Why is every event about just maxing kills on ultimate?

Miku

Miku

vocaloid
Why is every event now just about killing as many enemies as possible on ultimate? We used to have some variety as cookies would have the same drop rate on any difficulty so it could be a good time to play on normal, but no more. Now all of badges, cookies, eggs, presents are just about kills on ultimate. So these all greatly favor quests which kill enemies as quickly and easily as possible. And then some people might wonder why half the server only plays MAE:Forest. And anguish is greatly undervalued in most events as it doesn't even boost the drop rate of the event items at all.

So my real question is, why is it this way? There are so many more parameters that drop rates of event items could be based on, such as the enemies...
  1. Experience points
  2. Weapon pattern dropped
  3. Meseta amount dropped
  4. Enemy's HP
  5. Enemies that have been slain the lower number of times in total on the server
  6. How high ranking of armors are dropped in the area
  7. Some slightly more manual setups like just area-specific, and just specifically giving higher rates in harder areas and lower rates in easier areas.
  8. Some combination of the above.
Maybe someone could enlighten me about why the current way is better. Or is it just that it's simple and easy?
 
I can imagine the reason being is because its simplest and easiest to do it by kills or quest completions. Easiest to track, easiest to implement. All the other methods you mentioned are really just placebo anyways. When you think about it, there's no significant differentiator between an event tracking how many kills you got based on an enemies Meseta dropping versus just giving you a flat value for each kill, outside of the obvious of it just being more work the developers have to endure and put in to make it functional.

I'd imagine the reason why most things are based in Ultimate is because that's where the majority of the player base plays. There's not a contingent of people playing on Very Hard on the regular for some significant advantage outside of a couple of RBR related outliers. Cookies did still drop in lower difficulties for Halloween, they just had harder drop rates due to the fact that you can kill enemies so much faster in Normal-V.Hard mode compared to Ultimate. Could you imagine making the easiest drop rate for Cookies in Normal mode? What a blunder to the economy that would be.

I'm sure if there was a cool and interesting mechanic they could pull off for an event that seems within the boundaries of their limitations or time constraints they would do it but the fact remains that this is a server that is ran by volunteers and owned by people who have full time jobs and families. I would very well understand why maybe they're reluctant to make something more complicated than it needed to be for the sake of authenticity or personality that differentiates from the rest when its both unnecessary and, most likely, going to be heavily criticized by the community if the features aren't always "respecting the player's time".

People did hate on the implementation of boxes sometimes being immune to damage as an April Fools prank after all, so imagine the backlash for an actual event.
 
98.5% of the experience needed to reach Lv. 200 is on Ultimate. You are literally 1.5% of the way to 200, EXP-wise, when you reach Lv. 80. Forcing people to reach Ultimate for the best rewards is not exclusionary or gatekeeping. It only takes a modest time investment to reach Ultimate for the first time, and the overwhelming majority of the remainder of your PSO tenure will be there.

N-VH are great for that wonderous, first time experience of PSO, which is itself very rewarding. For all subsequent characters and playthroughs following that first time, N-VH will be more of an afterthought, as they should be.

The 1.5% stepping stone should not be given the same level of attention / resources as the other 98.5%.
 
Ade said:
98.5% of the experience needed to reach Lv. 200 is on Ultimate. You are literally 1.5% of the way to 200, EXP-wise, when you reach Lv. 80. Forcing people to reach Ultimate for the best rewards is not exclusionary or gatekeeping. It only takes a modest time investment to reach Ultimate for the first time, and the overwhelming majority of the remainder of your PSO tenure will be there.

N-VH are great for that wonderous, first time experience of PSO, which is itself very rewarding. For all subsequent characters and playthroughs following that first time, N-VH will be more of an afterthought, as they should be.

The 1.5% stepping stone should not be given the same level of attention / resources as the other 98.5%.
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Yes I get that. And I understand kills come faster on the lower difficulties so it makes sense for them to have lower drop rate of event items. I was asking more about why it is just kills/minute and not some other measure that could better measure the total strength of enemies you put into the grinder or the real amount of trouble you had to go through in order to complete your quests.
 
I would assume it's because so little of the 1 to 200 journey happens in N-VH that really devoting any thought to it at all is probably considered to be not worth the time. But I can't say for sure.
 
There should be a event where the player can't perform any attacks (so you can't kill), and must instead run through all of Ragol, dodging monsters and traps to reach the end for the rewards. Survival mode?
 
The short answer is, if I'm understanding your complaint, is balance. And maybe some complacency.

They probably haven't had the time to think of a more creative way to run more original events, life gets in the way. Since I'm sure nothing has changed in my absence I'm going to go on a limb and assume that the homogenized approach to events is still an attempt at economic balance. And the mentality has kind of lead to a homogenized approach, because if you're afraid of too many items getting into the wild that might affect the worth of peoples stuff, why stray away from a controlled method that actually works for the community? That's not to say its easy to just pop out ideas that work. Even when I was on staff I was kinda stumped for a way that was not as limited but still brought the community something nice, and that was long before community wide burnout.

Maybe future events can take from old sega stuff like ma2v2 where you're incentivized to actually kill, earn points, and unlock tiers of new stuff to do that isn't like the kill gates we used to have, just your own personal thing. It'd be kinda gatekeepy but i mean, the only limiter there is yourself. That way, people are earning it, they can find cool stuff that makes it worth their time to actually play rather than spending 30 days of event to find nothing and feel like the game and server doesn't respect your valuable limited time. It'd take EFFORT TO get to the nice stuff thats actually worth it so its not just free babby tier lvl80ramar walks into forest and finds 100h SJS.


Harborer of Hope said:
Because ANYTHING BELOW ULTIMATE would be Abused~??? lol. nya~!!
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Most if not all of the reason people abused lower level stuff is because people feel like they're wasting their time without something gamebreakingly exploitive like doing ccc or other stuff on lower difficulties. I personally was still against the abuse and I'm glad its gone, but it had a valid purpose. Its why I don't play PSOBB as often anymore, its a wasted effort. Especially when I see other ships/players get constantly high hit stuff, its almost insulting lol. I sympathize with the staff though, because It's tough to really balance stuff because you want the players to have that awesome "OMG" moment when you finally get something but, pso's balance is so ridiculously interweaved with "have ft (ban casts) or have high hit" that I and many others don't give a crap to try anymore. props to those that do, you're beasts.
 
Still better than before when was forced to have certain quests cleared per account per 99times. Sorry some people have to spam the quests less played to complete a goal. Balance, will never be perfect. Also can't please everyone or everything anyone expects in a event. Take what they give and be happy for the extra boost and them even donating time. Appreciate the staff always for making pso and events happen. Stay humble. Also don't forget to give us all 1 free ps this summer event!
 
I'm honestly not really sure what you're asking so here are a few answers that relate

- Creative events take too much effort (in the sense of something like an original Ephinea version of say, the original Maximum Attack 2 event)
- Matt is now a literal dinosaur who wants Ephinea frozen in 2023 post HBR and enjoys laughing at people who want optimal Excaliburs
- Other ways of determining drops are easily abuseable or lock players into specific places. While making an under killed enemy an influence for rates sounds cool, people have shown over the years they don't really give a shit and will probably just complain about how they want to hunt x but have to kill x
 
Okay let me explain. You see, right now, you could do 1 run of a quest like MAE: Tower, or in the same time, you could probably do like 3 runs of MAE: Forest. But you see, you get far more badges from taking the easy quest of MAE: Forest so that there's not enough incentive to go to the hard areas like tower. The lower difficulties thing isn't really a main point of what I'm getting at here. I just mean that why aren't there more or at least some events about actually beating strong enemies? They all are just the same old TE or maximum attack quests to just kill lots of enemies as quickly as possible to maximize the amount of the event items you get. Some of us have done most if not all of those quests a lot of times already. But it's just so inefficient to get after a lot of the harder quests, it just doesn't seem worth the trouble for most of them the way things currently stand.
 
It depends on where you are on gear progression.

I already have a high hit Frozen Shooter and Snow Queen. And I already have a Heaven Punisher with Divine Filter. So there aren't any essentials for me to hunt in Forest.

I COULD still spam Forest to find FS / HP / Badges / PDs to increase my overall wealth, but most of the items I'm after now are huge ticket drops that most people wouldn't sell / auction if they found them.

Thus, my "best" way to play the event is to de-emphasize how fast I can hunt badges / PDs, go directly to the areas that have a chance to drop the high-end gear I want, and swing for the fences.

I imagine more people are going to reach this point year after year, so we should see more gameplay in the harder areas as the years go on.

In the meantime, I don't agree with messing with badge rates. If you want to spend the entire event in Forest to watch your overall net worth increase several hundred PDs by hunting badges and PDs, go for it. I would rather swing for the fences and go after items that are worth THOUSANDS, which are going to be found mostly outside of Forest.

I LIKE the fact that there's a "safe" path (stay in Forest and watch number go up semi-consistently) and a "shoot the moon" path (hunt big item in other areas). It means there's multiple ways to play / enjoy the event.

The admins being upset about people spending too much time hunting in Forest shows a lack of understanding on gear progression. If I was still after a big Frozen Shooter or Snow Queen, Forest is exactly where I would be. (Hunting Heaven Punisher in Forest is bad and ineffective, and was mentioned earlier for illustrative purposes only.)
 
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Well I think you're a rare case. For most of us it's not the same. I feel like I'm pretty rich at this point, and yet I still don't have all that great of a FS or SQ and I still barely have any PDs sitting around so any of those would be of a great help for me. And as for shooting for the fences, I'd think a 100h SQ would be game-breaking, having around a 50% chance to freeze deldepths and a near guarantee on almost everything else, arguably to the point of where you wouldn't even need a frozen shooter. Honestly one of the best shooting for the fences thing to get I would think.

And badges was a bad example. If this were to happen, it'd probably make a lot more sense for an event that has few to no event-exclusive quests, so that then at least that even wouldn't just be more TE and max attack quests. Although I guess there are few such events and even then, they seem to have mitigated that by adding a boost to the RBR so that there are still other quests worth doing for the event items, so maybe that's largely just a moot point.

And now that all the MAE quests are gone anyways, maybe none of this really matters. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything but I kinda had forgotten they'd recently added the RBR boost thing. I guess it's fine how it is, and there's gotta be something more useful than this they could be working on anyway.
 
Hm...

I think the Anniversary event did a good job of loot balance because it separated the loot by your ability to get badges. The ultimate players could get the better badges a lot easier than the lower level players, but the lower level players could amass tons of bronze badges and exchange them for higher badges.

So in effect it still allowed the lower level players to be rewarded for their time and have a good reason to want to reach level 80... and it still favored rewarding the majority of the playerbase....

Now leaning more into your question, if you kept the Badge system for balance, you could totally do cool stuff to earn badges that aren't necessarily killing:
  • Back to Basics! Complete government quests, be rewarded a badge
  • The RBR Journey! Complete all RBR quests before the weeks up and be rewarded a couple of badges (Not sure if that's doable, but it could create incentive to play things other than TTF, honestly might be a good idea to implement anyways)
  • Beat The Clock! Complete a certain quest within an allotted time limit, win a badge (could already be a thing and I just didn't know)
  • It's Gambling Time! Add the badges as rewards to the gamble routlette game
  • Catch the Mew! Mew hides somewhere in the lobbies and if you find her, you get a badge.
  • Santa-Mew! Makes a server wide banner "Do you hear siegh bells?" Then goes around lobbies and gives players a gift (or for fun, coal) (For xmas event but could be used for other events with different theme)
  • Rare Banner Contests: there could be a "rare banner" bonus reward where if you get a rare banner you get a badge too. (Not sure if there's an automated way to do this, could be too much work for the staff) Or perhaps a weekly contest where the best finds are rewarded at the end of the week.
  • Black Market Badge Dealer: "Hey bub, wanna buy ah badge?" an NPC that'll allow you to get badges from them but only if you'll do "favors" for them... So basically you do a quest they want you to do, or perhaps you trade them rare items they're looking for and you earn a "favor" ticket from them that can be exchanged for badges.
 
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