Kikori

Random still runs the risk of being unused. Biased would at least align with useful times. I'd personally stand by activity-based because even low activity periods with a chance of triggering it would still see it trigger from time to time, and it does make sense to have it happen when the most people are on to benefit from it.

While reading some of the older posts about randomization of Happy Hour, I'm suddenly drawing inspiration from Discord. I've got a friend who made a bot, and some features in it. Among them a PvM style minigame of the people against monsters he makes. Our activity on the server is logged and treated as gaining experience, as well as contributing to the spawning of these creatures. He's made it so both the amount of content we put out and the amount of people involved are used in the calculation for spawning creatures. At the present, it basically works with the likelihood of a creature appearing increasing the more people talk within the most recent 20 minute window. Nine people say something within the past 20 minutes, the odds jump to like 15% chance to spawn with a respectable message. Activity drops off and only two people talk for 20 minutes, the chance drops to like 0.75% or so. After a spawn, there's an invisible minimum wait timer before the next spawn to avoid everyone staying around and spamming to force more spawns. This is with a group of roouuughly 75 people. I wonder how this kind of "activity increases the chance" treatment would work for Ultima. Look at the general levels of activity when an event is on and off, figure out what times get a respectable happy hour distribution among the most active time zones (US, EU, Pacific), find a calculation that works where enough activity can trigger happy hour. Give it a trigger that involves activity, such as the killing of monsters. If 10 hunters are actively killing monsters in the past hour, each kill calculates a 0.001% chance to trigger happy hour. If 30 hunters are actively killing monsters in the past hour, each kill as a 0.01% chance to trigger happy hour. After Happy Hour ends, deadlock it from triggering again for x hours so it has little chance to trigger during no-man's hours or immediately upon ending. Note: These numbers are likely INCREDIBLY inaccurate to a good Happy Hour distribution; it's the concept more than the final result. The worst you could get is a single fanatic running high-kill quests as if unsealing things and triggering it at odd times once in a while so the lockout timer is going on during a busy period. Note I only described three general time zones; with the current limit of 12 hours possible per day, this accounts for a charitable GM giving a locked out time zone a freebie Happy Hour.

Kiikori. Kikori. Striker of Chao, V801, etc.

Heh, seems I met you in-game before here. Welcome to Ultima.

To be more specific about it, Individual Drops splits drops to be totally separate between all characters in the same room. The chance at you seeing a drop is reduced a bit more the more people join, but the chance of a monster actually dropping something for someone never really decreases. Shared Drops rolls a flat calculation for a drop and puts it out for everyone to see, first come first served. There's a pretty common visual glitch in which you'll see the item after it's been picked up by someone else.

Good luck with the appeal.

A few small quality of life improvement thoughts. 1.) Allow bank styles to be saved the same way drop styles are. 2.) Can we adjust the roaming NPCs in towns to just sit somewhere obscure? It's annoying that they seem to act as heat-seeking missiles against players as they pass by. 2.5) If not, can we adjust something in their code to allow players to pass through them the same way players can pass through each other? 3.) Happy Hour's timer could perhaps be displayed upon login as if the /hh command has been used, or as a variable in the "Players" / "Parties" box when selecting the Ultima server on login. 4.) Probably another big thought for a little fix, but is there a way to remove the code that blocks out the requirements to use equipment and displays "CANNOT EQUIP" instead? I know my FOnewearl can't wear a 4-slotted Electro Frame, but I'd like to be able to see its requirements while on my FOnewearl to know if my RAcaseal could use it. Or if this HUcast I'm helping has hit the level for a spare 4-slot Armor I have lying around. And so on. The [X] next to the item name can certainly stay, and in my opinion, that's indicator enough. 5.) Website-side, could the Chatbox page be given a proper chat-style user list of who's logged in or not? The "Who is Online" list doesn't actively update with people coming in and out, after all. 6.) Website-side again, currently the PSOBB General forum has so many pinned topics that there's space for a whopping two more shuffle-able topics to be displayed. It's an odd day to have to check page two to find still-new posts. Is there any chance of cleaning this up a bit? I see a few guides (which we have a separate forum for), some that don't seem relevant due to updates elsewhere on the Internet (VoiP vs. Discord for communication, for example), and a Navigation Topic that could be expanded upon much more to keep pinned topics easily accessible.

Welcome back to the game. Thankfully getting started is easy enough with how much mid-game stuff is floating around and quick the grind is.

This is the Internet, everything is or becomes a meme. I'd nominate @MadOrNah myself. He seems pretty popular, relaxed, active, and fun-loving. What more do you need in a small, casual place like this?

They pulled the plug on hosting servers themselves, don't actively sell the game anymore, and haven't put their game up for adoption of any reverse compatible consoles that could do the job for them. As long as all three of those are true, there's little to no chance of anything going south. After a while, game companies simply stop caring. That's the reason websites like old-games can exist, or servers like these.

Given I played years on Gamecube with nothing but offline vanilla Episode 1 and 2, my entire view of PSO is basically like realizing there's more than one single room in a whole house. Two months of this have absolutely shattered every record I had playing solo, except time on a character. I'm still catching up to all the "changes" by my perspective.

179. Sneak attack by Serverus, the lobby isn't in Happy Hour mode.

179

Something simple, then. Can we make it so all menus allow you to loop from the top of the list to the bottom without reversing direction and manually going back? It happens so often that choosing Episode 4 ends up being Episode 1 because seemingly every menu ever except that one specific spot allows looping menus. (And/or moving Episode selection to the server creation to remove one window from the process altogether.)

Confirmed Pinkal getting Banana Cannon from Ultimate Dorphon Eclair.

It might help to make a list of which 30's you do and don't have, or want. I don't have any except Jellen I think.

Bleh. Another someone leaving before I get a chance to be able to run alongside 'em. Hopefully you enjoy yourself with whatever you go to do next. From the sounds of it with the reactions here, whatever community gets you next is gonna be lucky for it.

If this topic's up, the event is officially started.

> "General times", "Average times" More frustration if they don't keep up on that timer. As if it's an iron-clad job. > "saves them some frustration of not having a request hanging for longer than needed" Wait in a lobby until a gm comes... who isn't always marked or known as one to start with. Either I suck at typing or I don't understand priorities by trying to keep it a casual experience with some semblance of structure.

Which is precisely why I think a published schedule of general times someone can be on would be a good idea. People would know to avoid you unless it's the specific potential hour; if it doesn't get them their stuff faster, it at least saves them some frustration of not having a request hanging for longer than needed.

Unrelated to the issue of the economy. I've seen and heard a fair bit of people struggling to find a GM to redeem tickets for rewards. Seems like it should be an easy fix, though. Server side, I could see it perhaps working with giving a single item at a time. potentially a way to fill out a form with guild card and character name so it automatically tries to add the item to the toon's Character bank. I don't know how adding stats to weapons works, so I'm not sure if it would be possible to treat this the same way. Forum side, it shouldn't be too hard to get the GMs to compile a list of average times to be expected on, so people can have an idea when to look for instead of ask at random throughout the day and hope for the best. Keeping that up to date could turn to using a topic as a way for people to post saying "I'd like a GM for redemption" and GMs claiming them to schedule it.

It takes a strong person to stand up for something like that. Unfortunately, in an economy's case, it also means taking a stronger person to do without what they want while standing up for it. The action is always harder than the word. For better or worse, I'm okay with mediocrity because fun trumps pixels, but I do have a few thoughts and want to voice them. When I first played alongside CannaBeast in my first days, he told me a bit of the complications behind the economy when I asked him the conversion rate between PD and PT. I'm no marketeer or savvy merchant by any means, but when $1 can be four quarters when dealing with a direct trade but three gumballs, costing a quarter apiece, a money system is broken. I don't remember the exact conversion, but he told me very different values for PD:DT depending on if it was in goods or direct exchanges. Idea 1: Remove this discrepancy, if it exists, by solidifying the exchange rates of currency items. This could come with an idea of turning Donation Tickets into an actual, tangible item in the game. Instead of using donation tickets on the site as a measure, make a yellow, orange, white, bubblegum pink item box made just for tickets that allows people to directly exchange currency for currency in-game. Perhaps even a quest that allows an NPC to convert one way or the other, which would be an absolutely unbiased way to convert and set the metric. I have no clue what the rate is or should be, but I'll bet there are many more experienced marketeers around who could come up with numbers to take a good, solid average of. Since then, I've heard a fair few tales of some items being "made" exceptionally rare because a few spiteful figures bought up the goods and proceeded to cut their ties from the server entirely. Particularly true of the Dark Meteor / Dark Flow pair, as I understood it. If a server like this is able to keep track at any time of what someone has on them at the time of deletion, or if a character has not been logged into in x amount of time... Idea 2: Find a way to recirculate the valuables removed from the server by such grief tactics. This would likely come with some sort of revision in the terms of service that includes a note about a character being considered abandoned after a duration, and to leave a note with a GM to flag the character to be preserved for extra time until a check-in / renewal date. Re-circulation could be as easy as a periodic auction, as subtle as putting something into the drop table of an event, or as blatant as a GM-hosted in-game event like guessing a room's password. Or, hell, community vote again. Give people the power to decide if someone really deserves that $65 Wedding Dress. Unfortunately, neither of these is an assurance that people will play fair or get along. Greedy people will greed what they can, because their pixels matter. And I'll admit even I like it when my pixels have the right numbers. Everyone does. It's hard to please everyone with something, but when the idea is that too few people control too much wealth and too many people are left behind with no way to balance a three-digit donation to a game into their personal finances is the norm, it's an easy bet which side is worth pleasing. People who farm fair and square and sell fair and square exist, sure. But I know I'd rather place my faith in 90% of the community enjoying at least a 1/256 chance at, as an example, a Centurion/Arms any time of the year. I only managed to help a guy get one single Centurion/Power during the event, but I know it'd be useful to have another out of the blue, even if it takes 1/1024 Eclairs to get it. And it may just be me, but some of these event weapons I'm hearing about that are years old... Well, let's just say Runescape has demonstrated for all online games that a limited number of items dropping in a short amount of time and becoming trophy items or measures of wealth is a bad idea. Idea 3: Allow old event drops and rare items to be obtainable, even if at "impossible" odds. Here's a hint: when you run out of trees because you cut too many down, you learn to sew seeds and make trees grow again. Even if it takes patience. Hell, playing the Gamecube solo on my Pinkal FOnewearl I somehow got a Red AND Yellow Merge. Entirely solo. 1/6501, 1/5516 chances for the barriers alone, folks. The section ID cards are anywhere from 1/18000 to 1/40000. And currently the Heavenly series is a freakin' 5/16 across the board with the right ID and monster; only someone out for that one last pixel bank bump up could say a 1/1000 drop chance would break the chance to market things properly.

So I can freely pop any HP Materials and that be that? Sweet!

I've finally started amassing enough of a material count to consider how to spend them. Problem is, I was derpy at day one of playing and used any material I got, not knowing there's a cap. And after asking around back then, there was a bit of ambiguity about HP/TP materials possibly not stacking into the max material count--like I could use 150 HP and 150 Mind/Power as a FOnewearl. Can someone clarify if it's a flat 150 for all materials, or 150 HP/TP and 150 all others? It doesn't make sense to be the latter, but I'd rather be safe. And can't find an answer when searching here yet.

As Hentaimio said herself when I got the shot: "Rawr"