Schtsrev dead & Future of Sylverant

[Nico0020]

So after a long time coming it seems Schtserv is finally dead in the water. Like others here I left that place as soon as his server opened up and very much appreciate how things are run here. But with the loss of that server, many users are flocking to new places. There are quite a few servers out there, mostly BB oriented, but luckily we offer a haven for GC users who still played at Schthack. I really hope we end up seeing some new users in the GC area.

My question is, will the future of this server incorporate Blue Burst? I know it requires a lot more work, and even the servers that are out there now are plagued with some issues that have never been solved. I myself rarely played BB but still enjoyed playing from time to time. But with everyone moving to new servers and making new friends / online connections it might help jump start this server population a bit in the future. Thoughts?

[BlueCrab]

Blue Burst is... partially supported in Sylverant. It's just not enough to make it useful to let people play with it. I do intend to have complete support for it at some point, but I can't say when that point will be -- after all, as you've already said, there's a lot of bugs out there with even Schtserv's support of it.

I know that there have been a few new GC players over the past few months, and I've actually fixed a few GC-related things in response to that (like challenge mode on episode 2). I'd be happy to see more GC users, of course.

[tueidj]

I'd be happy to see more GC users, of course.

As long as you don't fix the broken server drops

[BlueCrab]

I'd be happy to see more GC users, of course.

As long as you don't fix the broken server drops

Almost nobody uses the server drops at all, to be honest.

In the end, it was all just written as practice (and verifiable practice on the DC/PC versions) to do so for BB at some point.

[tueidj]

I do, since you can nearly always be guaranteed to find at least one random (non-section id drop) 11-star unit per area.

[BlueCrab]

I do, since you can nearly always be guaranteed to find at least one random (non-section id drop) 11-star unit per area.

Got it. They'll be disabled tonight to prevent anyone from exploiting it further.

EDIT: And... Disabled.

[tueidj]

I demand a refund!

[BlueCrab]

I demand a refund!

Of what, exactly?

[Sir Rappington]

I think the only feature from Schtserv that I really miss is the ability to play cmode stages out of order. The original system works with a community big enough to find enough players for a given stage, but with how small this community is, it'd be a huge help to just play any stage (as long as you still need to complete them all to get your S-Rank).

[Aleron Ives]

Even if it were correct behaviour to do that (which it isn't), it causes bugs of its own, anyway. Your title is assigned based upon the final stage you complete, so if you do them out of order, you will end up with a permanent title other than Bu-EI if you forget to do Stage9 last. The only reason that bug existed on SCHTServ at all was that Schthack forgot to prevent you from joining teams when the leader is talking to the guild counter (which shouldn't be allowed in any mode, not just Challenge). Stage restrictions had already been implemented many years ago, so the ability to play stages willy nilly was already fixed; people just found and exploited a bug to get around it (until Lee fixed it).

Besides, I've seen multiple Challenge teams open in the weeks since Episode II got fixed. People are warming up in Episode I before trying to tackle it.

[Sir Rappington]

I'm aware of how it was designed and why, and I'm never one to favor the subversion of existing game design if it's possible to find some other workaround. Unfortunately, this particular design assumes that you'll have a large enough community to form cmode teams who need a specific stage with few, if any, instances of redundancy. I wouldn't ask anyone to run, say, c2 for me if they don't need it, and conversely, I'll be honest in saying that I have no interest in replaying stages myself (which is not to say I've never done it, but not with the regularity that the original system would require).

I honestly don't have the sustained interest in PSO that I had on Schtserv, and I've been focused on other games in the last couple of weeks so I haven't even seen the games you mention. So it's great that they exist, but I don't see it being sustainable without a massive increase in community size. Even Schtserv at its peak didn't have a GC community big enough to support that much cmode redundancy.

The specific issue with locking yourself into a title other than Bu-EI is the only real flaw with Schtserv's model, IMO... but personally, I just made sure to play c9 last so I never had that problem.

Functionally speaking, you still need to complete the same requirements, so it's not like you're playing fast-and-loose with legitimacy rules as Schtserv was always so fond of doing.

[Aleron Ives]

I think the restriction was put in place to combat that exact attitude. Challenge mode is all about teamwork, so you're forced to play the stages in order so that you have to help other players in order to make progress; you can't be self-serving and only do the stages that you need. Besides, the stages do get somewhat progressively more difficult, so you're supposed to cut your teeth on the easier stages before you tackle the harder ones (even though it doesn't really work out that way, as Stage2 is much harder than Stage3, but Sega probably didn't want you to do Stage8 before you did Stage1). I don't think Sega's assumption was that the community would be large enough for you to avoid stage redundancy; I think replaying stages was always intended, especially since doing so allows you to improve your times.

It's also important to note that SCHTServ didn't have a "model" of playing stages whenever you wanted; doing stages out of order was patched ca. 2005. There was a bug on the server, and people chose to exploit it. The only reason it became so popular was that the terrible administration there never did anything about it, despite the rampant cheating. It took 5+ years before the bug finally got fixed, and by then people were so used to being able to cheat that they started seeing it as a feature, rather than as the bug it was.

[Sir Rappington]

It's funny, you see, because not too long ago I played an MMO where this exact kind of issue was rampant (to the tune of 50-page threads and 1500+ vote polls, in some cases). Trust me when I say I'm aware of the lengths people will go to and the size of blinders they'll put on in order to rationalize anything and everything that personally benefits them. All other factors being equal, I'm always in favor of good design over the molehill-sized conveniences that people like to make mountains out of.

But at the end of the day, whether you consider it a bug/exploit or not really isn't relevant. I'm just trying to approach this from a practical standpoint. Strict adherence to such a small design decision isn't doing you any favors when your community is too small to realistically play by that original design on a regular basis.

Case in point: I connected the other night, in one of the few nights this week I could steal time away for PSO on my desktop (which will remain the case until the OpenVPN driver is updated for Win10 so I can use the laptop for Sylverant). Four people were online, one of whom was a lv1 grinding in normal, and the other three were gearing up for 1c6. Currently I can only do 1c2 on one character, 1c1 on all the others. I had maybe an hour to play, so there would be no waiting around for them to finish. And again, I wouldn't want to make people do cmode stages they've cleared if I could avoid it. So I just quit, two minutes after logging in, because I didn't feel like soloing for the umpteenth time.

Now, you could argue that I'm not putting in the dedication to earn an S-Rank weapon, and you wouldn't be wrong, mostly because I don't care (and if I did, I could easily load a character down with a dozen self-earned S-Ranks from my old GC cards). But how many people actually do care that much to work within the original design nowadays, rather than casually playing like myself? From what I've seen, there is - maybe - one full team's worth of people who do cmode with any efficiency. Even then, they often just do runs with three or even two people, which makes me wonder what kind of times they're even getting with that setup and whether there's any point to it.

Also, you said Schtserv patched it out as of 2005? Because I did the bulk of my cmode in 2006-2007 and out-of-order cmode was very much alive and well at that time.

tl;dr: For practical purposes, I think out-of-order cmode stages need to be allowed if you want to have any sort of thriving cmode scene. Though I would be interested in knowing what the current cmode team thinks of the issue.



Regarding stage difficulty/progression: I think we're past the point when we have a bunch of true newbies to shepherd. Most people who do cmode are old hands at it, if a bit rusty like myself, and those few who are new should have no problem being taught the concept of cmode (provided they understand the basic mechanics of PSO, which if they've taken the trouble to connect to Sylverant, let's assume they do). But let's be honest here: 80% of running cmode is being aware of the tricks and traps in the individual levels, which PSOW should cover fairly well.

[Aleron Ives]

Also, you said Schtserv patched it out as of 2005? Because I did the bulk of my cmode in 2006-2007 and out-of-order cmode was very much alive and well at that time.

The server used to show all the stages all the time, and I asked Schthack to patch the server to read everyone's Challenge data and only show the stages available to everyone, which he did. The problem was that the server always allowed people to join teams when the leader was using the guild counter, so you could have two Bu-EIs make a team, have the leader talk to the counter to display all nine stages, and then have a player (or two) with no data join the team and then be able to load any stage, even though if the leader were to close the menu, stages 2-9 would disappear if he were to open the quest list again. The bug went unfixed until like 2014 or so, so people got used to abusing the glitch to play stages in any order. The fix is to forbid players from joining teams when the quest list is open, which is how both Sega and Sylverant operate (and SCHTServ, towards the end).

[Bradenburg]

Hello, I'm new to the server.

Regarding the original thread-topic; psobb is much less of a hassle to cop than noodling around on ebay for an expensive broadband adapter. Fully integrating psobb would probably yield a ton of traffic on this server. The ratio of psobb to v3 or dreamcast players was very high back on sh*thack.

[BlueCrab]

Hello, I'm new to the server.

Regarding the original thread-topic; psobb is much less of a hassle to cop than noodling around on ebay for an expensive broadband adapter. Fully integrating psobb would probably yield a ton of traffic on this server. The ratio of psobb to v3 or dreamcast players was very high back on sh*thack.

First of all, welcome to the server, and I hope you enjoy your time on it.

I'd love to have full Blue Burst support, unfortunately, that requires that I find the time to write the code for it. Plus, I'm not in it for the traffic or popularity -- I've always worked on Sylverant because it is something I enjoy and something that I want others to enjoy too.

I certainly don't want to drop everything I'm doing and focus on things like Blue Burst support over the bugfixing that I normally do. I don't want to abandon all of the versions of PSO that people have been using on this server for all of its existence. I know that many feel that schtserv abandoned DC, and PC (and to a lesser extent GC) to drive traffic with Blue Burst. That's definitely not something I'd want to see happen when (note that I do say "when" here, not "if" -- it will happen eventually) full Blue Burst support is implemented in Sylverant. I enjoy the community that has been built around Sylverant. I only want to see it continue to grow and don't want to do things to alienate those who have been with me since the beginning.

[Sir Rappington]

The server used to show all the stages all the time, and I asked Schthack to patch the server to read everyone's Challenge data and only show the stages available to everyone, which he did. The problem was that the server always allowed people to join teams when the leader was using the guild counter, so you could have two Bu-EIs make a team, have the leader talk to the counter to display all nine stages, and then have a player (or two) with no data join the team and then be able to load any stage, even though if the leader were to close the menu, stages 2-9 would disappear if he were to open the quest list again. The bug went unfixed until like 2014 or so, so people got used to abusing the glitch to play stages in any order. The fix is to forbid players from joining teams when the quest list is open, which is how both Sega and Sylverant operate (and SCHTServ, towards the end).

Without wishing to bicker about it too much... I'm just going to say that I made somewhere around 20 S-Ranks in my original GC run, the vast bulk of these were on Scht, and I made the games a good portion of the time. I don't have the greatest of memories, but I believe I would've noticed behavior like that. Maybe the "fix" didn't work as designed?

It's all academic now that Scht is down, anyway. I would simply argue that from a practical perspective, doing out-of-order cmode could really benefit the community and doesn't have any significant drawbacks (unless you count design purism for the sake of design purism ).

Regarding Blue Burst... eh, screw Blue Burst. Not saying I wouldn't like to try Ep4, but I will say that not relying on server-side saving was one of PSO's greatest strengths, and BB removed that strength... as quite effectively demonstrated when Crono screwed up a hard drive.

[BlueCrab]

Without wishing to bicker about it too much... I'm just going to say that I made somewhere around 20 S-Ranks in my original GC run, the vast bulk of these were on Scht, and I made the games a good portion of the time. I don't have the greatest of memories, but I believe I would've noticed behavior like that. Maybe the "fix" didn't work as designed?

It's all academic now that Scht is down, anyway. I would simply argue that from a practical perspective, doing out-of-order cmode could really benefit the community and doesn't have any significant drawbacks (unless you count design purism for the sake of design purism ).

I would argue that allowing out-of-order cmode doesn't actually benefit the community at all. In fact, it discourages the idea of community involvement to achieve a common goal. That's my US$0.02 anyway.

Plus, as Aleron Ives already pointed out, if you do the stages out-of-order, you end up (potentially) with a challenge rank that doesn't actually indicate what you've completed. Sure, it's a minor detail, but to a lot of people, it'd probably be a big deal.

Regarding Blue Burst... eh, screw Blue Burst. Not saying I wouldn't like to try Ep4, but I will say that not relying on server-side saving was one of PSO's greatest strengths, and BB removed that strength... as quite effectively demonstrated when Crono screwed up a hard drive.

Well, I sort of (kinda) already addressed that issue by allowing people to download and archive their own character data from the server's account pages. At least in that way, it can be kept safe if there is some sort of server failure.

Of course, I keep (multiple) backups of the server's database too... But that's another story all together.

[Bradenburg]

I'd love to have full Blue Burst support, unfortunately, that requires that I find the time to write the code for it. Plus, I'm not in it for the traffic or popularity -- I've always worked on Sylverant because it is something I enjoy and something that I want others to enjoy too.

Fair enough!! I'm most fond of the GC version myself so I couldn't really say it impacts me all that much either way ^u^

[jdmojojojo]

Well it's completely gone now check their domain.