Question about Joint Servers

[terrell707]

So I'm a whole lotta confused on the whole global servers issue. From what I understand, PSO used global servers back in the day, but people say that SoA balls it'd up and kind of left the US servers to rot. But what confuses me is if the servers were joint with Japan's, shouldn't the updates still have affected the American servers but they would just be in Japanese?

Would this also be the case if PSO2 was joint? Wouldn't that mean that SoA would have to translate the updates at about the same time that SoJ released the update? Sorry for all the questions, just pretty confused on all of this.

[Sp-24]

Old PSO games did have shared servers. In Dreamcast days, Sega had great ambitions, so their online services were global. Episode 1&2 also had shared servers, both on GC and Xbox, but it probably has more to do with it being expensive to pay Nintendo and Microsoft to maintain 4 servers on 2 consoles than 2. Also, updates weren't an issue on DC/GC/XBox, because they didn't exist. PSO, PSOv2 and Ep.1+2 were full games. PSU X360 also has shared servers but that's, again, because keeping one server on Xbox Live is cheaper than 2.

Sega is not going to make servers global. Their key audience is in Japan, and they only throw lots of money at something that will throw more back. Everything that comes from outside is just a bonus. Making the game fully accessible to everyone would mean that Japanese players would have to wait in order for everyone to get the same services equally fast, and Sega isn't going to experiment and, god forbid, spend money on something that may attract more players but may also make them lose their target customer... and cost money, since localisation doesn't come cheap for some reason.

If Sega ever cared about American, European and all those other not Japanese players, it was long, long ago and not true.

[WeaponX3523]

Also, updates weren't an issue on DC/GC/XBox, because they didn't exist. PSO, PSOv2 and Ep.1+2 were full games.

This is not actually true. Dreamcast version did have new content added post launch. It was not necessarily available to US players. This would be one example:


http://www.pso-world.com/news/0851-few-hints-quests

Unfortunately I don't see why Sega would do any differently this time around based on their track record.