Open Mic

[Ducks]

scht at it's peak was before any character changes or new items were added

i think it was mostly due to having not only fun quests (the ones with shitloads of endless mobs), but a decent variety of quests
events like xmas when they tried to keep the items dropped sorta balanced like 30 hit snow queen, something thats good but can still be outshined by hunting something better, and pre-crackmas era when playing ult was really a chore (i could see this being fun as a quest but not as global ult that people with no shit have to endure)
cmode was more forgiving which let you always progress by jumping from character to character to do stages even if you hadn't done the ones before
old scht had most of the multiplayer quests available in single player, i know this server wants to focus on multiplayer but that was a draw

but this server doesnt have to be scht version like 9
content can be added without any previous game balance being touched

fucking with character stats/mats, weapon unlocks, the enemies themselves (how they function, fight, or otherwise), global rare drop rate, increased experience gains, or just making the game itself more or less of a grind all seems kinda foolish to me. other server have tried doing this every which a way and it almost always ends in shitty shit

just add more content and have fun events as best you can. dont make the shit different from the original game just to be different, make it better without removing the charm of the original

the quality of life changes for this server have been really nice and mostly lightly added without affecting the base game too much
just continue making small but effective changes and i think this game could be fun again to even jaded veteran players

i really wish this forum had a spoiler box too cuz i suck at not leaving walls of text

 

[Ps0master]

Here is my opinion..I vote yes but please don't change and tamper the charcters if you balance them out then it takes away the diversity. also maybe some cool events and quest here and there with nothing too broken like the quest strange sightings . add milestone rewards bring back the casino and change the items every so often Maybe add unobtainables or unique items there. a weekly lottery system that gives all the players a fair chance of sumthing nice. Add the command to join in quests. Material reset but only once Per charcter. Please don't make costum Weapons they will unbalance the game big time. the drop rates are mainly fine and same for rare enimys except ids like bluefull should get a slight boost to be on par with the rest of the ids since they all should be equal if not it's fine Though. You can keep the server vanilla while still spicing it up. The real server is dead but if it wasn't there would be so much new stuff so why not change it up. Who wants to play the same quests forever eventually we will seek sumthing new or challengING why not make a quest that you can fight duel bosses at the sametime together or add special perks like for example .1% chance the game will have increased drops kinda like the Halloween quests but for the quest you choose. Or increased exp regardless make them very rare to spawn we don't want the game easyer well I don't anyways. Last but not least add drops for hard and vh dark falz and olga flow. Theres so many ideas in my head but I'll leave it at that.

 

[falkenjeff]

I remember Lee giving the newmans a 200 materia cap on scht and it didn't really hurt anything.

Well Lee also broke a fuckton of other characters with combo unlocked weapons and stuff, so the newmans kinda needed it to keep up... Just saying.

Playing my characters with shitty weapons and a General/Battle just isn't fun.

There are a ton of heavenly/battles on the server now. You should find someone who's selling, and buy it . There are probably still a few god/battles floating around too.

 

[qwerty]

don't care as long as these changes can be opted-out in Tethealla

 

[Mad]

Having a free/libre/open-source PSOBB server that gets improved (= becoming more and more vanilla) by people actually playing (not just testing) on a reference implementation … wow, that’s powerful. That’s the reason why I came to Ephinea. I want to help recreate and preserve vanilla PSOBB, for the future generations to come, and for days when our nostalgia comes over. In an ideal world, that would be Sega’s job (@ every company running proprietary game servers: release the damn source code if you don’t want to run servers anymore!), but they failed, so we have to do this.

At the first weeks on Ephinea I was hooked, but then more custom changes were implemented, and now it no longer feels like Ephinea would be the server to achieve this goal.

Don’t get me wrong, there could definitely be custom changes that make the game more fun and better, and I would also like to play on such a server, but it would be something different than the PSOBB. Even if custom stuff is optional, and I decide not to use it, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s no longer vanilla, because it’s not only about my own little experience in my party, but about the experiences of all players on the server.

So for me, ideally there would be two servers run by Ephinea’s team (which does a fantastic job so far):

1. default¹ installation of Tethealla, for people that want to play vanilla PSOBB and for people that want to help by reporting bugs, reporting missing vanilla features etc.
2. installation of Tethealla with all custom changes enabled, for people that want to play "PSOBB enhanced" and for people that want to suggest non-vanilla features

If Ephinea is meant as [1.] (which I still hope), my answer to this poll is: hell no!
If Ephinea is meant as [2.] (but in that case I wouldn’t play much here), my answer to this poll would be: y…es *sheds a tear*, because I couldn’t see what speaks against it (if you have one custom change, it’s hard to argue why not have another one, and another one, and …)

¹ assuming that all custom changes have to be explicitly enabled by the admin (I don’t know if that’s currently the case, but I’d hope so)

 

[Neirene]

I think that we are at a point that theres a conflict between the newer generations playing PSO and PSOBB for the first time and the old, traditional players of the game. Sodaboy decided to release Ephinea as a showcase of the upcoming Tethealla Server version as a vanilla experience, then this project quickly decided to take another path which is what we see now.

Since I joined the forums i've been trying my best to give the best feedback based on my previous JPBB experience to help make the game as Vanilla as possible but my suggestions many times were ignored or actually became a nuisanse for the developers in this server because maybe they tought I was being way too purist or hardcore or whatever, so to avoid problems I decided to step back it's their project and i'm just a player that is trying to voice her opinion.

Because of all this I've decided to stop posting suggestions on a daily basis and just limit myself to just watch how Ephinea quickly decided to divert from the Vanilla experience in pro of trying to appeal to a broader range of players and thus receiving more players specially from the defunt Schthack servers.

Then a few months later I just see a completely diferent game with stuff such as:

-Hybrid of PSZ and PSO2 drop system
-PSU features such as the lucky system
-Numerous unesessary client modifications such as stakable mats, unnesesary unitxt_j changes and so on..
-Diablo II & III like "Hardcore Mode"
-Global Bank
-Custom Quests
-GM's playing with players with GM characters.
etc!...

As a fellow programmer I think Sodaboys and Tofuman intentions with all this new systems and modifications on Ephinea are a way to challenge thenselves and their skillsets to sucesfully implement add-ons and extend the game mechanics this is the only reason why I think they decided to add so many custom stuff and I can relate with them completely but there are moments that sometimes stuff are good just as they are without any extra.

I'm very sorry for this long post again lol

 

[Sodaboy]

-GM's playing with players with GM characters.

Any GM that's not Tofuman and myself can't make items and the like, so this isn't really an issue.

I almost never join games with other people and when I do, it's usually with some gimped low level character.

 

[Nyte]

soda, i'm ok with deviating from the "norm", as long as:
1. if stats are changed, players can reset materials.
2. if drops are changed, please consider allowing players to change section ID once again.
3. if new items are introduced to make classes more balanced, please make it a permanent drop so a casual like me can eventually get it without having to trade literally everything i own for it. i would even roll another section ID just to find it. (like i'm doing now to find a twin blaze lol, great fun.)

thanks for reading

 

[Ps0master]

-Hybrid of PSZ and PSO2 drop system
-PSU features such as the lucky system
-Numerous unesessary client modifications such as stakable mats, unnesesary unitxt_j changes and so on..
-Diablo II & III like "Hardcore Mode"
-Global Bank
-Custom Quests
-GM's playing with players with GM characters.
etc!...

Thats called improvment the only change was making a 13 yeAR old game better. Who cares if mats are stackable you rather have half your bank filled with grinders and Def mats? Lol.. the common bank is the best what if u need to transfer items to another charcter and you got no trustworthy friends. I've had items stolen from me on d2 because of that and it sucks

 

[Matt]

don't care as long as these changes can be opted-out in Tethealla

The goal of Tethealla is to provide a PSOBB server as accurate as possible to the official while also giving people the means to customize it to their liking. This means no changes on Ephinea are forced on your own Tethealla server -- Ephinea is basically just another PSOBB server using Teth, it is not a 100% accurate copy of the Tethealla software and its parameters.

The above comment is not endorsed by Sodaboy, but my point is that you don't need to worry about what happens on Ephinea in regards to the Tethealla software. Options might be added to let you replicate some stuff if Sodaboy wants to release that particular code, but you can just leave it Vanilla if you really wished.

 

[government]

lol ya unlock df man

 

[Addy]

Would it be possible to implement these changes on only one of the ships? It could end up splitting our already small community even further but the poll is also REALLY close.. Making a group of players leave seems much worse than splitting us up.

I voted yes, btw; for what it's worth I don't know a ton about this game ,but the changes that I've seen so far haven't really seemed to impact the core of the game at all. Mostly just quality of life changes and optional fun stuff. PSO2 drops make me more willing to play with randos because I don't know what anything's value is...
I'm all for Nyte's suggestions too, if we do end up going that route. :3

 

[Ryan]

A lot of smaller changes are great ideas (things already suggested here like resetting mat counts and new quests, the latter of which is honestly the best thing that could be added to this server right now in my opinion), but let's be real. Most of the players here that came from somewhere like Scht or Eden were really put off by the shit that they added to the game that ended up completely breaking it; I don't think that's what's being proposed here at all, but something like, say, unlocking Iron Faust or Dark Flow or whatever just strikes me as doing exactly what a lot of people wanted to get away from. Where do you draw the line?

I think all the stuff that was added here so far is great because it doesn't have any major impact on how people play the game; PSO2 drops make people more willing to play with others, the luck system has a trivial impact on drop rates, hardcore is separated from the base game completely, and the common bank and mat stacks are necessary things, in my view. Going past that and changing characters/items? Well... it makes me uneasy, to say the least. Anyone who played on Scht remembers DF/Rainbow/that one damn claw that I can't remember the name of but it was broken as hell. I'd be horrified to see this server take a direction anywhere close to that.

 

[Nikki]

-GM's playing with players with GM characters.

Any GM that's not Tofuman and myself can't make items and the like

I actually kinda appreciate this in a way. There's so many times I've run into mods on servers and they obviously have /item'd gear. I remember holding Gil's stuff for him in a item transfer once, 100 hit stuff everywhere lmao.

 

[Mr J]

You wanna know what makes this server more vanilla than all the others and more enjoyable to me? No bullshit EXP rates "have a free trip to ult" crap, and no bullshit "every 3 enemies is a red box" rare drop rate.

Everything else they've added have solely been QoL changes that you can opt out of. (except the dynamic droprate now, but really is a 3% difference to your drop odds going to matter that much?)

If you really hate the global bank because it's "not authentic" then I think you're taking this attitude a little too far.

 

[Natural]

Would be cool to see Nug 2000 Bazooka being buffed considering it's the rarest bazooka in the game.
(Not worth the time to hunt with the way it is now.)

You can get it from BPD but it can be taken out. It's super hard to get with hit and good percents and it's like a 1/18000 to 1/20000 drop rate so good luck with that lol. It has crazy variable ATP which makes it not viable to even use. It's currently 400 to 660 with a grind of 32 so (464 to 724) if anything it should be like 696 to 821 ATP with a grind of 32 or so (760 to 885). I mean Cannon Rouge is way easier to get and it gives 600 to 750 with a grind of 30 so 660 to 810. Also cannon rouge is easy to find with good percents as well if you were really trying to hunt for it. Episode 4 CR made the weapon obsolete and people may argue well it's episode 4 all the stuff is better. Yeah but Nug 2000 bazooka is a classic, it's dope AF, and it was hard AF to get before BB came out unless it was non-legitimate.

I also think that ultimate mode should be level 80 instead of 90. Didn't really understand why Sega made ultimate as a level 90 requirement in BB. Also VH should be level 40 like how it was back in the day. The game is a grind as it is and people are barely playing together in pubs due to difference in levels or want to play and level by themselves for self-sufficiency in the lower difficulties especially if they got the gear. It's going to happen regardless but it may promote more players to play together in ultimate since the difficulty would be 80 instead of 90. They wouldn't really be able to solo 100% at 80 in ultimate unless they were already super geared up/mated or had the right type of class.

 

[CocoapuffFarmer]

They wouldn't really be able to solo 100% at 80 in ultimate unless they were already super geared up/mated or had the right type of class.

That sounds like more of a reason to keep the level requirements as they are. Its only 10 more levels. 10 more levels to gain stats, and equips.

I voted no. As someone said earlier, all changes so far have been quality of life changes. One of the best changes, up for debate, was the ability to change between classic drops and PSO2 drops. This is a 15 year old game, nobody wants to have to play with a vacuum cleaner for a player or have to worry about leaving drops behind for someone.
Hardcore is optional, and fun. Doesn't effect the normal game in anyway, anymore.
And Ep4 drop rates are well adjusted for this server.

 

[Henomura]

I say no. Server seems very vanilla like and no need for any changes such as new items, stat increase for classes. Just keep it original style. This was one of reasons I joined this server due to being very classical PSO SEGA style. I do wish every item can be available though such as the tekker that Skylar spoke about getting the rare shield but only during certain event.

 

[Sodaboy]

Hi, we have that Tekker on the list of things to do, haven't gotten around to it yet... I'll bump up it's priority, though.

 

[government]

I think adding multi-mode quests in solo might be a good thing too. It was very fun playing the quests in solo mode on other servers.
it would definitely benefit the Time Attack community.

Another idea would be to make the difficulty level requirements 20/40/80 for all episodes. Makes creating new characters easier, and it removes the extremely boring grinds you have to go through on the last 10 levels of each difficulty.