I feel that we often talk of the wonderful moments we all lived in the old PSO but that many times we tend to gloss over or downright ignore it´s ghetto, ep 1&2, and how bad things were in that particular version of the game.

And that is because a lot of people´s experience with the game come from DC/XBOX or modern Private Servers.

If you never played PSO Ep1&2, there is something you must know, and that is that most files, character data and item data were stored locally or in the disk., this gave hackers complete access and control over not only their own characters and game files but also over everyone else´s.

That is to say, that while all cheaters with a simple Game Shark could cheat, some hackers with advanced scripts and tools/programming could interact with the servers and had de facto admin powers and ruled over all other players.

And Sega´s hands off/maintenance only approach to the game meant that said hackers were able to do as they pleased to the point of account theft with total impunity, as there was no-one to face them.

A simple disagreement with someone could see your character back to lv1, your memory card corrupted (losing everything in it, not just PSO files) or even your account stolen and given to the hacker´s friends for their own use.

(And let us not forget to get an account you had to buy a new copy of the game)

There were entire ships and servers in which the mere act of entering them could see you lose everything you had, as hacker groups or communities considered them their turf and did not suffer any uninvited intrusion.

Particularly malicious players could even send mails and private messages to other players in your name as to defame you and then accuse you of being hurtful or to have said things you had never said, and there was nothing you could do.

PSO EP1&2 was the Wild West of the MMORPG and PSO mmoverses.

It comes to show how much technology and administrative approach has changed since the late 90´s /early 00´s and today´s online gaming.

I remember cheating for sure. Multi-equipping and and instant lvl 200s, all of which was frowned upon. I also remember people FSODing lobbies and item duping/hacking. I also do remember corruption and how a slight internet waft during a save would mean goodbye hundreds of hours or even more.

Despite all that, the way you're recalling it is way overblown. You wouldn't just login and disagree with something and then be instantly corrupted lol, and beyond the things I mentioned I'm not sure what you mean by "de facto admin powers". Of my thousands of hours in PSO on GC, at least, I was relatively unbothered by "malicious" players, the vast majority of their ripple effect felt through the dupe economy. Playing in Antares 8 was also a good way to avoid a lot of the things I mentioned.

Must have been an Xbox thing, TBH.

@Zipzo said in The dark days of PSO EP 1&2 (Gamecube):

I remember cheating for sure. Multi-equipping and and instant lvl 200s, all of which was frowned upon. I also remember people FSODing lobbies and item duping/hacking. I also do remember corruption and how a slight internet waft during a save would mean goodbye hundreds of hours or even more.

Despite all that, the way you're recalling it is way overblown. You wouldn't just login and disagree with something and then be instantly corrupted lol, and beyond the things I mentioned I'm not sure what you mean by "de facto admin powers". Of my thousands of hours in PSO on GC, at least, I was relatively unbothered by "malicious" players, the vast majority of their ripple effect felt through the dupe economy. Playing in Antares 8 was also a good way to avoid a lot of the things I mentioned.

Must have been an Xbox thing, TBH.

It did not happen to you =/= It did not happen =/= "It is way overblown"

As you have said yourself, you played in Antares 8, which was a borderline abandoned ship, but if you had played in any of the largely populated Ships (the Equivalent to 02: UR today) , such as VEGA 02-01 you would have seen this and more.

By the way, i do not blame you for playing there, in fact, it was probably a very smart move given the circumstances.

And what i meant with "De Facto Admin Powers" is exactly that.

Near the end (Perhaps the last 1.5 years) of PSO ep1&2,. the biggest/well known hackers, the ones that actually developed the hacks, not the gameshark script kiddies, had literal control over other people´s accounts and could even inject "content" and non-existing items that actually worked and could be used online and seen by other players.

They could also activate events and quests that were not mean to be on, although this suffered from some errors and issues.

Also no GMs so guilds like NK would spam lobbies.. The good old days..

I would not have any interest in this game were it not for Ep. 1 & 2 on Gamecube. I never really played it "online" though, just local multi-player with my siblings and friends. I was a little more obsessed with it than they were, but I loved that game so much... Still have the case with my flawless unscratched mini-disc, as well as my memory card with my save still on it. Too bad I don't have a system I can actually play it on anymore...but that's a long ridiculous story I'm not sure I want to tell... LOL

Ep I&II is awesome. Actually I prefer Ep II/IV maps over Ep I. I still play on PC during maintenance if anyone is ever online there

Memory card data corruption and loaning a character to someone and then never getting it back without having to delete it. My first character about 30 got corrupted, so i switched everything to a better more secure card so it never happened again. I think I stopped somewhere around the 70s. I don't remember.

Played GC online for thousands of hours, The only thing I remember people doing that affected others was FSODing folks(Frozen Screen of death) and that was done by people using a certain word select exploit that freeze you in the lobby you tried to join if they were spamming it( the main EU ship Polaris 1-1 died because someone sat in the lobby for over a year staright doing this constantly)

Later on when episode 3 came out there was also a more controlled method of FSODing the entire lobby if you had a Japanese copy of the game while using a action reply to force it into English once again this was word select related.

Shop dupe /multi equip exploit was being used everywhere but don't think most people cared and the folks that wanted to play legitly just stuck together.

Saying that I might have missed some stuff near the end, I spent my last few months subbed making friends on the Japanese ships running around the lobbies spamming silly symbol art.

Also done abit of digging the folks that lost their accounts lost em to a scam rather than hack, They were giving over their CD keys for "access" to private servers.

@IfrianMMO Antares 8 ended up more populated than Vega half the time atleast when the game was somewhat alive, Most folks just avoided vega after the first year or so after the game launched it was lag/spam central and put you at more risk of having the game DC during the double save.

Antares 8 was not "abandoned" lol. Come on, you just worsened the integrity of your argument...

Please, do not be ridiculous, Antares, Deneb, were nearly empty during the American/Japanese prime-time, in fact, it is so much so, that both Deneb and Antares, which shared a single server, were often turned off and used as a substitute log-in server whenever technical issues occurred or the log-in server was down.

Heck both Antares and Deneb were down for literally months at one point between 2002 and 2003 and near the end of the GC service they were turned into the log-in server nearly permanently and you could access the address even from internet explorer.

If i remember correctly it was server06 at games.sega .net

Now do not get me wrong, it´s not like i kept a population census for the nearly 6 years the service was on, so it may indeed be that there were pockets of time in which Antares may have been momentarily played more than VEGA during specific time-frames, i mean, at some point when the game was very popular in EU, the ship Alphard suffered a boost in popularity for a period of time, but VEGA was by far the most populated ship for the longest time, and home to the majority of hackers and scripters.

Alot of the EU players still played, They just all went to the US ships after Polaris 1 was inhabited by someone who was paying a subbed to spam the world select FSOD glitch 24/7 for several years, If I recall the some group of JP players did start using one of the EU ships as a hangout.

Antares 8 was more than populated during the 2002 period as it's were I spent most my time playing before switching over to episode 3 in 2003 and even then there were still folks playing on the ship as I have old screenshots of the lobby full of folk while playing episode 3.

After talking to a few old friends that played up to the end they did mention the game was over ran by scammers and idiots using proxies to stupid stuff, by the end of 2005 I'd moved out from home to live with the person I'm married to know so stopped playing online at that point so can't speak of anything that happened during the last 2 years before they closed the service but the first 3 years of the game were when it was at its best community wise.

@IfrianMMO My very first time online on Dreamcast I joined a random open party to try out multiplayer, I was Nol’d. XD I never had any issues like that on GameCube, I corrupted once during a save. The hacking wasn’t limited to the old console versions though, when pso2 JP first launched, nugz and broomop were moving npcs around at the gate and all kinda stuff.

@DKGJustus Reminds me of a friend of mine gave himself 999,999,999,999 Meseta during the early days of PSO2 JP. (Anti-Cheat was non-existent back then for PSO2, sadly can't remember if it was during Alpha or Closed Beta.) Was hilarious to see, good thing Sega did reset progress after. Wish I had saved a picture.

Sure takes me back hearing the names InfamousNugz and Broomop.

I never encountered someone altering someone elses data in all my time playing PSO1 online on the Gamecube. Duping on the other hand was just the norm. It was so easy to do that everyone basically had every best item in the game.

Somehow this never really dulled my experience and I had fun anyway. Not like it was ever a competition. It's just a place to hang out.