Had to edit and repost this to correct the statement about the gacha. There is a way to get the outfits in the gacha via something called BP Points. You can salvage stuff you don't want from the gacha into BP Points. However, the chance of getting the fancy outfits from through the gacha is still less than 1%.
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Right before the weekend, Bandai has done a ban wave in #BlueProtocol hitting players who are playing outside of Japan or using VPNs. The Spanish guy I have been watching cover info about the game got banned on stream today and many of the people in his Discord server also got hit on the 16th. He stated he had actually been playing without a VPN most of the time but those in his servers using the free Urban VPN got hit. I'm unsure if any other VPNs got hit.
Both me and him aren't personally mad about this. We knew it was coming, as Bandai ToS says it's for the Japanese public only, and I anticipated the ban wave as well since they likely wanted to reduce server load for the Japanese player base right before the weekend so the experience is better for them. I haven't felt any bad lag or even disconnects after the rocky first day, at least.
I also personally haven't been banned yet and neither has my friend. But we may get banned soon. We took a break after playing close to 12 hours today. I also streamed for 7 hours.
The latest vod for today has footage of a 40 man raid and the gigantic boss, which was buttery smooth and I was getting 40-50 fps on max settings during it while also streaming. The optimization for an MMO made with Unreal Engine 4 is honestly impressive.
Despite how tedious and difficult it is to play even with a translator due to everything mostly being viewable within menus and me having basically no short term memory, we have over 30 hours now and reached around level 18 and obtained a mount today. For native players, they can breeze through a lot faster though I didn't see anyone today at the level 40 raid boss portal.
The gameplay is solid and the progression even at these early levels feels so rewarding. It's not perfect and I feel combat elements need adjustments but I'll gather my thoughts more about it in the following days. I think it's been overhyped as "the MMO savior" and I just don't think it is. I haven't personally seen how reasonable the BP Points store is when it comes to getting the currency. But it is still extremely fun if you want actual enjoyment in this cursed genre full of garbage P2W MMOs.
