I played a lot of PSO Ep1&2 Plus on my old Gamecube but only in offline mode, sometimes co-op with my best friend. After seing the Forbes article and a few videos from Ephinea, I decided it was time to quit playing boring games and come here instead. MAN I wasn't dissapointed! So, why come back to PSO when there are so many games out there? Easy answers for me: TRUE MMO GAMEPLAY+GREAT COMMUNITY.
I played a LOT of online games during the last 5 years or so... None of them were as fun imo. I'll take WoW as an exemple since it's a well known and still very popular game. I go pretty deep with all this so feel free to skip... or maybe grab a cold beer and enjoy my little "rant".
In WoW you have WAY more stuff to do, it's a fact, but the content can get boring for many reasons. In many games like WoW and other MMOs there's often a tradeskill system where we craft gear and other things like mounts and toys. Unless you want to be broke all the time, you'll want to make some money (gold) to at least buy some collectible goodies like mounts/toys right? So here's the problem, and believe me, I know what I'm talking about since I've been the biggest crafter/seller on my server for a quite a while.
1st prob: Too much solo farming. Yeah, if you want to get "rich" you'll be farming for crafting materials a LOT, even with the most optimized character/class. We're talking about easily spending 10+ hours each week (honestly more around 20 hours or even more) farming stuff and not even in combats in some cases (minerals/plants). Hope you like flying over the world while looking at your mini map to spot some mineral veins or plants on the ground, I garantee you'll be doing that a lot. And people rarely form groups for these things... LONELINESSSSSSSSSSS... '
2nd prob: That damn auction house: You've gathered/crafted a lot of things to sell, now you need to sell them. When you have an auction house system like the one in WoW, things get annoying VERY quickly. Why? Two words: Addons and very obsessive competitors. If you want to be able to sell properly, you'll need some addons since the standard game's auction house menu is ridiculously devoided of useful features. Once you have proper knowledge of what addons to get/install and how to use them, now's the time to "try" to make some money. I say "try" because the competition is pretty insane most of the time. There's almost no penalty when people remove their products from the auction house and repost them. Meaning they'll scan all the sales every few minutes and repost everything that another player posted at a lower price. It even got worse recently since players can pay their subs with in-game gold... So yeah, get ready to spend, again, a LOT of time in front of the auction house's counter to scan/remove/repost your stuff all day long. Sounds fun right?
3rd prob: The addons. Some players don't use any addons but if you want to get anywhere in WoW or many other MMOs, it's almost certain that you'll need to install a lot of addons. Get ready to read tons of tutorials on how to use them properly for the most complicated addons like the ones for the auction house. Boring...
4th prob: The collectible stuff. Low xp and drop rates are a common thing in MMOs in general and I don't really mind, at least when the farming/grinding can be done with other players in most cases. In a lot of games, farming is better done solo because the rewards, like rare mounts in WoW, are shared within in the entire group. In other words, players will be solo farming all the time if they can because if that damn 1% mount finally drops, they want to be sure they'll get it. Since a lot of the raids/content from previous expensions can be completed solo, people don't see the point to do these tings in a group anymore.
5th prob: Micro managment: Want to spend even more time playing solo on a MMO? Guess what? You can have garrisons in some games, meaning you can do stuff like sending npcs on quests for extra rewards, sometimes even unique stuff like, again, mounts. Of course you'll need to learn how to install/use a few addons (yeeeeeah!) to speed up the process since, again, the in-game interfaces are often very limited and unneficient (bah, the modders will improve it for us anyway, why bother).
Final prob (not really but gotta end this post someday lol): The community: Really big servers means toxic community imo. The fact is, on popular games like WoW there's so many people that you can expect a lot of trolling and stupid/hateful comments in the game and the chat. A reflect of our society I guess.. and IT SUCKS! Sorry, just needed to get that outta my system.
Now back to PSO: Noticed that pretty much everything I mentionned above doesn't apply to PSO, or at least on this server?
Solo farming? Maybe a bit but here on Ephinea we have the awesome PSO2 loot system (well done guys) so shared loots are not a problem. Even better, the drops are well balanced in PSO and if you want good gear, you have to play on VH or ULT, and you'll probably want a group for Ult and/or can easily help lower lvl players in VH groups while farming your gear/items. In the end, not that many things you'll be doing solo in PSO, unless you REALLY want to.
Auction house? NONE and it's 100% better that way imo. No abuse, no cheating, no addons, no time wasted and better than everything, you won't be dreaming of the damn goblins on the auction house counter when you go to bed. Yeah, happened to me once...
Addons? Do we really need addons for PSO? Nah.
Collectible stuff? Yeah, PSO has plenty of things to collect for, and it can mostly all be done with a group. Again, PSO2 drop system!
Micro managment? Unless we count raising MAGs there's not much for micro managment. And for MAGs, people often create open room for others to come and maybe have a chat.
The community? Damn, I've met more people and had more fun doing so in 2 weeks on Ephinea than I had in 4 full years on WoW... What more can be said? The community here is GREAT! Quality over quantity!
PSO is great and almost perfect by being more simplistic than most other MMOs while focusing almost entirely on multiplayer gameplay. Other MMOs should take notes, lots of' em could learn what MMO is supposed to mean.
I give PSO 9½ out of 10, only because perfection is a matter of opinion.
So there ya go, my full thoughts on the subject! Now back to the lobby that I love so much!
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