Neverwinter 1 help

Which one is better?
NWN, or NWN EE, or NWN 2?

There is no mechanical difference between NWN and EE, aside from a higher price.

NWN 2 have a better original campaign and wider variety of classes/races, but the engine and controls are super clunky, in the best tradition of Obsidian.

>erp server drama
omg fuck beamdog!!!!!!!

That's where the cash is going and why it isn't enhanced.

Fuck i loved NWN. Some of the best online RP communities and custom modules for years. Golden age of RP for a lot of folks, me included.

The very base campaign is sort of dull, but it does pick up. Base campaigns for the expansions are great. Custom modules are where it's at though; off the top of my head, these are must-plays

i might have some typos or slightly wrong names
>The Hex Coda
>The Rose of Eternity (chrono trigger in my nwn?)
>Shadowlords, Dreamcatcher, etc
>All the stuff by "Stefan Gagne", just google him
>A Dance with Rogues (extremely sexual but incredibly good module aside from that, fuck the haters)
>Darkness over Daggerford
>Aeilund saga

nigga there is so much badass NWN content i cant even remember it all

That's completely untrue, NWN EE takes about 150% to 500% more resources to run.

>tfw enjoy roleplay but not so much dungeon crawling
>no decent MMO with a good RP community
>only other place to get RP is typefucking communities like f-list
>totally missed the NWN RP train
life is pain

Attached: 1534335429270.jpg (960x960, 66K)

kys

You shouldn't play the OC, it's honestly really fucking bad, basically just 60 hours of fetch quests with piss poor story. I'd just read a plot summary of it so you know who Aribeth and a few other characters are, since that comes up in SoU and HoTU (which should be the first things you play, in that order)

Man, I'd recommend you check out some MUDs but all the good ones are either dead or hollow shells of their former selves. Armageddon was fucking fantastic back in the day, but everything good was literally surgically removed from the game.

All the good RP communities have died already. It's a dead game, a wasteland of RP run by bandits and closed off communities clinging on to lost glory.

Original campaign of this is what made me never get hyped for a game before release again

No one actually plays NWN1 for the story. Even expansion, which were a step up, are basic in that department. When people look favorably on the game they're thinking about persistent worlds and community modules.

The forest part is really good, so are the mines and that part pre mines. Game has its moments, wait until them

Is it as good as BG or PT?

Unfortunate but yeah, the days of golden NWN RP were a long time ago.
>The Magic Bubble
I miss this server/module. A lot of good people, everyone in-character.
I feel like RP these days has become all ERP and dumb degenerate trannies sexting each other. Back in Magic Bubble/NWN it was alot like tabletop D&D, everyone wrote decent backstories and interacted in genuine in-character dialogue and went on quests together, and DM's often made little side-stories and people grew their characters together.

It wasn't always hardcore RP, NWN had a good PVE framework too, so it made for good adventuring on expansive modules with lots of content. It was a forerunner to what MMO's could have been desu

So
Linu or Sharwyn?

>Armageddon.
user, why. Why did you do this to me. WHY DID YOU HAVE TO REMINDER ME YOU FUCKER. I hope these motherfuckers of mods land on fucking Sahara without water.

Attached: 1522702288408.png (841x849, 956K)

neither

It always was erp and favoritism. It was just later that people have the veil lifted from their eyes.

I used to play a lot of servers like you describe, and some of the players were very anti-erp. When I was a dm on one server I hop around and one day it's like oh here is the server admin and she's fucking her animal companion for her RP husband who is watching. Oh look he has all this epic level gear and he easily got that locked subrace werewolf application without a hitch.

Later we all found out most players did erp or went to social servers. What was really cancerous about it all was perpetuating the false narrative and people acting shady and dishonest to "cover their tracks" even when it was obvious at that point. It was just something people do and it's better to make rules about it to prevent favoritism than pretend it doesn't happen.

No. However, NWN2's expansion is as good as PT.

Can i just skip to NWN2? or are the story connected

I suppose; humanity is sexual and people are going to do sexual stuff, but I participated in a lot of RP servers and never encountered that much.
If i go jump on FF14 and hop into Rhalgr's reach on any given server, it's literally shout-chatting furries talking about fucking each other and hardcore depictions of animal sex.
It was never that in NWN, at least in my many thousands of hours of enjoying it. Characters might have romance, but you're sort of going the way of "All rp was always erp and everyone is a corrupt faggot and every server host/dm is a corrupt faggot behind the scenes"; i don't buy it.

Sure, there's gonna be corruption and retarded trannies no matter what you do, but there's also the good RP'ers and author-types interested in high fantasy and a good adventure. They can coexist, but i feel like we've gone to the extreme end of the trannie degenerate cancer spectrum.

Thanks for your insights and perspective anyways

I don't remember exactly but there are links netween nwn and nwn2; I'd suggest playing both, what's it going to hurt you? NWN's base campaign might be a bit of a slog at first, but it's expansions are well worth it. NWN2 is better put together plot-wise but the engine is wonky and janky like everything Obsidian does.

Base NWN campaign is fucking terrible and you can safely skip it. Play the expansion campaigns instead if you must.

Op here my dudes
Yeah i really dont care about Faerun at all so i guess i'll jump to the expansions. witch one first? do they tie in together? to they tie into the base module.

>Thencheck out top rated community modules, a lot of which are better than professionally made campaigns
i poked around the vault can anyone give me the best fan modules off the top of thier head? Also this A Dance With Rouges module. i know its smut. but is it good smut?

Attached: 55.jpg (978x1000, 98K)

People usually don't fuck on the side of the road not even on social servers in most cases. People on your FFXIV server are probably just being edgy because American culture stigmatizes sexual expression.

If you don't buy it then don't buy it, be blissfully unaware. But I will say I don't see how it's corrupt, usually they're biased, on any server with human dms that decide who gets nice things and who doesn't. But there's nothing inherently corrupt about erp, or you'd have to think most people are inherently corrupt. I just got tired of all the double think needed to keep up the image of rp as a pure and wholesome high adventure pursuit.

see all those listed are fantastic.
there's a shitton of amazing custom modules, some took literally years to make, most of the listed are far better than anything made by the developer. there's a lot of good.
>dance with rogues
yes its' smut, and yes it's really good smut and it's good even if you disregard the smut

>yes its' smut, and yes it's really good smut and it's good even if you disregard the smut
Sounds like my kind of smut

Dead game.

I thought Beamdog was supposed to bring back the glory days, but there are only 200 people online across a little under 200 servers.

You're an idiot if you thought that, all they were looking for was your money.

What where the glory days like user? Was it like a mmo? Or more like diablo 2. Was it full of ERPers?

Also since we where talking about A Dance of Rouges what are some other good smut modules?

keep in mind when it gets dirty, it was written by a middle aged woman

Do we know if she was hot at least? I doubt it but stranger things and all that.

So you would open up the multiplayer and then you had different categories to choose from. Action, Story, Story Lite, Roleplay, Team, Melee, Arena, Social, Alternative, PW Action, PW Story, Solo, Tech Support.

Every section had game servers up, Tech Support might have only had 10 or 20. Then Roleplay, PW Action, PW Story, and Social would each have hundreds of servers to choose from. Each of the large categories would have around 5-10 servers that were near the player cap of 64 players, then you would have about 20 servers after that with between 20 and 50 players. After that about 100 servers with at least 1 player up to 20. Then another 100 with 0 players.

A lot of the early servers started with the letter A and were based in an unknown homebrew island in the Forgotten Realms. But you also had Greyhawk servers, Mystara servers, Dragonlance servers, Planescape servers, and original setting servers. Star Wars was very popular and so was Lord of the Rings.

Every server was different, and every server had its own unique community heavily invested in what was going on. Some unpopular servers were hard sticklers for locking people up for running or shouting, others had open pvp and factions. Arabel, Arelith, Daggerdale, Astoria, Narfell, Solarune, Amia, Nordock, A this, A that, A more As and so on.

Action servers were like endless dungeons, and you had a lot of pvp servers too. The first early social servers were based around things like Gor, Anne Rice novels, and other fantasy books. Some of them were cities with dungeons, local vault characters. The main social hub was a whore house where players of whores could post their rates. Then the PvP-RP and faction warfare social servers came like Good vs Evil and Something Kingdoms or other. Eternal Beauty and The Crown Cities or The Three Kingdoms , I forgot the exact name, they pushed social into full RP and faction based PvP/RP in the backdrop.

Tens of thousands playing on thousands of worlds all day.

Sounds beautiful. Its a shame i never got to see it. Most games let alone games dont even come with a FOV slider for fucks sake. And here you had people making entire worlds almost the content must have been endless.

>let alone games
Let alone rpgs*

Might as well ask about NWN2 here: I plan to start playing that soon. Does the game expect me to put a lof ot points into diplomatic and other social skills? Will some standard 10 CHA suffice or would I miss much?
Also I plan to play through the whole thing. Wizard/fighter -> or duelist or wizard/fighter -> eldrith knight? My favorite classes are actually cleric and druid, but I want to mix it up a bit. Thanks for answering.

Attached: 1434548960807.jpg (690x683, 174K)

The content was endless. When the official servers shut down there were only about 2000 players at peak times, and the servers were closing doors one by one. Players left or joined other servers that remained. That's actually why so many of the popular servers today are so shit. It's because they were never good on their own merits but they got fed by all the displaced population. Many of those that stayed were really hardcore with extreme and weird opinions, that also influenced how the servers evolved. How they became so elitist and stuck up their own anus.

By the time Beamdog came around there were about 500 people on max and now there are max 600 people on. The current servers in their entirety don't even match just one popular category from old NWN.

The game is dead.

It's not that important but might give some extra choices if you really care about more highschool level dialog.

This.
I don't really care about the other stuff, but Beamdog has made it easy for me to join any server I want without having to hunt down a dozen fucking content packs from websites, download them, and put them in a specific folder. I think they deserve a little credit. Without them, NWN multiplayer would be dead right now.

Everything has to end i suppose. Did NW2 have a similar multipler and success? I always hear about 1 but never 2.

Slow down a second here, you're talking about a fear you had but it doesn't meet reality. Here is what really happened.

1. You had the client extension.
2. You check out a server, the link takes you to their website.
3. You download a single file that extracts to your hak folder.
4. You play.

Beamdog changed it to this.
1. You download updates to join updated servers.
2. You click on a server with no information.
2.2 You might look it out on steam workshop first.
2.3 Then you have to subscribe to their workshop items.
2.4 Then verify you have them.
3. You wait hours for nwsync to work or steam subscription to finish downloading.
4. You join server.

Fuck that, it's for extremely lazy people and hasn't improved the multiplayer population in a significant way at all.

Is it just me, or has NWN:EE development stalled? They were releasing a new update every 2-3 months, but there hasn't been a new one since October, around the same time they stopped doing Friday streams.

Beamdog has implied they want to create a spiritual successor to NWN even after having worked on NWN:EE... I have to wonder if they're trying to coax WOTC into letting them make NWN3 or something.

>1. You download updates to join updated servers.
Uhh... you mean the game updates that Steam installs without me noticing? Yeah, sure. That's a big step.
>2 - 3
No idea what you mean by all this. A correctly configured server auto-downloads everything for you without having to go through workshop or anything. And while the download speeds are dependent on the NWSync server, it shouldn't take more than a few minutes unless you're trying to download something huge like CEP (which you should already have).

No, NWN2 was dead in the water when it came out. The toolset wasn't made for people to be able to work with it easily. There were also other problems that made it harder. Like every area that got changed on a server required a brand new download before people could play again. The character models had very little customization. The animations were derpy and the mechanics were poorly implemented 3.5 that lead to tons of cheesing.

Most worlds were about a fifth of the size of NWN worlds despite all the extra baggage. T

hey didn't listen to what the community wanted and just made their own RPG like it was another KOTOR 2. The DM client came out later and was poorly done. The autodownloader came out years later and would still glitch frequently. The client was sort of like Everquest 2, where it had all these bells and whistles but it was such a resource hog and didn't ever justify it.

That's not to say you couldn't have some fun there but it was always sort of irritating in some way. By the time the master servers went down NWN2 had the population that NWN EE has now, currently NWN2 gets max 100 or 200 people total.

>I have to wonder if they're trying to coax WOTC into letting them make NWN3 or something.
Please god no.

Why does Faerun get multiple games but never anything interesting like Mystara or Dark Sun. Fuck even Grey Hawk is more interesting than "sexually free" notEurope

So let me get this straight, you're playing only on servers with tiny amounts of content, and you're ranting about how difficult it is to click their website link and download a zip that you extract to a hak folder named 'hak'. Sure buddy, saving people 20 seconds of work is what saved NWN but didn't actually have much impact.

They're working on a new renderer because everyone kept bitching about the graphics. What they don't get is if people wanted graphics they would play something else entirely.

It undersold and the head honcho in an interview said they'll be pretty much done with NWN once their new renderer is finished.

They've also said that they're closely working with the community to create the best updates. But we all know that is a lie, they're only working with a few nobodies that never had much to show.

Man, I remember buying NWN2 after playing NWN online for a while and thinking, "OMG this is going to be amazing!"
Only for it to be absolute shit. It took months just for them to fix basic stuff like not making every player on the server teleport when one person used an area transition.
And yeah, the download sizes for NWN2 were much larger because outdoor areas had a heightmap system, which also meant that it took much longer to create content for those areas. It was never going to replace NWN.
Sure, NWN's tilesets can get a bit old after a while, but I think that's just part of the challenge of creating interesting areas. Any noob can just plop down some tiles and encounters, but it takes a master to add the sort of placeables and interactive scripts that makes those areas interesting.

I'll do you one better. Why is almost every fucking Faerun game set on the Sword Coast? There are plenty of other interesting locations.

>sexually free, global notEurope

The main story is shit. Play the expansions, or some community modules.

I miss the VtM:Redemption RP servers. Some of them were so fucking good.

They also stopped NWN2 updates shortly after updates stopped for NWN, which says a lot. I remember trying to tell myself why NWN2 really was better, and more like D&D. In retrospect it was just a psychological phenomenon to justify my purchase. I tried to like it, I played it a lot, I was quite good at the terrain tool. At some point I just decided to admit that it was shit and no amount of effort was going to unlock potential that was never there to begin with. It's not even the most advanced terrain painting system out there.

I never played those, what were they like? Did they have special classes or use d20 modern haks?

It uses the
You can choose to be human, ghoul or kindred. There are 10 clans to choose from, and a shitload of disciplines.
Some modded servers had even more possibilities, including werewolves and lovcraftian horrors.

*Uses the Vampire: The Masquerade system.
Managed to erase the first part somehow.

Linu (that was the cleric one, right?)

Wait how did it use that system it's a d20 game.

Are there any good servers up now? Preferably something non-Arelith. Something more action-oriented.

user, Arelith is extremely action-oriented. You get "quests" of kill this which you repeat over and over again. There's no risk and magic items are plenty, crafting is accessible to all without build investment. It's the RP conceit that Arelith is an RP server and hence is not action-oriented. Actually it's like a poor WOW rip-off.

It's not a very good action server but it is an action server. As an RP server it fails miserably and all of their archaic rules do nothing to actually support RP in the slightest.

There is one particular section that allows you to utterly destroy a smug cunt over the duration of 10 minutes if you level your diplomacy high enough. High point of the whole game.

Soooooooooo

Is this easy to pirate?

Impossible.

Was before NWN:EE. All you needed was a keygen after the "master server" was taken offline.
Does anyone else remember Bioware taking it down after the data breach and then promising they'd bring it back? Yeah, I knew that was bullshit.

Wait so you need a server in order to play this thing?

It's a multiplayer game.

>Also since we where talking about A Dance of Rouges what are some other good smut modules?

Whatever you do, don't play Demonheart.
It started off amazing, but then the author flaked the fuck out and decided to abandon the mod and turn it into a bare bones VN with no sex and on rails story progression instead of meaningful choices.
And now she's remaking it again, probably with no smut again, on RPG Maker MV. The most unstable of RPG Maker versions.

Better to not even bother and get your hopes up for nothing.

You can't pirate those?

You have a CD key that's your player account.

Play the expansions in order instead

mods

The original campaign is pretty bare-bones - it was created more as a proof-of-concept for the toolkit included with the game than an actual, serious campaign. The expansion campaigns are notable improvements.

How are you supposed to get into using the toolkit and why would you bother when there are better games?

Reading the manual and some prior knowledge of programming help with getting started. As for why you would bother, I've heard it said that the original plan was to sell the toolkit to developers to give them a comparatively simple and easy way to make games for D&D 3rd Edition.

So why are most people interested in the campaign if it's just 3D RPG-maker?

Because it's kind of fun, even if it's hardly prize-winning writing. Plus, as mentioned, the expansions upped the ante on the story.

Okay so what have you made for this toolkit?

My PW idea is a world where magic is evil and it burns people that use it. With witch hunter prestige classes and no magic items except very rarely. Just casting simple spells will turn them into a homing beacon for evil monsters.

It's been a decade, but here's what you do:
>find an old conversion mod called Lord of Terror
>find your old buddy who you co-oped the original Diablo with dozens of times
>profit

So are the Neverwinter games based on D&D 3.5 or 3.0? I for one hate 3.0 and 3.5 so ive largely staryed away from the Neverwinter games. Now i know playing the actual system and a video game based off it are not the same thanks to the computer handling the numbers and rolls but i was wondering if it can be easily broken like actual 3.5.

Well just consider how 3.5 is "broken" because you have to have a DM to which you can rules lawyer and convince of something. Try to convince your CPU of something with rules lawyering. It wont listen.

Both games do have broken things but they're things that work differently in 3.0/3.5 or don't even exist.

Same reason why 5e would be a steaming pile of shit, because there is no DM to affect and describe the basic mechanics.

NWN base is a pile of garbage.
Just skip to SoU and then do HOTU with the same character
The campaign in the base game was only forced in - the original NWN goal was "it's a PC toolset to play your own stuff in"
SOU and HOTU are much, much better.

But no, the most you get is one companion.
You can get two in HOTU.
The game is heavily based around you just having a hireling in the campaign and not having many problems. The exceptions are if you take the sorcerer then you're fucked. the bard is kinda shit too but she's not completely bad since bard song gives you saves against bosses.

Just be aware that all the campaigns are lopsided towards melee or ranged fighters. Magic users get fucked over to an extent. You'l be cheesing the game a lot. A cleric or druid is recommended, just buff up and as a cleric go nuts in melee or as a druid get the shifter class and buff up and then change into a tiger and go nuts

You forgot to mention the meme that is base campaign writing.

Find the Waterdhavian creatures.

>I want more money!
>I know you feel you deserve more but it's all we have
>character can't reply

Seems legit

The OC is a decent crawl if you skip most of the dialogue bloat. SoU I forget, and hordes of the underdark is great

Beamdog is a guilty of a number of different crimes. Here are the major ones.

1. The Enhanced Editions are essentially a collection of free mods that had existed for nearly twenty years. Beamdog gathered them all up, slapped "Enhanced Edition" on it and resold it as a new product. There's very very little in the Enhanced Editions that wasn't already out there, and most of it is stuff you don't want (like obnoxious character outlines).

2. The games didn't sell so well and the originals were still far outselling them, even twenty years after their release, so Beamdog had EVERY digital distributor stop selling the originals and ONLY sell the Enhanced Edition. If you want to buy a digital copy of the originals now, they're "bundled" into the Enhanced Edition. Now these scumbags can claim sales from people just wanting to buy the originals as their own.

3. The infamous 600+ bugs on launch. The game is still riddled with bugs (as even a perfunctory glance over their forums show) but the fact that it took nearly two years for them to get a game that had been working fine for 20 years to reach playability after launch is telling of their wild incompetence.

4. This is where we get to the ones that really piss people off. Beamdog couldn't just remaster the game, they had to fuck with the content too. New dialogue for existing NPCs like Jaheira, Viconia, Safana, Kivan, et cetera was written in to make the characters more progressive and leftist friendly. Beamdog shills will argue that "adding content isn't changing content XDDD" but it is when the new content changes the core personalities of the existing characters. This is in addition to adding a slew of their own LGBT (hitherto there were none in Baldur's Gate) NPCs, all flooded with OP attributes and magic items to encourage people to play them despite their cancer.

5. Siege of motherfucking Dragonspear.

6. warosu.org/vr/thread/5402232#p5408278

Listen to this OP, base campaign is a total slog. I'd say the first act is decent generic D&D, but as soon as you leave Neverwinter it becomes a slog for the next 70% with an ever dumber story developing. They should have just made a short and sweet campaign.

The bloat isn't even dialogue though, so much of it is filler combat with barbarians/hill giants/Luskan gangs that has almost zero connection to the main story.

There is a new chapter in the Beamdog saga of fucking fans over about NWN specifically.

NWN fans don't give a shit about Beamdog's infinity engine games because they're just fixed stories. They also don't care much about the official NWN campaigns because it's all about the modding and custom campaigns. Beamdog could replace all the npcs with rainbow colored homosexual unicorn men, and it would be at least a month before anyone notices.

>witch one first? do they tie in together? to they tie into the base module.

Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark are Part 1 and 2 of one character's story so it's best you play them in that order. The expansions reference the base module as it features the base's companions and the story of "The Hero of Neverwinter" is mentioned here and there but it's not required to play the module to understand anything that's being said, so you can skip it without hesitation.

I remember on pws nobody talked about neverwinter but every server with drow talked about a valsharess. It was so cringy but it also indicated that HotU was taken seriously but the OC was not.

Got any links for a NWN2 keygen?
I want to play online

>Original campaign is notoriously bad.
I never understood this.
I played it in 2002 and i play it every year since, and its one of my favourite games

Fork over money for a GOG key, you cheap bastard.

>NWN2
>I want to play online
user...

The game itself is just a module creator - the campaign was pushed on last second to sell it.
You're supposed to be playing with multiple people with a GM. Instead we got some 12 year old's fantasy writing attempt.

Ignoring the story for a moment though - the entire campaign is fucked as a "here's lots of loot" style gameplay. Which is clearly a problem when you're either goong to have build your character just right or get unusable shit.
There's a reason it's a fighter with long sword specizliation as reocmmended - that triggers the loot system to give you swords instead of random weapons you cannot use or at best, are just "here's a 1d4 club" over and over.
Like how you're not playing a monk but here are some monk only gloves and robes.

Again because the system is designed with multiple characters in mind, playing a wizard or sorcerer is hard mode unless you know what you're doing. Like hiring Grimgaw or Orc boy right away.

The fact that the game assumes you aren't playing a rogue/bard and can't unlock chests and dumps Tomi right out of the tutorial shows us that they knew people would just rely on a rogue since they'd hopefully pick a fighter as recommended with a longsword specialization so that you don't get too off track.

Not to mention the fucking "choices" in the campaign are shit - there is no "don't help and this happens" or "do help and this kicks off a story". It's "here's the quests, do it or not, I don't care"

Yes?

Attached: tumblr plays nwn2.jpg (1920x1080, 241K)

That server doesn't let you play that anymore. They changed all their monster character races so you're fucked and you'll never be as good as a human. It used to be quite popular and it had a lot of right wingers in their staff, but they kept fucking with it. So in a short time it went from 60 players online at night to 10 most days and occasionally more.

It was a combination of things. They started to make poorly thought out rules. They screwed with the mechanics in a way they had no fucking clue how D&D works. Finally they literally chased away groups of players for being antagonistic to their opposed alignment characters like angels and demons not getting along.

It was a big clusterfuck and a cautionary tale of mismanagement and how not to run a server. Most of the players now don't speak English and have no investment in the setting, they just try it out with friends.

Still beats BG server

Man, you must be retarded. I've played over 30k hours in this game and I've never played the OC once. You're like someone that plays an MMO for 10 years and never gets past the newbie quest.

No it doesn't, not even close. They royally fucked themselves like that meme of the kid that tries to stick a game controller up his ass during a tantrum. It never recovered and has been in a slump ever since.

The changes to the mechanics make no sense and it's an exercise in figuring out what they fucked the most. At best it's just a forgotten themepark barely operational where the rides are just straight forward dungeons with a different planar theme.

BG still has an active community, has rules that at least follow some sense of logic, and has a way your character can actually interact with the world and progress.

If you want to compare it to other servers you need to compare it to things like Tales of the Moonsea, Dragoncoast, and the Steampunk server. All like Sigil barely get any players and often become empty.

BG barely has active DMs, is biased as fuck against evil aligned players, and to top it all the main audience roleplays like 10 year olds

Dude Sigil has 10 players online and BG has 54, don't be a retard, there is no dm plot going on. Your server got fucked, that's a fact. I'm just saying the one that fucked them is themselves.

I love how NWN threads inevitably end up with people bringing all the NWN community drama and taking shots at Beamdog.

Meanwhile the Arma threads are all chilling and posting gratitude videos to Bohemia Interactive.

Sigil 6 players, BG 58 players. Who will win in the fight for relevancy?

BG has always been the most popular NWN2 server, or at least it has for years now.
It doesn't mean it's the best.
That's like saying Arelith or SInfar are the best NWN server, RP wise at least.

With great power to customize a shared game world comes great drama of whining losers.

Yeah but it's not practically dead, so it wins by default. In NWN2 you only have a handful of serious choices. BG, Haven, and some of the Euro servers. A couple of years ago you might have had a point but now you're spiting in the wind, you're in denial about reality.

NWN actually has a choice of servers. You can choose between multiple servers that all get more players than the nearly abandoned has beens of NWN2.

I'm working on a reshashed release of a nwn2 server that's been around many times. Will probably never reach 1/10 BG pop but I have fun dming and developing new classes, spells or just improving existing ones plus I love the undead creation and equipping system and the new summons I've made based on alignment

You would have more luck even releasing it for old NWN which still has more players than NWN2. Otherwise you better enjoy 0 players.

It usually achieved 20-30 players during release back in the day, but I wasn't in the team back then, I plan on making it right after years of playing nwn1&2 this time, enough so people would stay past the initial weeks anyways