A Final Stand?

Changing stats in quests is a major pain unfortunately, especially for PC. Besides, if you could only access more difficult monsters in quests, then you wouldn't be able to fight enjoyable monsters while also having the ability to find rares. It would also not solve the problem of Ultimate being even more boring offline.

The main problem with Ultimate is that it is two difficulties in one. Forest and Cave are separated from Mine and Ruins by many different stats. While Forest and Cave are difficult at low levels, this is mostly because the game does not give you any useful Ultimate weapons while in Very Hard. By changing weapon stats and giving players a few more weapons to work with via quests in Very Hard mode, I can make the transition to Ultimate far less painful. I am not suggesting raising the bar for the entire difficulty, but rather making Forest and Cave closer to being on-par with Mine and Ruins. It might cause players some extra grief in the beginning, but if they use teamwork and the extra weaponry, armour, and shields provided, they would have the ability to level up quickly and gain the strength needed to progress on their own.

The main benefit will be felt at the end of the leveling road, as in the current stat system Forest and Cave are just plain boring and unenjoyable because they are so easy. People do not seem to realize that this happens when they don't have any high level characters, but it does happen. Your stats change phenomenally over the course of 80 - 150, and by the time you reach 150 all your stats should be maxed, or at least very close to it. Once that happens, you're stuck with playing only half of Ultimate, because Forest and Cave is so easy that it is no longer even fun.

I agree with you Aleron.
To my way of thinking, ya should go on with your project, making the changes about the difficulty/ side quest/ drops you think are necessary, and which don't mess with the games integrity.

If the gameplay remains the same with just a few "tweaks", but still very legit, everythings allright.
Just please, don't make easy drops like BB. If there is anything we can do to contribute, just tell us. I may be talking by myself but I am almost sure that everyone who's reading this topic, sure wants to help.

Side note here... there are crappy ship names around, like "dont panic" etc... and maybe to many ships for just BB... This is just a suggestion dude.. If you got time, try to run your own dedicated ship server. Be ready to make OUR revolution... be ready to fight for our dreams... "it's thinking".. don't let it die, cause you know it will if we're not strong enough.

Seeing as there is no DC/PC only software, there's no way to host a Ver.2 only ship. Even if there was such software, I do not have Internet access capable of hosting a PSO server.

Drops are a major pain, seeing as they can't really be tested in a timely fashion. If drops were being made fair, then it would still take a while to find various things. Unfortunately, that would mean it would take several months to test new droprates even once the modifications were complete. I'm certainly not planning to make everything drop like Red Handgun and Imperial Pick in terms of frequency, but considering how few people play the game now, we don't have a huge playerbase to have people combatting difficult rates with high playtime. I don't think it should take more than a month or two of constant playing to find really good items; we've waited long enough for things to be obtainable.

Something else that must be considered is enemy frequency. Consider Red Handgun and Red Saber. They both have the same rate more or less, but which one do you find more? Red Handgun. Why? There are more Barbles in Forest 1/2 than Gulguses. Consider if Hildelt had an identical droprate to Barble. You would get the Hildelt rare far less frequently than the Barble rare simply because there are maybe 1/5 as many Hildelts in a run of Forest as there are Barbles. As such, the same droprate on a Hildelt is five times harder than the same rate on a Barble.

How longer do you think it will take you to finish this project?
It seems that this is originating some controversy at dreamcasttalk forums.
I guess you should also post this on Schthacks boards to grab more peoples attention?

I wasn't aware of those forums, but a quick search brought them up. People are free to love or hate this as much as they want. I do not care. If people really think that modifying Ver.2 in any way suddenly makes the game completely different, they are free to have such a view, though I don't believe the holier-than-thou legits have the answer to the game's problems. (If they did, then Ver.2 wouldn't be a ghost town. It's obvious that the game, as is, does not appeal to many people because of its flaws. I merely want to fix them.) People claim that modifying the game makes you illegit, which is true according to Sega's standards. The thing is, according to Sega, playing online at all is cheating. Nobody is legit anymore unless they only play offline, and PSO sucks that way. Sega's standards do not really apply anymore if you intend to play online, so it is up to the players and server owners to define what they consider acceptable on their servers. The term "legitimate" now equates to "acceptable", nothing more when applied to online gameplay. People can flame me on Dreamcast Talk, Azure, and whatever other forums they like, and it will not change my stance. I hope that the people here will share my vision, but now I must stop writing as class is starting.

too bad you can't get rares to drop in quests, as its about the only thing i'd want to change (that and activating falz drops).

I think a major problem is the lack of Dreamcast Broadband Adapters and the sheer expense of them when the odd one finally finds its way onto the market. I'd be playing the Dreamcast versions of PSO a lot more if I had a BBA at hand but as it stands I'm not willing to set up a separate dial up ISP account just to play PSO.

That aside I'm not so sure that the difficulty of v2 needs to be altered much and always found it acceptable enough as it is. Things I'd like to be altered/fixed though would be:

01: Increase the ATA values on the High v1 Rare items so that they are actually still useful in Ultimate.
02: Decrease the the drop % of the rares that drop so often that they are no longer "rares".
03: Give minor increases on rare items that have insanely stupid drop rates to something more credible.
04: Increase the rarity value of certain items like "State/Maintenance".
05: Release all unreleased items either has quest rewards or by altering monster drops.
06: Allow % on weapons to go above 60% but perhaps still cap it at 75-90%.
07: Re-balance the experience required to level up at the higher levels (160-200 perhaps).
08: Re-introduce the penalty for death = drop equipped weapon/meseta (This helps build trust!).
09: See about the possibility of using the VR Temple/Spaceship maps for proper monster populated quests.
10: Fixing some of the exploits in the games code.
11: Perhaps slightly increase drop rate of rare items dropped by rare enemies.
12: Importing as many quests as possible into the actual offline game as possible.
13: Porting of quests from other versions of PSO to v2 (I believe a lot of these have been done).
14: Translation of any remaining JP only quests (I could help with this but I'm lazy).
15: Re-open Psoquest so we have a good and accurate resource for DC v2 (Sorry about that one)

I could think of a few other things to add but in the end it comes down to the feasibility of how much v2 could be modified. It's not like we are really going to see additional content being injected into the game so we have to make full use of everything that wasn't used and perhaps exploiting certain coding quirks to our advantage to help balance the game more.

@ Bob Dobbs

Don't you play Roblox? Your name is familiar to one in my friends list. Just curious, so off-topic I know.


@ Everyone else

Now hold on. About the PK'ing thing... if we did that, we would have to remove all HUD's except when you're in battle mode, and place other players HP below their names. Then, we would need to make a special map where we can travel around with multiple teleporters, specifically made for PKers and PKKers and players who want some new stuff. Then, we would need to extend the party limit to about... I dunno, about 500 each PK server. Might cause lag, but that's the case for most MMORPG servers. Plus, it's not much. The battle mode should be at least 8 players, and there should be more items. There should also be the occasional monster. If we made the ability to go into Normal mode stages, then it would be sort of cooler.

It's Yume! Long time no see. Are you bored of PSU now? xD

aaron_yume wrote:I think a major problem is the lack of Dreamcast Broadband Adapters and the sheer expense of them when the odd one finally finds its way onto the market. I'd be playing the Dreamcast versions of PSO a lot more if I had a BBA at hand but as it stands I'm not willing to set up a separate dial up ISP account just to play PSO.

Yes, it is a problem. DC-PC connections are the only way to get the Dreamcast online for a lot of people, but most people no longer have voice modems and the connection is tricky to set up and to operate. If I had no other choice I'd gladly keep paying for a dial-up ISP to play online, but that's just me.

aaron_yume wrote:That aside I'm not so sure that the difficulty of v2 needs to be altered much and always found it acceptable enough as it is.

...You never found Forest boring after maxing your stats and getting weapons with high percentages? You can cut through Bartles like Jell-o.

aaron_yume wrote:01: Increase the ATA values on the High v1 Rare items so that they are actually still useful in Ultimate.

I'm planning to do this, and ATP will probably be increased as well, depending on the weapon.

aaron_yume wrote:02: Decrease the the drop % of the rares that drop so often that they are no longer "rares".

You mean stuff like Club of Laconium and Varista? Those weapons drop frequently in Ultimate, and once they are no longer so sucky they would actually be usable there. If only normal weapons drop you won't be able to use any of them. xD

aaron_yume wrote:03: Give minor increases on rare items that have insanely stupid drop rates to something more credible.

Minor increases would not make much difference. Major increases are needed on a lot of items.

aaron_yume wrote:04: Increase the rarity value of certain items like "State/Maintenance".

While I would agree here, I'm not sure it would make much difference. People would just get States with the old drops then transfer them so they didn't need to find them with the new rates. :/

aaron_yume wrote:05: Release all unreleased items either has quest rewards or by altering monster drops.

Yup.

aaron_yume wrote:06: Allow % on weapons to go above 60% but perhaps still cap it at 75-90%.

Hell no. Have you ever used a 60% weapon? It's so absurdly powerful it isn't even funny (well actually, it's quite funny...). Having a 1.6x multiplier on your ATP makes a huge difference, and there is no way that the percentage system should be changed to allow 60% or more to be obtained easily.

aaron_yume wrote:07: Re-balance the experience required to level up at the higher levels (160-200 perhaps).

We have no idea where the EXP tables are, and it's too easy to level up in Episode I&II. The new EXP table is a joke.

aaron_yume wrote:08: Re-introduce the penalty for death = drop equipped weapon/meseta (This helps build trust!).

We're still talking about Ver.2, Yume. It was never removed. (Though IMO it should be, at least the weapon part.)

aaron_yume wrote:09: See about the possibility of using the VR Temple/Spaceship maps for proper monster populated quests.

Palace and Spaceship are not full areas, unfortunately...

aaron_yume wrote:11: Perhaps slightly increase drop rate of rare items dropped by rare enemies.

Considering the ridiculous infrequency of rare monster spawns and the fact that having them spawn in quests is useless, they should drop rares like 90% of the time.

aaron_yume wrote:12: Importing as many quests as possible into the actual offline game as possible.

You mean the online quests?

aaron_yume wrote:13: Porting of quests from other versions of PSO to v2 (I believe a lot of these have been done).

More are also on the way.

aaron_yume wrote:15: Re-open Psoquest so we have a good and accurate resource for DC v2 (Sorry about that one)

R.I.P. PSOQ.

o_O

I'm starting to get worried that no one's gonna make a reply on my idea...

Be nice. PK'ing would be pretty cool if you weren't banned every time and it was a rule to play on.

PK = player kill. It cannot be done without codes except on JPv1, and when you use codes to do it you just piss people off. PK is pointless because Sega created Battle mode. We already have a mode dedicated to PvP, so enough.

Aleron Ives wrote: It's Yume! Long time no see. Are you bored of PSU now? xD

What was it... digs through my emails account.... a certain mail dated 25/7/07:

Aleron Ives wrote:P.S. I have a feeling it'll be another 2 months before I hear from you
again, hah.

I think you had the right idea just not the right time frame. Sorry about that. I only played PSU for about 3 months and then got bored with it. PSU just doesn't click with me, it's like they've used PSO's framework but ripped out everything that was good about it. Been AWOL alot mainly because I've not been able to live in my own home and only recently moved back into it, albeit it is still somewhat of a building site.

Aleron Ives wrote:
...You never found Forest boring after maxing your stats and getting weapons with high percentages? You can cut through Bartles like Jell-o.

This may stem from the fact that I enjoy the forest level more than any other. My order of level preference is Forest,Ruins,Mines and lastly Caves.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:02: Decrease the the drop % of the rares that drop so often that they are no longer "rares".

You mean stuff like Club of Laconium and Varista? Those weapons drop frequently in Ultimate, and once they are no longer so sucky they would actually be usable there. If only normal weapons drop you won't be able to use any of them. xD

I was thinking more along the lines of things like the IcePick,Red Handgun etc. Items that are needed to get off to a good start in Ultimate mode but if the v1 unique model rares were modified to become usefull in ULT then they could become made rarer so they become at least sought after to some degree.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:03: Give minor increases on rare items that have insanely stupid drop rates to something more credible.

Minor increases would not make much difference. Major increases are needed on a lot of items.

Okay you have me there but still we don't want them to become too easy to get either and as you stated earlier I think a lot of testing would be needed to find the right balance for this.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:04: Increase the rarity value of certain items like "State/Maintenance".

While I would agree here, I'm not sure it would make much difference. People would just get States with the old drops then transfer them so they didn't need to find them with the new rates. :/

I get that but State/Maintenance just seems to me to be one of the best items in the game and it's classed as a common item where by other inferior slot items are classed as rares? This makes no sense to me!

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:06: Allow % on weapons to go above 60% but perhaps still cap it at 75-90%.

Hell no. Have you ever used a 60% weapon? It's so absurdly powerful it isn't even funny (well actually, it's quite funny...). Having a 1.6x multiplier on your ATP makes a huge difference, and there is no way that the percentage system should be changed to allow 60% or more to be obtained easily.

Well I have but 90% of the time I played as a Force so those higher percentages makes all the difference especially on hit for v1 items in Ultimate (null and voided if v1 items are modded). I'm not saying it'd be a good thing to do really and I'd still want the percentage capped but its something that could be altered if needed/required.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:08: Re-introduce the penalty for death = drop equipped weapon/meseta (This helps build trust!).

We're still talking about Ver.2, Yume. It was never removed. (Though IMO it should be, at least the weapon part.)

Maybe I'm going senile already or have I just played GC PSO too much now?. When I think back the chance of losing something while making people more cautious also had the benefit of that when you got a good set of friends together the trust in each other would be very high. Although at the same time you have the disadvantage of losing that rare that took you months to find which sucks really bad.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:11: Perhaps slightly increase drop rate of rare items dropped by rare enemies.

Considering the ridiculous infrequency of rare monster spawns and the fact that having them spawn in quests is useless, they should drop rares like 90% of the time.

Totally agree with you there unless the rare monster spawning rates were increased then a balance of some sort would have to be reached.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:12: Importing as many quests as possible into the actual offline game as possible.

You mean the online quests?

Yeah but also include the download quests on the game disc as well if possible. It's just a nice thought to know that if they were hardcoded onto the disc then no matter what happens in the future they'd still be playable/accessable offline.

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:13: Porting of quests from other versions of PSO to v2 (I believe a lot of these have been done).

More are also on the way.

This is great

Aleron Ives wrote:

aaron_yume wrote:15: Re-open Psoquest so we have a good and accurate resource for DC v2 (Sorry about that one)

R.I.P. PSOQ.

This year (well early next year) for sure I'm going to remember to snipe the domain from the old host before they renew it again. Currently they are holding it for ransom since the last few bills weren't paid and they want a minimum of a $1000 bid on the domain. Me and Nataku want to see it opened back up as an information only site but none of the other old administartors are interested. The only problem is none of us have a full backup of the site except perhaps the sites old/original owner who can only be found on FFXI these days of all places ¬_¬

We were/are considering hosting some sort of Psoquest re-union Private PSO server over the Christmas holiday but I'm having no luck with hosting servers on my own PC as I only seem to be able to get them working for me locally. Something to do with how my router works I think. >_<

Ives, I'm going to say that you have my support in this for the most part. I definitely think that adjusting the drop rates to be a tad more favourable is a good idea, and certainly trying to do something about the difficulty for higher level characters is as well. Although, I do think that things should be implemented gradually and specific ideas discussed before deciding on whether or not to go through with them.

aaron_yume wrote:This may stem from the fact that I enjoy the forest level more than any other. My order of level preference is Forest,Ruins,Mines and lastly Caves.

Forest is a fun area at first, but once none of the enemies can hurt you and you can kill all of them without any percents or bonuses it becomes really dull. :/ Very Hard and Ultimate Forest are similar in difficulty once you're maxed out except that it takes a few more attacks to kill the Ultimate enemies because of their HP/DFP.

aaron_yume wrote:I was thinking more along the lines of things like the IcePick,Red Handgun etc. Items that are needed to get off to a good start in Ultimate mode but if the v1 unique model rares were modified to become usefull in ULT then they could become made rarer so they become at least sought after to some degree.

The main trouble we have with modifying the Ver.1 rares is that they will then be able to rape Very Hard mode six ways from Sunday. As such, some of the best Ver.1 rares would have to be Ultimate mode drops. The only difference between these Ver.1 rares and Ver.2 rares would be their name colour. I imagine most of the currently common rares will stay the same, though Imperial Pick could be made rarer and a bit stronger since it has such a useful special but has weak base ATP. IMO the Red weapons should all be easy to find since they are only nine stars and essentially "basic" rares for Ver.2.

aaron_yume wrote:Okay you have me there but still we don't want them to become too easy to get either and as you stated earlier I think a lot of testing would be needed to find the right balance for this.

Of course we don't want rares dropping like hotcakes. I did a quick mod to one of the drop tables and managed to get multiple rares in a single run. I can't remember the exact statistics, but it was something on the order of 1x S-Red's Arms, 2x Parts of Baranz, 2x Handgun:GULD, 3x Heaven Punisher, 1x Twin Psychogun, 3x Red Slicer, and so forth. You get the idea. Obviously it's possible to go too far, but thankfully such mods prove that making rares drop is possible without modifying the exe. The right balance just needs to be achieved.

aaron_yume wrote:I get that but State/Maintenance just seems to me to be one of the best items in the game and it's classed as a common item where by other inferior slot items are classed as rares? This makes no sense to me!

Hence why Sega was lazy and removed it from Ver.3 and created the Cure units. If I had such an option, I would prefer to add the Cure units and require that users collect all of them and combine them to make a State/Maintenance. Unfortunately I can't, so I see little point in changing the frequency of State drops since people will have access to the original droprates to farm the units.

aaron_yume wrote:Maybe I'm going senile already or have I just played GC PSO too much now?. When I think back the chance of losing something while making people more cautious also had the benefit of that when you got a good set of friends together the trust in each other would be very high. Although at the same time you have the disadvantage of losing that rare that took you months to find which sucks really bad.

The penalty isn't dangerous when you're playing with friends, but it does suck when you're playing with strangers since most of them turn out to be dishonest. It's also annoying to constantly have to pick up and re-equip your weapon and sort your inventory. Overall, the penalty causes more harm than good, unfortunately.

aaron_yume wrote:Totally agree with you there unless the rare monster spawning rates were increased then a balance of some sort would have to be reached.

I would definitely prefer to increase the rare monster spawn rates, unfortunately that's probably buried in the exe somewhere and not going to happen. People's best bet for getting drops from rare enemies will continue to be piping them offline. xD

aaron_yume wrote:Yeah but also include the download quests on the game disc as well if possible. It's just a nice thought to know that if they were hardcoded onto the disc then no matter what happens in the future they'd still be playable/accessable offline.

Since the download quests are tied to your serials, this wouldn't work. The only way we could do this would be to add a new section to the quest list offline, and it's highly unlikely that we can do this since the list is probably also hard coded in the exe. Ideally I agree that adding more offline quests would be good.

aaron_yume wrote:This year (well early next year) for sure I'm going to remember to snipe the domain from the old host before they renew it again. Currently they are holding it for ransom since the last few bills weren't paid and they want a minimum of a $1000 bid on the domain. Me and Nataku want to see it opened back up as an information only site but none of the other old administartors are interested. The only problem is none of us have a full backup of the site except perhaps the sites old/original owner who can only be found on FFXI these days of all places ¬_¬

Well I can provide information, I just suck at web development. I don't feel like learning enough HTML to make my site pretty. Tweeg might have some PSOQ backups, and the Internet Archive also has some from which you could rip the base HTML for a lot of pages.

@ Caboose

My first goal is an EUv2 disc, which I may get working this weekend if things go well. >_>

Flash T.H. wrote:@ Bob Dobbs

Don't you play Roblox? Your name is familiar to one in my friends list. Just curious, so off-topic I know.

No he does not. However, he does play Q3, UT, & PSO.

Shouldn't this be like... posted on schthack too??

I just registered here, so I'm a little behind on what you guys are talking about. I see everyones point of view based on their opinions. However, I do not feel the drop rates should be messed with. It would be interesting to make the game harder, because like previously stated, it gets boring after a while & becomes too easy, you can just play with your eyes shut. On the other hand, for those who are just starting because they couldn't play when the ships originally started or having trouble leveling up because they do not have the time to play, it's hard enough don't you think? I'll post more later, I have things to do. There's my rant.