I am not up-to-date at all with Innova company politics, so I can't really give you an answer. But what you should always keep in mind, while online numbers are certainly an indicator for the success or failure of a game, what companies are exclusively interested in is the revenue that is extracted from the player base. Due to the toxic time-point payment system, NCKorea is failing spectacularly in that respect. NCWest, on the other hand, has very few real players (most of the online numbers are RMT bots), but by skillfully exploiting human weakness through gambling events, they have made it to the rank of top contributor for Lineage 2 worldwide. Innova has a pay-to-play Premium Account system which does not make them rich, but provides a stable base revenue that can be added to via occasional pay-to-win store events.
Last Friday NCWest has launched a major anti-bot campaign:
http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.p ... age=10#187This means the exodus of players who have turned away/moved to Core in disgust about the rampant cheating must have reached a dimension that was financially felt. Otherwise NCsoft would not have invested any money for developing those elaborate bot detection methods. In the wake of the first euphoria many old players are returning to NCWest, and if the company keeps up their anti-bot policies, they will probably stop the exodus to Core. This is good for us, but bad for Innova. No fresh meat coming in
About Lineage Eternal I have serious doubts. The fact that nothing has been revealed about the game except continuously postponed dates for Open Beta testing makes one suspect that the developers are not sure of themselves and their product at all. Only time will tell.
About the further developments in Lineage 2 the only thing I can tell you that after the latest update in Korea,
Grand Crusade, there was one Command Channel on one server who checked out the new content. They found that the drops in the new hunting grounds were abyssal, absolutely not worth the effort, and nothing has been heard since; players are completely ignoring the new content:
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=1645&start=50#p33621The
Arena System, however, was a huge success in Korea:
viewtopic.php?f=53&t=1265&start=850#p33431Overseas Lead Designer Nam Taek-rim has already announced that we will get it at NCWest:
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=1639&start=30#p33508Since the export version of the game is basically the same for all territories, InnovaRU and InnovaEU will most probably also get the Arena System, maybe with an improved party matching system that allows you to play with your friends
