Nah, I was just saying I did not experience any of the problems you mentioned on Ephinea, and I played with a lot of hardcore players on past month. And yeah, Spuz is one of the best persons from Ephinea server, I agree with you on that.
But your experience while playing with Hardcore players was vastly different than mine, they played like normal players on my parties. Didn't see anyone leaving party afraid of dying permanently. I can understand though, why you would be mad seeing a hardcore player leaving party afraid of dying without scape dolls, but personally that never happened to me.
I don't agree on that, because it would limit the game enjoying and experience A LOT, there would be almost zero incentive to make hardcore accounts if they restricted HC players from playing with normal players. But that's not something we should discuss here.
Also @Emewn, I did not like you using my name in such way, you don't have the right to do that. Because I am giving my opinion doesn't mean I am conspiring against the server, that's dumb. Just stop with your stupid superstitions.
I played on Ultima since five years ago, I started my PSO career on this server and I've went through many things, I will never bite the hand that feeded me, it is just that I am burnt from all the drama in the community, I don't have many goals to accomplish here and lately I felt like going back to a more vanilla experience.
The point I was trying to express is that SonicTeam Armor as it is (vanilla) already broken enough and fits perfectly the monster buff we have on Ultima. If we were to nerf the monsters back to their vanilla properties (i.e. weaker), that would make STA even more broken. You would take absolutely zero damage from vanilla monsters. The custom weapons we have are meant to be used with the buffed monsters, if we were to turn monsters back to their original properties, a major overhaul of items would have to be done, because our custom weapons would be absolutely broken.
Which makes me believe that at this point it might be a bad idea changing monster status.
The point is that buffering the monster EVP requires weapons to have more Hit%, but the Hit% drop average on weapons didn't increase as far as I know. That means that weapons that would perform decently on a vanilla server, don't perform so well here because they are much more prone to miss (not land their attacks). Kikori covered this question quite well.
For a few years I thought the Hit drop % on weapons have been lowered, because I personally never saw weapons dropping with more than 60% on Hit, I've seen like 3 weapons with above 90% Hit Dropping on past 3 years, a 85 Hit Arms, a 100% Hit Raygun and a 90% Hit Gungnir probably? All other weapons with Hit above 90% (You can gte 85's from RoCT and 90's from CCC) are custom made only. We are a community of 11 years long and on all of those years, I don't think any legit weapon (non GM-made weapons) with that amount of Hit has been found.
Even @Saber +7 for some time thought that Hit drop % was nerfed on Ultima, and after further investigation, looks like it wasn't after all. We are just all unlucky.
Or maybe we don't have enough players to spam quests and find such drops.
Anyways, the existence of Donation Tickets covers this problem well, it would be interesting to have Hit Events at least one time per year though.
And no, I'm not against donations, even though some people say Ultima is "pay-to-win", being able to add Hit% using DTs gives the players the opportunity to improve their weapons without massively grind for days or weeks for a specific weapon status, and covers an aspect that was missing from vanilla PSO. I've never donated a single cent to have my weapons with maxed Hit. I've earned DTs from trading and made use of the few Hit Events that were hosted Ultima to achieve this goal.
That's true @Larva, but when I say about our community being toxic, I am talking about the weird dramas being allowed on our forum's shoutbox or left without the proper moderation, all of those personal status updates spam in a row and so on. I know moderators can't be available all the time, but if something wrong keeps recurring, then something should be done about that.
About what happens on reddit on other communities, nothing can be done sadly. I know we can't stop other communities from talking bad things about us. But I still think our forums could use of a slightly stronger and rigid moderation.
As @Patrick Bell said, enhanced EVP killed the purpose of most S-Rank weapons, because their ATA wasn't buffed as well. Mr. Naka's Cards killed the purpose of doing Challenge Mode, which was to obtain the so special S-Rank weapons. As it currently is, S-Rank weapons are only desirable for Zalure special, otherwise, TypeSH/Shots, Arrest Needle, Boomerang, Kiss of Death and Ultima Reaper replaced the S-Ranks since years ago.