ahead. The main one that the previously completed Alpha testing is no longer applicable and will have to be redone. While disappointing on the surface, the alpha testing phase did provide me, along with the rest of the staff, insight into what you guys are looking for.
 

GM Arthose looking forward to the future of L2Toggle

So what is the plan moving forward?  A new Alpha testing phase will begin shortly.  The Alpha test server is actually currently ‘up’, but it needs about a day before testing can truly begin.  Our staff will not forget the hard work the Alpha Wolves have done up to this point and rewards at launch will be given out accordingly.  That being said, with another wave of Alpha testing comes a 2nd chance at being an Alpha Wolf, and the possible for (more) rewards at launch date for those who help out in testing this time around.  Just a reminder that our application for alpha testing begins here.

Because the file structure is so much better now, Alpha testing will be a much shorter phase (hopefully with fewer issues), will thus transfer much smoother into Beta testing, and official launch.  Remember that our staff here at L2Toggle is always available to you if you have questions. Feel free to send us a question/concern you have either here on the forums, or on our discord server.

Excited to see where we are this time next week!

Welcome to the (late) 4th edition of Tuesday Toggle Topic!

The Alpha Stage continues as we’re moving towards feature updates. It has been more than a few weeks since the last update, so this time it’s packed with fixes, updates, and improvements. You can find the complete list of changes here. Content-wise we have updates to mobs AIs on newer zones and Lucky Pigs. Some of the bug fixes were as simple as changing a few fields or lines but a selected handful is a complete pain. We’ve been trying to find the cause for mobs to become 10x harder to kill after killing the same spawn (with bots that’s unavoidable) for three weeks now! We even end up creating custom debugging features just to help us find leads with it.

L2Toggle team brainstorming on how to reproduce a bug.

TTT - Test Test Test?

To achieve a stable and reliable server we need to know what’s wrong and what’s missing. To do that, we need to relentlessly test all the features created throughout the years and that’s no small task. With the help of our dedicated Alpha Wolves, we are moving forward day by day.

Just last Sunday we had our first testing event organized by @Arthose and carried out together with @FrostIce and @ElMuerte. In a few hours span, the team was able to conquer a castle, fight Baium and get destroyed by Antharas! We want to make this a recurring affair so please keep an eye on our discord for more announcements.

Sunday Testing Event - Baium fight. 

With all this work being done and things being polished for a better experience, we still have a high demand for testing capabilities. So if you’ve been hesitant to join Alpha Wolves, don’t be! It’s as easy as filling out an application! In return, you get to shape the project closer to your vision and a handful of shiny things in-game.

Fixing issues and adjusting content is no small task, but that’s only a part of what we do here. After we got familiar with the files and their state, we are now confident that we can take some of the focus away from bug fixes and shift it towards features. We are happy to say that we have multiple features being worked on right now and they will start rolling out quite soon. Speaking of future features.

Party Dialog

As we all know Lineage2 was not created as a group controlling RPG and L2Toggle being a bot allowed server that has to be addressed! We are happy to announce that the first major quality of life (QOL) update will be the Party Dialog feature.

What that is and how it works, you might ask. If you’ve ever played L2 and had to move and control more than a few boxes, you should be familiar with the pain of having to switch between clients to talk to NPCs, teleport, or go through quest dialogs. I hope most of you had some kind of script to help with that! Well, we have good news for you! Party Dialog feature adds additional dialog options to NPCs so that most (TBD) dialog actions (including teleports and quests!) could be performed for the whole party from a single character. Want to teleport a whole party? It’ll be as simple as a single* click. Want to do a quest on all party members? Just have your party with you and choose the Party Dialog option when going through the quest’s steps. The team already has multiple ideas on how to “abuse” this feature to ease-up leveling and gameplay in general. We can’t wait to see the creative ways this will be used in the future.

Please, let us know if you think of any other QOL features you’d like to see implemented.

Here’s to another productive week on L2Toggle!

Alpha Testing continues as we test, fix, and re-test basically the entire game.  It is exhausting work, but vitally important to ensure a stable and fair server for you.  One of the many debates our staff had was deciding on server files.  While using server files from Sunrise would have been the ‘easy’ way to go, we found it prohibited change.  Sure many bugs would have already been fixed, features tested, and provided a quicker launch date, but using pre-compiled files ‘locks’ in certain features. Ultimately we wanted the ability to modify any and all features even if that meant a longer testing/fixing phase.  Thus, we landed on L2jServer.  While L2jServer has its own set of problems, we believe that putting in the hard work now will provide us with a better server with more options in the future.

Now let’s talk about something old, but something new. Vitality!

Vitality

We believe retail vitality had good intentions, but poor execution. A feature aimed to help newbies and casual players ended up being abused by P2W “mechanics”. That is why we want to give vitality a 2nd chance and a facelift. That being said, Vitality on L2Toggle will be rare and modified as described below:

• Vitality will have the same effect on all vitality levels.
• Vitality levels will be equalized so that one level would represent 1/4 of total vitality.
• Vitality will increase XP/SP/Adena/Drop/Spoil by +50%.
• Every day 2 levels of vitality will be refreshed.
• The player will be able to disable vitality usage so that you could plan how to spend it.
• Nevit’s blessing will be controllable too so that you could plan when to use it.
• Vitality replenishing items and actions will be scarce (No Steve Shyagel)
   

NPC Buffer & Support Classes

Throughout the development of the L2j engine more and more custom features were created. Some of them, NPC Buffer for example, became a standard. As mentioned in our promises section, L2Toggle is aiming to create a comfortable environment while staying closer to retail (at least for a while). That being said, we feel that not having an NPC Buffer forces people to run large and complex parties. There’s nothing wrong with that, we even encourage it, but it might feel like a burden for more casual players. On the other hand, we don’t want to make 1/4 of all classes semi-useless. Therefore we have decided to create something unique.

NPC Buffer

• Available buffs and their level will depend on the character level. The idea is for NPC buffer to have most of the buffs available as if it were two levels lower than your character. For example, Prophets get Might lvl 3 at level 40, so a character will have to be level 42 to have it available from NPC Buffer.
• The NPC buffer will not have improved and forgotten buffs.
• Buff duration will be 1 hour. Premium accounts get +50% duration. Elite accounts get additional +50% duration.
• Buffs will be available starting from a level 1 character and the base will be newbie helper buffs.
• Buffs will have a dynamic cost depending on the character level. If a buff skill requires consumables, the NPC buffer will deduct consumables cost in adena instead.
• All quality of life features - schemes, party schemes, buff pet/summon.

Support Classes
To counter the NPC buffer, all support classes will be boosted in one way or another. We have multiple ideas in development and we can not wait to share them with you once we have the details figured out. Our goal is to create a balanced environment for players to create groups the way they want it. Not all setups will work for everything of course, but that’s how MMOs are - to achieve great things the best way is to cooperate.

See you next* Tuesday!

Alpha

Opening L2Toggle was and is no small undertaking. It took us ages to discuss and agree on all the things that come with an L2 Server. Right after that, we focused on testing and fixing bugs, but we’d need testers, and in order to get testers we needed to build the L2Toggle brand and forum. This came with its own challenges. We designed and deployed the whole infrastructure to be as dynamic and portable as possible, so we wouldn’t be locked in with one vendor or end up paying large rental fees.

After months of hard work and a lot of patience, we have a running alpha server. Alpha Wolves are hard at work testing and reporting what they’re most passionate about. GMs helping out where they can and also running their own tests. Taskboard is as busy as ever.

“Alpha has proven to be a great tool to not only fix issues prior to launch but perhaps more so it has generated a lot of discussions between the team and the Alpha Wolves.  For example, one of the topics being discussed currently is buffs.  Buffs play a huge role in any server and L2Toggle is no exception. There are pros and cons to every scenario and while we know not everyone will be happy with the server features 100% of the time, we are committed to thinking through each issue rather than making quick, knee jerk reactions.  We are hoping that the discussions generated in Alpha testing will lead to a better Beta launch where issues are then finely tuned prior to the official launch.” - Head GM @Arthose.

We are immensely proud that we didn’t give in to temptations to take the easy route, instead we stubbornly stayed the course. Alpha Server has shown itself to be more than a bug testing environment, but also an inspiration for ideas for the smooth future of L2Toggle. We want to thank Alpha Wolves and all our followers for their time and support. We have a great journey in front of us.

Toggle Team