There was a thread on /v/ a day or two ago saying PSO2:NG had like 2 thousand players now- almost nothing.

RT: https://poa.st/objects/2bc832de-5a33-4f9b-aabd-171184549f99

@AngryWraith no need to guess about the numbers, they're right there for free. also you should strongly consider not listening to anything anyone on /v/ says or has ever said

@merchantHelios @AngryWraith @brimshae the new anti-cheat is normally a worse one, but they are seemingly running a custom version because it's actually less intrusive than gameguard is. it literally only runs when the game is running and performance increases across the board. a lot of people saw that they were changing the anti-cheat to this worse one and got freaked out and never looked any further into it. as of right now though you can still use gameguard if you really want to.

also, this is just the steam playerbase. it is also on xbox and ps5, and on the xbox store and epic store on pc. there was some handshake issue with a patch last week on xbox so the game was offline on microsoft services for a while, which actually tanked the player base and you could really tell.

as someone who actually plays daily, and usually at really weird buttfuck hours in the middle of the night, i've never had any issues finding parties to do current content with. a lot of people say the game is dead but man, they have no idea what a dead game really looks like. the player base isn't great, but it wasn't crazy to begin with. as you can see from the graph, a ton of people hopped on NGS right when it came out and since it was pretty barebones they never touched it again, just moved on to something else. i think pso2 global had like 4 or 5 thousand players usually, something like that. if NGS didn't exist i'm pretty sure a lot of people would be bored of pso2 classic now as well.

imo like 95% of the criticisms against this game are fucking retarded and people only talk about it because they're addicted to hating things on the internet and getting good boy points for agreeing with everyone else. the game IS different from PSO2, but people really approach it with the wrong perspective and a lot of their grievances apply to pso2 as well, especially before global happened since they packed like 8 years of content into 1 for that.

@beardalaxy @AngryWraith @brimshae good to know about the anticheat - glad it's good news too. As for the "dead game" allegations - I personally wouldn't say that. I like to think I DO know what a really dead game looks like - and NGS still definitely has a core base of people still playing.

That said: Having played a hundred hours or so at launch, I was disappointed with the lack of content after coming fresh off the heels of playing a few hundred hrs of the original PSO2. After a few months, I asked some people I knew who still actively played if substantial content (not just scratch tickets) had been added, and their answer was no.

If that answer has changed in the past 6-ish months, I'm more than happy to give it a try again. But I would be very surprised, since Sega or the devs, whichever it is, do not seem to put much value on the IP

@merchantHelios @AngryWraith @brimshae Did you only play PSO2 Global? Because like I said, they really packed in a crazy amount of content in a very short time. JP had that stretched out over 8 years, and even with Global you saw the player count consistently dwindling in just a year. So, I don't really think the comparison is very fair.

I am maybe not the right person to ask, since I have always been playing and enjoying it. I will say, though, that my average playtime per day has increased because there typically is more stuff to do. They have been expanding the current content that exists while working on new stuff, which is due for this June I believe. They have been pretty open to player feedback, and have openly admitted that they have had to change gears and it has been pretty difficult. I can tell they're going down the right track now though, more or less. There are some story elements that are beginning to hook into some neat stuff as well, the new area coming in June appears to be an original ARKS fleet ship's urban district.

If you hopped in now, you'd see a higher level cap, Ancient Enemies to farm for the current BIS gear, Leciel Exploration rotations, extremely difficult variations of the Dark Falz urgent quests that can be played at any time (one of which gives you SG every week), whatever the limited time quest is, and as of the patch that went live just an hour ago a new mechanic in one of the combat sectors called "the crimson realm" which seems pretty interesting. There's a new boss there that will drop better loot depending on how much damage is done to it.

We're getting more of a roadmap for the next 6 months or so I believe in the headline next week. I'm pretty sure within the next few months we're getting another new kind of quest, an expansion to Leciel Exploration, and then in June we get that new field (which comes with more stories) and something similar to the AIS suits. I'm pretty sure there's a bit more, and likely more to be announced more specifically, but I can't think of it off the top of my head. Probably because I didn't care too much about it lol.

I think most people's problem is that they just don't like the content, not that there isn't enough of it. At least now. I legit had a friend tell me he didn't think there was enough content and I'm pretty sure the dude didn't even get halfway through the current story. Just parroting what he'd heard online and since he didn't like the game he just gave that same excuse. At least, that's my theory. Then you have the people who will grind out a new update for like two days straight and then complain there's no content afterward. It's like... yeah, there's no content because you played all of it, and maybe even spent money to get your gear at min-max.

I don't see it as a game that you can spend like 4-5 hours on a day like a lot of people do with their MMO of choice. It's more like an hour long play session a day, maybe a few longer ones here and there when new content drops. If that's not your thing, then it's not your thing, but honestly that's pretty much how PSO2 was also, unless you were really going ham on like Challenge Miles.

Gear was a lot, and I mean a LOT harder to obtain in PSO2 also, so it gave you more of a reason to grind a lot. NGS made it significantly easier to not only get good gear, but to augment it as well, and now you have people complaining that rare drops are too rare! I really don't think people actually know what they want, they just know they don't like the game and they channel that into complaining about stuff that, if it were changed, they probably wouldn't like playing it that way either.

@merchantHelios @AngryWraith @brimshae Also, spoiler alert, but Manon tries to kill herself and some twitter freaks were upset that the game would talk about suicide because it triggered them or something. So they've got that going for them at least xD the story has been a little bit stale since Zephetto fucked off and left us with the Starless, it's been more about character building stuff and it's been a slow drip feed of it. Once the new area comes out, we'll be getting new story to go along with it, and I can only imagine what it's going to be like if we're getting AIS kind of stuff and potentially going to an ARKS fleet ship. Which, if it means anything to you, potentially has Clarissa in it.