From the Lost Company emulator team, thank you for doing what we couldn't (in any timely fashion): bringing back the game we spent years trying to rebuild. We know you couldn't put all the effort into it that you wanted to, AC1 is what we subbed to and its development had to come first. But you took on the extra work, even if it was just an attempt to save AC1 from sinking, trying to learn the code of another game that you hadn't worked on before. Working with the same resources you got another game up and running, keeping the server stable as you could through the holidays, doing what you could with the atrocious GUN server code and updating quests to be more in line with the post legions curve.
Even with all that effort, players did what players do these days, power right through to the level cap. The exp curve was too easy post legions, but many players would have burned out with the old exp rate. The silver lining of the grind game was the consistent and short patch cycle, always adding new content to keep players entertained. A truly successful relaunch would have required more than the company could/wanted to afford to keep feeding us updates, let alone spend the time required on any UI changes or modernization of the client. And even with a sufficient team there would be players that complained how it was allocated. AC2 fans might be more reasonable on average but some will always be inconsolable and ununderstanding of the time and effort coding takes, we had a few like it when we were working on a server. Of course there were more appreciative people than entitled ones and the case is the same here, while there are threads full of complaints and shaming, most of us are very grateful for the effort you put in and the time we got to spend playing one of our favorite games again.
That being said, we would also be immensely grateful for any further effort you put in toward helping us run our own server. LC would put every bit of effort into quality development that you or Turbine would, we love this game and would make it show. Even back when we were working on it we knew that even if we got a server up and running, we would need content updates too. And thus we came up with the content arc of the return to Ispar, the home world of the humans who were beckoned to Asheron's portals to rescue Dereth from the olthoi. Knorr was measured to determine the size of an expansion continent, a spot was found in the ocean to accommodate it and a grid was laid over one of the fan made Ispar maps to give a rough guide to work from with our landblock editing tool.
But I knew we were at least a year out from a playable multiplayer server build, so I held off on starting knowing that it would probably be a yearlong project just to build a landmass that size by hand and that we had no way of creating new art assets, quests or mobs. Time was better spent on decoding the portal.dat to get more server functionality. Then came the time that LC got the cease and desist because we had the game client available for download, which was Turbine property and we stopped development. At that point I was glad i hadn't sunk the time into it for nothing, but later on regretted it as Oplock's server that could handle multiple connections came around. But again, with the worry of it not finishing or also getting a C&D I never motivated myself up to the point of starting the Ispar project, only again to regret it when our dreams came true and AC2 was officially reopened. After rushing through the content with the rest of you and hitting the 10 levels of chaos plane grind, I tried discussing the idea of creating a smaller landmass or duplicating a lower level dungeon and creating new monster files for it using old ones as a template. Unfortunately WB couldn't allow help due to legal issues of unpaid volunteer work as a for profit company, so I again set aside my ideas, every couple weeks considering "maybe I should just do it anyway and throw it on the forum, couldn't hurt" but never bothered to try knowing that even with the landblock and monster files that it would take more time than they had to implement it and populate it with spawns.
We know you already have a lot on your plate finishing up with AC1, but we don't want to rely on its private servers doing well first to even get a chance after all of the time we put in trying to make our own server work. If you can give us a server to run and the ability to update the portal.dat/cell.dat with new files that we already can build/edit in hex code we will make the best of it. If you can give us real tools to work with we will make a game that will make Turbine proud of its splash screen, Powered By Our Fans.
Even with all that effort, players did what players do these days, power right through to the level cap. The exp curve was too easy post legions, but many players would have burned out with the old exp rate. The silver lining of the grind game was the consistent and short patch cycle, always adding new content to keep players entertained. A truly successful relaunch would have required more than the company could/wanted to afford to keep feeding us updates, let alone spend the time required on any UI changes or modernization of the client. And even with a sufficient team there would be players that complained how it was allocated. AC2 fans might be more reasonable on average but some will always be inconsolable and ununderstanding of the time and effort coding takes, we had a few like it when we were working on a server. Of course there were more appreciative people than entitled ones and the case is the same here, while there are threads full of complaints and shaming, most of us are very grateful for the effort you put in and the time we got to spend playing one of our favorite games again.
That being said, we would also be immensely grateful for any further effort you put in toward helping us run our own server. LC would put every bit of effort into quality development that you or Turbine would, we love this game and would make it show. Even back when we were working on it we knew that even if we got a server up and running, we would need content updates too. And thus we came up with the content arc of the return to Ispar, the home world of the humans who were beckoned to Asheron's portals to rescue Dereth from the olthoi. Knorr was measured to determine the size of an expansion continent, a spot was found in the ocean to accommodate it and a grid was laid over one of the fan made Ispar maps to give a rough guide to work from with our landblock editing tool.
But I knew we were at least a year out from a playable multiplayer server build, so I held off on starting knowing that it would probably be a yearlong project just to build a landmass that size by hand and that we had no way of creating new art assets, quests or mobs. Time was better spent on decoding the portal.dat to get more server functionality. Then came the time that LC got the cease and desist because we had the game client available for download, which was Turbine property and we stopped development. At that point I was glad i hadn't sunk the time into it for nothing, but later on regretted it as Oplock's server that could handle multiple connections came around. But again, with the worry of it not finishing or also getting a C&D I never motivated myself up to the point of starting the Ispar project, only again to regret it when our dreams came true and AC2 was officially reopened. After rushing through the content with the rest of you and hitting the 10 levels of chaos plane grind, I tried discussing the idea of creating a smaller landmass or duplicating a lower level dungeon and creating new monster files for it using old ones as a template. Unfortunately WB couldn't allow help due to legal issues of unpaid volunteer work as a for profit company, so I again set aside my ideas, every couple weeks considering "maybe I should just do it anyway and throw it on the forum, couldn't hurt" but never bothered to try knowing that even with the landblock and monster files that it would take more time than they had to implement it and populate it with spawns.
We know you already have a lot on your plate finishing up with AC1, but we don't want to rely on its private servers doing well first to even get a chance after all of the time we put in trying to make our own server work. If you can give us a server to run and the ability to update the portal.dat/cell.dat with new files that we already can build/edit in hex code we will make the best of it. If you can give us real tools to work with we will make a game that will make Turbine proud of its splash screen, Powered By Our Fans.