Well The series X is gonna play everything the Xbox one can play so I don't see how the next gen launch is gonna kill this game. I tend to buy/play on all platforms but the with Sony's recent Interest in censoring anime boobs I think it night be best this game stay away the platform for now be happy to see it on the switch in some capacity outside of Japan though.
I played PSU on the PC and the market was destroyed in months with all the hacked meseta that inflated the prices of everything, My brother played the 360 version and would laugh when we compared the price of stuff on each version.. Playing PSO2 on the xbox is probably the least cheated/hacked/abused online phantasy star game I have played to date.
Well it's not just the US version being squeezed, JP players gotta spend 10k AC if they want the sonic lobby emote we got in the founders edition.
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.
Only barrier is you need to buy gift cards in US dollars to buy anything
@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.
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.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/final-fantasy-14-is-coming-to-xbox-one-at-long-las/1100-6471467/
dunno now due the the current situation with the pandemic but was sorta pointed that it be out around the end of the year
