Originally Posted by
Dark Mits
The social aspect of a multiplayer game is very important for player retention.
A lot of returning players, who were PSO1 and/or PSU players and have expressed their interest in playing PSO2 West, do not want to do so only because they expect gameplay features, lore, settings, names, skills etc. that will resemble those earlier games; they also remember the fun they had in group quests, their friends with which they grouped up to clear content, and the general banter that took place not only while preparing for quests but during questing.
Players in PSO2 socialize less not only because of more means to socialize outside questing (or even in game), but because the structure of the game is fundamentally imposing players the dilemma: Do you want to break fun with others in the mpa, or do you want rewards? You cannot have both. With half EQs allowing as many runs as you can fit in the 30mins, and the other half being exploitable by switching to another character/ship/account, and ticket bonuses being all time-based, in combination with today's paradigm shift to reward vs. effort and reward vs. time investment even in online gaming, the game will be more likely to retain players that enjoy this behaviour. Add to this the fact that there is no content in the game that cannot be done without treating the game as offline singleplayer, and absolute maxxed stats can be acquired even by treating the game as offline singleplayer.
And a personal observation: players with japanese characters in their names are at least 10x more likely to say "TY4MPA" or any variation of it, even if as an autoword, than any character with non-JP name. By extrapolation, this means that non-JP players are less likely to even care to acknowledge that there is a person playing that other character in their group.
I'm overanalyzing something that pretty much everyone knows but doesn't want to accept.
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