Lineage 2 is NCSoft's baby, their signature game.
It's like choosing to hire your less talented best friend over a more talented acquaintance. Not saying it's a good choice, but that's the way NCSoft seems to handle things.
That said, just because Lineage 2 is F2P and is considered an inferior game to CoH doesn't mean it deserves to be shut down. It could still be bringing them lots of money from the korean market.
Shockingly, the original Lineage, which is a fixed-camera, overhead-angle, low-poly, click-on-the-ground, ancient MMO, is still one of the most-played MMOs in Asia.
Not so shockingly, most Asians do not own computers in their homes. They play games for pennies-per-hour (with the time rolling over into the next month if left unused) with their friends in bongs, a.k.a. internet cafes with snacks. I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that these bong owners are not replacing their PCs with bleeding edge hardware every ten minutes, or even every ten years. This type of a game can be played on a pinecone wrapped in bail wire, so it works there.
The Lineage series never took off over in NA. It bombed about as hard as CoX did over there. It's just different circumstances, different culture (click on the ground every so often to run around, while snacking and chatting with friends at the local bong), and a different mindset for gaming.
Lineage 2 is actually a 3D MMO more in the style of what westerners expect, but it's PURE LONG MISERABLE GRIND from the babyland on, lol. Again, it's that "pennies-per-hour rolling over into the next month if not used" thing happening. They want even the simplest little thing to take eons and eons of real-life time, because they're never going to accrue enough pennies from each player if they don't.
