$8.95 a month in the US? the new EGM says why...

[faceless]

so i went and bought a modem and bba, then ordered the japanese pso... fuck $8.95 a month...

anyway, the new EGM's letter the month follows...

Hacker's Delight


(letter from Philip)

Is there any logical reason at all that can explain Sega's monthly fee of $8.95 a month for Phantasy Star Online Episode I & II for GameCube, considering:
a) The Japanese (JP) fee s roughly $12 for 3 months.
b) The PSO servers don't even save our character data and, as the past has shown, have had horrible security concerning hacking.
I have nothing againt online fees. I bought PSOv2 for Dreamcast, and had multiple Hunter's Licenses during the time that i played it. But a 2.25X rate hike over the JP version for even worse service is just inexcusable.


(reply from EGM)

Your points are valid, Phil, but they fail to see the whole picture. To get a better understanding of Sega's pricing policy, we asked Rich Briggs (senior product manager at SOA) to clarify. Rich says, "The higher monthly fee is necessary given the increased customer service and online network costs in the U.S. Japan, being a smaller geographic area than the U.S., has lower costs associated with it'so online infrastructure. Japan also tends to have less extensive customer service issues than the U.S. With respect to security, U.S. hackers were the primary cause of most of the problems with the Dreamcast version of PSO. There were not nearly as many problems with Japanese hackers, and Sonic Team was constantly forced to update the servers to counteract various U.S.-spawned issues. Therefore, there are added security costs for running the servers in the U.S., since the security has been improved dramatically over the DC version. So, in fact, the higher fee will actually lead to better customer service, better online maintenance and better security than the DC version, all of which are necessary given the reasons listed above. Finally, the monthly fee brings with it access to new downloadable quests, items and events."

[Sput]

Did anyone ever stop to think that maybe ST did the split versions with the dup bug on purpose? So that US hackers would be less prevelent on JAP servers?

food for thought

[EDarkness]

Well, I had mentioned this to friends while playing Version 2. There was so much crap going on in the original PSO, it was ruining it for everyone else. Something had to be done. If people would just act like they have some sense and play fair I'm sure the cost would have been a lot lower.


-Darkness

[flyrobinfly]

Sonic Team should be paying Baru and company for their, erm, "services", seeing how it provides them with a valid-sounding excuse to inflate the service fee as high as they'd like.

How exactly does America's physical size cause operating expenses to be higher than in Japan? I've been under the impression that bandwidth and what have you is vastly more expensive in Japan due to it's crummy network infrastructure - It's mobile communications that are more expensive in the U.S., if anything.

[saffaya]

I would put it in another way.
Item 1- They say ST designed hacker-proof servers (although the nastier attacks (NOL, PK) had nothing to do with the servers)

Item 2- ST ships the final game with a dupe bug

ROTFL. What a prowess ...

You don't need to put a bug in your game to separate servers btw.

[Alielle]

From what I understand, Philip's letter got chopped up pretty badly. Head over to the newsgroup alt.games.phantasy-star, where he posts, and you'll see his whole letter, which seems a lot more thought out than this version. Must be pretty annoying to have EGM edit your letter to death and say it "doesn't see the whole picture".

<-- newsgroup lurker

Anyway, the reply sounds like PR bull to me. It's not altogether unexpected, though... but instead of lying or making excuses at the last minute, they should just tell the truth and say, "We're doing it because people will pay it."

[_xX_Frosty_Xx_]

........what's that aroma I'm smelling? So prevelant.....I've smelled it before.......BULLSHIT. When we don't get new quests or anything like the JP version don't be surprised....customer service my ass.

[Ness]

On 2002-10-29 09:04, Sput wrote:
Did anyone ever stop to think that maybe ST did the split versions with the dup bug on purpose? So that US hackers would be less prevelent on JAP servers?

food for thought

I'm sure they did it on purpose. There is no possible way a big company like Sonic Team cabn ship a product without being aware of a bug.

The reason why they shipped it is unknown.

[amoralist]

Our quests always gets delayed, is that $8.95 gonna cover ST sponsored tournaments like JP had. I mean PC gaming can be worse, but SOA could do better than $8.95 a month just, JUST for clearing up the hacking problems. New items, quests, and event automatically come with the HL. If I SOA asks me to pay for the HL fees, they better translate the new events quickly and correctly or I'll be pretty pissed as a consumer (as I'm already pissed Sonic CD didn't make it, neither did Knuckles Chaotix, and Eternal Arcadia gets delayed and censored).

But SEGA had done good before, let's hope they can clean up their loads of shi.. I mean mess.

[vaz9999]

That reply was a bunch of garbage(from egm & sega), everyone knows that we don't get all the quests and the ones we do get we get way later. I personally played most of my quests in japanese because they could not release an english version in a timely matter. I bet there is still going to be a cheating problem in this version as well. The only way I would be satisfied with this new price is going to be if they actually had someone in the game hunting cheaters, which of course they are not going to do, so this is indeed a bunch of bullshit.