Amid an ongoing struggle against illegal botting operations, Lineage Classic took the drastic step today, Wednesday the 29th, of imposing character creation limits across all servers. With restrictions now in place on 27 servers—excluding Valakas—players are no longer able to create new characters.

This measure appears aimed at more effectively rooting out illegal bot farms that have persisted despite hundreds of thousands of account bans. Because these operations use stolen identities rather than their own, they simply create new accounts with new credentials as soon as their previous ones are banned. This behavior disrupts normal gameplay, negatively impacting hunting grounds and item acquisition for legitimate players.

NCSoft has been aware of the issue and has consistently issued bans, but the sheer volume of bot farms has proven overwhelming. With so many operations flocking to Lineage Classic and competition intensifying to farm more Adena due to its declining value, these botters have become brazen enough to stop hiding their nicknames. This recently became a hot topic when accounts starting from 'Mul-ori 1' surpassed the 100-count mark.

In a war of attrition where the game developer is inherently at a disadvantage, the rampant activity of these bot farms has forced NCSoft to resort to the extreme measure of a total server-wide character creation ban, despite the inconvenience it causes to regular players.

The primary advantage of this restriction is that it prevents bot farms from accessing the game with new accounts once their current ones are banned. Now that the restriction has been applied as of this morning, the next step must be a server-wide purge through additional ban waves. All eyes are on whether this measure will prove more effective than the previous restriction on the 10 main servers, and what further countermeasures will be prepared before these limits are eventually lifted.