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Zynetic

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Zynetic last won the day on July 22 2021

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  1. Being vanilla is not necessarily a perk, I'd just say it's the overall design of having a game that respects the time you put into it, and also allowing you to play at any time without feeling like you're wasting your time. Ephinea is a server where you're making progress entirely on your own schedule, you could play 10 hours a day or 10 hours a month, and you'd never feel like you're "falling behind" in any way either - your progression is on your own schedule. Missing an event is no big deal either, they give nice little boosts but don't have anything to really worry about. Therefore if Ultima was to also follow this philosophy, I personally think it would do a lot better. While time gated stuff is working for modern games as a business model, I think someone coming back to PSO is mostly trying to avoid that sort of stuff. For what it's worth gear treadmills are totally fine but it has to be relatively frequent to keep people coming back, like something new to farm every 3 months or so.
  2. (This is Matt from Ephinea, by the way) I totally understand where you're coming from with this, but Ultima's current low population count comes from a few factors. New items and hunts can pad the game out and increase the longevity of the game to a degree, but it won't fix all the problems with the game at all, plus your proposal also causes some other issues which may even hurt the population or turn people away in the long run. During Ephinea's early days, we also had issues with low player count outside of events; in fact, we used to also hit single digit numbers on some days too, and playing outside of events was just something you didn't do. Low population begets low population, it's a bit of a catch-22 unfortunately, and getting out of that rut is hard. Many players will leave a server for another that may not quite be their cup of tea because "it has people". To fix this, we didn't do unique things between events, or added new items or anything like that, we did what you may think is unthinkable: We nerfed events hard so they stopped being powerful, and there is no exclusive or major advantage to playing them, it's just a fun time with some extra boosts. Naturally, this had some negative reactions at first, but as you can probably see, it has paid off. See, when events or boost periods (such as Happy Hours) are powerful, they are detrimental to a game's long life and population, because what they do is make the regular game not feel like it is worth playing. Why would somebody get online to hunt a Frozen Shooter now, when they can wait for Happy Hours or a Rare Enemy boost and get it in a fraction of the time? In context for Ultima, there are two issues related to this: Happy Hours / Weekend Boosts Exclusive Event Items In regards to Happy Hours, they essentially make the game not worth playing for hunts, because why get online when you can just do something else and hop on for Happy Hours, and get your item 3x faster? Because of this particular feature, it lowers the population during normal times, and as mentioned before, a lowered population creates an even lower population, because what's the fun of a multiplayer game if it's a ghost town? If normal times are unpopulated, many people will also just forget about the game too, so Happy Hours will not actually bring everyone back (like, you can see this in action in the most recent Phantasy Star title, New Genesis, they make it so you can't make progress except at certain times, and lots of people are just logging off and forgetting about it). Secondly, Ultima has a lot of extra items that are stronger than the standard official set of items, and these items are what I will call "gameplay critical". A "gameplay critical" item is one that is considered a staple, or adds some sort of extra tool or power to your arsenal. Because of this, players also feel that it is not worth playing except during events. Why bother hunting something like a 50H Baranz Launcher when it will just be replaced by Dark Meteor? You might as well just not play and wait for Christmas instead, and this also applies to so many of the custom items here, as they are just straight up better than all the items you can get during normal times. Nobody wants to invest time into something that they know will just be outclassed by something they can get later. Like, does anyone actually hunt Hard/Very Hard rares? No, they jush rush to Ultimate and skip to the final thing to not waste their time. In Ephinea, the only items that are exclusive to events are those that are cosmetic in nature. There are no "gameplay critical" items obtainable through events (except maybe Drill Launcher, I forgot about that, maybe I should do something about that). Things like Mag Cells and joke weapons are the only things that you can get exclusively, although they're not the only items of course. So, what's my point? While there is a sort of "issue" with DTs and whatnot allowing you to get perfect items, depending on how you look at it anyway, I think the biggest issue is actually that Ultima is not a very good server for pick up and play, with many boosts and items being timegated. This just keeps people away in regular times and if you're not actively playing, you are very likely to just not play again, because the game doesn't actually respect your own schedule, it expects you to play when the game says so if you want to maximise your time. In regards to your proposal, it actually fixes nothing, and actually causes more issues than it resolves. As mentioned prior, people just want to hunt for the things that are the best, so what will happen here is that everyone will just focus all their time and effort on hunting the "Ultima Photon" and its related items. Other items will just fall by the wayside, and the only content that will be ran are the ones that give you the best rate of Ultima Photon. What your proposal does is not actually increase the longevity of the game, it just changes what you are doing instead. It will only add something new for those who have played already, and those who are new will just have the same experience as before in terms of play time, because now they just skip over many other things that are staples today, and beeline for these items instead. Secondly, it is yet another timegated piece of content. This is something that is only obtainable through non-events. Since these items are so much stronger than the others, what this actually means is that events are now practically worthless, and what you'll have is good population throughout non-events, and lowered population during events (so actually the Ultima Photon is kind of the event now?). All you're doing is flipping the script (although of course there's more non-event time than event time, but still). Also while it's a scavenger hunt at first, most people do not participate in that, and just wait for everything to be found. (sauce: We run an event like this on Ephinea and it's extremely common lol) Lastly, new things are not actually new content in a sense, not with how people actually play and approach games. For a piece of content to actually be an addition, you must be careful that the new content does not replace other content in some way. This is very hard to do. To be quite blunt: If Dark Meteor Storm exists, what incentive do people have to hunt the regular Dark Meteor? All you're doing here is shifting the content that is considered "worthwhile" or "playable", while not actually adding anything interesting. I'm very careful about this on Ephinea, we add custom quests all the time, but before any of them get through, I vet them to make sure that they do not replace current quests. If a quest with 20 Girtablulus was to be added, nobody would have any incentive to play the other quests with them, such as NMU5 or WoL4 or MA4C, so what is actually happening here is that content is *replaced*, not *added* so to speak. For example I completely nuked Path to Salvation, because it was the only Ruins quest that people were playing, since obviously it's like the best for every hunt, so the game became a lot more boring after a while. If you want to add new content in the way you're proposing, it must be done constantly, which means that everything is kind of subject to planned obsolescence, because what people want is power. This is a successful model, but it requires a lot of work and also the right audience as well, and I would kind of garner that anyone playing PSO kind of does it mostly casually and wouldn't appreciate their gear being outclassed when they take a break, but I may be wrong here. So, if I had to give any advice for Ultima's player population, I would suggest the following: All "gameplay critical" items must be obtainable at all times. By putting these things behind events, it only discourages people from playing at regular times. This covers absolutely everything from tools to weapons to frames to any powerful mags or anything you can think of that changes gameplay. You can make the items obtainable in whatever way you like (quests, combinations, drops, whatever). Happy Hours and Green Name boosts are bad for the game and really should be done away with (people have asked me for this on Ephinea and I have shut it down every single time over the past 6 years without question). Obviously this will get some bad reaction at first, maybe you'd want to consider buffing all rates across the board permanently, but once you do this you cannot go back to regular rates. If people are only getting on for 3x rates, why bother having Happy Hours at all? Just buff everything or cut its throat because it's clearly not helping. A lot of people are really turned away by the concept of Donation Tickets on a game like PSO. That should probably be reworked in my opinion as it comes across pretty Pay2Win when there are unique things you can do with them. While you can trade with them, it just kinda means whoever has money can inject currency into the game (and their wallet). I've noticed on Ultima that you try to keep people around with lots of events or mini-events, but from watching my own players over the years, I don't think this is a good strategy if what you want is people playing at all hours and days. All lots of events/mini-events do is make people stop playing unless something is going on, and I expect that you don't really want to be doing things all the time. Plus, too many events can lead to event burnout as well from people feeling like they must play because something is happening. tl;dr: Exclusive Event Items, Happy Hours, Green Name Boosts and other related timegated content/boosts make Ultima a bad server for pick up and play, which just makes people stay away as they forget about the game or end up playing somewhere else that respects their time. While other servers may have 1x EXP rates, their time is respected as the progress they make will never be devalued by broken events or time periods.
  3. We participated because people were claiming how unfair it was that you were participating with Saith, so we felt like turning up.
  4. Nah 2P is the best. Way more fun than 4P imo, especially in 2C4 (the best stage)
  5. Here's the video for the 36:00 run. The setup is P1 FOnewearl and P2 HUcast.
  6. Well here's a time. Unfortunately no handgun dropped this run which didn't help, as we had some desync issues in Area 4 where I had to run away and waste time. I'd argue a proper time for this quest would be around 31~33 minutes, although with the drops on Ultima I'm not sure if that's possible without running the same quest for 6 months. I'll PM you the video once it has uploaded, it's a rather large file. I'm assuming they're well-known here, but the extra UI elements are Soly's PSOBB Addon for Eidolon's Lua Plugin which just shows some data, and does not give any actual benefit to getting a faster time. Regarding the "P1/3" route, 2C2 splits up the party numerous times (Area 1, 3, 4 and 6) depending on your colour dot, and if players were to force themselves to be the Red and Yellow dot, they wouldn't have to split up which is not the aim of the level.
  7. Well I have a run already, although it cuts off when I'm warping to when I'm warping to P2. I think I might have it going to the lobby but not sure, if not I have the character with the time that I can screenshot. Was definitely Ultima though, because the drops suck so much here we didn't even get a handgun・・・
  8. Out of curiosity, when and where do you want times posted? PM to keep it seekret, post publicly whenever or only post times at the end?
  9. I'll be playing with @lostfish.
  10. You can't SN glitch with melee weapons, what are you talking about? The way it works is that you start another attack before the previous attack actually lands. This is not possible with any melee weapon other than slicer, since that has a projectile. (though with C/Battle I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible with attacks like Lavis Cannon spec and DF spec) Specifically, you can SN (or SS or HN or whatever is appropriate) with the following weapons: - Slicer - Handgun (max range) - Rifle (max range) - Mechgun (max range, only 2 shots of the previous volley will get glitched unless ghosted shots) - Shot (max range, although this is easier with weapons like the Baranz Launcher) - Cards Edit: Thinking about it, I've never used Ultima's Cent/Battle so I don't know if you need max range for these. Melee SNS definitely does not work though.
  11. Normal attacks are affected by hit %, why wouldn't it be? All three attacks work off the same formula, but normal is 1.0 ATA, hard is 0.7 ATA and special is 0.5 ATA. (1.0/1.3/1.69 for the 1/2/3 combo as well) Personally though, I just see Ultima as its own thing, and just play elsewhere for a more balanced/vanilla-like experience. PS: I would personally not recommend making techs do decent damage on Episode 2 enemies at all. I think it is far more interesting that a different approach towards enemies has to be taken as FO, instead of just being able to brain-dead nuke like the other 2 episodes.
  12. Considering that most stuff cannot hit Deldepths well even with vanilla stats (unless they are frozen), Fyrewolf's example is also not great because Slicers can use the "SNS glitch" which allows you to get a special attack with the accuracy of a normal attack. "SSN" is a similar one for where even a second normal attack will not work. There's also a massive difference between "it can connect" and "it rarely connects". Just because something can hit doesn't mean it's fair.
  13. Here are all the activation %s from the ItemPMT file (if there's any custom mags on Ultima, I don't have them):
  14. For the Lost E2 quests, Lee scripted those and SEGA scripted the Lost E4 quests as well, since we're talking about credits. Lost Chaos Calibur uses script from one of the Lost VR quests, and Lost Heart Breaker uses script from Lost Devil's Scepter (both scripted by Lee). Both Lost E4 use Lost Heat Sword's script, which is by SEGA.
  15. I don't feel like reading the posts but event-only drops that are considered endgame are a terrible idea in general. People shouldn't have to wait or shell out 924580248509824 DTs to be able to get an item, they should be able to constantly work towards goals at their own pace. Make things take a while, don't make them easy but only during a certain timescale. It doesn't matter if the event drop is easy, I don't want to wait 10 months to be able to actually farm something worthwhile. This is a huge issue because a lot of the normal items are unwanted due to how overpowered the Ultima items are, making it hard to trade unless you directly buy DTs.
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