I'm a lot more hopeful about the new forum than a day ago thanks to various work done to improve its look and feel today.

I can't really fit that image into my signature as it is but I'll try. For posterity here's the sig I used throughout the life of this forum, only really changed when I added other main classes, for NGS, and to add the link to my campaign tracker.

Edit: Ahah! I can just convert my legacy sig into an image to save on characters. My sig is now ginormous but it's not like people will be using this place daily in a few hours' time so that shouldn't be an issue.

We wouldn't need to worry about Rain's personal agendas in a user-controlled space. Even if they were able to disguise their mannerisms (I'm sure everyone has their beliefs about that possibility), they're the only one who wants to eliminate F2P and magically prevent YouTubers from covering the game, so either they mention this and we know who it is regardless of conduct, or they don't and that problem solves itself.

Closing this forum is far from the first act of blatant mismanagement Sega have made with this game, with Phantasy Star or with games at all. And it'll be far from the last.

We're left with an official Twitter channel that is doing a much better job than this forum ever did of discouraging new users from trying NGS, an official Discord that's terrible for depth conversation and resource-sharing (starring a crazy restrictive link whitelist and false-positive message deletion and tempbans for parts of innocent words), a Steam forum they'd probably delete if Steam didn't require it, an unofficial Reddit not worth mentioning, and a few other disparate third-party spaces. Dark times.

Hopefully whatever this website rebuild is going to be will provide a replacement feedback channel. It's becoming very obvious that Twitter is ignored but for a select few #NGSHeadline questions and the katana main screaming, and also that the official Discord isn't getting a suggestions channel anytime soon. I'm not sure I can remember the last time any feedback sent through the (probably still working) Zendesk support system including failed campaign distributions led to any action either.

Oh well. Forum was good up until NGS released at least. Gotta be thankful we had it when we did.

Do I gotta say something?

I haven't got nearly as much of the resources I want to preserve saved as I'd like to... the forum's closure coinciding with the end of a ton of campaigns (see the tracker in my sig!) has really been troublesome for that. It's reassuring to know it'll remain available for a while, I'm going to need that time to rescue some knowledge that would otherwise be forever lost!

Twitter and Discord are terrible mediums for detailed discussion, and the Steam forums are not available to all PSO2 players. It still remains to be seen if the one would-be successor forum is going to catch on and I wonder how it's going to make itself visible especially after this forum switches from read-only to deleted as the Discord in particular has a whitelist that never gets updated even for active community resources.

But hopefully that can be sorted out in the coming weeks and we can get a detailed discussion space that's a little more free of known bad actors than this place ended up being.

@Redex said in What do you guys think Summoner and the new Gunslash Class will play like?:

I always kind of thought "Gunslash" in Phantasy Star Zero was a bad translation for "Gunblade" as we have it in PSO2.

I mean it's not exactly a great translation, being a mismatched combination of noun and verb. It's comparable to calling it Swordshoot.

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

you lack proper data to prove anything

Makes it quite a compliment that in spite of that alleged lack we were still able to show unique regular players (the real metric against which suspensions should be gauged to determine impact) were over tenfold more than any concurrent peak then. Thanks!

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

Second, mucho texto.

Just providing the necessary citation to demonstrate to anyone reading this topic how the basis of your statements are flawed.

I'm not going to argue with you as that would be a lost cause and a waste of time, so feel free to continue the unreferenced "type less and think more" whining but please be aware it won't concern me.

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

What was last time's troll tactic? Oh yeah, jumping at people's throat lying saying something like "99% of maintenances finished in time".

What a comical retelling. The Twitter claims were that a majority (not 99%) of maintenances either got extended or were followed by an emergency maintenance. Instead of fighting I demonstrated that at no point in the history of the Global service was that ever true. I'm sorry if that offends you?

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

Good job generalizing and slandering the whole banned playerbase btw!

I haven't. It's not even possible for me to voice beliefs on whether all of the accounts actioned (not all of which are were bans, the community team has repeatedly pointed out) deserved it because I simply don't have that information.

All I've done is note that apparently the best individual example you've provided of a player whose conduct earned punishment was someone that in isolation very quickly demonstrated behaviour that I would feel is punishable. That's no indication on anyone else.

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

Oh, and the metric can be confirmed in game checking block populations.

Block populations also only show who is online at the time of the check, not unique daily/regular players.

I'd like to remind that the first day of the 9th Anniversary event briefly brought the Steam concurrent metric up from 11k to 16k. We worked out on that day that the cross-service player total after 18 hours was an absolute minimum possible of 129k unique accounts but more likely something between 184k and 258k, and by day 2 was likely between 221k and 285k unique accounts.

If at the time 4k players were warned or penalised it would've been plainly wrong to say 25% of all players were permabanned when we could see it'd really be around 1.6% of very recent active players (and a smaller portion still since that'd have excluded weekend-only players and such) would have been actioned (not necessarily banned).

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner

SteamDB shows 11k active players two weeks before the ban, 6k active players the week bans began and from there onwards it fell to 2k.

SteamDB shows 11k concurrent (not active) players once after the 15th of July; this was the 4th of August, more than a month before the taking a stand announcement on the 7th of September. It was also the day of the Braver class release, so it should be plainly obvious that it was an exceptional day rather than the norm.

As shown on the zoom-out below the chart, the curving decline of the concurrent player count had steadied out long before this point, and it should be common sense to attribute the majority of the slow steady decline that follows to the most overwhelming complaint players have been making for months (the lack of things to do) which doesn't just indicate players leaving the game but also most players playing fewer hours each day (which reduces the concurrent players metric without reducing active players).

It's also worth noting that since that announcement a further 1,390+ accounts have at minimum been announced as suspended at minimum (950 announced on 16 Sep and 440 announced on 04 Oct primarily for RMT, and an unknown number announced on 13 Nov for multi-accounting). All of these combined with a similar total have had such an imperceptible impact on the concurrent player metric within this date range that to say they've caused a significant reduction would require claiming the game would actually have a growing population overall.

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

which they couldn't explain

That "innocent" friend you brought to this forum who immediately began spewing obscenities meant no explanation was necessary.

@Zenchi-the-based said in Looks like we will need a replacement forums much sooner:

costed us 300% of the current active players.

Providing "active" is given the misused definition of "currenly online on one of the launchers". To be fair you're far from the only one that insists on making this mistake but it feels more deliberate considering the number of times you must have been told how inappropriate the metric is by now.

I'd say thanks for helping explain to the organisers of the likely successor forum why your openly saboteurial conduct shouldn't be given a seventeenth chance but it's not as if a bunch of us aren't expecting you to try to flood the place with poorly-disguised multi accounts from day one anyway.

If so then when I asked "You mean PSO2 being on EGS?" They could've just said "Yes" lol.