AndvariAR
Jun 9, 2005, 06:30 AM
I've been lurking on/off for the past year; seven months ago I moved from GC to Xbox, and two months after that I ended up having to leave PSO entirely. With the BB beta i've been back and reading up much more often.
What I'm coming across here is damn near distressing. I am absolutely thrilled by Blueburst, and am enjoying more than I have any PSO iteration since the Dreamcast launch. (Having played every single version except Episode III, i like to think that means something.)
Why, then, is this forum community so fraught with elitism, misinformation, and moreover a seemingly fervent batch of BB-haters?
Firstoff, the sheer size of the "I cheat because I like to, fuck you" community is astonishing. Nobody seems to have any value for the joys of a valid player community and economy. Where items and finds mean something, and you actually have a USE for the goddamn trade window.
I played PSOGC online for three months and Xbox for two, and found that cheating was so rampant that there was minimal real purpose to the game. I lost interest short of level 40 with every character I attempted. There was no community, just religious zealotry on the two sides; the cheaters everywhere who didn't have a care in the world for others, and the legits who clung to their tiny groups, afraid to go out and form a valid player economy.
Blueburst, being free of cheating, has devloped a robust player community. Trades go through often without the assholish lobby begging we've been used to. People actually share treasure, knowing that the strength of the party is greater than the strength of their bloody bank deposit. The team system rewards altruism and community-minded thinking in fantastic ways.
With all my experiences with DC v1, v2, and both consoles of Eps I&II, this is quite possibly the greatest I have ever seen it.
But the pro-cheating group hates it because its serverside and, surprise, difficult to cheat in. The legits hate it for anything they can come up with;
A) no voicechat, keyboard controls suck.
Two things can solve this. 1) Learn to type, its not the massive effort youre making it out to be, and 2) spend 15 bucks on a nice PC controller. Come on, the game is a FREE DOWNLOAD. Consider that fifteen dollars spent towards its basic purchase and no more.
B) you can't play offline for free.
You can play solo mode with all the original quests, but sorry, the price of SECURE SERVERSIDE STORAGE means you must connect to a server. Why are so many people in this forum obsessed with playing singleplayer exclusively? Moreover, why do they consider it such a SIN to imply that the game was MEANT to be played online?
C) the team/clan system creates enemies out of friends, they say.
as an american gamer myself, I have no qualms making the following accusation. In an exclusively co-operative game like PSO, american gamers are absolute pricks. Call it a culture gap, but japanese servers thrived in the original DC days while american players bitched nonstop about the lack of PVP modes. For some reason we, as a collective, were less interested in building a community than we were in shooting eachother in the face. Why the fuck are we, as a culture, always looking to make immediate threats against each other? The team system creates a minor community; a tightly-knit group that works towards collective good. Except in rare events, they do NOT compete against other teams at all! the point is group achievement, NOT at somebody's expense. All it does it add to the spirit of the game and create more group-minded players who watch out for eachother and know how to contribute to the whole.
D) so-called 'legit' players are angry that they can't dupe their favorite items for 'backup.'
hypocritical asses. Firstoff, way to bust your whole legit thing. I know, lockups and DCs can threaten your items. Its a threat. Guess what. In Blueburst, it is nigh-IMPOSSIBLE to lose your items. Through disconnections, spontanteous shutdowns because I play it fullscreen, to outright power failures, NOTHING has fucked with my save or my items in Blueburst. I don't NEED to dupe my stuff because I don't have a paranoid reason to do so. I don't so much as lose magsync when I enter a new game in Blueburst.
the game was founded as a community-based concept. the enemy in the game is every retarded, near-sighted mutant critter that attacks you from forest to tower. Your allies are, and were always MEANT to be EVERY OTHER PLAYER. This is undeniable. For some reason our culture thrives on pissing on eachother, because from the start we fucked it all up.
Yeah, there are japanese hackers. But you know what? Time and again its shown that its nowhere NEAR the degree of ours. The console versions have lost any universal community they may have briefly had. Cheating and self-centered bitchery is entirely to blame.
Hacked items leaking into the community destroys the ingame economy. With no value left in your finds, people don't put the effort into finding them, the sense of identity given by your finds will be nullified, and the most central sense of the game is lost; its a quest to unlock the secrets and treasures of the gaming world and enrich the community with them. The COMMUNITY.
BB is still hack-free. People find inferno bazookas and give them to the ranger in the party. People find high-level spells and, if not a force, give them to the nearest one. People are contributing, sharing, and working together. Functional trades are going through. People who desperately want addslots need just ask about, and somebody will soon name a price (if not give it for free.) It is ENTIRELY thanks to 'forced' legitimacy and the taught altruism of the team system that it is thriving so well. The challenge has returned. The community is worthwhile. You can go into any lobby, find somebody your level and set out for conquest alongside them.
No FSODs. No Noling. No PKing. Just a shitload of people who are nice enough to save some of the dozens of varistas they find in the hopes of making some noob ranger's day with them.
How the cheaters can admit they lack the balls to contribute to a healthy player economy with valid effort is beyond me. How the 'legits' can label themselves and practice as if some kind of pompous cult is obscene. They claim the BB teams are privatized elitists and yet the only way to PLAY on Xbox servers is to find a tiny, likeminded crew to run with.
I'm sorry that Blueburst is hackproof. I'm sorry that it FORCES people to work TOGETHER. I'm sorry that it makes use of the social graces that elementary school tried and apparently failed to teach us.
But not since the first month of DCv1 have I actually enjoyed the game like this. Rumors still fly about regarding the rarest weapons. There's still so much to look forward to. When you see an amazing weapon on somebody, you know for a FACT that something hardcore had to go down for them to get their hands on it. its all earned, and moreover, its all shared. Everybody in the game is actually TRYING now. Those damn DB's sabers are WORTH something to people, whether passed down to noobs who lust for them or contributed to the team for further achievements, every single item and shred of meseta is cycling into a proper player-based economy. For every career trader there is a philanthropist somewhere as well.
Groups are banding together for online quests constantly. Everyone is out for the same goal. I'm starting to become glad so many people don't want BB. They seem like the types who'd just fuck it up for those of us who enjoy it.
This is, in effect, my going-away post to PSOW. I loved the original PSO for its player-and-player dynamic. it was never versus, nor was it meant to be. A game that made all players allies, and the american release demanded we be made enemies. Why are we so bad at co-op and community-oriented games? Why is "pro-cheating" even a condonable position? Are there really such serious cultural differences at work that we must be obsessed with divisive competition?
Seriously, I love Blueburst. It feels like the old PSO is new all over again. That's all I ever wanted out of any of the other versions, and what none delivered.
it just feels that this site seems to have degraded from a "uniting hunters" compendium to a mag-feeding quick-reference accompanied by a glorified scribbleboard. I know that me leaving the forums is no huge deal; I was never too active, I just read along. But I have to know, am I completely alone in these thoughts? Am I the only person here who enjoyed PSO for that kind of challenge, and for the community, of all things?
What I'm coming across here is damn near distressing. I am absolutely thrilled by Blueburst, and am enjoying more than I have any PSO iteration since the Dreamcast launch. (Having played every single version except Episode III, i like to think that means something.)
Why, then, is this forum community so fraught with elitism, misinformation, and moreover a seemingly fervent batch of BB-haters?
Firstoff, the sheer size of the "I cheat because I like to, fuck you" community is astonishing. Nobody seems to have any value for the joys of a valid player community and economy. Where items and finds mean something, and you actually have a USE for the goddamn trade window.
I played PSOGC online for three months and Xbox for two, and found that cheating was so rampant that there was minimal real purpose to the game. I lost interest short of level 40 with every character I attempted. There was no community, just religious zealotry on the two sides; the cheaters everywhere who didn't have a care in the world for others, and the legits who clung to their tiny groups, afraid to go out and form a valid player economy.
Blueburst, being free of cheating, has devloped a robust player community. Trades go through often without the assholish lobby begging we've been used to. People actually share treasure, knowing that the strength of the party is greater than the strength of their bloody bank deposit. The team system rewards altruism and community-minded thinking in fantastic ways.
With all my experiences with DC v1, v2, and both consoles of Eps I&II, this is quite possibly the greatest I have ever seen it.
But the pro-cheating group hates it because its serverside and, surprise, difficult to cheat in. The legits hate it for anything they can come up with;
A) no voicechat, keyboard controls suck.
Two things can solve this. 1) Learn to type, its not the massive effort youre making it out to be, and 2) spend 15 bucks on a nice PC controller. Come on, the game is a FREE DOWNLOAD. Consider that fifteen dollars spent towards its basic purchase and no more.
B) you can't play offline for free.
You can play solo mode with all the original quests, but sorry, the price of SECURE SERVERSIDE STORAGE means you must connect to a server. Why are so many people in this forum obsessed with playing singleplayer exclusively? Moreover, why do they consider it such a SIN to imply that the game was MEANT to be played online?
C) the team/clan system creates enemies out of friends, they say.
as an american gamer myself, I have no qualms making the following accusation. In an exclusively co-operative game like PSO, american gamers are absolute pricks. Call it a culture gap, but japanese servers thrived in the original DC days while american players bitched nonstop about the lack of PVP modes. For some reason we, as a collective, were less interested in building a community than we were in shooting eachother in the face. Why the fuck are we, as a culture, always looking to make immediate threats against each other? The team system creates a minor community; a tightly-knit group that works towards collective good. Except in rare events, they do NOT compete against other teams at all! the point is group achievement, NOT at somebody's expense. All it does it add to the spirit of the game and create more group-minded players who watch out for eachother and know how to contribute to the whole.
D) so-called 'legit' players are angry that they can't dupe their favorite items for 'backup.'
hypocritical asses. Firstoff, way to bust your whole legit thing. I know, lockups and DCs can threaten your items. Its a threat. Guess what. In Blueburst, it is nigh-IMPOSSIBLE to lose your items. Through disconnections, spontanteous shutdowns because I play it fullscreen, to outright power failures, NOTHING has fucked with my save or my items in Blueburst. I don't NEED to dupe my stuff because I don't have a paranoid reason to do so. I don't so much as lose magsync when I enter a new game in Blueburst.
the game was founded as a community-based concept. the enemy in the game is every retarded, near-sighted mutant critter that attacks you from forest to tower. Your allies are, and were always MEANT to be EVERY OTHER PLAYER. This is undeniable. For some reason our culture thrives on pissing on eachother, because from the start we fucked it all up.
Yeah, there are japanese hackers. But you know what? Time and again its shown that its nowhere NEAR the degree of ours. The console versions have lost any universal community they may have briefly had. Cheating and self-centered bitchery is entirely to blame.
Hacked items leaking into the community destroys the ingame economy. With no value left in your finds, people don't put the effort into finding them, the sense of identity given by your finds will be nullified, and the most central sense of the game is lost; its a quest to unlock the secrets and treasures of the gaming world and enrich the community with them. The COMMUNITY.
BB is still hack-free. People find inferno bazookas and give them to the ranger in the party. People find high-level spells and, if not a force, give them to the nearest one. People are contributing, sharing, and working together. Functional trades are going through. People who desperately want addslots need just ask about, and somebody will soon name a price (if not give it for free.) It is ENTIRELY thanks to 'forced' legitimacy and the taught altruism of the team system that it is thriving so well. The challenge has returned. The community is worthwhile. You can go into any lobby, find somebody your level and set out for conquest alongside them.
No FSODs. No Noling. No PKing. Just a shitload of people who are nice enough to save some of the dozens of varistas they find in the hopes of making some noob ranger's day with them.
How the cheaters can admit they lack the balls to contribute to a healthy player economy with valid effort is beyond me. How the 'legits' can label themselves and practice as if some kind of pompous cult is obscene. They claim the BB teams are privatized elitists and yet the only way to PLAY on Xbox servers is to find a tiny, likeminded crew to run with.
I'm sorry that Blueburst is hackproof. I'm sorry that it FORCES people to work TOGETHER. I'm sorry that it makes use of the social graces that elementary school tried and apparently failed to teach us.
But not since the first month of DCv1 have I actually enjoyed the game like this. Rumors still fly about regarding the rarest weapons. There's still so much to look forward to. When you see an amazing weapon on somebody, you know for a FACT that something hardcore had to go down for them to get their hands on it. its all earned, and moreover, its all shared. Everybody in the game is actually TRYING now. Those damn DB's sabers are WORTH something to people, whether passed down to noobs who lust for them or contributed to the team for further achievements, every single item and shred of meseta is cycling into a proper player-based economy. For every career trader there is a philanthropist somewhere as well.
Groups are banding together for online quests constantly. Everyone is out for the same goal. I'm starting to become glad so many people don't want BB. They seem like the types who'd just fuck it up for those of us who enjoy it.
This is, in effect, my going-away post to PSOW. I loved the original PSO for its player-and-player dynamic. it was never versus, nor was it meant to be. A game that made all players allies, and the american release demanded we be made enemies. Why are we so bad at co-op and community-oriented games? Why is "pro-cheating" even a condonable position? Are there really such serious cultural differences at work that we must be obsessed with divisive competition?
Seriously, I love Blueburst. It feels like the old PSO is new all over again. That's all I ever wanted out of any of the other versions, and what none delivered.
it just feels that this site seems to have degraded from a "uniting hunters" compendium to a mag-feeding quick-reference accompanied by a glorified scribbleboard. I know that me leaving the forums is no huge deal; I was never too active, I just read along. But I have to know, am I completely alone in these thoughts? Am I the only person here who enjoyed PSO for that kind of challenge, and for the community, of all things?