I've been a PSO fan for a long time, and the one thing that's been annoying about PSO2 is how different ships are completely isolated from each other. In the older games, your character was independent of the ship you happened to play on; if one was overcrowded, you could just choose to play on a different one. In PSO2 on the other hand... well, I just found out that a few of my friends have also been playing for a while but are scattered across different ships.

The fact that we can all be playing the same game but be unable to play with each other with our existing characters because of a decision we made months ago is pretty disappointing, to say the least. The options aren't great:

• We could do ship transfers to consolidate everyone on one ship, but that involves convincing other friends to spend real money to get this done, won't happen until the next maintenance, and means we leave a bunch of items behind (most of us only have one character anyway so everything left in storage is effectively useless)
• We could create new characters on another ship, but then half of us have characters we've been playing on for months (and are about equally-leveled) and the other half are starting from scratch. Fine I guess, but not as fun as if we were able to play together with our main characters

It just feels like an arbitrary limitation when this wasn't even a question in the original games.

Not really seeing a problem, personally. Sure you might not be able to party with people on other ships or even trade with them, but that is how over 99% of all MMOs are. They can't support a game on a single server anymore, since there are a lot more people now with highspeed internet than back during the time of the original PSO. Also, during original PSO, your character data was stored on the console, while on PSO2 it is stored on the server, which will always allow access, even on another device.

It's anything but arbitrary. This wasn't a factor in original PSO because your character data were stored locally on your system. I shouldn't need to explain to you why that is a terrible idea.

@Ilúvatar said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

It's anything but arbitrary. This wasn't a factor in original PSO because your character data were stored locally on your system. I shouldn't need to explain to you why that is a terrible idea.

That was the case for v1 and v2, but not PSOBB, and BB didn’t have this limitation either.

@terracrypt said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

@Ilúvatar said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

It's anything but arbitrary. This wasn't a factor in original PSO because your character data were stored locally on your system. I shouldn't need to explain to you why that is a terrible idea.

That was the case for v1 and v2, but not PSOBB, and BB didn’t have this limitation either.

Even original PSO had different ships you logged into tho, segmented further by blocks. Just you weren't character locked to that single ship all the time. It even told you how many people were logged into a single ship too, miss those days instead of a loading bar where u have to guess what it means in terms of capacity like in PSO2

@terracrypt said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

@Ilúvatar said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

It's anything but arbitrary. This wasn't a factor in original PSO because your character data were stored locally on your system. I shouldn't need to explain to you why that is a terrible idea.

That was the case for v1 and v2, but not PSOBB, and BB didn’t have this limitation either.

Because like 5 people played PSOBB.

It seems you're just complaining that you need to pay to transfer characters.

@terracrypt said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

@Ilúvatar said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

It's anything but arbitrary. This wasn't a factor in original PSO because your character data were stored locally on your system. I shouldn't need to explain to you why that is a terrible idea.

That was the case for v1 and v2, but not PSOBB, and BB didn’t have this limitation either.

The Ship structure came from Phantasy Star Universe's Japanese version. At launch, Sega's servers were unable to support all players on a single ship; the Japanese launch was basically PSO2 NA's initial Closed Beta only the issues persisted for a long time.

The solution was to introduce the "Entrance" system which were basically like PSO2's Ships. This of course never made it to the Western version.

As for why PSOBB could do it... the game is not as server side as PSU or PSO2 were. Functionally, not much changed server-side from all other versions of PSO1 with the server-side character storage amounting more to a change in save medium; the game still downloads your entire character to the RAM and gradually save it to the server. In contrast, PSU and PSO2... do still run client side but have the servers control a lot more than PSO1's servers ever did.

this is why you discuss with friends where to go before making a character

PSO and PSO2 have 2 different server methods to work with.

PSO used a server to connect and manage the connections but didn't had the data of the characters in the server and instead was in the host, for that reason it was possible to connect into any server without having to worry with the data of your character, on the other hand if something happened with your save data you will lose everything.

PSO2 servers do everything and the player is only connected to the server, because of that is necessary to use separated servers in order to the server can deal with everything and the simultaneous connections don't overload the data transit of the connections, it is possible to make the data being able to connect into any server but that demands to put a server and that server connect to the others and well doing that is pretty expensive

@terracrypt said in Is anyone else really frustrated by the division between ships in this game?:

I've been a PSO fan for a long time, and the one thing that's been annoying about PSO2 is how different ships are completely isolated from each other. In the older games, your character was independent of the ship you happened to play on; if one was overcrowded, you could just choose to play on a different one. In PSO2 on the other hand... well, I just found out that a few of my friends have also been playing for a while but are scattered across different ships.

The fact that we can all be playing the same game but be unable to play with each other with our existing characters because of a decision we made months ago is pretty disappointing, to say the least. The options aren't great:

• We could do ship transfers to consolidate everyone on one ship, but that involves convincing other friends to spend real money to get this done, won't happen until the next maintenance, and means we leave a bunch of items behind (most of us only have one character anyway so everything left in storage is effectively useless)
• We could create new characters on another ship, but then half of us have characters we've been playing on for months (and are about equally-leveled) and the other half are starting from scratch. Fine I guess, but not as fun as if we were able to play together with our main characters

It just feels like an arbitrary limitation when this wasn't even a question in the original games.

Not a problem at all. Knew about it well in advance anyway. Next time people should research stuff and lineup with friends accordingly. When your friend rolls on another server then tell them how dumb they were.

Its been known for years now. Pso was the first online console game and back then it wasn't a popular thing to play video games so servers could handle the player base since it was so small on dreamcast. If you want to bring up ep 1&2, GameCube and xbox were on seperate servers. Every game does this now. Gaming is far different from before so comparing pso to pso2 is like comparing a cow to a chicken. But thats just my opinion on it.