Metin2 SG Basics for Beginners

This text is a presentation of our server seen from my eyes. It is not perfect and it’s adapted to my game style. Readers are asked to apply the information from this guide to their preferred game style.

• Making Items

Beginners can buy the items from NPC in city maps. To improve the quality of their items they will have to farm metin stones and use the green adders and changers dropped. This will allow them to enjoy the game. It is necessary to complete all quests in order to gain the boost needed to catch up with more experienced players.

Items can be upgraded at city blacksmith, guild blacksmiths, in DT blacksmiths and at orc maze blacksmith. The city blacksmith and all guild blacksmiths will ask additional items for upgrade. The same happens if players use upgrade scrolls (Blessing Scroll, Blacksmith’s Memo, Wise Man’s Memo, Dragon God Blessing Scroll and Master Compass) to improve their items.

Rarity items with valuable bonus are too precious to be risked at blacksmiths. Players will use upgrade scrolls or where is possible the rarity blacksmith at 12^th floor of DT.

• Making Money

In Metin2 money can be obtained in different ways. The amount of them is determined by player’s ability to compete with other players.
Quests offer a fixed amount of gold and some items every player can use or sell

Farming is the best way to make money, starting from map1 to the latest dungeon at the highest lv available. When the number of players on a server is increasing, more items will be needed so the amount of money earned is increasing as well.

The most farmed objects in Metin2 will always be the metin stones. Depending on their lv, they drop books, stones and items. Some are quite valuable.

Upgrade materials are a very good idea to farm. They drop from monsters at metins or in different maps and will always be a good choice to use/sell. A player who wishes to farm upgrade materials should always think first which will sell fast than others. Like this nobody will spend too much for farming items that may sell very slow.

Dungeon runs come in handy for experienced players. There are several guides and descriptions in forum, I will not insist at this topic.

Lv 30 weapons’ farming it’s another way to make gold. A server population will consist mostly in warriors and suras so weapons for them are needed. Higher the average of the weapon, the better price for it, and if it has good rarity bonus, it will cost even more.

Items’ refining (upgrading) is also a way to make money. This is mostly done by beginners in Demon Tower but experienced players will always upgrade common items there too. The items with rarity bonus will be improved with upgrade scrolls and for sure their price will be fabulous compared to common items.

Stone upgrading is available from +3 stones and it can be done only in valley at NPC Seon-Pyeong. The max lv of a stone in our server is +6. PvM stones cost more and can be sold easier.

Events help players to progress faster and earn good amounts of money. The Event Calendar is available in forum.

In SG server Item Mall materials can be sold in game, so a player can use real money to buy from Item Mall and sell the stuff in his shop.

Fishing and mining are also important, but they depend on player’s ability to dedicate time for such activities.

Horse medals are required to increase the lv of the horse and to feed the power mounts. Horse Medals can be obtained killing monkeys in the monkey dungeons. One is in city map2, the other two in desert. Drop is pretty good and there will always be request for horse medals in the market.

Buying cheap and selling for more is a way to make profit and requires the ability to see what sells, what’s not selling and what is the price for items. It’s an activity I don’t recommend because it can lead to inflation and loss of players.

• Making Skills

Skills are special abilities of each class to inflict damage, to stun and to poison enemies, monsters or other players. Skills can be used from lv5 and with every level one skill point becomes available to add into a desired skill. In the moment a player adds 17 points in a skill then the level of that skill should change to Master. Now, if it’s not happening, a player up to lv 30 can go to Old Lady and reset the skills to try again; from lv31 players should remove skill points with the band of oblivion corresponding to the skill with problem and add points back until it becomes Master.

Skills have four forms of power: skill points, Master, Grand Master and Perfect Master. From Master to Grand Master the skill lv is increased with skill books and from Grand Master to Perfect Master with soul stones.

• Playing on SG

This is a complex activity including some parts from what I wrote above. Players farm, improve the skills, lv up and strengthen their characters according to their needs. Some like to farm more, others prefer to lv up and enjoy the PvP aspects of the server.

I consider important for players to complete biologist quests before they choose to lv up. This saves time and once the quest is done the character becomes faster and stronger.

Players who have more information for beginners can contribute to this guide with their replies.

Beginners are kindly asked to request more information if something is unclear.

Please contribute!

Farming Spider Eyes in desert - my favourite places. The marked spots in the map show the dominant type of drop, either spider eyes or spider web, but they both drop.

In about 2 hours, with a 2 hours glove and a lv 25 character (i like to use body warrior) the shop will look like this :

Lv 30 weapons drop in Red, Yellow and Blue Map2 (mostly FMS). They drop from Bestial Archer and Bestial Specialist.

Lv 30 weapons Drop in the Orc Valley:
Red stands for FMS
Yellow stands for RIB
Blue stands for BLD

Bestial Archer and Bestial Specialist drop FMS in valley.
Green orcs drop BLD in valley.
Esoterics drop RIB in valley.

Lv 30 weapons can be obtained in cursed lands of each kingdom and in cursed Pandemonia Map.

2017 Trends in SG Server

1. Market Overview and Estimations;
2. October 2016-April 2017: Analysis of the Impact Produced by the Updates;
3. The PvP Model: Deep Causes for the Lack of PvP on SG Server

1. Market Overview and Estimations:

SG market is PvM oriented. Most of the updates are directed towards increasing of players' population and this is reflected in the quality and quantity of the items in the market.
Most shops are in the blue kingdom, where is concentrated the largest percentage of the farmer population. Each day new items are brought into shops and the trend is to replace common items with the more valuable items containing rarity stats.
Main occupation of many players is to obtain a good amount of green adders and changers. While green adders have no value, the green changers will keep their price in 3-4kk range.
Most items sold are low and mid lv PvM, fully stated and/or refined to +9 and stones added. Prices tend to remain high because the demand it's quite substantial. PvP items are pretty expensive but more difficult to sell because there aren't many reasons to be used. If for PvM items the offer is very good, in PvP area there will always be a lack of essential stuff.
Upgrade scrolls, upgrade materials and PvM stones have and will have a very good value on the market. Poly marbles are requested by high lv players so their price increased over the last two months.
Item Mall stuff is going to be sold at a good price over the next months. It is difficult to appreciate the trend but it should be steady with a slight increase produced by the higher chance to successfully refine items.

2. October 2016-April 2017: Analysis of the Impact Produced by the Updates:

Since the first major update in October the server population kept increasing. The update was meant to boost the number of new players and to allow beginners to enjoy a pleasant stay in our server. Updates are increasingly PvM oriented and the Team is pretty generous in rewards at events.
Several major changes tend to affect the way players farm and what items have high value/price:

• Farm with main rule during important events is keeping the number of farmed item mall items low and the price pretty high. In the past experienced players could flood the market with tons of materials but now tens to be a balance between the possibilities to farm with high or low lv characters. This way beginners will enjoy these events more but they will not look to increase their lv.
• Green adders and changers are helping the new players to get good items but they are also a reason for them not to lv up. The farming population is stable and if Tec decides to add more updates directed towards them their number should increase.
• IP block on dungeons forced many players to find partners to farm with. The result was seen in the price of items dropped in high lv runs with an increase of 100-150%. I don't believe there will be an increase in the number of players taking part in runs in the next months mainly because there is a monopoly over essential information regarding these runs and the runs themselves are pretty demanding in top PvM equipment with high value.
• Increased chance to refine items to +9 should increase the number of good items in the market. This change will maintain the demand for upgrade scrolls and upgrade materials so the sales should be very good in this direction. Refined stones to +5 and +6 should be also selling well and the price should be stable.
• Erebus run, gold injection and lv120 update sent up the prices of Item Mall stuff and now the prices tend to be stable with little to no chance to get down.

3. The PvP Model: Deep Causes for the Lack of PvP on SG Server

When I am analyzing the pvp activity our server has, I have in mind several truisms: only high lv players wealthy enough can afford the fun of building pvp items; strong guilds with many pvp players are the best place for strong pvp action - new members will try to join and help in wars; the chance to get perfect items is challenging but will deter new high lv players from joining wars or events; in an environment with too little pvp activity nobody will pay too much attention to it.

SG is a pretty rewarding server. Most events were offering great advantages to low and mid lv players and high lv players could solo all dungeons to dominate the market. With Arboreal Menace update came the teamwork inside dungeons and a change on moonlight event which switched the balance towards high lv players. Players are motivated to lv up and try new things. The ultimate challenge is PvP.

Metin2 is an old game and doesn't have too many features available to upgrade it to modern times. SG had numerous population when Gameforge servers were lacking updates but the number declines when the updates in SG cannot keep up with Gameforge servers. A large population is required in order to get pvp action and nobody will try to play on an empty server. In order to boost the population and offer them a motivation to play Tec organized drops in a manner a player will get an easy start to integrate into community. Here I can Identify two problems:

• The balance of power between experienced players and beginners.
• The guild system which allows beginners to isolate from community and direct their efforts only to farm.

The balance of power is made from actions of experienced players. They have the experience and motivation to use any change to their advantage. They will go to great lengths to keep the things the way they are. Experienced players can prevent new players from acceding to their ranks by keeping information secret, over farming and monopoly on vital items.

The guild system allows every new player to make his own guild or join a farming guild to invest the experience and keep a certain lv. It is pretty much rewarding to be a low/mid lv players so many won't lv up. In my opinion in a large guild players will enjoy farming and will try pvp. If they are isolated, this won't happen, many will get bored and will quit or will farm alone for a longer period of time and then quit.

PvP is not attractive to all players in the same way. It would be different if PvP will be necessary to trigger weekly rewards and special rewards, but this is not happening. With so many rewarding events the only reward left for pvp players is the experience. While it is good to reach high lv, it comes with a higher cost in items and many players are not willing to do the effort.

The pvp bonus system is also allowing to get perfect items. While this rewards rich players, it also constitute a barrier to players which don't want to get much trouble from pvp. The system is switching the pvp from large groups to solo immortals. In a natural way strong players will enjoy the company of other strong players and this leads to status quo guilds (kingdoms). The strong kingdom will easy massacre weak one and this normally leads to less pvp activity.
To enjoy pvp there must be an equilibrium between the power of the kingdoms. In this way weaker players will also find a place to help until they become stronger. If the equilibrium is broken even strong players which don't enjoy enough numbers will stop participating.
Players tend to pay much attention to their items. There is guild war which allows all players to be equals but it is not used. I believe the lack of information and the dispersion of players in countless guilds contributes to this. Guild wars are not known in SG and raids to enemy town rarely can be seen.

For the next 12 months i believe the pvp will be much of the same. The Arboreal Menace update brought many pvm updates and the players which could use the updates already did. The gap between high lv players and the rest of server population is pretty high. The update didn't bring changes in pvp and is less likely such changes will occur. Strong players will fight only to crush the opposition in order to conquer a lv up spot. There are no farming places for high lv except dungeons so the PvP will not increase. What will players do is to prepare for next pvm updates by upgrading and refining their items. I am not ruling out future concentrations of players at NW but these will be the exception and not the rule.
Tec will focus on pvm updates to diminish the difference between our server and Gameforge ones. Pretty much all the income comes from pvm because many players join the server and experienced players need TP to get new items ready. Pvp is going to be ignored because only Webzen can create the pvp challenges by modifying the items and this won't really happen.

It's great to see you are thinking to come back in here. I don't think it's for the better to open guild for beginners, they should be included in the existing guilds. The reason is simple: in the existing guilds you meet people with deep knowledge of the game features so you won't have to find out by yourself how things work.

About PvP, i wrote above the PvP Model. I test the functionality of the Model as often as I can and at this point, if you expect experienced players who worked very much on their items to lower the bar for PvP, you are dead wrong. If you expect more players to focus on PvP and become experts, the costs are too high and not many are willing to do that. If you think you can do PvP without items...well, as long as you do some wars for fun in the Arena or just try to help, I believe you can do that. You won't be able without items to hold your farming spot or conquer one (not that we have many conflicts with such spots).

Moonlight Box Drop Places - Outside Lemures' Map

Places marked in the maps are far less populated with monsters to drop the moons if we are to compare with DAWN. Lemures are going to remain the favorite mobs to farm during this event. However, in Thunder, where I farm, the drop is around 550 moons/hour, I believe in the other maps the drop rate should be about the same.

Short Information about mobs at every map:

Fugitive's Cape at Teleporter starting with Lv60; easiest to kill are Manticores, they are animals and don't have long range attack monsters in the area that I marked on the map.

Thunder: Access from Fugitive's Cape the portal at the top right side of the map; Gigantic Biters/Slaughterers and Cyclops are the easiest to kill, they are orcs, points marked on the map don't have long ranged monsters.

Nephrite Bay: Access from Fugitive's Cape the portal at the top-middle; Tritonics are the easiest to kill, no long range monsters in the marked places.

There are far less monsters in these three maps but they are an alternative to farm when DAWN is full.

Understanding PvM Resistance

PvM is very easy to understand, since the monsters (AI of the server) always do what they are programmed to do. They don't come with different ideas every time they are challenged, they don't invent new ways of killing the players.

There are three types of PvM resistances which together form the overall resistance in PvM of a player:

• Passive resistance is the defense (AC) a player might have at one moment in time; it is the least important in most of the maps because it can be pierced, thus becoming from resistance a source of damage for the player. It can be enhanced using Blessing buff from dragon mage and average damage resistance items/alchemy. Magic resistance against magic damage can also be included here. And if a player is looking to kill boss monsters, then resistance to skill damage is going to be useful.
• Active resistance is created by the chance to block physical attacks bonus from various items and stone of evasion. The more a player has, the better, because this type of resistance can't be pierced. I include in here the chance to dodge arrows, which proves to be very effective in the maps with many ranged monsters who deal arrow type damage. Active resistance is the most important and players should try to get as much as possible in order to be able to farm everywhere.
• Offensive resistance consists from the chance to faint existent in the items of a player. I include it at resistance because an incapacitated monster cannot deal any kind of damage. Again, the more chance to faint a player might have, easier it will be to tank large amount of monsters.

Depending on budget and character class, players should find a way to balance every type of resistance in order to obtain the desired effect. My choice is for the max active resistance for day to day farm. I rarely do bosses and my guides explain what items are needed on runs.

Both Average damage resistance is increasing the passive resistance but without block you will die in no time.

I'm not recommending anything, because it would be silly to ask to a lv 35 to put evasion+6 in the armour. Until lv 61 players can be OK with 30% block, maybe 40% block. Being lower lv is easy. However, from lv 61 players should consider having 40% block or more. I have 60 block on my farmer for HL1 and 57% block for metins. On dragon mage I have 55% block for metins, 59% block on healer for tanking in Enchanted Forest in poly. I'm having on dragon mage (Vyenna is Dragon Mage) for Ice run 64 block but I'm using armour with def+6 stone as well because is one hell of a map.

There is no recipe, max block is the best. You get it according to the budget and the farming or lvling up place.

Marketing - the Art of Sale in SG Market

A controlled market like the one we have on SG knows three phases:

1. Expansion when a high number of players are building their items and the sales are going very good, prices are increasing and everyone is farming or upgrading;
2. Stagnation when the prices are high, players have built their items, sales are declining, new items are brought into the market every day by farming players;
3. Decline when there is almost no commerce, players are leaving the server because of too high prices and the Staff is going to operate harsh changes to revive the server.

Now, it's a technical impossibility for a market to be only in expansion. For this the number of players on server should keep increasing and the Staff should not only rain with events but also with updates to give a purpose to everything. Thus being said, sooner or later any market is going to face stagnation and if no changes are going to be tried, decline will follow.

Selling the items (pieces of equipment or upgrade materials) requires good knowledge of the existing prices and number of items from the market. Also players should keep on eye on the current updates and future updates thus farming what's needed the most.

The Rarity system gave market a new life, the high lv armours with avg dmg res and HP restore are the most wanted. On the 2nd place come the shoes with avg dmg res and skill dmg res, the shields with the same Rarity bonus as the shoes and then the vs monster helmets and avg dmg earrings and lv 75 weapons. Of course, drop is moderate but such items, already made, cost very much.

The upgrade+ system and the higher chance to upgrade, combined with generous events increased the number of refined items+9 and the price of upgrade materials. At the moment I'm writing this post the market is in stagnation, in recovery from a short period of decline. There are many upgrade materials available in the market, the price of blessing scroll is very very low, players have made the items so the sales are not great. However due to the recent update with alchemy drop, the price for green dragon bean has increased a little and they sell very good.

Poly marbles crafting at NPC Baek-Go in map 1 will always bring very good money. Probably the easiest to craft are esoteric fanatic and baby spider. This guide has maps with the drop places for both poly crafting materials. A lv 25 char with mall glove and 2 hours glove (I like body warrior for this and I can use my buff skills to kill even faster with relatively cheap items) can bring lots of gold in short time. All what players need to do is to put a good price on their items.

I would like to remind players reading me that main causes that are driving the market into stagnation and decline are over pricing and over farming. Sometimes over pricing is mentioned as a very good source for gold. It may very well be, but is not going to last for ever. As for the over farming, the SG is mainly PvM, it happens