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What do we need?


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This server unfortunately is seemingly dying.

 

The server is realistically only active during events, more specifically in Decemberish time of the year.

 

This server had a lot of people on a few years back. So what do we need to do? What can we do?

 

Ideas to improve the server has been a post around here for some time. A long while. But a lot of those idk if they have been implemented.

 

New players on the server the most I see them last is 1-2 weeks.

 

Partially what I may believe in is that those who do still play only play in small groups and outright ignore others, that's not very welcoming in my opinion. I also find it hard to come on and play because I see 4-5 rooms locked doing a quest by themselves as well.

 

It's kinda sad, I find Ultima to be a "home" and now it just feels dead.

 

So what can we do as the community to help? Where can we bring the activity?

 

I have a few ideas and I've spoken about these ideas with some individuals before, however I want to ask the community.

 

What does Ultima need to be what it was?

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I disagree with this assessment. There's currently 20 people on the server even tho it's a Tuesday outside of event, no HH.

 

It's surprising to me that this game has so many people playing regularly still. Back in the fall of 2020 before triforce there was entire weeks where the population was less than 5.

 

The fact is that this game is just old, and it's unreasonable to expect the population numbers to be what they were even 5 years ago. I think the best thing the server can do is to avoid this gloom and doom narrative that it's dying or it's dead or that it died in whatever year. As long as I can still log in and run TTF with one or two other people than it's not dead.

 

There have been posts like this with concrete additions and changes that admin knows the community wants. They just either can't do it or won't do it. So they best way to keep the community going to maintain it themselves. Post jokes in the chatbox, send memes in the comments, shit post in the discord, etc. As much as I love PSO, I only still visit Ultima is because of the people I've met on the server

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3 minutes ago, jdhenry124 said:

I disagree with this assessment. There's currently 20 people on the server even tho it's a Tuesday outside of event, no HH.

 

It's surprising to me that this game has so many people playing regularly still. Back in the fall of 2020 before triforce there was entire weeks where the population was less than 5.

 

The fact is that this game is just old, and it's unreasonable to expect the population numbers to be what they were even 5 years ago. I think the best thing the server can do is to avoid this gloom and doom narrative that it's dying or it's dead or that it died in whatever year. As long as I can still log in and run TTF with one or two other people than it's not dead.

 

There have been posts like this with concrete additions and changes that admin knows the community wants. They just either can't do it or won't do it. So they best way to keep the community going to maintain it themselves. Post jokes in the chatbox, send memes in the comments, shit post in the discord, etc. As much as I love PSO, I only still visit Ultima is because of the people I've met on the server

 

Hey stinky fart go be a stinky fart somewhere else.

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PSO is very dated when compared to other options for games to play with friends, and new people won't stick around because of that. It's why most of the community is made up of people who played PSO back in it's hay day or when they were younger. Ultima introduces some changes to spice up the game, but it isn't enough to sell people on a game over a decade old. The community itself is the only reason Ultima hasn't crumbled already, especially evident when seeing how long Ultima's been around.

 

Come for the game, stay for the people.

Edited by teh2chao2
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Well about 3-4 years ago this server was popping pretty high.

 

After that it slowly died.

 

This servers player base was 100 players (rounded up from 90)
On downtimes was about 40-50
The very rare occasional 20 players.

 

Now its 30 players if your lucky

20 players average

3-10 players over night

 

and everyone is a no you, users who dont respond, or people just simply refuse to play with others.


Some are rude and disrespectful making it hard for the new players to stay around.

I get the players who are in a team playing with people.

 

Dont get the wrong idea of what I am trying to say. But something happened to the server that caused it to tank.

 

IronSheik and jdhenry are both new to this server. Users who where not here during a time of the server being active.

 

Now granted life could've caught up with 50 people who where playing constantly and the server tanks sure, but how do we make the server it is better?

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The server had 90-100 during anniversary and Christmas event this past year. 

 

I've been here for over a year now and there are more people on now then there was at this time last year. Also me and shiek are new people that have stuck around, so there must be something going right. There are other players that have joined in the last year that are still playing regularly.

 

Im just saying that the server is fine, and it's going to be fine. People will come back when they get an itch to play and new players might stick around and they might not. But looking at the "raw numbers" from.the time I started, the server is actually doing surprisingly well

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1 minute ago, jdhenry124 said:

Also me and shiek are new people that have stuck around, so there must be something going right.

 

It was the pandemic that did it for me. I wanted a familiar game that I can enjoy with people online during quarantine and this fit the bill perfectly.

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These where times outside of events. If you read my initial statement

 

Also please dont nit pick small things like how you two have stayed around, believe me thats great you guys stayed, but I also dont know you guys at all.  But mainly I came across 20+ new players all leave within a 1-2 weeks. I am not saying all players, thats kind of a slap in the face to me mate.

Also your a player within the last year or whichever. Im not saying its going to be perfect but.
 

The server is realistically only active during events, more specifically in Decemberish time of the year. <- this. (anniversary and christmas)

Events are what drives a lot of things, but then its just dead. Its kinda boring, and it wasnt this way before. Now do things stay the same, no. But as a community who do play the game.

 

How do we make it more enjoyable for others so its not just 1 person by there lonely. <- this is my driving statement I am trying to get at.

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These lulls in player counts exist between events because a lot of players are already maxed out with year-round obtainable gear. That's why special events with unique items bring back maxed players, and the EXP boost draws in low-level players. If you really want to increase year-round player count, you need to create more year-round incentives for people to play, similar to how HH operates.

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They exist now because of thats the current player base. Old players come back to do events.

 

This is not how it was before.

 

No special events with unique items don't bring players back. They are there to make this server desirable over other servers and there items. On top of the 3x exp rate that we have, HH, and sometimes 5x experience and the green names which gives more ability to find rare monsters. These are Ultima specifics as a server and what makes this server different from others. This is Ultimas core features, not to bring players back.

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You completely misconstrued what I said. I never dismissed those features as the server grasping at straws. I outlined them as examples for why player count might fluctuate. Events help add variation to PSO's gameplay, and when the event is over, the gameplay is closer to the vanilla experience. Many core features of Ultima revolve around the aspect of being temporary events with limited, exciting, and even new items to incentivize playing. The events don't exist to bring players back; players come back because of the events.

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1 hour ago, jdhenry124 said:

I disagree with this assessment. There's currently 20 people on the server even tho it's a Tuesday outside of event, no HH.

I partially agree with his disagreement of the initial assessment. Ultima had / has been lower than it currently seems to be. There's no denying Ultima is no longer it's peak in terms of population, but it's been rebounding slightly. It's nice to see, but that's just the natural flow of PSO. A lot players quit and return on repeat.

 

1 hour ago, jdhenry124 said:

 

The fact is that this game is just old, and it's unreasonable to expect the population numbers to be what they were even 5 years ago. I think the best thing the server can do is to avoid this gloom and doom narrative that it's dying or it's dead or that it died in whatever year. As long as I can still log in and run TTF with one or two other people than it's not dead.

This I disagree with. As I am writing this Ephinea has 70 players online to Ultimas 20. While it is surprising to see Ultima with 20 players it's pretty clear that the version of PSO that Ultima has put out is simply not the version of PSO the average player wants to experience (speaking in totality of PSO not just Ultima). It's obviously possible for a given server to have numbers similar to a few years ago as Ephinea is literally doing it now. 

 

The peak of PSO private servers was some late 2000s early 2010s Schthack. It will simply never return to those levels. It is what it is. 

 

Ultima "needs" a lot of different things to bring it back to where it's reasonably comparable to Ephinea. Here's a few things that I think would really improve the experience Ultima provides:

-Getting rid of buffs. I understand for whatever reason that you guys specifically here seem to like it, but as indicated by the comparative populations that's simply not what PSO players want. It's arbitrary and I'd even say dumb.

-Rework DTs in some way. No one ever wants to hear something crazy like B> Dark Meteor (an item that's not even supposed to really be good) 450 USD. It's stupid. DTs have too many functions that only they can consistently do. They need to have an in game equivalent or have some of the usefulness taken away. Plain and simple.

-Ephinea events suck too (imo), but Ultima events create these extreme cycles of boom / bust because nearly nothing relevant drops in the "off-season". There's actually some good arguments for this system being okay at best, but clearly people want to be able hunt the purposeful items year round. I won't propose specifics here of what exactly a system should look like, but people should be able to gear themselves without paying money at any time during the year. 

-Ultima game play has a weird middle ground where Dark Meteor HHH is strong / simple / fast enough to clear pretty much everything without switching weapons or using your brain, but HUcast is still mostly superior if used right. The issue is is DM is just too simple so players don't attempt to learn engaging game play and just HHH their way through the game. That shit is not engaging and it's lame. If you log into Ephinea it's mostly HUcast around the clock and a fair mix of RAs / FOs. I don't know exactly how to fix this without "ruining" Dark Meteor, but again it's clearly not what the average PSO player is interested in or Ultima would have 70 players on spamming HHH right now and Ephinea would have 20 players on actually switching weapons.

-While it can be cool to push the limits of what is possible within a quest Ultima has a lot of quests that are simply too much monster count wise. This ruins hunt variety. Ephinea attempts to keep their quests in check with Sega quests monster count wise to some degree so that people aren't spamming only one quest that's too broken. I had never played or at least don't remember playing Intelligent Defense System until some time earlier this year. The quest is "cool" in that it's definitely very different from some of the more modest custom quests and Sega quests, but it's monster count makes it silly. There's no reason to ever hunt Baranz anywhere else. It pretty much insures that you get whatever a Baranz may be dropping while also ruining other quests for the Baranz hunt. There's more examples of this.

 

I feel like this is yet another subject I could write forever about, but I think these few things mark some of the biggest reasons why people clearly prefer another server at the moment. 

 

In my eyes the version of PSO that was the most popular was probably also the best. The quests weren't super wild, the monsters weren't buffed, the classes weren't buffed, but there were still new quests and new items to spice things up without completely changing how PSOBB is.

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