@Anarchy-Marine We don't know and likely never will. Sega wont confirm the number of active players on global, all we have to measure by is steam metrics and Sega's confirmation that pc players make up the majority of the player base on global. Even then it's still a crap shoot to how many players are still active. If the total player base is around 100k+ for instance, seeing 1600 of them get banned in one fell swoop following the twitch debacle isn't that surprising(or that big of a deal really), if the total player base is only say 20k or so, then yeah, it's extremely doubtful a lot of those bans were justified.

We also don't know how many of those banned accounts were still active players either. If GM's were combing through old chat logs from 6+ months ago to ban people now, then most likely some of the accounts that were banned were accounts of people who have already quit the game and moved on anyway. Sega just banned them so they could do their PR move/announcement to save face after the twitch streaming situation made them look bad.

At the end of the day, wasn't wanting to start an argument as generally I agree with your takes on a lot of threads, my only intention in my prior comment was to point out that in the past when Sega banned a lot of people for RMT they would give that as the reasoning for why they did the bans, this time around however they didn't.

As for ship 2...I play on ship 2(have since global first launched). I can't speak for the whole ship's community, but I can say from my own experience that yes, there are certain blocks I've learned to entirely avoid on that ship.

At the thread in general, so I don't get dog piled for "defending Sega's decision" in the matter, I don't personally feel getting perma banned for something that happened 6+ month's ago is fair. Granted I do think there are a lot of instances where a temp ban is justified if reasoning was given along with it to the player. An example, when Gigantix first launched I saw a ton of players griefing and openly harassing other players in general chat on a daily basis. Since it was the same players day after day doing it and getting away with it, then yeah if Sega retroactively slapped them with a 1-2 week ban, told them why, and warned them a perma ban would follow if they did it again that's 100% fair in my opinion.

@Anarchy-Marine The 1600 bans had nothing to do with RMT, if they had been RMT related bans then Sega would have said so when they released their statement on why said users were banned, as they have done so in the past when banning RMT accounts. The 1600 bans were due to discriminatory and hateful behavior(Sega's own words), whether that be racist slurs, intentionally breaking/bypassing the chat filter, erp, false reports, leeching/griefing, etc, is anyone's guess how the numbers break down.

https://www.mmorpg.com/news/phantasy-star-online-2-bans-1600-players-over-toxicity-symbol-art-changes-coming-2000123039

^link to an article that has a screen shot of Sega's official announcement on the matter, to show RMT wasn't a part of it.

@Lanre The first half of my post wasn't meant to be taken seriously(hence why I included the line saying it was sarcasm), was just meant to be a joke.

As for the serious half of the post. Prices can't inflate at all if there are price caps implemented as there would be a set max price the good could be sold for. When a scratch discontinues in the current system prices inflate because the supply of the AC items coming into the market is cut off. The other half of the problem is as you said, people scalp said items and hoard them waiting for this moment.

Then when the scalpers have cleaned out whatever inventory is left on the market they are free to dictate the value of said item. A hard price cap stops that from ever happening as Sega would set a limit of what something is sold at. This would disincentivize people from scalping because whatever the price cap was when they bought it they could never resell the item for a higher amount thus never making a profit off of scalping.

Ideally Sega would limit the price cap to something feasibly obtainable for FTP players. I'd still be enough meseta whales would sell the items, but stay affordable to FTP players. In the same token there shouldn't be a price minimum at all, that way people are still free to liquidate items faster by undercutting which also benefits FTP players.

Nah, just make them bind on account when bought off the scratch, then you wont have to worry about inflation at all because they can't be traded on the market at all, ><. That way they stay at the low, low price of "insert X amount of AC here," and Sega wins far, far more in this scenario as ALL cosmetics have to be bought individually by every player who wants them, for cash only. 10/10 way for Sega to make more money off this game.

If they wanna double down on it, make the AC scratch only accessible to players who have premium(fixes the problem of all the people who were whining that premium didn't have any tangible benefits when NGS first launched).

Grabs pop corn and patiently awaits the flood of comments that wont realize the above text is sarcasm

In reality, the only way Sega can hard check inflation is to set price caps on items that dictate the value goods can be traded at(similar to what is done in Black Desert), but even this while probably being viewed as a boon by FTP players, would probably cause less AC items to be purchased by whales overall(they'd make less meseta thus less incentive for them to buy things to sell to FTP players in the first place). Doing this would have adverse consequences in the game(loss of sales/players spending money) that's been talked to death in numerous other threads about this very topic, but it's realistically the only avenue that Sega could pursue that would achieve what people keep asking for.

@TechyAzeem Honestly I wouldn't know. I played PSO on dreamcast back in the day, but I never got to play it online. I played PSU on ps2 as well, but again, only single player offline. Global was my first time playing the series online(same for my friends as well). We're all kinda disappointed with the current state of the game. Kept it installed though, and I'll wait and see after the more content updates roll out and see if the game improved before making a final decision to move on entirely or not.

@The-Merfox You are the hero this thread never asked for but needed, ><.

@Rain-Gnyu said in Not happy with the game? Stop logging in completely if you want SEGA to get the message.:

So we can revisit this in November? We should see these so call effects of people leaving the game right?

You've already seen the effects...NGS...if Sega thought the money they were cash grabbing so hard off people was worth investing back into their game it wouldn't be as barren as it is.

The reality of what I've seen is that when I started on PSO2 Global, I convinced 5 of my friends to make characters as well. All six of us were on premium most of PS02's lifespan and we all spent a decent amount on scratches/inv space/etc. Once NGS dropped all of my friends dropped the game within the first month entirely. Hell, I still have premium on the game and haven't even logged in once to it for the past 3 1/2 weeks, and when the premium drops I wont be re-subbing again to it.

If Sega was more concerned about putting worthwhile content into their game and less concerned about raping people's wallets with a new scratch every week, maybe more players would have stuck around and spent money on the game...hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.

@Gilver-Redgrave said in Take the time to thank your fellow whales in game.:

@Ravness01

Wrong.

The very first DLC ever was a Horse with Armour which did nothing else or gave any special stats NOTHING. People payed for that Horse DLC and that was the moment the gaming industrie realized that this kind of monetarization works.

I know i am old....i was there and saw it with my own eyes.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/new-mechassault-content-available-for-a-price/1100-6084650/

Dlc has been around longer than Oblivion, -.-".

@PBJ-Time And I remember my parents complaining that Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger costed $80 each on release. I remember personally paying $70 for Killer Instinct Gold for N64 on it's release day as well, and this was in the US.

@Gilver-Redgrave Whales are not the reason why dlcs were born...smh...

Inflation is why dlc/season passes exist. Games costed 60+ dollars all the way back to the NES/SNES days. If dlc and season passes didn't exist in modern times then the base cost of games would be far higher than what they currently are.

Something a lot of gamers don't understand is dlc/season passes are cheaper to produce and have a higher profit margin than the actual games do thus keeping the cost of games to the consumer relatively the same as time goes by, even though the costs to produce games have increased. Likewise, hardware, ie consoles, don't really turn much of a profit on sales. People complain about having to pay for Xbox live/PS+/etc without realizing that those services are where companies make the majority of their profit, not off the sale of the consoles themselves, keeping the costs of the hardware affordable.

I personally would much rather pay $60 for a game that has optional dlc, than be forced to pay $80-90 for every new release.