beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

@veru thanks! this was insightful.

tbh MMOs don't usually appeal to me. at all. i played a shit ton of runescape as a kid because it was free and i could play with my friends after school without actually going through the trouble of asking our parents to hang out and all that. other than RS though every MMO i tried to get into just did absolutely nothing for me, and that's still the case. they're often super heavy on the UI elements and have a shit ton of mechanics and using all of your number keys (and sometimes even more than that) is totally necessary. they're just all so bogged down. then you add on top of that all that typical F2P stuff and it's just blehhh.

PSO2/NGS, in my opinion, actually has one of, if not the best, monetization models. it's crazy how people still complain about it, like they've never played another F2P game in their life. the fact that 99% of the stuff paying players have access to are things that free players can also obtain with in-game currency is amazing. people complain that you have to pay for the best gear but you really don't, and even then the best gear is only going to be marginally better than whatever the stuff that you get literally for free in-game is. meanwhile you have a game like FFXIV that has outfits locked to classes and plenty of stuff you can only get by paying money, including the expansions, which have always been totally free in PSO2. the amount of free stuff you're given just for logging on and playing a little bit is astonishing when compared with literally any other F2P game i've ever played. so i hope that Blue Protocol takes notes from that and manages to do something similar, hopefully without some critical errors that NGS made in the beginning that made it a little rough for a while (mainly stuff related to RMT).

PSO2 has done some anime collabs, unfortunately NGS hasn't really had many collabs in general yet but they've had Hololive, Nijisanji, and Overlord collabs. PSO2 classic had Evangelion (not on Global though REEEEE), Sword Art Online, Konosuba, and definitely some other ones but I can't think of all of them off the top of my head.

while i like MMOs with action combat more, the other ones i have played that have it always end up feeling way more clunky. NGS is prime in that regard, and it seems like PSO in general has always been the best of its kind at the time before being bested only by itself. at least, IMO.

i am not worried about bandai namco as much as i am about amazon, who seems to be publishing it overseas. idk what their track record is with censoring stuff but i hear >big corporation< and immediately get worried that they'll do some shit to try and appease as many retards as possible.

you can make decent lolis even in global, but it's definitely a lot harder and they're not explicitly meant to be lolis from the devs themselves. SEGA has been kinda gaying it up recently though and they even changed some stuff in the localization because it sounded bad, like changing the Slave weapon series to "Raven" and changing a character named "Diggah" to some other shit for sounding too close to nigga, and then like 8 months after Global's release they changed your little helper robots to say "Handler" instead of "Master" because of slave connotations or some weird bullshit like that. i wanna say all of this might be because of Microsoft because the game is obviously unchanged in Japan, but i honestly don't know.

i know a lot of people had like, goblin, dwarf, and fairy characters though that were really small and certainly not lolis. i think that was actually mainly the types of small characters i typically saw, that and shortstacks. didn't see many lolis at all on JP tbh, but maybe that was because i was on the unofficial "english server."

PSO2 having a loyal player base is... i don't know if i would call it that. it seems like most of the people who play it over in the west actually just fucking hate it and complain about it 24/7. seriously can't look at anything related to the game anywhere without several people saying "this game sucks, it needs more content and i want more free stuff by doing nothing." when the game didn't have a whole lot going for it initially, a shit ton of people just jumped ship to go play FFXIV instead. i think a lot of people who play PSO2 are unfortunately being held hostage by their own FOMO and that's 100% their fault. i would much prefer a tighter community that actually enjoyed the game than one that just shits on it all the time.

on another note, i heard someone say that NGS is pay to lose and i have kept saying that ever since. i feel like a lot of players might just pay their way to the BiS stuff, blitz their way through the new content that comes out in 6 hours, and then they complain because they've got nothing left to do. i think this could be somewhat alleviated if NGS brought back those insanely rare drops that can't be sold on the player market, but people would probably complain about that shit too because the current PSO2 community is just full of serial complainers.

i'll have to try out BP when it releases. don't think i'll end up playing it very much because i actually am pretty loyal to NGS despite its flaws and i only have so much time to devote to games, gotta pick and choose wisely. i'll give it a shot though!