Apparently this game has been out for 8 years and uses instancing as opposed to open world ANYWAY and you can't simply friend accounts on other ships and bridge them into the same instance with a friend system? Has SEGA been sitting on its laurels and wasting time or what? I now have to pick which friends I will play with and which I won't in 2020 when this could have been made a non-issue a long time ago. Like, that's crap design. Even worse if these are just shards and not physically separated servers. The excuses for that are sucking or an effort to nickle and dime players to make them bounce around. Or force them to be no-lifers who dedicate every waking moment to maxing multiple toons on multiple ships to play with friends who might main on different ships thus ensuring they won't keep up with each other.

Either way its garbage design and should have been addressed years ago. People can say what they want but they can't reason it is player oriented design. It's laziness. Implement a proper friend and party system instead of this servers segregation BS for your instanced game that has enough money to add this QoL feature. Unless you're tanking. In which case, I guess we know why: your failure to reinvest in and improve the product. Tanking or not its still a big example of that.

I agree, they should have gone with a Megaservers approach. Even cross-region play/transfers should be allowed (the JP English community will be left stranded there otherwise as NA/Global grows). But I presume they might be leaving all that effort/improvements for New Genesis instead.

I agree, they should add a method to play all modes with players from any ship, as well as connect the JP and NA/Global servers to allow the same, when NA is caught up. Charging $7 per character, per transfer, has always seemed excessive to me. If SEGA really isn't willing to lose that $7, maybe make it some sort of visit system where you can to another ship and have access to everything except buying/selling/trading, and not have to wait for maintenance for it to process, and I'm sure many people will still keep spending those $7 each way to buy and sell across ships. But, also a free full transfer every few months would be nice too.

@Home-Rowed said in The audacity of not being able to friend and play with friends on different ships.:

I agree, they should add a method to play all modes with players from any ship, as well as connect the JP and NA/Global servers to allow the same, when NA is caught up. Charging $7 per character, per transfer, has always seemed excessive to me. If SEGA really isn't willing to lose that $7, maybe make it some sort of visit system where you can to another ship and have access to everything except buying/selling/trading, and not have to wait for maintenance for it to process, and I'm sure many people will still keep spending those $7 each way to buy and sell across ships. But, also a free full transfer every few months would be nice too.

Admittedly, I don't care about ship economies or even physically visiting other ships. Just being able to instance and play missions with people in other ships would be great off a party invite or a friend's list. As I have friends in multiple spots and had to basically choose. But a visit system like that would be pretty cool.

TBH, I see your post and I remember pso1 where you could just pick any ship after selecting the character lol. I'd love cross ship to play with all of my scattered friends without splitting my assets and character slots