Drazn

The Arrest Needle is practically not mine. I was given a spread needle and a POST by a generous player... Like pretty much all of my equipment was. The problem is not that good gear takes a long time to accumulate, its that not having good gear feels like your wasting your time. Which is not at all how i felt when i got to max level on GC. My gear frankly was pretty terrible and I knew much less about the game than i do now. But I still felt like i was reasonably powerful. On Ultima, unless you have the absolute best equipment you feel like a total weakling all of the time. Apparently even with the best gear you still feel extremely weak, either because you don't have enough base ATP, or you don't have a weapon with 50h+ on it... I'm not trying to say that getting geared on Ultima is impossible, or that getting to max level is particularly difficult. I'm arguing that it's a terrible experience. The game can be hard, after you let people feel like their making progress towards being powerful. If you make people feel weak and drastically limit their options for getting powerful, they will just get frustrated and bored. There will be people who enjoy that sort of grind but me and my friends and pretty much everyone else i've shown ultima in the last month are not those sort of people, and we are being pushed away by these things. And these are all people who played PSO, either with me or by their selves, in the past and they greatly enjoyed the experience. Sure, I was making full use of Freeze Traps, Confuse Traps, Arrest needle, Frozen Shooter and so on. The problem is, at what point do I actually do damage? My frozen shooter does about 60-40 damage per shot to a Baranz. While a single volley of their missiles instantly kills me from full health, at any damage to their armour. When your in a room with more than one Baranz, or other mobs besides, I cant afford to focus my attention on firing the ungodly number of shots it would need to take one down while doing 50ish damage. Also, im grinding, the point is to do it quickly, which means taking risks. Killing 20 Baranz in an hour with much frustration when the average drop chance of an item you frankly should be able to get at level 120 is well into the 1/600s is a terrible experience that makes me rather go and play another version of PSO where I would never have such an experience unless i was grinding truly endgame stuff. Hell I come from playing Path of Exile which is far more unforgiving than PSO is, and the experience i've had playing that has been far better than this particular experience. The point here is more that anything of value that could make an actual difference with your experience with Ultimate, is hidden behind the wall that is Ultimate itself. Whether you lower the stats of the entry points to Ultimate, or return them to vanilla and add a completely new difficulty or mode ontop of that, something i feel very strongly needs to be done here.

I admit that i wrote my post in a great deal of frustration, and probably is full of hyperbole, but i'm sitting here after having tried to grind for a Panzer Faust in Ep2 Ulti for about an hour, and having killed a grand total of about 20ish baranz and dying at-least five times as much as that as a level 123 RAcast with all the listed equipment. I don't know how typical that is, but I don't ever remember having this much issue with getting through ulti in PSO. Sure the later parts were pretty spikey in difficulty, but Forest and the beginning of EP2 I don't ever remember being as weak as this, with vastly inferior equipment. I will admit that I haven't counted how many shots it takes to kill things with my Arrest Needle, but i can tell you it is far slower than what I would expect were i playing any other version of PSO I currently own with the amount of ATP my character has. Which would be less of an issue if it wasn't content that frankly a character of that level should be able to do, unless you want people to be stuck doing Vhard as I said into the mid 100s. It is a grindy game, and I do not have an issue with this. I come from a background of many ARPGs like Diablo and Diablo 2, Path of Exile, Borderlands and so on. I am used to and enjoy grinding in games. What I take issue with is bad grinding in games, of which I also have a fair amount of experience with, Maplestory, Fly For Fun, and that korean 2D fighting RPG i cant for the life of me remember the name of. Those were bad times. And what those times had in common was a feeling of making no progress whatsoever. What better ARPGs had in common was that they gave you a little often, and a huge amount some of the time. its what keeps you coming back, a feeling of accomplishment. It was a feeling I had when i hit 200 on GC or when I get a build running on Path of Exile and its a feeling that I totally lack on Ultima. There is a lot to be said for a smooth progression in a game, and what exists on Ultima today is far from smooth and is compounded further by the game's economy and many of the issues vanilla PSO had. I just think Ultima can do better than this. We need a steep slope, not a brick wall.

Price check on this junk please XD Demolition Comet 10/0/0/25|25 Mahu 0/25/30/0|25 Slicer Of Assassin 0/15/0/0|30

Interesting reading this thread 4 years later because this is exactly what happened. Allow me to go on a little rant... I've been playing PSO for a very long time, basically since I was a kid. I've gotten to 200 on the Gamecube, i got to high 100s on the official Blue Burst servers. I've done ultimate before. It was pretty tough but it was doable and the rewards were worth it. So then recently I returned to Ultima, decided to give getting to 200 a solid shot again since the server has EXP boosts, figured it would be pretty smooth sailing and with lots of super powerful weapons and items added in for the fun of it. So far it has been the most grindy and unsatisfying experience I have ever had with PSO. I have been given donations a plenty from some extremely generous players, even donated myself a substantial amount ($55) to try and piece together an ultimate-capable set of gear. I got a level 200 Mag, got a full set of 115 power materials, even manged to get an Arrest Needle. And with all that i can now clear Ep1 Forest in ultimate. Slowly, taking more than 12 shots from an Arrest Needle to kill even a single mob. I do 0 damage to Gal Gryphon with all my weapons, even a fully grinded Ultima Reaper. I dunno if there are some really masochistic players in this community or everyone expects to be boosted to 180-200 before they can even consider trying to do Ultimate without a level 200 with a Dark weapon helping them. But none of this seems like good game design, or even just a matter of "git gud." Its just boring. Really, really boring. It amounts to either your given your levels and gear by someone else, or you spend days pouring over tradelists not actually playing the game because if you want gear to do ultimate, you either have to get someone to get it for you or have it given to you because there isn't a way to do ultimate so that you can do ultimate... I've never had an experience like this with PSO before. The game always had something for you to do at each level, and while there were some slow spots none of them were particularly bad. Most of them where to do with the poor pacing of levels between Vhard and ultimate, in that you reach Ultimate too fast and Vhard stops being profitable too soon. All the buffed stats on Ultima have done is exacerbated this problem so that what once was a relatively steep slope is now something more like a brick wall that you either need to pay real money or rely on other player's generosity to have any chance of having an enjoyable experience with. PSO is a multiplayer game, and yes I know your going to say "but working together with people is the whole point of the game!" But thats hardly a useful point, because if you take 4 people, have them level together to 120 without any interaction with the rest of the community outside of people their level and with similar gear they are almost certainly going to have a terrible experience with ultimate mode, in that none of them do any damage, cant hit any of the monsters and have no way to rectify this problem outside of an extremely long and tedious grind to max level on Vhard. So the only option is that they try to raise wealth inside of a economy that suffers huge inflation on the prices of, and permanently low supply of useful weapons for Ultimate mode, or relying on the generosity of the community. So its terrible for multiplayer too, not even counting PSO's inherent problems with multiplayer (free for all loot, damage canceling, section ID abuse etc.) And I don't know about you, but I thought PSO was a Loot Grinding game, not a Loot Donation game. I like the feeling of earning my powerful weapons, not having them given to me. And while trading is an excellent community-builder, its also a huge barrier to new players with no wealth because we all know how easy it is to make money once you actually have money, but if you have absolutely nothing your gonna have a very long road ahead of you, especially since pretty much everything you can get your hands on is worth absolutely nothing to the majority of wealthy players in this game. Sure with some knowledge you farm up some mats or something and make some money that way, but its slow and tedious outside of green-names, and during green names they are worth half as much as they normally are. If I wanted to play the long game and build up wealth over the course of several months, i'd go play EvE Online instead. This is not the reason why I enjoy PSO, this is not reason why any of my IRL friends enjoyed playing PSO with me, and I'm sure many others in this community agree with me. Trading is a good thing, as an option. It should not be a requirement to beat the game as not everyone enjoys it. What is important for Ultima's health and for the health of PSO is to be welcoming of new players. This game is far too close to dead to be erecting barriers that deter new players. I also feel Ultima as possibly the most popular and well known private server for PSOBB has a larger responsibility in this regard that most other servers do. However I also understand that the long term players of this game need to be given a reason to come back. This community is too small and the influx of new players is too slow to risk shedding veteren players by not heeding their requests. In other words, there needs to be a balance here which currently, I feel, does not exist. Crack mode needs to come back, another difficulty needs to be added, Priestege, something needs be done to remove the wall between Vhard and Ultimate so that newer players can have a smoother and far more enjoyable experience with Ultima. I'd love to help, but without any programming experience I fear I might be useless to you. But if you need testing, or advice or anything you think I could do to help, ill be there. This community so far has been extremely welcoming and being the largest server keeping one of my favorite games alive I'd do anything to make it better. Rant /fin

what are the stats on the Yas 9000m?

Thanks for the heads up ^^ I've decided to just grind for them instead. Also, updated list with Materials for sale.

Updated buy-list

Master Sword has Sold. Also, i was Buying a red ring, not selling one : P

Selling: Demolition Comet 10/0/0/25|25 1PD Mahu 0/25/30/0|25 1PD Slicer Of Assassin 0/15/0/0|30 1PD x89 Mind Materials 6:1PD, 14PDs for the lot x33 Power Materials 5:1PD, 6PDs for the lot Buying: Adept 3DTs Heaven Punisher 50H+ Offers Wanted Iron Faust 50H+ Offers Wanted Yas 9000m 50H+ Clean or with Charge Offers Wanted

The issue has been effectively solved on Sodaboy's server simply by having better servers in better places. If you look back a bit in this thread i posted a video of people abusing traps in a way that would surely cause damage canceling in a slower system. So improving Ultima's servers could have the same effect. As for a solution in the code, it seems like its an issue with how the client to client communication of damage works. It might also be a database problem. I'm not programmer so I don't think i can help much, but other people in this thread have posted some ideas as well. All I can say is that this is an issue of great long-term importance for the health of the game.

Regardless of whether you think the game favors multiplayer or singleplayer that frankly doesn't matter. Damage Canceling is a bug. It is not how the game is intended to operate. For this reason alone it should be fixed. You can argue the virtues of the fact it promotes team-play but the fact remains that damage canceling is a completely unintuitive and nonsensical bug that tricks newer players into stepping on the toes of more experienced ones, punishing them for actually trying to play the game. It also encourages passivity and an attitude of "well if you don't do the absolute best damage you shouldn't be trying to do damage at all" which destroy's class diversity and centralizes power into a few select min-maxed classes (Like HUcast and RAcast for example.) You can argue Ultima has done much to promote class diversity by introducing new items and weapons, but thats just working around what the problem was in the first place. As a game mechanic frankly, its boring. It means as certain classes all you do is apply status effects and stand around waiting for things to be killed for you. Some people may enjoy playing like that, and power to them. But there is no other way to play for classes with poor per-hit damage which is restrictive and completely ignores the wide class diversity and flexibility present in PSO's class system. At no point should any game mechanic ever un-ironically promote that doing absolutely nothing is the best strategy. Ever. Its bad game design, people like games because they get to have agency, they get to do stuff. Not wait around and wait for other people to do stuff for them. And even with the bug fixed all the exact same teamwork scenarios will still work. The only difference is that suddenly you have more options when making those strategies. Either way, improving server structure is one way to mitigate this issue. But it would still be interesting if we could have a complete solution via code, as even with the best servers and the lowest ping, damage cancel will still exist it will just be much harder to trigger.

Can't we just get the crack server running again... anymore buffs would be painful for new players : /

After doing some of my own research turns out they solved the issue by simply having better servers in strategic areas. Doesn't remove the issue entirely, but mitigates it into irrelevance. Here is a video of people doing something that should by all accounts be impossible due to damage canceling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkvdmFdQ8fE Perhaps something Ultima could look into, if it manages to raise enough donation $$$s.

Perhaps it would be useful to get in contact with someone managing that server and ask them how they solved this issue, if they actually have in a useful way. It seems like a very frustrating bug that leads to a lot of unintuitive play, and prevents wide range techs from being useful (rather detrimental) as well as other bad stuff like Rangers canceling Hunter damage. Reminds me of when i used to play Path of Exile back when it still had massive Desync problems.