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Ideas to improve the server - feel free to post!


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The Admiration Mode sounds pretty good :o It'd also be awesome if there was a way to manipulate the camera better with a command (like being able to move it around instead of it just being fixed on the player character), but I'm not sure if that would be possible or not.

I'm still waiting for a working trainer... then I can add it lol

Moving the camera itself might not be possible... or just too complicated... I was able to move it a bit but not freely, that'd be better to just use a trainer.

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i'm sure this has already been mentioned but.. i saw on one of soly's videos i believe that he was adding sounds to different drops and people we're commenting saying it would be nice hearing you got a rare drop or so before actually looking at the box or i believe it was also to help hear a rare drop in a crowd of drops basically and it made me think why not color coordinate drops from one another.. example lots of green crap is mixed together and separating them might be nice for example giving materials a color of their own rather then being green, make them whichever color like gold or purple.. this can obviously be done with a variety of drops.. giving them distinction before running over them and having to read what they actually are. sorry this is long >.<

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just change the media pk2 file (not sure if i named that right lol) of that specific item? shouldnt each item have its own data file where u can color its image? or color a new image and copy/paste that image file over those certain items? i may not know what i'm talkin about D: i'm going off of info i know about other game files

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First a big compliment for your work.

Improving Ideas:

I'm talking as a former Schthack player, so I'm not yet used to your economy.

1.

We should have an event, where really good items (maybe new ones?) also drop on the lower difficulties. New people seem to be cowed sometimes when they see the wealth gap between them and the pros.

Don't get me wrong: The pros earned their wealth by donating and daylong hunting.

But new people really have problems selling their found stuff, as no pro would ever buy it. As result, they struggle in getting good equipment what makes them struggle in Ult, where the good stuff drops. And even if something drops, chances are low that it's gonna be theirs, as i saw pros reserving the PoST as soon as the room was created.

What we need is a noob-friendly environment(x3 Exp is awesome), that brings new people to the server, which will also bring a little balance to the economy.

(Easter Event of Schthack where Quantum Booster, Egg-Rainbow and other stuff dropped the first time on several difficulties for example )

2. Maybe make some stuff in Gallon's shop cheaper? The magic rock heart key seems quite expensive. If i see it correctly, it's the same price as a p-wand atm? So no

proportion at all, as it's always available. And showing it as a list maybe instead of clicking "no" a thousand times?

That would be awesome.

3.

I know creating new items is limited always complicated af and a bunch of hard work, but it's always appreciated, as it brings variety to gameplay and sometimes economy.

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Hello, recent re-turnee to ultima and a long time PSO player from all the way back when it was on dreamcast XD

Always loved to play Force, but never at all understood enemy elemental resistances when changing between single player and multiplayer.

When online enemy HP increases, which makes sense since there is (usually) more than 1 person there so mobs get stronger. But monster elemental resists also increase.

All that does is hit Forces trying to use Techs for damage twice in a row. Now mobs have bonus HP AND take 20-80(!?) less damage from all your attacks. This problem only gets worse in EP4.

From all my experience playing, Forces seem to be on-par with rangers for DPS while in single player, but their damage is reduced to practically nothing unless you stack tech bonuses like crazy, and even then you do far less damage than a ranger with a similar level of gear, never mind a hunter. I get Forces are a supporty kinda class and have stuff like Megid to even the score at times, but surely the have attack techs for a reason, and not just so they can clear single-player...

Basically, what i'm wondering is if the fairer elemental resists for Single Player can somehow be transfered to multiplayer? I know you guys made a crack to make the game harder for people that wanted a challenge (Though it seems to be broken atm?) Would it be possible to make similar changes to make the game fairer for Tech forces?

This is a pretty specific and potentially far reaching request that could be extremely time consuming to execute, but I genuinely think it would be better for the game as a whole. I wonder what you think.

Thanks regardless for keeping my favorite game from my childhood alive. You guys do awesome work, keep it up ^^

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Unfortunately, the people in charge of this server seem to hate techs in general. Not only are techs vastly inferior to swords and guns in most situations but a FOnewearl, who is the class with the strongest techs and weakest melee, is better off meleeing in most situations.

The solution to techs being weak should be to make techs better, but instead they ended up improving the melee capability of forces to help them catch up with hunters and rangers. So we have a version of PSO where even the tech users don't use techs. As someone who only wants to use techs, this makes me very sad.

At this point, it would be pretty hard to fix this problem. I would suggest to buff techs but also to take away many of the super powerful melee weapons from forces, but that would upset some people. I've given up on techs being good on this server and have started to work on doing melee with my FOnewearls. It sucks but I want to be good at this game and I'm not a scrub, so that means doing melee over techs for the class who was originally designed to have much stronger techs than melee. *shrugs*

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These are my thoughts exactly!

Though i wouldn't say its the server that hates techs, but the original design of PSO that hates techs.

As i said before i played a whole bunch on pretty much every platform this game has come out on, and I have encountered the same problem on each one: techs don't do damage in multi-player, but do in single player for some non-apparent reason.

While melee forces are a cool idea which i also personally enjoy, I would also like the play the classic spellcaster, throwing huge balls of swirling fiery death, dropping bolts of lightning from the heavens and freezing my enemies solid with blasts of absolute zero.

In reality, you do these things and tink off an ultimate mob for 200 damage while that hunter melees it for 800 6 times before you even begin your next spell... While in singleplayer you hit for 1400 easily to entire groups of enemies.

Techs could fundamentally do with being a bit stronger even then, but being comparable to an okay geared ranger would be better than being worth nothing except what S/D and J/Z added to the group's damage.

But again, a change of this sort might have far reaching consequences (Elemental weapons come to mind) and would probably not be easy to implement. But I feel it would be great for the health of the game if people that wanted to be bad-ass spell-weavers had the damage to back it up.

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I agree with you, as i also have a Fonewm which I like to nuke monsters with. This worked so far, but i see myself buying Excal, Reaper and some nice guns in future, as Magic doesn't really do much damage in ep1 ep2

But:

We can hit many more monsters over a bigger range than any ranger could (speaking of Rafoie for example which hits the whole room).

We can do fairly good damage in ep4 except for the Boss ;-)

There now are items like Hylian Shield and Psycho Bridge that can help you doing damage by increasing Ra-Techs % about 70% each.

I still agree with you, but simply reducing elemental resistance won't help. I rather recommend what Lee did on Schthack: Increase % of stuff like Summit Moon and Magical Piece or even include some new Merges like (Si, Gi and Ra-Merge). That way you can use the 1 which seems the best to you depending on situation.

Remember that also Hunters and Rangers change their weapons frequently.

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@Midori

I totally agree with you. But I don't think that has anything to do with Ultima.

PSO just doesn't allow us to choose either you want to make a battle force (using melee weap) or a pure force (using only tech).

You got to be ambivalent and that's what makes Force the most difficult class to play (pso guide do mention that too btw). Now that Ultima has taken the path of reinforcing the melee capability of Force over techs... is kinda easy to explain.

Just have a look of :arm:Samurai Armor by example. They did try in the first place to make it so it reinforce rabarta if am not wrong. Now it gives +50 luck... Why ? I believe because implementing tech support is more difficult. So yeah, creating new weapons, armors is easier at the end. Remember the v802 talk ? Same story for casting speed so...

@Muchigan

Remember that hunters/rangers change weapon frequently because it's easy to do with the quick menu. There is no such things for shield/armor (except F2 but that's not quite as simple).


Now just my two cents but :

At the moment, I have the strong feeling that what you stated about Force vs Hunter/Ranger is also true for Hunter vs Ranger.

Like Force were meant to cast, Hunter were meant to use melee weapons.

Now am pretty sure that there is some hunters out there who almost never use a melee weapon (except DF of course for the wealthier and TJS for the show off). And I can understand why, even though it bother me to admit it.

Beside, because of :uni:Smartlink, a hunter will often be more accurate with a range weapon than with a melee weapon. Which is why there should be a new unit for hunter only which would raise ATA for melee weapon.

See => http://www.phantasystaronline.net/forum/index.php/topic/6048-ideas-to-improve-the-server-feel-free-to-post/page-63#entry148748

Examples :

It has come to the point where sometime I just have to force myself to use melee weapons over range weapon (because it's getting boring and if I wanted to mainly use range weapon I would have make a Ranger in the first place).

Just to play ROCT or anything in the tower, playing range weapon is much faster/safer than using melee weapon and will get the job done pretty much as fast if not faster.

Edited by Misombre
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I agree with you, as i also have a Fonewm which I like to nuke monsters with. This worked so far, but i see myself buying Excal, Reaper and some nice guns in future, as Magic doesn't really do much damage in ep1 ep2

But:

We can hit many more monsters over a bigger range than any ranger could (speaking of Rafoie for example which hits the whole room).

We can do fairly good damage in ep4 except for the Boss ;-)

There now are items like Hylian Shield and Psycho Bridge that can help you doing damage by increasing Ra-Techs % about 70% each.

I still agree with you, but simply reducing elemental resistance won't help. I rather recommend what Lee did on Schthack: Increase % of stuff like Summit Moon and Magical Piece or even include some new Merges like (Si, Gi and Ra-Merge). That way you can use the 1 which seems the best to you depending on situation.

Remember that also Hunters and Rangers change their weapons frequently.

Oh I wasn't saying a tech force was incapable of clearing content. its just slower and harder to do so because of the higher resistances.

The problem is largely to do with the MST formula and resistances.

On paper MST and ATP are very similar, 5 points gets you roughly 1 damage.

However ATP is consistent, there aren't enemies that resist 80% of your damage because DFP is a flat defence, it removes an amount of damage equal to its value, and everything past that is pure profit as far as damage is concerned.

So with characters with especially high ATP the effect of DFP on the damage is very low when compared to their total damage which is exacerbated further by the amount of weapons Hunters have access to that hit multiple times.

Factor in Shifta/Zalure there is no way in hell a force can keep up when hitting something that resists even just 40% of its damage (Which is practically every mob in Ultimate EP1 when online.)

This is why Hunters are well known for steamrolling through most content with few hiccups, their damage is extremely consistent and once you get ahead of enemy DFP their damage becomes incredibly high.

Techs on the other hand are affected by resistances which reduce their damage by a percentage. This is important, because to a force, a 50% resistance means you always do 50% less damage. While to a hunter, something that resisted 50% of your damage, could be reduced to resisting just 20% of it because DFP does not scale up with the amount of damage you do, while thats exactly how Resistances work. The more damage a Force deals, the more of their damage is blocked.

This is also ignoring the massive almost 70% damage boost Hunters get from hitting a Zalured target with Shifta on them, which means they shave through even more of a mobs defence.

Couple this with no actual way to get MST over your class's cap, your just left with percentage bonuses from weapons. But when 50% of you damage is being resisted, just throwing a halfhearted 30% more damage is just giving forces 15% more damage, assuming they are not wearing a shield merge, at which point that extra damage amounts to 11% extra damage overall assuming one of the Red, Blue or Yellow merges.

Even with those added weapons you listed giving a 140% bonus to Ra techs, thats just 70% more damage against most mobs in the game online in Ultimate mode. That might close the Shifta/Zalure gap, but your gonna need 200 or even 300% bonus damage to techs before resistances to bring them closer in-line with the damage Hunters do. So what does a Force without exactly those rare weapons do? What if they are playing Solo or self-found? They need to go online to do some of the more important quests which means a very very slow crawl through content. I've done it before, it wasn't fun.

You'd expect the draw back of a Force, and what makes them hard to play, is their low defence primarily and all their support responsibilities on top of that. You wouldn't expect them to also struggle to deal any noticeable damage but thats where we are right now, basically existing to throw S/D, J/Z, Resta and Reverser at people and sit back and watch everyone else do the work. Sure you could play them like that, but is that fun? I don't think so, and the only way to change that is to be a pretend hunter rather than a spell caster. In short it makes little sense to me.

So the problem with Force damage is definitely that Resistances are not a fair defence to compete with compared to DFP, unless resistances of at-least one element per monster were extremely low or non-existent and served only to enforce the find-the-right-element-for-the-job playstyle Tech Forces have. These low resistances already exist in the game, on single player.

And even then i'd argue that some of them are far too high for the amount of damage Forces do.

That said, the single player resistances reflect much better the kind of resistances you would expect if you wanted Tech Forces to toe the DPS line with Rangers and Hunters. Like in the previous example where a hunter can get enough ATP to effectivly push 80% of their damage through to monsters unhindered, Forces are constantly having 50% or more of their damage blocked at all times, if not more when trying to attack a variety of monsters with differing resistances.

So to sum it all up Hunters are less affected by monster defences, can easily over-cap on ATP through the use of a weapon, get a massive boost from Shifta/Zalure and only have to worry about getting enough ATA to reliably hit their special attacks.

While on the other hand

Forces casting techs are much, much more affected by monster defences, have no way to over-cap on MST in any noticeable way, do not benefit from Shifta/Zalure and have to worry about getting rare weapons and armour with % bonuses to tech damage to even try to compete, all of which is still taxed by monster resistances.

The whole system of resistances vs DFP is heavily skewed toward weapon usage over techs, which is why even FOnewerls with their piddly 580 ATP cap seriously consider using a melee weapon over casting techs because Shifta and Zalure are just that good.

Again, changing resistances to be fairer to Forces is what needs to be done, but may be too complicated or time consuming to achieve. Personally I think this is an important issue, but I'm biased because I love forces and techs in general : 3

If something could be done i would be extremely happy, but I'm already extremely happy to be able to play my favorite childhood game with friends over modern Internet connections, something I thought i'd never be able to do again when the official BB servers shut down. So don't sweat it, but do keep it in mind ^^

Edited by Drazn
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Well said Drazn.

It's true that techs are underpowered. I agree what needs to be done is a reassessment of elemental resistances of the enemies. I don't think any major change needs to happen, but a few tweaks here and there would really make things a lot more fair. I don't think every enemy should be easy to kill with techs. Enemies like hildetoors, dorphon eclairs, chaos bringers etc should be the situations where force characters should bring out weapons to defeat instead of relying on techs, but as things are right now, there are very few enemies outside of ep4 that are worth using techs on. The fact that there are enemies like Sinows in CCA where tech boosts makes no difference to damage you do is just ridiculous. You're doing like 200ish damage to them max with a level 200 fonewm with high mst and natural RA-tech boosts.

I would love to work with others and come up with fair changes to some enemies elemental resistances to make the game more interesting and balanced. But I don't know if it's realistic for the proposed changes to be implemented.

I think every experienced ultima player can agree that techs are underpowered and would probably be in favor of at least some changes being done.

Edited by tru
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