A harder difficulty

[tru]

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

It's sad for me to hear you say "So far it (ultima) has been the most grindy and unsatisfying experience I have ever had with PSO." I figured most of the people who had a problem with the difficulty of Ultima would have similar complaints about pso in general. My experience on Ultima has been the most satisfying out of any pso game and even any online game period. It's unfortunate that you haven't been having a good experience. I don't think it's required for you to donate to be successful in the game. In addition, I don't think it's required for you to play with others often. I've played by myself 90-95% of my time here in ultima and I've had a good deal of success. I will admit things may have been easier when I started because prices weren't so inflated. I was able to buy some really useful event items for about half of what they're worth today (stuff like hylian shield and psycho raven), and saving up PDs equal to that amount (66 pds or so) wasn't too difficult. Green names were pretty common when I started so I was able to hunt materials and mostly a lot of photon crystals. I played BPD on ultimate with my FO (which wasn't difficult) and sold a lot of the bpd items I got that I wasn't gonna keep. It adds up pretty quickly. I sold a lot of items between 1 and 5 pds. That added up to around 66 pds even though the gear I had wasn't that good. Lots of little trades add up. I also played blue star memories quite a lot to save pds (which isn't really the best method, but it was very easy). I find it surprising that you find the progression on Ultima to be so slow in comparison to other versions of pso. I got to level 144 on my second day on this server with my FOnewm (x5 exp was on), and it took hundreds of hours on GC for me to ever get close to that high of a level. I don't know if anything can really be done about inflation. Ultima is difficult. It's meant to be, but I don't feel right if people are having worse experiences than me due to the fact that they started on a later date. I would feel very discouraged if I saw some of these prices for event items when I first started playing. 500 dts for DWs is ridiculous. Of course you can always hunt for it yourself, but even that can seem out of reach when you don't have decent gear to begin with.

I will admit that the grind I've experienced on Ultima has been soul crushing at times, but to me, that's the way pso is. That's how it was on the GC, and if I didn't like it then, I wouldn't be playing this game now.

The fact that you have arrest needle which is often consider high end gear for a RA and you've been playing for less than a month would suggest that the progression isn't too slow. It's typical for a person to spend many months (or even years) before they have some of the best gear in the game. I know donating was a big factor in that, but I've seen people selling POST for 8 DTs and many people will trade DTs for PDs at a 1:5 rate right now. So if you save up 40 pds you can get a POST which gets you one of the best ranger weapons in the game. It's not difficult at all (even for a new player) to save up pds if you put time into the game. As long as you know how to farm.

I would say don't get discouraged.

Edited April 6, 2016 by tru

[Saber +7]

I feel like maybe you just need freeze traps or something... Jokes aside ultimate here has boosted enemy stats and Ep 2 in particular. Perhaps try playing a little more careful.

Keep grinding

[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.

I feel like maybe you just need freeze traps or something... Jokes aside ultimate here has boosted enemy stats and Ep 2 in particular. Perhaps try playing a little more careful.

Keep grinding

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.

[Saber +7]

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.

Tried playing with other players?

[Ardh2005]

I started playing back in September, and I didn't really experience the struggle you're describing... I used my experience from my GC days and started with a Greenill RAmar and got a Justy as quickly as possible. The relatively massive HP of enemies is a lot less daunting when you're halving it with every hit. You actually got more help than I did, as I was only given a Red Scorpio for starting out... Also, hit and run tactics are very useful if you're having trouble surviving Ultimate (which I still have to do at times.) If you're having trouble with Baranz, (and yes, they are a giant pain the the rear), try hunting something that you can kill more safely... Then go back to the Baranz when you feel more confident. (Besides, I think that the Iron Faust is practically endgame level gear on this server.)

[tru]

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 do see what you're saying with making ultimate easier, then making crack mode so the veteran players don't get bored killing weak enemies. The only problem is, the only way to people would have the incentive to hunt in crack mode all the time would be if drops were easier there, and if they were, veterans would have an easier time getting good items and they could sell it for cheaper and it would widen the gap between the vets and newer players in community. If the drops weren't made easier then that would decrease the replay value because there would be no point in getting maxed gear if you can run through the game without it. Its great meeting people who are successful on this server (good gear+high levels) because you know that they probably went through the same struggle you did. Most casual players would've just rage quit. Ultima isn't designed to favor casual gamers. I think that's a good thing.

If ultimate difficulty is too difficult for you, it may be time to reevaluate your strategies or play a lower difficulty. There are still a ton of useful drops on very hard. Start with easier hunts and work your way up to more difficult ones (like panzer faust).

Figure out what your goals are then ask for advice if needed. If you find ultimate difficulty on ultima to be an insurmountable wall then wouldn't you want to overcome this wall like hundreds of other players have instead having it being made easier for you?

[Midori]

I love how Ultimate mode is harder on this server. When I first reached lv 90 on my FOnewearl and tried it out, I couldn't believe how hard it was. It was a massive jump in difficulty from VH but I loved it. I played PSO2 before coming to PSO Ultima and there was absolutely no challenge whatsoever in that game, so it was really great to see. I worked hard and gradually got better gear, and eventually was able to get strong enough to handle Ultimate mode. It was a lot of fun.

Being new to Ultimate and struggling to play it is a good reason to play multiplayer. Just join/make open parties until you are strong enough to be able to solo.

[Shominaminoto]

Harder quests > Harder difficulties IMO.

[Larva]

Well it is true that the game can become some sort of a pain, but like other users mention. It's not impossible to get gear or grind your character. within the years we been changed some aspect of the games aspects that i feel was needed to for Ultima. When i started the server i saw other servers doing the opposite making the game more easy and to me that is not what PSO is. I never ever changed the game thinking in donation im honest here. I did the changes to make the game more enjoyable for specific PSO players that i fit or used to fit in that category. Many time i been told to make changes in different aspect or areas of the game. I always listen to recommendations. I have my belive of what Ultima and PSO have to be, its when i decide if the recommendation actually fits the style of Ultima, if it does then we make it if not then we dont. Something that i dont like right now in Ultima is the overpriced weapons and how some users use the donation system. This is something we have to take action, some way to re balance the economy in a different way. But the exp the difficulty the boost the drops its something that i feel we did it correct and that i feel happy and comfortable the way it is as now. Still we need to balance some drops (minor details) because theres always something to do here lol.

I believe the same as other member, Ultima it's not for the like of everyone not all PSO player can say they enjoy this side of PSO but its what it is, there's certainly other PSO server's easier to play.

just try to have a patience and open mind.

[Hanya]

The only real grief I've got with this game is my own misfortune in drops. However that is something I've had my entire MMO career. Yeah sure, the economy isn't always fun, but plenty of games suffer the same aspects. It usually always comes down to those setting the prices and those overbidding to make sure they get the prize. And other things as well I'm sure, but I'm not in the greatest state to go deeper into it right now. Then why am I posting-.. I don't know man! Stop asking me questions!!

But on the other side, I've never gotten this far before in any PSO, so yay! And thank you all for helping.

[tru]

I'm really glad to see that the people in charge care about the economy.

[El Socko]

The only issue I (and many others) have is that you gave enemies way too much EVP, especially in Ep2. This drives people to go for 80 hit on as many weapons as possible, which obviously is only realistic via redeeming. I don't think I have to say more.

[tru]

Episode 2 is particularly frustrating for solo force characters. Even basic enemies like zol gibbons and sinow zoas can cause headaches >.< Trying to hit enemies like ill gills and delbiters with 80 hit weps as a fo can be problematic.

In general, I enjoy the challenge, but it can be frustrating at times.

Edited April 11, 2016 by tru

[Trefleex]

Well it is true that the game can become some sort of a pain, but like other users mention. It's not impossible to get gear or grind your character. within the years we been changed some aspect of the games aspects that i feel was needed to for Ultima. When i started the server i saw other servers doing the opposite making the game more easy and to me that is not what PSO is. I never ever changed the game thinking in donation im honest here. I did the changes to make the game more enjoyable for specific PSO players that i fit or used to fit in that category. Many time i been told to make changes in different aspect or areas of the game. I always listen to recommendations. I have my belive of what Ultima and PSO have to be, its when i decide if the recommendation actually fits the style of Ultima, if it does then we make it if not then we dont. Something that i dont like right now in Ultima is the overpriced weapons and how some users use the donation system. This is something we have to take action, some way to re balance the economy in a different way. But the exp the difficulty the boost the drops its something that i feel we did it correct and that i feel happy and comfortable the way it is as now. Still we need to balance some drops (minor details) because theres always something to do here lol.

I believe the same as other member, Ultima it's not for the like of everyone not all PSO player can say they enjoy this side of PSO but its what it is, there's certainly other PSO server's easier to play.

just try to have a patience and open mind.

Hi can we soon get a update about this matter and plans?

Edited April 11, 2016 by Trefleex

[Lemon]

Hi can we soon get a update about this matter and plans?

Give him at least a full week