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.

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