@KOSMOSFAN22497 The same kind of people who are trying to fit every single Phantasy Star game into one timeline despite Rieko Kodama (the one responsible for the Classic Series) starting that all games starting from PSO1 are not set in the same universe as the Classic Series. Profound Darkness' presence in PSO2 definitely lead to people taking the superficial implications that "Profound Darkness was never truly gone" without looking into the fact that, much like every single Dark Falz, this is merely an entity with its own unique history bearing the same name.

@Mattwo7 Truth be told... I wouldn't consider Sonic 4 as an example of extending a franchise past its prime. The media I used as examples were those which had proper conclusions; Sonic 3 & Knuckles did conclude the Death Egg Saga but that didn't exactly mean the end for Sonic; after all the first game and Sonic CD didn't have the Death Egg and the story of Sonic Adventure was developed with the intent to build off of the lore introduced in Sonic 3. As such... there really was room for a Sonic 4 but what we ended up getting was a huge amount of missed opportunities.

Compare that to how MegaMan X5 ended; a final stand between X and Sigma where Sigma's seemingly defeated for good but at the cost of Zero and then ending on a huge timeskip which shows the world reconstructing or, since this is the PSO2 forums, Phantasy Star IV which established Dark Falz as being a spawn of Profound Darkness and ends with Profound Darkness defeated for good instead of merely being sealed away and all major conflict that was present throughout the classic series being resolved... it really is a satisfying ending. Assuming what people want out of "Phantasy Star V" is a new turn based adventure in the Algol system, you'd have to essentially undo or make pointless a lot of what that ending accomplished...

Just to answer a few of these...

1. Websites all work fine during the lag. (Twitter, YouTube, Steam, and even this forum.)

The websites is hosted on a completely set of servers separate from the game.

1. Chat still worked for some users. (In most MMOs, chat is actually done on a parallel server so that players can communicate even when the main game's server is lagging.)

This is correct, I dunno how things are now that the Steam version is live... but back then PSO2 used the Xbox Live servers for all forms of communication. Whenever Xbox Live was having an outtage chat related functions like emotes and chat messages would not work.

As for the original post... I do think that OP is overestimating how much Bots can actually do as well as misunderstanding a bit on how PSO2 works.

To no one's surprise, PSO2 is in fact around 60-70% client-side; Player Movement, (majority, there are some exceptions) Enemy AI, Item Use, etc are all handled through the client. Keeping that in mind... the servers themselves are not hacked, MAJORITY of bot software is merely one that replicates player input but the extent of what they can directly do is limited to just what any other player's able to do on their own client. The instances are hacked items are not the result of server hacks but the fact that PSO2 trusts the client so much that users are able to hack their own client and the modified data ends up getting stored on the server.

Sega's not 'allowing' Bots on the game; Bots and their actions are literally against the Terms of Service if you give it a read. The issue at hand is more the fact that the PSO2 JP Team (who run the Global version) have never had to deal with Bots to this extent during their eight year run and from the look of things (though I could be wrong on this) administrative actions like banning users or modifiying player data from Sega's end can only be done during maintenance.

@Mattwo7 said in Phantasy Star Collection!:

@KOSMOSFAN22497 said in Phantasy Star Collection!:

Asking for a Phantasy Star V Is a lot like basically asking for a Mega Man X6 or a Star Wars Episode VII. So no. There doesn't need to be a V more over the fact that the OG team of the classic games are all but gone. Barring III ofc.

I think you meant Mega Man Zero, X6 was needed to explain how Zero was still alive.

Don't wanna go too off-topic but... sorta. Originally Zero was made with X5's ending in-mind with MMZ resurrecting Zero following the events of X5. The sudden announcement that there would be an X6 apparently changed those plans.

That aside... I do agree with the previous statement. I think whenever people say they want a new 'classic' Phantasy Star game they don't mean an actual Phantasy Star V since... nearly anyone who's ever worked on the classic series had by now long left Sega or have been busy with other projects and Phantasy Star IV wrapped things up quite nicely hence the reason why PSO onwards would rely a lot on alternate universes rather than trying to finish off a storyline that's concluded.

Many of the issues concerning communications is due to the fact that PSO2 Global is ultimately managed two different teams; Sega of Japan and ESTsoft.

ESTsoft is the company the GMs work for, the one who handle social media, livestreams, English announcements, etc. That said, like many people correctly guessed here, they have very little power on lots of things since ultimately its Sega of Japan who runs the game's servers, pushes out updates, creates and implements content and carries out investigations on many matters; hence the reason JP and Global BOTH had their player shops close at the same time as the exploits had begun to appear on the Japanese version as well (also, the team managing the Global version is the SAME team that manages the JP version).

Now mind you, ESTsoft's responsibility is also to communicate with Sega of Japan on many matters but, like the GMs have stated multiple times, there's no guarantee that suggestions or appeals will be accepted by them.

The game's age and programming also plays a huge role too. We don't know the specifics on what tools the Japanese team have available to them and all that mind you, but the best of putting things is.. under-the-hood, PSO2 is more of a badly programmed single player game with multiplayer support when you consider the way in which nearly 80% of the game runs client-side! On JP, a few hackers could actually make themselves GMs and teleport players all over the place and summon bosses to the lobby and so on. As such things like restoring lost items, seeing in-game item purchase history and so on may very well be things which the game's server simply wasn't programmed to keep track of and the game may very well not have been programmed to deal with bots all that well. The only reason PSO2 wasn't hacked back in the day was due its obscurity outside of Japan; the Global release had in a sense made the game a bit more mainstream and in turn... a bigger target for those with other motives.

Taking all that into account.... I feel there's very little that can be done. At the very least, with New Genesis around the corner there's a small chance some of the issues PSO2's code had might be dealt with but I really wouldn't count on it...

All that "Getting Started" does is place you on Ship 1, clicking on it or not has no bearing on whether you get a tutorial and beginner features.

@Thedovahmon said in Expanding Ps02's Story:

@Kurumi-Tokisaki said in Expanding Ps02's Story:

@Anarchy-Marine said in Expanding Ps02's Story:

@Thedovahmon That never happened, it was just Doctor Eggman's fever dream.

do you think Dr. Eggman is PSO2's hidden antagonist? When you defeat robots in underground shafts, they drop red meat! That means animals are controlling the robots, right?

That would kind of explain why Deus Esca keeps pissing on the moon, he's got some of Eggman's genes in him.

For sure: https://www.reddit.com/r/PSO2/comments/ips3cn/you_have_5_minutes_before_the_dpscheck_d_r_o_p_l/

@Maxwell said in Tale of two collaboration announcements:

It was clear when I saw the livestream that the people who is apart of the team were clueless, like that one guy did not even know why PSO2 went into the fantasy realm i.e reliving their true roots...

I mean... I wouldn't call the series roots as being fantasy. From the first game, the series was always meant to be a Science Fiction series with Fantasy elements with the game's director drawing inspiration from the likes of Star Wars. So even though elements like say... Dragons, Vampires and Medusa were a thing in the first Phantasy Star... the game still took place in a setting with a futuristic society with advanced technology such as robotics and space travel and each planet having its own 'alien' inhabitants. The rest of the series (outside of III which was handled by a different team altogether) dropped many of these elements altogether. As such the statement still does stand true as EPISODE 5 is seriously the most in which the franchise had gone into the fantasy realm before IDOLA Phantasy Star Saga released.

Other than that all other criticisms regarding the presentation are valid. I do believe things would improve for New Genesis; most of the announcements concerning New Genesis were literally the Japanese video... but in English. But for now, we have two teams (Sega of Japan who run the entire game and ESTsoft who are responsible for Community Management, Support and Promotion) who've ben established need to improve their communication.

@ZorokiHanuke I'm all for this! Phantasy Star Universe did this too with a couple of quests set on Ragol but... I feel a lot more could be done with New Genesis than PSU whihc... admittedly could have been done better (Forest didn't have as much variety in its environment, consisting of the same areas repeat... the Central Dome is just a 2D graphic in the distance).