For those who played in the DC/GC era, what was it like?

[Spoon]

As someone who has only been able to experience PSO's online play through small private servers, I think it'd be interesting to hear about what it was like to play in the game's heyday. It's hard to gather good information on this subject because there's not much video documentation, most of the old forums are either hard to find or don't exist anymore, and really it seems that finding an old PSO veteran is really uncommon even in these circles.

Some questions I'd like to ask

- How many players were usually on at one time? How many players were there total at the game's peak?
- How many ships/blocks were there? How did you decide which to go to?
- What were the events like (Yahoo/AOL cup)?
- Were Photon Drops still the de facto currency of PSO? Or was it more of a trading/barter system with items rather than PDs or Meseta?

I'm sure others will have questions to ask too. I'm interested to hear what players of the original game have to say!

 

[Aleron Ives]

The original game has neither Photon Drops nor a trade window, so you had to drop trade items to barter for everything and trust the other person to be honest. Of course, PSO remained legit for only a few weeks, so once duping came about, all trading opportunities pretty much died (not that you can really find anything worth trading on V1, anyway, but back then people thought finding a Varista was a major accomplishment ).

DC had 16 blocks per ship, and IIRC GC had 10. GC was never as popular as DC, since Nintendo didn't support online gaming the way Sega did. As for how you decided which ship to use, generally it was just "don't pick the first one", because that's where all the people who would RSOD you in the lobby would hang out, as well as all the people who would join your team to NOL you.

The only good thing about those days was Io 11, where all the Japanese players would play Battle and Challenge 24/7 once V2 came out. Assuming you could find JP players who would play with Westerners and not disconnect the moment you joined and didn't say something in Japanese to prove yourself, you could get a game at any time with competent players who would show you the ropes. IMO Io 11 was a better place to learn Battle than Miranda 7 (the US Battle block), because the JP players were willing to branch out among all the good rules (2, 3, 6), so you got lots of variety. The M7 battlers (and Western players in general) were better at B6, but that was the only rule they ever played, so they sucked at 2/3 compared to the JP players. You couldn't have as much fun fighting them as you could with fighting JP players, because of that lack of variety.

If anything else was good about those days, it was the magic of having the game be new and everybody being just as much of a newb as you were. These days PSO gets micromanaged to death, but back then everybody just played together for fun and the wonder of learning new things about an awesome game. Tryhards tend to do everything they can to suck the fun out of the game now, so it's a lot harder to find like-minded players if you just want to have fun. Conversely, it's a golden age now to be a PSO tryhard, if you're into that, since pretty much every game mechanic is well understood and is thus able to be manipulated to the fullest extent possible.

 

[Loser]

i was like 12 or 13 when pso for dreamcast came out. i bought the dreamcast right when it came out. i remember going to toys r us to buy pso for it when it came out. before that all i had were 40 demo discs and quake 3 lol. 4x4 evolution and san francisxo rush were some of my fav demo games to play before i started burning games but none of the burned games i tried were that good really. also, sonic adventure.

anyway, i still remember the first time i logged on to pso for the dreamcast near the time it first came out. i was a racast. racast and racaseal are the best classes in dreamcast version. in psobb and probably gc and xbox the ramarl is best solo character to be. dreamcast had totally different balance everyone running around with spread needles with super long range and lots of techniques.

anyway the first time i logged on there were a TON of people playing online. lots of people chatting in the lobby. i remember a HUnewearl character coming up to me shortly after i entered the lobby and asked if i wanted to play with her. after that it became kind of a blur. the game was revolutionary at the time. it seemed like the game was such a mystery of fun and brilliance. i LOVED it and played it for many years.

opa opa was mag of choice ot hack to level 999

people would also buff their stats with 10000000000 hp etc.

lots of people thought it was cool to make their characters as small and short as possible.

Durring those years hacking started and i got into hacking with a gameshark. people made god/hp with like -1054547u938 hp. when they equipped it it would keep killing them nonstop lol.

People also learned how to walk through wall hack and dupe items and even how to target other players and attack them. some used resta hack that stole people's hp to kill them rather than give them hp. there was also people using a hack to give people tp.

one thing that was really cool is NORMAL PEOPLE used to play pso back then. little kids played, grown ups, your average person was playing not just middle aged men with nostalgia like it is now on the dreamcast lol.

there was a hack to enter people's locked game rooms who were usually transferring character items so you could run in there and steal their stuff lol.

it got really bad when people started using a cheat to cause people's game to freeze when they entered the lobby. people made hacks to counter this and prevent the freeze. during that time it was pretty bad. was becoming hard to play and enjoy the game.

There was also something called NOLing which turned everyone into a NOL character erasing their data and making them like a level 5 character named NOL lol.

My brother for whatever reason blocked our dialup from connecting to the server somehow like a asshole he told me years later. so i eventually stopped playing cause of him doing that. so i missed out on a few years of playing. there was more like kids pretending they worked for sega using god of equip cheat etc to explain why their elf was holding a rifle etc lol.

i dont remember people trading a currency usually a rare gun or unit or shield or frame for another similar item by dropping it on the floor and running to pick it up. usually people would drop a crappy item and not the item you agreed to trade for thus ripping you off. there was no trade window.

when you died you dropped your money and weapon on the floor. so you could steal people's stuff when they died. was pretty awesome. they kinda turned pso into a baby game removing that.

also, i had v1 not v2. v1 was free to play. v2 needed hunters license. v1 had most good rares a lot of people used like heaven punisher, spread needle, etc. v1 also had more cheating abilities than v2 lol.i didnt know that v2 had ultimate mode til like 6 years ago kinda sad lol. v1 had v2 items but like they just looked like a generic non rare with the rare name could be wrong about that...

 

[Loser]

honestly now that i think about it pso for dreamcast was a real shit hole.

 

[Aleron Ives]

TBH the early days of SCHTServ (2004) were better than Sega's server in a lot of ways. The odds of getting hacked were way lower, and there were still tons of V2 players since GC wasn't supported yet, and BB didn't exist.

 

[JAG1024]

PSO on Dreamcast, was a magical place to me, my first exposure to online gaming, and was a very social game at the start. Nobody solo'd, some people logged on just to chat.
You could only have 1 character on a VMU(SEGA's memory card),
and you were required to play offline to open the 4 areas online.
Not too long after, gameshark codes ruined the game, too many hacked everythings, but the worse was having your Character corrupted PK'd, rendering them unrevivable, unplayable ever again. Japanese players shunned westerners, when at first they were friendly, and there was a general uneasiness playing with steangers.
The community was divided between hackers & non hackers, the first ship Oberon was preying grounds for newbies, avoided generally at all costs.
Lots of "Legits Only" or PW games, soon the player base took a big hit, lots of cool people quit. I put up with it all, cuz I enjoyed the game, played so much I burnt out the reader on my DC, then decided to move on, but still have fond memories of my time there.

of all my DC toons my fav 3:
Xcalibur-RAmar LV 100
Xcel-HUmar LV 73
Xotica- FOnewearl-LV 50

 

[Retty]

I remember having guild cards with people's phone numbers on them, usually with a note saying "pls dont call me while im playing itll disconnect me", or their geocities/lycos/angelfire pages with shitty low res DBZ screenshot galleries.

I could go on and on about the hacking stuff that plagued the game in DC days, but it's those little things I remember the most.

 

[Harborer of Hope]

I remember having guild cards with people's phone numbers on them, usually with a note saying "pls dont call me while im playing itll disconnect me", or their geocities/lycos/angelfire pages with shitty low res DBZ screenshot galleries.

I could go on and on about the hacking stuff that plagued the game in DC days, but it's those little things I remember the most.

Waaaaay back then you will also remember we had 30 PAGES of cards! Not the skimpy 15 pages we has now. *le sigh* Mew herself is traumatized that she had a Lot of Global friends and PSO loved ones that had put their emails on their cards so that we could keep in touch in case of anything. Think mew's told this story before....but just in case for sake of Venting... One night mew was logging into her PSODC and to her horror found PSO Data MISSING! The last time mew had seen her VMU was in the paws of her nephew the night before...The little boogar DELETED YEARS of SEGA server Dreamcast data...for what??....so he could have room to play "Stupid invaders"?!! Mew was DEVASTATED! Years of emails GONE!...ppl mew could have kept in touch with as PSO changed from console to console....Never to be heard from again...unless by some miracle..they stumble upon pso here. ONE found mew on Scht 15 years later!! <3

 

[Kevdo]

I used to play with my cousin on GameCube a lot, and sometimes online. The online portion wasn't all that memorable to me. It was essentially what you'd expect, lots of hackers and generally the same game as offline. On GC, I don't remember ever getting hacked in a bad way, although it's possible I did and never realized it.

I remember someone gave us a hacked Chao mag with 300 in every stat. It made my FOmar incredibly strong. But the thing about that mag is that every time I let someone borrow it, after they gave it back, their memory card would corrupt. Eventually my own memory card got corrupted data too. I have no idea if they were related, but I've always wondered that. I was only 11 when PSO came out on GC, so it's all kinda fuzzy.

I will say I suffered many memory card corruptions in that game. I never really knew why, although many many years later I realized it was likely because I used a third party memory card with more storage because I thought it was better. Should've stuck with my original Nintendo memory card.

Last things I remember is the transition from normal to hard to very hard to ultimate. Each time we moved up, I remember being mind blown by the new things each difficulty brought. The first time I found a gigush in Forest on hard I was like WHAAAAT lol. Also, when we got into ultimate, I was like HOLY MOLY THESE GUYS ARE SO FAST. Everything was new and exciting lol. Good times, and like Aleron Ives said, people back then didn't care to play optimally. We all just played for fun. Somewhere along the line, people forgot how to do that.

 

[Aleron Ives]

Every once in a while I go back and look at the Guild Card comments on my characters from Sega's server. Ah, memories. :')

 

[Spuz]

It was an opportunity to get humars trapped+dead and steal their spread needles.

 

[CTB]

I think most of it's been covered, but I loved damn near everything about EP3 for the first few months. The PSOPC era of Schthack was, uh, interesting too (including the PSOPC demo server lol. Yahoo Groups with King Arthur?)

 

[Sky's the Limit]

It was a very fun experience. I made lots friends. I'm pretty sure Ms. Mew was one of them.. My brother and I would wake up early to play on school days and we had an RP storyline with another friend at school. It's hard to explain the experience accurately, especially with so many things out now that do what PSO did back then in a more modern way. Chat systems and mechanics and the like. It's nice to remember the good and the bad times. The upside and downs.

It was all about the community. The various people you met. I've lost touch with pretty much all of them. It's a bit sad, but that's life. People move around and move on.

As for hackers, not all were bad. There were a handful of super cool hackers. One took me on a magical trip around to weird places and put on strange and pretty light shows on loading screens. He leveled up my character and I had a lot of fun.

 

[thejoeshow91]

I remember being a kid and being absolutely blown away at the concept of online play. Every time someone played with me or even the small thing of people talking in lobbies utterly fascinated me. I remember being so proud wheb I reached level 20 and being able to start hard mode. And then some dude kireeked me. I remember losing my mind when a double saber dropped and the time when a RAcast I was playing with straight up stole my double saber after he said he would trade it for something better (I was 9 alright? I still had a dumb kid brain haha). Also this game, along with Gundam Wing and other Toonami anime, really got me into anime but that's another story for another time.

 

[UNO]

This thread is like asking your grandpa about the war

 

[Neanderthal]

Exciting during your first playthrough and boring during your second since hard mode was just the same crap in more hp.

 

[Kevdo]

This thread is like asking your grandpa about the war

Lol, this week I was explaining to one of my younger siblings what life was like before social media. How most of my time online back then was spent on video games, aim/yahoo messenger and chatrooms looool. asl? asl?

It's crazy how things change.

 

[raggamuffin]

DC PSO was my first ever online gaming experience. Limited to 2 hours online per week. First time online I got NOL'd and lost my character. That was upsetting to the extreme. I'd never encountered hacking before or how malicious and petty people could be in the online realm.

It was also my first experience of online chat. But using a controller it was a slow and cumbersome affair. It was an addictive game especially only being allowed online for 2 hours per week.

GC PSO I encountered a lot of item duping. Crazy stat weapons made the game pointlessly easy. Back then I was dating someone and was able to go online whenever I wanted. The GC game felt friendlier and I also invested in a keyboard so I could type online. That was a breath of fresh air. I played it far too much.

Never capped a character or found end game gear (legitimately).

My fav PSO era is when i discovered SCHT. That rekindled a huge amount of nostalgia for me.

Ed

 

[Aleron Ives]

DC PSO was my first ever online gaming experience. Limited to 2 hours online per week.

You poor deprived soul! Many of us were playing 10 hours per day back then. For a game with so little content, PSOv2 was surprisingly addictive.

Of course it wasn't so much the game itself but the fun of meeting people from all over the world that kept us playing late into the night day after day.

 

[conenubi701]

I remember my friend making "ForestToRuin" games and after the Dragon he'd cast Grants on players going up to P2 bam FSOD.

Or nearly getting to 100 wins (multiple times) with no disconnects and then your mom picks up the phone during a battle. RIP flawless 100/0 record. I think I had 543 wins and 3 or 4 disconnects on the main humar and a couple of other 100 + win characters. I even got to 100 wins on my Ramar. Spent too much time on Battle mode when I was 14 lol

Good times, good times.

The only good thing about those days was Io 11, where all the Japanese players would play Battle and Challenge 24/7 once V2 came out. Assuming you could find JP players who would play with Westerners and not disconnect the moment you joined and didn't say something in Japanese to prove yourself, you could get a game at any time with competent players who would show you the ropes. IMO Io 11 was a better place to learn Battle than Miranda 7 (the US Battle block), because the JP players were willing to branch out among all the good rules (2, 3, 6), so you got lots of variety. The M7 battlers (and Western players in general) were better at B6, but that was the only rule they ever played, so they sucked at 2/3 compared to the JP players. You couldn't have as much fun fighting them as you could with fighting JP players, because of that lack of variety.

Io 11 was incredible since there were always battle games going on. Plenty of Japanese players played with Westerners, a Japanese friend of my neighbor that set up our Dricas accounts helped a lot in getting us to play with the Japanese squads. Maybe you joined up when the Americans had a bad rep due to all the PKing they would do on the JP ships lol. 4P Battle 3 or even 1v1 Battle 3 was the go to rule there. Battle 6 1v1 wasn't really popular on Io and there were rarely any 1v1 B6 games there, B6 was mainly for 2v2 on Io.

The Japanese players were the absolute best at tech battling and you had to play a lot with them to get to their level. M7 was where techless slowly started to take over between Hucast players since those players were trash at tech battles. That crowd later followed on v3 (GC/Xbox/BB) because other players couldn't adapt to the tech boosts and new tech knockdowns.

You poor deprived soul! Many of us were playing 10 hours per day back then. For a game with so little content, PSOv2 was surprisingly addictive.

You got to the online party late though didnt you? I think you told me you joined DC online by the time M7 was dead or dying off. If you were in Io in the early days then we must have battled many times since me and this Japanese player would dominate that block.