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

@Flowen231 Of course you would! Because that only makes sense for a game like this, and pretty much any game in 2020. Especially an MMORPG in 2020.

i think you care too much. if you wanna play with somebody then make a char on their server, this isn't new to pso.

@SuperND420 said in The audacity of not being able to friend and play with friends on different ships.:

i think you care too much. if you wanna play with somebody then make a char on their server, this isn't new to pso.

Just because it's not new to PSO does not mean it's not garbage and should be changed.

Especially when in all probability this BUSINESS can change it easily.

to add a person from a different server is not possible to do with each server structure, games that have that feature normally use a different system that works in a separated server to do it like Blizzard did with Battle.net, so for Sega add this feature in PSO2 they gonna need to create a entire new system for that and considering they gonna need to do that with Sega ID, Xbox account and Steam account it will be a monumental work to make it happen

It is not impossible at all if they took a step further with the current Challenge Mode / PVP shared ships. Let you access missions from those, but i understand those ships have a limitation of not letting you access your real inventory for it's temporary purpose. Even if all rewards get sent to Team OP storage like the other shared Ship stuff it would still be inconvenient though.

Either way of course this isn't happening now, NGS is their focus.

They could make pve instances shared between ships. Hell WoW made multi server pvp instances in 2006 when each server was a separate machine. I can't even fathom why they haven't made pve cross server and cleaned up the join party for quests feature yet.

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

to add a person from a different server is not possible to do with each server structure, games that have that feature normally use a different system that works in a separated server to do it like Blizzard did with Battle.net, so for Sega add this feature in PSO2 they gonna need to create a entire new system for that and considering they gonna need to do that with Sega ID, Xbox account and Steam account it will be a monumental work to make it happen

If this is in regards to the idea of being able to match with players from other ships it is possible via the "Universal Ship" which is currently exclusive to the Challenge Mode and Battle Arena portions of the game. I would absolutely love to see the matchmaking mechanic become extended (or at least normal game content) by either having it be something in its own Universal Ship or to allow players to simply match-make across ships to easily help populate content others ships would struggle to match with.

This functionality is already-in-game and if you were curious about multi-platform connectivity the Japanese version of the game already solved this by having the SEGA ID take precedence and that any other platforms (Nintendo Switch accounts for PSO2 Cloud access, PlayStation Network for PLayStation Vita and PlayStation 4 connections, and other methods for NetCafe access and the likes) will eventually be tied to a SEGA ID. In the global version we are simply tied to either a Steam Account or Microsoft Account (or both if you tie them together) as our "SEGA ID" is a pre-generated string starting with "PN" and numbers afterwards.

I do not believe it is as farfetched as you make it out to be considering that the Steam and Microsoft Store versions (and by extension the Xbox versions) are all tied to the same servers as one another in a way that the Japanese version isn't fully committed to that I recall. In the Japanese version each platform (at least to my memory) had exclusive blocks they could access (such as the "PlayStation 4" blocks or the "PlayStation Vita" blocks) because of some platforms having unique settings. For instance, the PlayStation Vita block was stuck on its own blocks because content (like the number of enemies) was toned down significantly to keep performance being tolerable. The PC and PlayStation 4 players can join this but the Nintendo Switch players could not and to my knowledge the PlayStation players could not visit the Nintendo Switch blocks either. In the global version we are able to play with players from either supported platform without any particular segregation.

@VanillaLucia I'm not saying is not possible, only that will take a lot of time to be fully functional and in the moment Sega is focused in New Genesis, they can use other systems like Steam and Xbox systems to do that instead of doing a new system but still it gonna take a lot of work and lots of testing to see if it works like it should, so something like this will only appear after New Genesis.

@Jamesmor I am not disagreeing with you but my point was more that this functionality is already in-game and already exists for the most part. We could easily have specialized lobbies created for matching (even if it is only for something like Divide Quests, Emergency Quests, Extreme Quests, and the likes) as we already have universal currencies (Battle Coins and Challenge Miles) that persist on characters between ships.

While I am hopeful that something like this is more integrated for New Genesis I do feel that the extension of this functionality should hopefully become a priority when Sega proceeds with their new Challenge Mode additions that was confirmed on the Japanese roadmap (Source).