Lineage II introduces new
account management tools
By
Michael Lafferty
Players
now offered paid services that include in-game name and gender changes
NCsoft’s
Lineage II, a massively multiplayer online subscription-based game, has
certainly made some strides in the four years it has been live. But the team
behind the game is not about to rest on its laurels. Changes are constantly
flowing into the game and the latest involves account management services that
players have been asking about for a long time.
GameZone.com
got to chat with Tim Tan, Lineage II’s North American producer, about the
changes to the subscription services. Going live today, those changes include –
for a fee – the ability for a player to change his or her character’s in-game
name and to change the gender of the character.
“The big
news for today is we are prepared to launch the first of three account
services,” Tan said. “The reason is we want to provide to the player base a set
of services they have been asking for some time. The first two is character name
changes and character gender changes. The big one will be server transfers. That
won’t be today, but they will be live in February, which is very soon.”
The services
will be attached to a fee. A character gender change will be $9.99 and character
name change will be $29.99 – both prices are in U.S. dollars. There are other
caveats attached, such as the frequency with which players can modify characters
or – when it goes live – transfer servers. NCsoft has provided a complete list
of the restrictions and how-to’s at
http://www.lineage2.com/my_account/account_services1.html.
While
players will be able to change names, they will not be able to totally escape
whatever reputation is associated with a previous name. Players on the servers
will have the ability to look up a list of a given player’s names to see who
that player may have been previously.
“Let’s say
you’ve been nefarious for a long time, you might build a bad reputation,” Tan
stated. “And you want to hide out and change your name, and that’s fine, but the
player base wanted to have a look-up list so you can see what their previous
name was on the server.”
As for the
pending character transfers between servers …
“Character
server transfers have been asked for for a long time, probably the first couple
of months of the game,” Tan said. “It has taken it a bit but we have been able
to implement a system that works. That protects the integrity of the players and
protects the population of the servers.”
There will
be limitations on the type of items you can move from one server to another as
well as how much adena players can move between servers. But the bottom line is
that NCsoft will be watching server populations closely.
“We have to
protect the population of the servers,” Tan said. “There will be servers you can
transfer to and some you can’t transfer to. On a week-to-week basis, I’m going
to determine what a server looks like (and that will determine which servers can
be transferred to, but right now ‘it’s a pretty open thing.’)”
In order to
implement the changes, players will have to log into their PlayNC account and
buy a service code and apply that code.