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I'm an old player who hasn't really had the time for PSO the last few years due to some big life changes, but I was catching up on what's changed while I was gone, and of course the thing that really jumped out at me was the removal of Hardcore. It's not news to everyone, but it is news to me, and as someone who exclusively played Hardcore, I'd like to air out my own feelings on the topic and the discussion around it. I understand the reasons Hardcore was removed and the feelings various players have about it, I agree with the basic idea that it wasn't "Hardcore" enough, but I disagree with how the situation was handled.
I never cared about the exp or drop boosts, what pulled me in was the thrill of permanent death. You can say that the prevalence of Scape Dolls made this effectively a non-issue if you played smart, but it made a difference that the threat was always there, looming. I always had Scape Dolls, always offered spares to those in need and was able to be given one if I really needed it, but as the kind of person who tries to conserve resources, it was never something I took for granted. Before HC I never memorized HP thresholds for not getting one-shot by the heavy hitting attacks in Ultimate, I never planned around EDK thresholds for avoiding Megid, I never put nearly as much effort in to avoiding death as I did after starting HC. Even taking into account /lobby or alt-backspace (which you still needed to do before taking a killing blow), there were consequences for running out of Scapes; you had to choose between staying and risking death or fleeing and leaving your team down a member and forgoing the rest of the quest you were on. These consequences do not exist in Normal mode, and existed despite the ways to avoid death.
I've read people complaining about their HC party members dropping out when running out of Scapes, and this was not an issue with the implementation of Hardcore, it was an issue with the desegregation of Normal and HC. You were still going to be down a party member whether they got deleted or fled!
It's fair to say Scapes were too plentiful even with how they were cut down in HC, but they could have just been made even rarer. Yes, it would have been a bad idea to remove them entirely, because PSO isn't balanced enough for that with the Dark Falz troll kills, the unresistable megid flowers in episode 2, and so on. A balance was needed, and an ideal one was never found, but I think there was more that could've been tried.
I never thought too much of the boosts either way, but I kind of assumed the drop boost was a counterbalance to the much smaller playerbase. If there was something really rare you needed, you weren't going to find someone to buy it from, you were going to gather friends and go hunt for it. Even so, those boosts were never necessary and could simply have been removed. Really, one of the strangest things to me about how this was handled is that there was concern about the appeal and advantage of boosted drop rates, and the solution to this was to roll us into the Normal economy with the years of spoils we've gathered from these rates. How is that fair to Normal players?
Others have said that you can still roleplay the Hardcore experience, but this is only partially the case. Having an in-game option created an offer and an appeal to players that otherwise wouldn't have considered such a gamemode in PSO (like me!), and allowed players to recognize each other at a glance. Less people will play because less people will even know it's a thing that's going on, and you can never know if you're on the same playing field as other roleplayers if it's just self-imposed rules that can't be verified externally. These social aspects are a big deal, and it's very dampened by making it a roleplay instead of a gamemode. There's also some memorable parts of the experience that simply cannot be recreated by roleplay, such as the death banners.
I also strongly disagree that there was no point in giving the community a heads-up. I might have not been around for the closure of HC (not that it mattered, with how abrupt it was), but I have been around for the closure of other games, and I've seen the myriad of ways that players choose to spend their last moments and send off something special to them. I, for one, probably would have sacrificed my character and enjoyed one last death banner as a farewell to the gamemode. It's really, really not the same just quietly selecting Delete on the character menu compared to being killed and a death banner heralding the game's deletion of your character. Even if all it did was "keep the Hardcore clique together for a little while longer, knowing that their mode was going bye bye", how is that not something simple and meaningful you could have allowed your players? There was obviously a point in keeping the mode around for a little while past the announcement (with the boosts removed in the meantime to prevent abuse of the economy merge), the staff just failed to see it.
I'm disappointed in the staff for both the decision and the aftermath. I think, if it was causing problems, they could have just removed the boosts, re-segregated the players, and left the mode alone until they were ready to re-structure it in a more "Hardcore" way, but I at least understand why they might've not wanted to do that. I definitely think they could have at least provided a heads-up to the playerbase, and that there was no good reason not to do that. Unfortunately, what's done is done. That being said, this remains an outlier to me in terms of this server's quality, and I'm still very grateful that the staff continue to do all they do. There's no other server I'd call home. I'm looking forward to returning to Ephinea when my life calms down enough to allow me to do so, and I'll eagerly be awaiting a potential Hardcore 2.0 all the meanwhile.
Also, uh, Merry Christmas!
I never cared about the exp or drop boosts, what pulled me in was the thrill of permanent death. You can say that the prevalence of Scape Dolls made this effectively a non-issue if you played smart, but it made a difference that the threat was always there, looming. I always had Scape Dolls, always offered spares to those in need and was able to be given one if I really needed it, but as the kind of person who tries to conserve resources, it was never something I took for granted. Before HC I never memorized HP thresholds for not getting one-shot by the heavy hitting attacks in Ultimate, I never planned around EDK thresholds for avoiding Megid, I never put nearly as much effort in to avoiding death as I did after starting HC. Even taking into account /lobby or alt-backspace (which you still needed to do before taking a killing blow), there were consequences for running out of Scapes; you had to choose between staying and risking death or fleeing and leaving your team down a member and forgoing the rest of the quest you were on. These consequences do not exist in Normal mode, and existed despite the ways to avoid death.
I've read people complaining about their HC party members dropping out when running out of Scapes, and this was not an issue with the implementation of Hardcore, it was an issue with the desegregation of Normal and HC. You were still going to be down a party member whether they got deleted or fled!
It's fair to say Scapes were too plentiful even with how they were cut down in HC, but they could have just been made even rarer. Yes, it would have been a bad idea to remove them entirely, because PSO isn't balanced enough for that with the Dark Falz troll kills, the unresistable megid flowers in episode 2, and so on. A balance was needed, and an ideal one was never found, but I think there was more that could've been tried.
I never thought too much of the boosts either way, but I kind of assumed the drop boost was a counterbalance to the much smaller playerbase. If there was something really rare you needed, you weren't going to find someone to buy it from, you were going to gather friends and go hunt for it. Even so, those boosts were never necessary and could simply have been removed. Really, one of the strangest things to me about how this was handled is that there was concern about the appeal and advantage of boosted drop rates, and the solution to this was to roll us into the Normal economy with the years of spoils we've gathered from these rates. How is that fair to Normal players?
Others have said that you can still roleplay the Hardcore experience, but this is only partially the case. Having an in-game option created an offer and an appeal to players that otherwise wouldn't have considered such a gamemode in PSO (like me!), and allowed players to recognize each other at a glance. Less people will play because less people will even know it's a thing that's going on, and you can never know if you're on the same playing field as other roleplayers if it's just self-imposed rules that can't be verified externally. These social aspects are a big deal, and it's very dampened by making it a roleplay instead of a gamemode. There's also some memorable parts of the experience that simply cannot be recreated by roleplay, such as the death banners.
I also strongly disagree that there was no point in giving the community a heads-up. I might have not been around for the closure of HC (not that it mattered, with how abrupt it was), but I have been around for the closure of other games, and I've seen the myriad of ways that players choose to spend their last moments and send off something special to them. I, for one, probably would have sacrificed my character and enjoyed one last death banner as a farewell to the gamemode. It's really, really not the same just quietly selecting Delete on the character menu compared to being killed and a death banner heralding the game's deletion of your character. Even if all it did was "keep the Hardcore clique together for a little while longer, knowing that their mode was going bye bye", how is that not something simple and meaningful you could have allowed your players? There was obviously a point in keeping the mode around for a little while past the announcement (with the boosts removed in the meantime to prevent abuse of the economy merge), the staff just failed to see it.
I'm disappointed in the staff for both the decision and the aftermath. I think, if it was causing problems, they could have just removed the boosts, re-segregated the players, and left the mode alone until they were ready to re-structure it in a more "Hardcore" way, but I at least understand why they might've not wanted to do that. I definitely think they could have at least provided a heads-up to the playerbase, and that there was no good reason not to do that. Unfortunately, what's done is done. That being said, this remains an outlier to me in terms of this server's quality, and I'm still very grateful that the staff continue to do all they do. There's no other server I'd call home. I'm looking forward to returning to Ephinea when my life calms down enough to allow me to do so, and I'll eagerly be awaiting a potential Hardcore 2.0 all the meanwhile.
Also, uh, Merry Christmas!
