[GC] Altimira

[Otto Baus]

...I was actually able to test the entire quest without disconnecting...

O rly? But yeah, it was fun. Until we all got disconnected in the last room! Have to do it one mo 'ghen.

Edit: So I finally got around to trading the majority of my crap rares for PCs. I was surprised at how many I got! On MintChip alone, I got 111. This is without trading my 3 Ragol Rings, which are also worth 50 PCs each. Did I mention that I have 3 Ragol on each character? Because I do. I only got one Soul Eater for each of them, and did the other plot line where you give Sue your name for 3/4 of the difficulties. So wow. Sitting pretty on 450 PCs after I trade off the rest of my crap. Hmmmm!!!

[Aleron Ives]

I've just added another feature to Garon's Shop: if you've completed the side quest in The West Tower to unlock Paganini's ability to add weapon percentages, you will now unlock two options, rather than just one. In addition to the "Enhance weapon's Photon" option, you will now find an "Erase weapon's Photon" option when you visit him.

The use of this option is straightforward: for the price of 50 Photon Drops, you can remove a Photon attribute from one of your weapons and set the area back to 0%. In doing so, you gain an extra slot to sphere the weapon in a different area. As you can probably imagine, the main reason for this option is to alleviate the situation where you've been hunting an exceptionally rare item (e.g. Sealed J-Sword or Zanba with Hit) and hope to sphere it, but when it finally drops, it has a percentage in an area that you didn't want, thus preventing you from sphering it. With this functionality, you now have the ability to "fix" your weapon so that you can sphere it in whichever areas you want.

The price for doing this is fairly steep so as to avoid making it the easiest course of action on every weapon, e.g. if you want to sphere a Black King Bar but find a Monkey King Bar with percentages in the wrong areas, it's more practical to simply find another Monkey King Bar than it is to spend 50 PDs to erase the undesirable attribute(s) on the one you have. Finding a second Sealed J-Sword or other "uber" rare is far less practical, so the 50 PD price would actually be worth it if you really wanted to sphere your weapon. Note that as with Paganini's Photon enhancement option, you cannot modify the Hit attribute with this feature. I've tested it several times to ensure that it's working properly, but feel free to post about any problems you may encounter.

In addition, I have also added an "Exit" option to Paganini's item trade menus. This wasn't strictly necessary, as it was already possible to back out of an item trade with him by refusing to give him all of your Photon Drops, but this change makes those menus more closely match the other ones you see when talking to him.

[Kayak]

Zanba with Hit

[Aleron Ives]

It occurred to me that GC could use a way to let you burn off your excess Meseta without having to spam Charge weapons day and night, and since Sega implemented a way to do so on BB with Coren, the "wandering Tekker", I thought I would do something similar on GC. Sega added Coren to freeplay Pioneer 2 in JPBB, though, which of course isn't possible to do on GC. As such, I've implemented a Meseta gambling system in Garon's Shop, instead.

When you warp into the shop, you will now find an extra computer console (a slot machine of sorts) when you turn around. As with Coren, this computer will let you gamble 1000, 10000, or 100000 Meseta at a time for a chance to receive a prize. Unlike Coren, this computer doesn't let you obtain all of the God units by gambling 1000 Meseta, as I don't think we need to emulate BB's power creep. Instead, you can gamble your Meseta for materials, grinders, Photon Crystals, Photon Drops, and 9* rare weapons. As with Coren, paying more Meseta unlocks the ability to obtain prizes from the next tier of items while also raising your odds of obtaining prizes from the lower item tier(s). Unlike Coren, the prize tiers are fixed and do not change based on the day of the week. If you lose your bet, you'll receive a consolation prize of Monomate, Meseta, or Garon points, instead.

Most of the weapons you can win are the same as those you can win from Lucky Roulette, but some roulette weapons are not available from the slot machine, while some slot machine weapons are not available from roulette. In order to avoid making roulette obsolete, the weapons you receive from the slot machine will have Hit from 5-40% in 5% increments, rather than 10-80% Hit in 10% increments, as is the case with roulette. Since obtaining Meseta is much easier than obtaining Lucky Coins, it's only fair that these weapons have worse percentages than those from roulette. Considering most 9* rare weapons are useless, even with Hit, most of the time you'll probably want to sell your weapon for 1 Photon Crystal. Even so, there are some potentially useful weapons in the prize pool, so you never know what you might get.

Are you feeling lucky?

[Aleron Ives]

I've just made two unrelated updates, although both of them are things that people have asked for in the past. The first is that I have boosted the output of Lucky Coins in the Phantasmal World quests, as with our reduced population, it is difficult to gather full teams that are eligible for Sega's maximum coin payout. In order to ease this problem, beating PW1-4 in Ultimate will now give you Lucky Coins equal to the number of players in the team +1, while beating them in "Super Hard" will give you Lucky Coins equal to the number of players in the team +2. In this way, you will be able to play Lucky Roulette more than 2-3 times per game, which presumably is what Sega wanted, since they set the cap to 100 Lucky Coins per character.

The second update is that you can now download new offline editions of The East Tower and The West Tower that include "Super Hard" mode. Since the quest download option doesn't have categories yet, the original PSO+ editions are marked as such in their descriptions, while the new ET/WT are marked as updated editions. As with the offline version of TT, SH gives Meseta and not Photon Crystals in ET/WT. Of course, the update fixes Ultimate Gibbles experience, too. Be aware that PSO won't display multiple copies of the same quest in the quest list, so you will need to delete old ET/WT files from the GC BIOS memory card manager before you download the new quests.

I have also patched the lone Seabed Recobox in WT to no longer be unreachable in both the online and offline editions of the quest, so you now have the ability to get any item it drops. I have removed the crate in the first room of upper Seabed in the online edition of WT as well, as it doesn't really serve a purpose: since WT allows piping, all players just end up piping to reach each other so that everybody can play together, depending upon whether the team wants to do the Zoa or the Zele route. Removing the crate simply removes the unnecessary step of having to set Telepipes at the start of the quest (and the PSO+ edition of WT doesn't have the crate, either, since you don't have any teammates to pipe you into the Zele route offline). You can now pick your desired route simply by walking in that direction. Lastly, I have adjusted the Meseta payout in these quests to better reflect the time and effort required to beat them. The rewards for the PW quests have been increased, while the rewards for ET/WT have been decreased.

[Otto Baus]

This pleases my Asperger's so much that I may have to play this weekend...

[doctor_oran]

I WAS getting annoyed at having to set up a pipe at the start of WT. I guess I'll give it a go when I'm back on

[Aleron Ives]

I've just made a series of updates centered around Maximum Attack 1 and 2:

• Points are now scaled by difficulty, so you finally have an incentive to play them in Ultimate, rather than to just spam them in Normal mode to reach 10 000 points.
• The time limits in MA1 have been adjusted. You now get 30, 35, and 40 minutes in Normal, Hard, and Very Hard, and you get 60, 55, 50, or 45 minutes in Ultimate mode for 1, 2, 3, or 4 players.
• MA1 will now end automatically when you kill all available enemies when playing solo, so you no longer have to sit around waiting for the timer to reach 0.
• You now get 2 extra Lucky Tickets in MA1 if you kill every enemy.
• The Forest 2 bridge will now rise after 15 minutes have elapsed, regardless of how much time you started with.
• You can no longer move and attack when talking to the Forest 2 bridge PC.
• Enemies now get frozen when you cancel MA1, so you can no longer get killed when you use the cancel switch.
• MA1/2 Meseta rewards have been adjusted based on difficulty and the number of enemies you kill.
• Tollaw experience has been fixed in MA1 (268 -> 281), and Mericarol experience has been fixed in MA2.
• The timer no longer skips seconds in MA1/2.
• Baranz missle damage has been increased to 80 in MA1 and 70 in MA2.

Of course, it's still quite difficult to gather all 22 hearts you need to beat Beach Laughter, mainly because the community is so small now, so I have made some adjustments in this area, as well.

• Purple Ring is now the maximum kill SS rank award for Towards the Future in Ultimate, while Black Ring is now the minimum kill SS rank award.
• If you've already gotten a ring for that rank, you will receive 5 Photon Crystals, instead.
• If you achieve SS rank on Very Hard, you receive 1 Photon Crystal.
• The S rank prize is now a Scape Doll.

I chose TTF for this purpose, because that's where Sega put Black Ring in BB. Sega also changed the consolation prizes from Star Atomizers to a Scape Doll, but I decided that PCs would be a better reward for achieving SS rank. Note that you can still get a Black Ring this way, even if you've already gotten a Purple Ring in the past, but you can only get rings in Ultimate now.

Because Black Ring is now in TTF, you can no longer get it from Beach Laughter. If by some miracle you manage to gather all of the hearts, you'll only get 5 Photon Spheres now.

I've also fixed Tollaw experience in Mop-up Operation #1, Endless Nightmare #1, and Lost HEAT SWORD. Baranz missle damage has been increased to 80 in Mop-up Operation #3, Endless Nightmare #3, Lost SOUL BLADE, and MA3.1a/b/c as well, because the previous damage value simply didn't offer enough of a threat anymore. This new missle damage value will hopefully strike a better balance between danger and fairness.

[Aleron Ives]

I've made some more changes to MA2 in particular, but because these changes are a bit more esoteric than usual, they require some background to explain why I made them.

MA2 is the only one of Sega's MA quests that gives you 45 minutes at the beginning, instead of 30. My interpretation of why Sega did this is that they wanted you to have enough time to explore the many routes that MA2 offers, as it has many more paths in it than most quests do, yet it still has a fixed end point at the top of the Control Tower. As a result, MA2 has a unique problem when it comes to adjusting the time limit for Ultimate mode: if you give enough time for people to split up and complete multiple routes, then there will be almost no time pressure at all when it comes to rushing to 10F, and if you allocate only enough time to rush to 10F, then there's no time to split up across multiple routes.

In order to alleviate this problem, I have implemented a suggestion made by one of our users. As you know, all players must arrive in Central Control Area in order to continue the quest, so CCA now serves as a kind of checkpoint: when all players arrive in CCA, the number of routes you cleared to get there is evaluated. If you cleared only one route with 2, 3, or 4 players, nothing happens, as you're probably trying to rush to 10F. If you cleared more than one route, you will receive an extra five minutes on the clock per route cleared, thus adding 10, 15, or 20 minutes to the remaining time. (If you're playing solo, however, you do get 5 extra minutes for clearing whichever route you chose to do, as you did technically clear the maximum number of routes that you could.)

In this way, you're rewarded for splitting up and trying to complete more of the quest in a single run, but you don't get that extra time if you don't play the quest in a way that requires it. As such, the starting times have been changed to match MA1: you now get 30, 35, and 40 minutes for Normal, Hard, and Very Hard, while you get 60, 55, 50, or 45 minutes on Ultimate for 1, 2, 3, or 4 players. In addition, the bonus minutes awarded for quickly clearing specific rooms in Seabed and Tower have been adjusted to 8 minutes for Seabed and 2 minutes for Tower, as the Seabed room was much more difficult to clear within the time limit than the Tower room was and thus deserved to be more valuable (not to mention that by the time you're half way done with Tower, you probably won't need a 5 minute boost, anyway). It is my hope that these changes will encourage players to try to get more kills in MA2, as the quest has a lot to offer in terms of letting you choose how you want to complete it. Perhaps now people will strive to get maximum kills on Ultimate, instead of Normal.

Finally, you can now find an extra NPC in both MA1/2, and he has an extra side quest for you to complete that will probably be familiar if you've ever played V2...

[Aleron Ives]

I've made a small change to PW4: you can now buy Scape Dolls from the MVM, but they will cost you in a way similar to how points in Rappy's Holiday get more expensive depending upon how many you have already. Each time you buy a Scape Doll, the price of the next one increases by 50%: the first five dolls cost 9000, 13500, 20000, 30000, and 45000 Meseta each, and every doll after that costs 45000 Meseta. Since you can't pipe in PW4, this will hopefully help people to avoid the "walk of shame" (and the associated EW risk) to 10F if they lost their dolls before reaching the final room.

In an unrelated change, I also adjusted the bulk discount Meseta option in the PC shop. You now get 450 000 Meseta for your PC stack.

[Aleron Ives]

I am pleased to announce that "Super Hard" is now available in Episode I. The Episode I enemies have been adjusted in a similar fashion to those of Episode II, except for their experience: since the 30% EXP bonus on Episode II enemies was meant to compensate for how poor their EXP usually is compared to the enemies in Episode I, it wouldn't make sense for Episode I enemies to have the same 30% bonus, as that would just serve to make the EXP in Episode II substandard again. As such, Episode I enemies only get a ~5% EXP increase over their regular values.

You can find the NPC for the Episode I edition of the side quest outside of the hospital, and the procedure for activating the side quest is the same as in Episode II. I should probably warn you that as someone who enjoys boss fights more when they are difficult, I have substantially increased the power and resilience of the bosses.

Finally, here are the Photon Crystal payouts for each quest:

04: Endless Nightmare #1
06: Endless Nightmare #2
08: Endless Nightmare #3
10: Endless Nightmare #4

04: Lost HEAT SWORD
08: Lost ICE SPINNER
08: Lost SOUL BLADE
10: Lost HELL PALLASCH

Since I had to make substantial modifications to eight quests at once, there may be some bugs I missed, so please report them here if anything is broken. In the meantime, go kill stuff?

[Aleron Ives]

I've been working on several updates at once, and I'm proud to announce that they're finally ready.

To start with, I've updated "Super Hard" with a new feature: for the first time ever, you can use your EDK to resist Mericarol's attacks in Ultimate. Instead of causing guaranteed death, I have updated the Mericarol series of enemies to use attacks within the normal EDK range of Megid, which means that you can use EDK gear to prevent yourself from dying.

Rather than force you to guess how much EDK you need, I will simply tell you: the spit attack on Mericarol, Merikle, and Mericus now requires 80, 90, and 100 EDK respectively (level 20, 25, and 30, in Megid terms) for immunity, and the purple Megid mist attack on Mericarol, Merikle, and Mericus requires 100, 90, and 80 EDK respectively for immunity. Of course you have a good chance to survive if your EDK is close to these values, but these are the EDK values you need for a 100% survival rate.

All online quests with "Super Hard" and Mericarols have been updated with this change, and the offline editions of ET/WT/TT have been updated as well. The EDK requirements for immunity in offline mode are 10 below the EDK requirements in online mode (i.e. 70, 80, 90 for the spit, and 90, 80, 70 for the purple mist). As always, remember to delete the old ET/WT/TT files before you download the new ones.

In addition, Maximum Attack 2 Ver.3 and Maximum Attack 3.2a/b/c have all been updated with survivable Mericarol attacks, too. Mericarols do still spit more frequently in Ultimate, though, so don't get overconfident.

Special thanks go to Ralf for providing me with the extra data I needed in order to figure out how to finally "fix" Mericarol's attacks.

The second update has to do with Garon's Scheme. "Super Hard" is now available in this quest, so you can challenge yourself with more robust Forest enemies offline. Of course, an NPC such as Alicia doesn't stand a chance against these more powerful enemies, so I've made some additions to help her out.

If you play "Super Hard" in Garon's Scheme, Alicia will be able to use my new Smart Mates™ system. Since NPCs are too stupid to heal themselves during battle, even when they don't have enough HP to take another hit, Alicia will now use a Smart Mate™ if her HP drops below 50%, unless her HP is low enough for her to use a Trimate or cast Resta (or you heal her first). As with Trimates, Alicia can carry 10 Smart Mates™ at a time.

In addition, if Alicia dies, you will no longer fail the quest. Instead, both of you will get sent to the hospital, where Alicia will revive, thus allowing you to continue with the quest. Reviving in the hospital will also restore her supply of Smart Mates™.

Finally, Alicia's respite period after getting hit is extended to 10 seconds in "Super Hard", so she has extra time before she will take damage again.

Note that Alicia will now revive in the hospital whenever she dies, regardless of the difficulty setting, but Smart Mates™ and the extended respite period are only available in "Super Hard".

The second part of this update relates to the Photon Ticket system: it is now possible for you to receive multiple tickets from a single run of the quest, and the tickets you earn will carry over into the next time you play the quest. You get 1 Photon Ticket in Normal, Hard, and Very Hard, 2 Photon Tickets in Ultimate, and 3 Photon Tickets in "Super Hard".

In order for these tickets to have some value, I have also replaced the prizes in the quest. I found out a while ago that GAME MAGAZINE used to be available in the quest Singing by the Beach, which was the reward quest for Famitsu -Maximum Attack- on GC, but to my knowledge, there is unfortunately no longer any copy of these quests on any current PSO server. As a result, GAME MAGAZINE has been unobtainble on Sylverant, until now.

You can now trade your Photon Tickets for CHU CHU FEVER, GAME MAGAZINE, and FLOWER BOUQUET, which cost 9, 6, and 4 tickets each, respectively. You will now also have access to your Photon Tickets (assuming you have any) in the Quest Board as soon as you start the quest, and you can buy multiple items in a single run of the quest, assuming you have enough tickets for both items. Note that you can carry a maximum of 10 Photon Tickets at one time. At last you can obtain the terrible CHU CHU FEVER frame without having to waste a Heart of Chu Chu and a bunch of hours raising a Mag to use the cell on.

Of course, assuming anybody actually played the old version of the quest, this creates a slight problem, in that Disc Vol.4 and Disc Vol.5 are unobtainable again. To rectify this, you can now buy all seven types of music discs in Garon's Shop.

Phew! I think that's everything. Please post if you discover any bugs...

[doctor_oran]

I've been working on several updates at once, and I'm proud to announce that they're finally ready.

To start with, I've updated "Super Hard" with a new feature: for the first time ever, you can use your EDK to resist Mericarol's attacks in Ultimate. Instead of causing guaranteed death, I have updated the Mericarol series of enemies to use attacks within the normal EDK range of Megid, which means that you can use EDK gear to prevent yourself from dying.

I remember the spit-rate being way slower on SH, was it sped back up to how it usually is in U b/c of this change?

[Aleron Ives]

I did speed up the spit frequency a bit to compensate for this change, but it's still slower than Ultimate, since a major goal of SH is to make Episode II more friendly towards melee gameplay.

[Aleron Ives]

I've just released the most pointless awesome update to Garon's Shop ever!

You will now find a jukebox in the shop, which you can use to entertain yourself with "sweet tunes" while you gamble away your Lucky Coins and Meseta.

Speaking of Meseta, the slot machine now tracks your longest winning streak, so you can see who the luckiest person in the team is. Note that your winning streak ends if you decline to keep gambling, so you'd better focus on your bets if you want to become a Lucky 7 player!

[Aleron Ives]

Prospective Horizons is now available on GC.

Woot.

Keep in mind that since server-side patching of quest music isn't available yet, you'll probably want to use the jukebox in the Quest Board to change the BGM ASAP, unless you have the client-side patch for your ISO to hear the Spaceship/Palace music.

[Aleron Ives]

Thanks to information from Doctor Oran, I was able to fix an undiscovered bug in Garon's Shop. It turns out that the Timing Game has never worked correctly, and you actually needed to press the A button about 1/4 of a second early in order to get a perfect score, which is why it's so difficult to get a good score if you follow the game's instructions. The bug is now fixed, so you can actually use the timer to determine when you should press A.

Since it's far easier to get a good score on the Timing Game now that it works properly, I've adjusted the point payouts for all three games. The Button Mashing Game's timer was also slightly off, so I fixed that, too.

[doctor_oran]

Thanks to information from Doctor Oran, I was able to fix an undiscovered bug in Garon's Shop. It turns out that the Timing Game has never worked correctly, and you actually needed to press the A button about 1/4 of a second early in order to get a perfect score, which is why it's so difficult to get a good score if you follow the game's instructions. The bug is now fixed, so you can actually use the timer to determine when you should press A.

Since it's far easier to get a good score on the Timing Game now that it works properly, I've adjusted the point payouts for all three games. The Button Mashing Game's timer was also slightly off, so I fixed that, too.

I still like your earlier theory that Garon rigged those games with a bad timer, instead of the timer just being coded poorly.

[Aleron Ives]

Yeah, it would be amusing if Sega had done that on purpose to further demonstrate how dishonest Garon is, although since the problem is caused by the same mistake Sega made in every other quest with a timer, I'm certain that's not the case. It wouldn't surprise me though if Sega made the same incorrect assumption that I always did before now: they tested the timer game, tried to hit A at 8 seconds, got a poor score, assumed they sucked at the game, and then concluded the game was adequately difficult to win. In actuality, the timer just doesn't reflect when you truly need to press A.

[Aleron Ives]

I've updated Phantasmal World #4 with a new safeguard. Getting EW in PW4 is fairly common, as you can't switch weapons when you enter the Control Tower from Pioneer 2. In order to fix this problem, the sparkly in the Lab will now send you to CCA, where you will find regular area teleporters that will send you to ET and WT. This way, you can easily switch weapons before you teleport. Hopefully this will make it a little easier to avoid EW in PW4.