Some games you play. Some games you never really leave. For thousands of players in Greece and beyond, Lineage II on NoobWars was the second kind. This is how it started, how it went quiet, and why it is coming back.
2004: a community before it was a server
noobwars.gr went online in 2004. Its earliest pages in the Wayback Machine date from April of that year. It did not start as the home of one game. It started as a Greek gaming community built by players, for players: Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike, Age of Mythology, Doom 3, Call of Duty. Every LAN-era name passed through here.
It is easy to forget what gaming looked like back then. Home connections were still a struggle, so many of us played in internet cafés. Better lines only arrived around late 2005 and 2006. Gaming was social in a way younger players may not recognise: people travelled across the city, and sometimes across the country, just to meet the players they fought and partied with every night.
2005: Lineage II NoobWars
In 2005 NoobWars launched a Lineage II server, one of the first dedicated Greek Lineage II private servers. Players downloaded the client straight from the site and never looked back. The server launched on Chronicle 1 and was later moved to Chronicle III with a quick, rough-and-ready update. It quickly built a reputation on Greek gaming forums as the cleanest L2 server in the country: anti-cheat, community first, and discussed well beyond Greece.
The community grew past its borders. The forum had Greek, Bulgarian, Polish and English sections, alongside reports, clan boards, troubleshooting and a busy media and movies section.
What it felt like
There was no Discord and no guide for everything. Nobody rushed to endgame in two days. An hour could go into a single level. You sat in town looking for a party. Adena for a teleport meant something, so you ran. Spoil, craft, soulshots, materials: nothing came easy, and that is why everything mattered.
Dion. Giran full of people. The first time you saw someone in an armor set you could only dream of. Waiting for your friends to log in:
“Where are you?” “Giran.” “Wait for me, I’m coming.”
Clan names mattered. Alliances mattered. Feuds lasted for months. The whole week led up to Sunday’s castle siege: hundreds of players outside the walls, frame rates collapsing, TeamSpeak on fire. Nobody cared, because everybody was there.
The lights go out, and a backup survives
Eventually NoobWars went dark. But on a forgotten server in Germany, a sysadmin had taken a backup just before the lights went out.
More than a decade later, the original NoobWars team went looking for it. They found it, brought it back, and with a lot of help from AI (and a lot of coffee) cleaned, repaired and revived the old forum. It is online again at archives.noobwars.gr, and thousands of screenshots from those years have been rescued with it.
2026: the awakening
NoobWars returns in 2026, led by people who were there from the beginning, including developers who worked on the project in its first years. They are joined by new team members with the experience and the will to build something worth players’ time.
The Lineage II server returns as Chronicle IV: a fresh start, built by the original team. The old game database is not part of the new server; what survived is the original forum, member accounts included, now back at archives.noobwars.gr. The countdown on the homepage points to 26 October 2026, 19:00 Greek time.
What we want is simple: a community where you can spend your time, play with your friends and have a good time, knowing the rules from day one. Clear terms, transparency and no toxicity. We are not here to relive old rivalries. We are open to players, teams, developers and communities who want to help gaming in Greece grow, just as we tried to do back then.
Where to find the official NoobWars
These are the only official NoobWars channels:
- 🌐 l2.noobwars.gr: the official Lineage II NoobWars server
- 💬 Discord: the official NoobWars Discord
- 📝 forum.noobwars.gr: the community forum
News, launch dates and the newsletter are here on noobwars.gr, and the restored original forum lives at archives.noobwars.gr.
NoobWars has a history. Now we want to give it a future. See you in Aden.