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Ideas to improve the server - feel free to post!


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10 hours ago, jespence said:

If you dislike encouraging boss farming then why give the drop to a boss in the first place;

For a simple reason.

Olga Flow used to be the only boss that has no rare item assigned on Ultimate during non event.

So the new drops were added only to complete the blank in the Drop tables, but in no way intended to "replace" older drop locations, so that if someone were to ask "What's the best way to hunt X" we shall never reply "RT" or "Olga Flow". 

I want the community to see Olga Flow items as nothing but a bonus, a collateral potential drop when you are hunting something else at the same time, I want to give everyone an actual good reason to finish their RT runs rather than /lobby after Gal Gryphon, finish their TTT runs, play Seabed if they feel like it and get at least a chance to get something good.

I want everyone to have a way to confirm during events that Olga Flow does not have an event drop. Imagine running DPC forever and yet not even be able to tell that you actually used the wrong ID, simply because Olga couldn't drop any rare at all.

The PSO burnout after Olga farming during christmas is a recurrent issue on Ultima, so making everything best on Olga would be the last thing I'd ever do for this server.

So "why giving the drop to a boss in the first place" you ask? Simply because it was the only monster on ultimate that did NOT have any drop in the first place.

Mothvist, Bulk, Recobox, and Death Gunner drops do not count because their drops can be bugged. We had to fix some server side code and make a lot of tests before we started Shiida's Hit Event, otherwise the Bulk drops wouldn't have worked (they'd get the Bulclaw rare instead).

 

10 hours ago, jespence said:

also, some items are boss only like above

I said I dislike the idea of encouraging boss farm, didn't say I wanted to totally get rid of the boss farm. Just saying I'm not going to add more to those which already exist.

RR and ADR are and have always been end boss rewards. ALT is nothing but a collectible.

 

10 hours ago, jespence said:

What about the time cost of hunting down Olga vs many Gi Gues?

Gi Gue SJS: 1/10240

Maximum Attack S 2: 123 Gi Gue in 30 minutes.

Average required runs per SJS: 83.25

Average time required to get one SJS from Gi gue: 2497.56 minutes so 41 hours 38 minutes

 

Olga Flow SJS: 1/409

Respective Tomorrow / Seabed / World of Illusion: 1 Olga Flow in 15 minutes.

Average required runs per SJS: 409

Average time required to get one SJS from Olga Flow: 6135 minutes so 102 hours 15 minutes

 

You tell me which is the best.

 

 

5 hours ago, Wavebuster said:

is there a chance the Glide Divine rate on Pinkal can perhaps be increased 4x-5x what it is currently?

Nope, for the same reason as above.

Pinkal is already a consistent ID to farm Wedding Dress in WOI and ROCT in addition to the presence of Olga.

If it was another ID, or if RT/Seabed were the only consistent ways to Olga, I'd consider a better rate.

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6 hours ago, R-78 said:

 

 

Gi Gue SJS: 1/10240

Maximum Attack S 2: 123 Gi Gue in 30 minutes.

Average required runs per SJS: 83.25

Average time required to get one SJS from Gi gue: 2497.56 minutes so 41 hours 38 minutes

 

Olga Flow SJS: 1/409

Respective Tomorrow / Seabed / World of Illusion: 1 Olga Flow in 15 minutes.

Average required runs per SJS: 409

Average time required to get one SJS from Olga Flow: 6135 minutes so 102 hours 15 minutes

 

You tell me which is the best.

 

 

Exactly, which is why I was aiming to equalize the two and not really one over the other, but if that's not your philosophy so be it;

but either way if it's true that hit % is only 1% for Ep2, that really needs some help

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I did not agree with giving a bias to bosses over regulars monsters.

But I did ask @Larva to increase the chances at getting hit% in episode II a month ago.

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On 8/14/2021 at 8:45 AM, R-78 said:

I did not agree with giving a bias to bosses over regulars monsters.

But I did ask @Larva to increase the chances at getting hit% in episode II a month ago.

 

Lets talk about this with more details, send me a PM over discord.

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4 hours ago, Larva said:

 

Lets talk about this with more details, send me a PM over discord.

Thank you so much for taking a look at this; I guess maybe what I was really going for is, just a slight boost to the chance of hit for all Eps

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20 minutes ago, jespence said:

Thank you so much for taking a look at this; I guess maybe what I was really going for is, just a slight boost to the chance of hit for all Eps

Please don't ruin Christmas 

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On 8/14/2021 at 11:45 AM, R-78 said:

But I did ask @Larva to increase the chances at getting hit% in episode II a month ago.

 

6 hours ago, Larva said:

Lets talk about this with more details, send me a PM over discord.

This would be a huge improvement for the server. 1/5 the hit chance of EP1 and EP4 makes some runs just suck, and really makes some events lead to burnout.

 

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14 minutes ago, Smoochum said:

 

This would be a huge improvement for the server. 1/5 the hit chance of EP1 and EP4 makes some runs just suck, and really makes some events lead to burnout.

 

Anything that improves QOL is great imo, do not want to make things to easy but I certainly think a slight boast wouldn't kill anybody besides elitist but they would not be playing here anyways to many buffs.

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  • 4 weeks later...
3 hours ago, Sundark said:

Hey please combo unlock Glide Divine because it has a cool sound effect and I want to hear it more when I swing it for memes thanks

Use Glide Divine V.00.

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Alright I've got some time and put a little more thought into things.

 

Quality of Life stuff:

- If it's possible, add a sound effect to the mag timer. It's one of the most useful commands for newer players/players feeding mags while trying to be efficient about feeding them during quests, but if you afk feed (as tons of people do), it would be nice to have something you can hear from another room.

 

- Stock the damn tool shop. Just, always. I know Lemon's shop exists, but having to go into an episode-specific quest (useless when you might just be playing normally), use a menu that isn't intuitive, that only allows for purchases in multiples of 10 (I'm assuming based on presentation) when that isn't divisible by 3 (the amount of items you feed one mag at a time), all while being overcharged is dumb. Please. Please just stock the damn shop.

 

Gameplay stuff:

- The buff to Ultimate is great, and with the stat boosts to classes, it really adds a comfortable level of challenge even to endgame content (right up until you've got perfectly optimized gear, at which point you just start TAing anyway). But it's kind of brutal for newer players and characters getting into the game, and when the meat and bones of the game is the Ultimate difficulty (which has always been the sharpest difficulty spike in the game) it's making a hurdle that was already large even larger.

 

I'm not entirely sure how to combat the above, but it's at least food for thought. I think a nice bridge would be allowing One Player mode to somehow have access to more (if not all) of the quests in multiplayer. Often I would think "I want to hunt this item, but I can't handle multi Ultimate alone, and the quest I want isn't available on One Person mode." This can create a reliance on other players helping you. Other people helping you is nice, but it shouldn't come down to being the only way to make some progress.

 

- I've taught several new people about Black Paper's Deal(s) in the past week! It seems like it's a much lesser-known quest these days, and I think effort should be put into rectifying that a bit, albeit I'm not sure how. Photon Crystals are easy farms on Normal with MA4DMD (Which has 6 Dorphons and 6 Zus within the first five-six spawns, and one of those is a guaranteed Dorphon Eclair), and you can get lots and lots of good stuff from those quests.

 

An idea I just had would be to play around with the drop charts of those quests, or even make a third, Ultima-specific version! Cut out some of the real chaff from the rewards to make them quicker and more worthwhile. Normal Rappy route can get you a Tripolic Shield or a Rappy's Beak, but you could also get... Resist/Burning and the like? The normal Zu route is a haven for getting great Double Sabers, but there's some redundancy there, too. Partisan of Lightning and Meteor Cudgel could stand to be axed, but the MKB/BKB split is good if you want an MKB for your male Ranger, and Twin Blaze always has utility. Is a 0-stat 0-slot Electro Frame really helping anyone? You get where I'm going with this.

 

I can honestly say that I've never done a single Dorphon route BPD1 either, except maybe way back to get a 0'd Shouren/Guren for Jizai or something, but those are also both available in BPD2. Normal and Hard Dorphon routes could definitely have an entire overhauled drop table.

 

I could go into an entire dissertation about what kind of items could be cut or added to either of these quests, but I'll spare everyone here a brisk thousand+ words. Point is, these quests are great for the newcomers, and I think that should be capitalized on more, especially when Ultimate has become a hurdle.

 

Events:

The current Triforce event is my first Ultima event despite my account being a few years old, because it just happened to coincide with me randomly wanting to dive nose-first into the good ol' pile of crack cocaine that is PSO for the first time in several years, and I have to say it's a wonderful, wonderful concept. The idea of re-figuring out the drop charts for a game that's old enough to drink, enlist, vote, and sign up for an account on its own forum is fantastic, and it was really exciting until I was on CCA #178 with no Hylian.

 

But the greatest flaw of events, and event-based items, is once they're gone, they're gone. And that's the woooooorst. You are just locked out of some of the best endgame gear until an entire year (presumably) later. Why the hell would anyone play outside of events in that case? I just don't think it's a great model for player retention or satisfaction. I'm very apprehensive about the possibility of the event ending before I get some of the most valuable and effective pieces of gear that's been introduced to the game by this server, and that's just... bitter.

 

My idea was to somehow allow access to the event drop tables, potentially through quests, but I'm not sure how feasible that is. If the chance to get an item was still present, it would be great for peace of mind once the event is gone knowing that you could wait for the next Happy Hour to roll around and start chugging away at a quest for the next little while to see if you could land something nice.

 

Random Stuff:

- Sometimes Shiida (maybe others) does a thing where, for example, "If I can see 5 different section ID chairs in Lobby 5 I'll activate HH." This kicks ass and is great community engagement. So much more of that would be great. 

 

- Make the Discord link more visible. Clearly the forum has tons of people asking this question, and that just means it's not catching people's eyes. It'd be a good way to get people a little more active, because holy god Ultima still uses a forum in 2021? I love the forum, and there's tons of useful information and guides here, and that's not going to change, but the Discord could use a lot more activity. But we might need to quarantine Wilson to the time attack channel first. Throw the link up next to the banner at the top of the forums, or in any of the little dropdown menus with information.

 

- Wiki improvement. There are still a couple things that aren't listed in the wiki, from what I've found (I think a lot of units? I don't remember exactly), and that's always a pain. Additionally, the drop table is really functional and cool, but if you look up an item on the wiki, its page should tell you where it drops from (or what quest it's a reward for, if applicable). It's a small (albeit large-scale) improvement that makes the ever-present research process smoother, especially for the numerous Ultima-specific items.

 

I think that's just about everything for now. Feel free to quote and talk about anything.

 

And I just want to close out for realsies (for now) by saying that I've really, really been enjoying my experience back recently. This server has some wonderful players that I'm very happy to have met, and I'm having a lot of fun with what feels like a fresh, new PSO experience that's still the core game I love.

Edited by Sundark
formatting, always
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  • 5 weeks later...

I've noticed I still have the last post in this thread even after a full month now, and I've got a few more ideas rattling around in my head, which I'll bullet point real quick (so much for that) outline below, but there's also an older post I want to draw more attention to.

 

I'll start with my little bullet points:

 

Revamp Very Hard Drop Charts

Meteor Impact. Meteor Impact. Meteor Impact. Diska of Liberator. Slicer of Assassin. Diska of Liberator. Slicer of Assassin. H&S25 Justice. H&S25 Justice. Wals-MK2. Wals-MK2. Devil/... anything. Look at that shitty chart. Very Hard is chock full of useless garbage in Episodes 1 and 2 (VH E4 is actually pretty useful!), and so much of it could be replaced with drops that are more meaningful. I think a lot of Ultimate-specific gear (don't ask for examples, I don't have them yet) should be dropped down to Very Hard, just to make them more accessible. Not the crazier things, obviously, like Excalibur or TJS or whatever, but things that would, again, bridge that gap from vanilla Very Hard to Ultima-buffed-Ultimate.

 

MO4R CUSTOM EQU1PS!!11!!11eleven!!11!1

The header is obviously a shitpost, and bear with me. Ultima has no lack of custom equipment, and it's all pretty radical. It's also all two things: Incredibly strong, and incredibly hard to get. Tons of the combination items for things like the Arrest Needle, Macho Blades, Mille Faucille, Psycho Raven, etc. are, again, the dreaded event-only drops. See my above post for how I feel about these (spoilers: unga bunga bad).

 

I'm currently in the process of designing/brainstorming some more custom items, but for a specific reason: to bridge the gap between shitty Very Hard rares and the items mentioned above. I'm not quite ready to drop the google doc (yeah, that's how serious it is) yet, but a couple examples are: Mechguns that work roughly like the Spread Needle, while being stronger than the Spread, but weaker than the Arrest Needle, and a Dagger that is comparable to Excalibur (in that it's 3-target, high damage), but without a sacrificial special and therefore less efficient, and still totally outclassed by Hundred Souls.

 

To give you an idea of what to expect, a lot of them are the result of more common rare weapons and pre-existing combination items (Magic Water, Photon Booster, etc.).

 

I wanted to preface and outline this idea before just cold-releasing the document not just because I feel like there's more I can come up with, but also so that the idea is genuinely given a chance. I'm not trying to make more custom equips for the sake of goofy overpowered custom equips, I'm trying to bridge gaps between "useless" and "if you don't have this you're not viable" equipment, with the occasional "this is a unique and niche idea" thrown in there as well, and I'm drawing heavily on pre-existing items for stat ranges, effects, unique gimmicks, etc. to make sure that there's a) no overlap or b) overlap for a good reason.

 

MOVING ON

The post I wanted to bring everyone back to was this one, made over a year ago:

I read this entire post, and it hits the "systematic problem" about Ultima and its playerbase/player retention, whatever you wanna call it, right on the head. I agree with just about every single word, though I think the entire section at the end on "lack of communication," while not incorrect, per se, can be ignored. It's not that it's not a problem, it's moreso just that it's not something that can be directly fixed. You can't help that people will just AFK in the lobby, although maybe adding an actual indicator of some kind that players could toggle on and off (could the arrow you can enable over your character's head be repurposed somehow? Food for thought) could be useful.

 

Anyway, some immediate thoughts just from reading that:

- Boost hit% chances in Episode 2, or maybe all episodes, and do it by a fair margin

- Make Happy Hour more reliable, attainable, structured, or otherwise less centralizing

- In tandem with the above, event drop rates should probably be thoroughly re-examined

 

At this point, please refer to the last paragraph of my above post. I'm enjoying myself, quite a lot. It's great playing PSO again. I'm loving it. But there are things that are very frustrating about this server, and if improving the server, as this thread suggests, is an actual, real goal, these are some of the things I think are important to take seriously.

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  • 2 months later...

Make Outlaw Star's Special's bullet the same as Dark Meteor's Special's Lingering laser.

It's not exactly another (and weaker version of) Dark Meteor. It's simply Hell Special with lingering trails like Dark Meteor's special {with color B L U E :D

 

[This Is, assuming making DM special land hell special Instead of heavy damage and changing trail's color are a possible feat :onion-head81: ] 

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, Kotta said:

Make Outlaw Star's Special's bullet the same as Dark Meteor's Special's Lingering laser.

It's not exactly another (and weaker version of) Dark Meteor. It's simply Hell Special with lingering trails like Dark Meteor's special {with color B L U E :D

 

[This Is, assuming making DM special land hell special Instead of heavy damage and changing trail's color are a possible feat :onion-head81: ] 

 

 

 

I suggest make the recipe with Proof of Sonic Team instead of stellar shard because no one wants to use SS for this instead of Neutron or MF

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