Saber +7

https://4waypb.com has been undergoing some massive updates in the past month or so. A lot of people have had input and have seen updates over that time. Pretty much EVERYTHING about the site has changed. This iteration of the site uses https://www.speedrun.com as a reference heavily and has many other changes from the old. If you're not familiar with what 4-Way PB is, it essentially is a record book of top time attack / speed run times for Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst on Ephinea / Unseen, Ultima, old Schthack, and then the GameCube version of the game as well. In the past I have done nearly all the maintaining of times manually with some help from phelix. This will no longer be the case on the new site. Moving forward users may create an account, log in, and submit times with a simple form (https://imgur.com/Szm7zbh). From there the times will be validated (https://imgur.com/2xecutG) based on the proof submitted (video or image) by one of the "moderators" which include a handful of players: myself, mt, reason, plx, armand, shiida, spuz, and probably some others I may be forgetting. This project is not complete by any means and truthfully is even missing some relevant content from the old site such as TEAMZ data among other things. As always feel free to point out any bugs or mistakes on the site. It will continue to be worked on to improve and add features. Special thanks to Soly as he does and did all the heavy lifting. I had little to no part in the programming side of things beyond design and basic level input on function. Feel free to sign-up and start submitting your times (https://4waypb.com/auth/register/), one thing to note is that for now accounts are approved manually throughout the day so when you sign up expect some delay in account activation. Change Log: -Overall interface / design update -User registration / login -User submitted times -Records page -Removed Episode column -Removed Team column (plans for something in its place) -PB / No-PB runs now have a column to denote via regular colored Twins icon and a mono-chrome version. -Rank now has a column to easily check the standings -Players / Class filter must now include any selections vs. any entry including any one of the selected values -Rules now live in their own page and have more detail (still being updated) -Removed unrelated content such as the entire Miscellaneous section, some items under Concepts, and the Server tab.

PSOw is probably just wrong. Just refer to this. It’s more compact and definitely more tested / accurate. https://wiki.pioneer2.net/index.php?title=Enemies#Ultimate

If there MUST be an "event" on for the server to remain captivating then there's something systemically wrong with the way the server is being run.

Ultima already has a handful of quests that the average party likely can't clear. CCC, CF4, RoW, some of Shiidas customs and I'm sure others I am forgetting. Ultima actually has the most consistent and bountiful quest collection of any of the private BB servers. In addition to this Ultima has a vast sea of custom items. New content in the form of quests or items isn't the issue.

Why even bring me up. I've hardly been hanging around here to begin with. Literally just logging for sporadic TA. Aren't you in the midst of your own manic power trip son? https://imgur.com/a/XnK1kAX Your own "co-workers" don't even want to deal with you. No players take you serious. You've left all the Discords except your final bastion in the Scht BB Discord. The only reason you still even have power there to begin with is because no one has seen the server owner in months. Just sit down. Go do something productive outside of PSO or something.

Very well done, I’ll get this uploaded next time I’m home and I’ll start running again as well.

Something for fun, it's obviously not super well practiced and there's some unlucky stuff in the last room. Enjoy.

Looooool this exactly why you’re not borrowing it. Imagine asking and begging someone to borrow something and making a thread crying about it when you get told no. You’ve done this in the past before and I’ve not even replied to you and you still cried in the shoutbox. Why would anything change in the past like 2 years you’ve been messaging me?

Imagine writing admitting that you didn’t even bother to check to know what’s up with these weapons. Obviously never tested them in game either. literal clown show 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Refuting to add new items especially the ones you want isn't purging the server of everything that makes it unique. Just because something exists elsewhere doesn't mean that it can't be used in another place. HBR is quite literally a Sega concept. Check out GBR from Phantasy Star Universe. It's not a "unique" idea to Ephinea. I think that Ultima peak (few years ago) and Ephinea peak (currently) are roughly the same. They've certainly matched Ultimas past peaks. There was literally one week where some famous streamer was playing Ultima and our counts went sky high. That doesn't really count. I think not a single player riding that wave is still around. You "grinded" all those through custom missions that more or less break the balance of the in game mechanisms used to spend them. It's not the same. Of course when WoI has guaranteed PD you've found a lot. Even if you're some how claiming to NEVER have gotten a PD as a quest reward, set PD, or from WoI area clear... where do you think the majority of the PDs that you traded come from? All those PDs are "illegitimate". It doesn't phase you here, but you should how other players else where play ALL DAY for that kinda stuff since they don't have DTs to literally item maker their gear or broken PD markets to sphere any item they touch. You don't ever have to donate to get DTs. I haven't personally donated for anything other than a mag or section ID change in the past like 5 years yet I've spent probably nearly a 1000 DTs. It is literally what you're suggesting. This game doesn't have some wild in depth crafting system like PSO2 or some other. Adding attributes is the "simple" crafting system (animal parts and Photon Crystals as well) and what do you figure the currency for that is? I am certainly not suggesting that we add ANY of the unique weapons that's correct. There's surely items to add that can in some way be impactful without power creeping too much or making entire classes more ass cheeks than they already are. Regardless, new items aren't really the fix anyway. You say you have everything YOU want, but I am sure if I had scanned your bank I could come up with 10+ items without thinking too hard that you're missing or that you need to work on. This is ultimately a YOU problem. I guess the same goes for you... "insistence that every single player adhere to your definition of fun is childish". SS and DF certainly have the higher ceiling compared to DF (particularly in party play). Something that also makes DM "worse" is that you have to play a RA to use it and give up all the things that HU offers. That doesn't mean pretty much any player can't just grab a DM and clear whatever they want (albeit slowly) without thinking. Most of this server is already DM spam because it's fairly strong on RAcast. Now imagine how much DM you'd see when you combine it with HUcast ATP + Serene Swan + Dark Flow + all the other things that already make HUcast > RAcast. It wouldn't be fun, you'd clear every wave in one combo even more than it's already done. I never once mentioned TA. I probably just wouldn't use those weapons in TA and would keep them banned as they always have been. I'd also like to point out that most TA on Ultima is actually done on the real server. I do think that, but a lot of players don't and that is thanks to Dark Meteor. It's where it would quite literally be the strongest due to his ATP so I think it's only natural to shift there. Sure you can fuck around and play it on classes that it's going to be weak on. I think most people after realizing that they can do the same style of play but take off a few attacks from every enemy just by switching class we'd see a big time shift. Why do you think RAcast is the most popular class to use Dark Meteor on? Because that's where it's strongest currently. I am not suggesting to "reinvent" Ultima. There's certainly a way to use the GBR Sega style of system that in some was is unique to Ultima. The quests could pop up and rotate during down time between events that earn you boosts that activate only during the events. This wouldn't change anything regarding weapon / class meta, but would offer incentives to play without an event up while also promoting possibly lesser played quests and rewarding the player for it down the line when it matters most. http://re-psupedia.info/GUARDIANS_Boost_Road#Point_system you can read about the system as Sega designed it here. Ephinea already has had prime Ultima numbers. Schthack obviously had the highest peak, but something you're not acknowledging is that it was before they were anything more than a rough recreation of official servers without any crazy boosted weapons, items, or tech boosts. Not to mention times have changed, there's more servers now. Back then that was the only place to play BB "privately". That's because players like yourself refuse to open up to the idea even though it's the entire core of the issue you bring up.

I think the "short lifespan" is directly related to how Ultima operates in regards to DTs, Nakas Cards, and set PDs / quest reward PDs. I will go more into this later in the post. Every user is different, not everyone can be PSO lifer like myself or some others. That's the way of the game. Hardly anyone plays years on end the way Shiida, myself, or a few others around here do. The quantity of huntable items is NOT the problem with Ultima, or PSO in general. The most populous places haven't added new items yet they keep their user engaged / active while also attracting new players. I think this directly reflects the issue with DTs specifically and as the life time PSO player that you are you should know this. Photon Drops are the end game currency you speak of. Think about playing JUST RAcast on regular PSO:BB. You have to sphere a set of at the minimum: Baranz Launcher, Charge Arms, Charge Vulcan, Heaven Striker, M&A60 Vise, Excalibur (4 separate ones), Daylight Scar, and Cannon Rouge. Imagine doing that legit. If all your weapons started with 0 attributes and like 35 hit (which ANY user would be grateful for in REGULAR BB, besides photon weapons and Baranz Launcher which get 50h in a different method) you'd be looking at 5120 PDs (of course you could be lucky and lower this by finding with attributes). Then consider S-Rank weapons that require specials to be added. As a RAcast you're looking at Arrest Needle, Berserk Needle, Hell Needle, Zalure Rifle, Hell Scythe, Hell Shot, and maybe even some others I am forgetting, but I'll only calculate these. That's an additional 300 PDs. You're looking at a grand total of 5420 PDs right there. No set boxes, no WoI, no RoCT reward, none of that. That's more than most of us have found even with these things. DTs mitigate ALL of this. That's just one class. It obviously gets more expensive the more classes you decide to play. I agree something should be done to address the way the population fluctuates based around events, but I don't think this is the solution. More items will never be the answer. We'll wind right back up where we are in like 2 years. These weapons should stay that way and for good reason. They're all very boring to use and take a lot of fun out of the game (more so than the Dark Meteor already does). Imagine everyone rolling around on HUcast with Dark Meteor... Would be stupid. This is probably the literal darkest path Ultima could go. I am not sure how much you've seen any of these weapons in action... It's really not as cool as you think. It's literally not hurting anyone that these items aren't in the server. If anything it's better that less and less people know about them as time passes. No one should've had them in the first place really. Again I can't stress it enough that these items are not as "cool" as you think they are. They nearly quite literally game breaking. Especially DM Storm. Some people get lucky, last year one fella found 6 or 7 STAs. In the past a handful of people found double digit PGFs. This type of things may "extend" the lifetime of PSO by a year or 2. After that it literally ruins the playability of the game because again these weapons are a lot stronger / dumber than you think they are. I am going to talk about both of these in the same because the reply is sorta the same, and honestly sort of the same as above. People are lucky, these things get found quickly and from there it's over with. I agree that newer players thoughts / feelings should have lesser impact than the more tenured fellas, but this idea you have is not the way to go. Not just whole weapons would be invalidated, entire classes would be deemed worthless. Leaderboards would be great, and they've been talked about for years. We've just never got them, but you can check out https://psostats.com/ and https://ephinea.pioneer2.net/leaderboards/ to see all the possible things (there's more than this as well) that could be tracked beyond who has some items. Ultima has been around at this point longer than any other Blue Burst private server, and will continue to be. Currently the most played versions of PSO are the ones most similar to the release and GameCube which has only really had custom quests added. Taking a page from their book would likely be more beneficial than trying to reinvent the wheel. Ultimately the Ephinea HBR system seems to be the most engaging and longest lasting way to keep players involved. There's definitely a way to make the system more unique to Ultima that more or less incorporates the main idea of said system. New items are clearly not the way to go as other servers have proved that. Ultima in general is certainly in need of some minor QoL fixes, there's no doubt. In order for "longevity" to be added to the game DTs need to be limited / removed and the game would pretty much take of the rest.

I like martikush. Another player as bitter and devote to the subject of pso as me.

Welcome

That’s not a custom weapon. It’s an S-Rank Needle with Hell. Available to any player who completes challenge mode and collects PDs to use at Gallons Shop. You can also get one with Mr. Nakas Business Cards, DTs, or player trading.

This is one of the slowest ways to play that will make all runs you’re in cumbersome. Don’t do this lol

You can see in the “Notes:” column that some mags simply can’t have PBs. Not a bug of the game. https://wiki.pioneer2.net/index.php?title=Mags

No, it’s always been on Ultima. It’s probably honestly better than it was in 2010 due to upgraded host quality and slightly cleaner code. Enemies can “desync” and be in different places and doing different animations on different clients. This is present on EVERY form of PSO.

I wouldn’t even bother comparing the two games in this way. Damage cancel is an intended “feature” to a degree. It’s just a little fucked up on Ultima.

DMC is short for "damage cancel". It happens on all version of PSO to some degree all the way back to the GameCube version (I am not familiar enough with Dreamcast V1 / V2 to talk about those versions) and is related to the way the server receives incoming damage packets from the client(s). While not a bug, there's varying degrees of intensity of DMC among the existing servers. I personally use GameCube as a metric for what it's supposed to feel like. However Ultima has the worst DMC of all the servers I have played on to the point where you could call it a bug. It's completely nullified on Ultima when more than one person attacks the same enemy and it's beyond annoying. Pretty much every combat action can cause DMC on Ultima. Normal, hard, and special attacks, traps, techs including Zalure / Jellen. There's solutions for this that for one reason or another haven't been implemented on Ultima. There will always be some limitations when it comes to a "DMC patch" (as it's called on Unseen / Ephinea) such as two players starting a Charge Vulcan combo at nearly the exact same time. Some amount of damage in that situation will be cancelled on those servers, but not whole combos like here. I can't speak too much for the Ephinea DMC patch, but it's probably nearly as good as the Unseen patch that doesn't have damage cancel on traps, techs (including Jellen / Zalure), and instead of actually canceling attacks that are done at the exact same time it just accepts the higher damage numbers and cancels who ever is weaker, but if the attacks are staggered at pretty much any time interval it will accept both damage sources. This is a little more robust than the way GameCube works, but GameCube pretty much just has restrictions of waiting the slightest bit of time between these actions to avoid cancelling damage. However, it's a lot easier to "wait" that time there because characters move slower (walk before run) as well as attack slower (25% attack speed boost only)

IronSheiks comment is probably the most in-depth on how to get your character in the position to be better, and in general become more comfortable with the environment that is Ultima. I'd definitely recommend reading his comment in full. Almost all these posts are about weapons / gear, but not actually about how to play better. A little can carry you a long lay way on Ultima. Wade alluded to that with this comment. Ultima for starters does not have a viable One-Player Mode so playing alone here is something meant more for people that are geared / experienced / familiar. It's a bit of a handicap on early player development especially if you're starting from square one (which is totally fine). If you could get your hands on a simple pair of Charge Vulcans / Charge Raygun and Frozen Shooter you could mostly play to the same level as some of these lads regardless of your materials and other stuff if you know how to PLAY. I've first hand witnessed players that have all the fancy end game gear play so bad that runs would legitimately be faster if they just AFK'd or left. Gear is not the end all be all of PSO gameplay and especially not until you're trying to become "competitive". It takes a long time to get familiar and comfortable with PSO, its monsters, and it's quests because there's so many of them and they all have their own nuances and little details. It can be really hard to describe certain things over text, but I will do my best. As you branch out from TTF and start playing quests with other people if you start paying really close attention to how monsters behave (movement, attack patterns, spawn animations) and which monsters in which quests need to be killed / handled before other monsters you can really propel your gameplay from bad / decent / good to superior. As simple as PSO seems if you take the time to "critically" think about the quests you chose to play and which parts are giving you or parties you're in struggles you'll find that there's going to be almost always be a variety of ways to break individual spawns down to a level that you can handle. One of the nice parts of PSO is that each individual quest (almost all of them) the enemies are set in stone meaning they will spawn the same way every time you play a given quest and just memorizing that and knowing where to stand based off that to either be safe or in position to attack will separate you from beginner type game play. I think this is sorta long enough as is, but if you ever have particular questions about combat in PSO or just want to know more in general feel free to say so either here or PM. There's websites that are gold mines for the fundamentals of combat of PSO that I can refer you to and quite literally 1000s of videos to refer to about cleaning your game play up and understanding the core combat of this game regardless of your gear / level. Edit: Something I'll add that in general applies to almost all quests is that controlling spawns is key. There's a lot of ways to do this. I am sure you're already familiar with Freeze Traps and specials like Blizzard and Arrest. These are tools you can employ all throughout the game on practically every spawn to break them down to become more favorable for you and your party. Once a spawn or set of spawns starts moving and entering attack animations and things like that there's potential for "disastrous" (it's just PSO so worst case you virtually die and reset lol) things to happen.

You can find old pictures on Ephinea selfie thread and I think you’d be sad that I’m nothing how you’d imagine way to always make it about me though. Glad to know I capture that much of your head space

This is elite. Can't wait to hear a reply from Usagi or maybe even she'll vanish lmaooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Bro gonna have to give mio his items back.

I feel like what you mean to say here is that because S-Ranks are outclassed that people aren't playing 1/3 (depends on how you view multi-mode and one-player mode) of the games available modes. It's totally fine that new weapons outclass S-Ranks. It's not fine that this in turn renders Challenge Mode useless. This isn't really relevant, but Blizzard Needle is not something that is used in the regular PSO. I agree in general that Needle weapons are generally neglected, but that's because there's no Type version of them. I think this is a very easy fix. I don't really think this is as you say among "3 major ones". Soul Booster would likely be the next combiner used for an item, but Ultimas issues are not related to lack of items in any way. I don't think this is a necessarily a good solution. Launchers sort of suck so I'm not going to even address this. There could definitely be a new Needle introduced to the game that's in the exact same vein as say Type SH/Shot relative to the S-Rank Shot. Same ATA, but you can add whatever special and hit with DTs. It could just be a standard drop somewhere outside of MotV and IDS as those are way busted for hunting. Ideally it would replace some regular no event drop because those tables are boring as hell and offer nearly nothing. Anything relating a GM redeeming for you is zzz. None of Ultimas issues are directly related to the lack of items. Ultima has A LOT of weapons / items. An optimal Ultima inventory pretty much has no weapons in common with that of a vanilla or GC inventory. The issues are the core systems related to gameplay and I agree that Challenge Mode serving no function is one of them. Changing the rewards is not too hard and is something I think should definitely be looked into. It's really hard to say what because in vanilla play CM adds an insane amount of replayability due to how the rewards function within Gallons Shop and the fact PDs are a little harder to come by. If Challenge Mode S-Rank clear times were made like 2 or 3 hours harder and allowed you to add hit to your weapons in 5 hit increments then it'd probably be more played than Normal Mode during non-events. This would be cool to me and also add a partial fix to the issue with DTs.