New user -- looking to be very active online

[renzokuken99]

Hello everybody,

I've finally got my game online with a Wii playing the Gamecube/Episode 1&2 version of the game. I'm very excited to hopefully find some action here online, but it does seem quite lonely on this board. I do have a few questions:

1. Online Quests- for the quests that are exclusively available online, can I go online and somehow download them so that I can play them *offline* by myself any time I want?

2. Rare Mag Cells- one of my dreams in the game was always to have at least one of the cool rare mags. But apparently these were only available for Halloween & Christmas events online (as far as I know). Does this server host events featuring drops for rare mag cells? I'm talking about ones like Chao, Robochao, Opa Opa, etc and also the Sega game system mags.

3. Challenge Mode- is this still a thing? I remember back in the day, maybe this was Dreamcast v2, there was an online challenge mode which was actually really hard and you could earn unique weapons, like "S-Rank Needle" or something, and also name the weapon and choose its special attack. I may be remembering this wrong. But is this on Sylverant?

4. "Item Loss Prevention" Patch- I was poking around the forums and found mention of this. What is this? It also brings up the greater question, how stable is the server? Is there any chance of losing items or other permanent "bad stuff" happening to your character? Is there any cheating/PK-ing?

5. Are there any alterations to the game code unique to this server (drop rates, spawn rates, etc)? Anything at all, I am just curious, since oftentimes free servers will do this.

6. How to get the most out of Sylverant? When are the peak times, and what is the best way to meet up with people?

Thank you!! Hopefully someone will answer my questions. I am looking to get back into the game and it would be great to find an online community of any kind.

[BlueCrab]

Welcome to the server. I hope you enjoy your time playing on it... Let's see if I can answer some of the questions...

1. Online quests are not really generally meant for offline play -- they're usually meant as something to play with others, so we don't offer them for download to play offline. There have been servers out there that would let you download some of the online quests for play offline, but I couldn't tell you where you could find them (if they're even still around). That said, we do have a number of new offline/downloadable quests available too.

2. The server does have events that may have quests that have interesting/rare drops. This sometimes differs per ship (Altimira, for instance, has seasonal quests, whereas Vega and Palmacosta certainly don't). Also, we periodically run server-wide events that involve tracking your kills in-game that may have interesting prizes. One will be coming up in the next few weeks, actually.

3. Challenge mode is still a thing and people do play it regularly enough on the server. S-Rank weapons were the prized prizes from doing challenge mode (and yes, they're still a thing).

4. The item loss prevention patch is just another layer of protection, because of the stupid way that Sega saves over save files during gameplay. While the server itself is relatively free from bugs that would directly cause problems, we still can't prevent issues with consoles overheating or network connections dropping out from under you. Cheating and PKing is against the rules on the server, so if you ever see it happening, please bring it up to either Aleron Ives or myself and we'll take care of it.

5. PSO actually generally handles droprates and such on the client-side, so that's not something that the server itself would normally handle. There is a way to have Sylverant do the item drops, however the implementation of this functionality on the Gamecube version of the game is currently not complete, so it is not available for Gamecube players (it does work on PC and DC, though -- but the rates themselves are still the same rates that Sega defined in the game at this point).

6. Evenings in the US tend to be the most popular times to play. Weekends also tend to bring more people online to play. As for meeting up with people, I'd encourage you to check out the Discord for Sylverant (here's a link to it) to meet up with people, as it tends to get more views/traffic than the forum itself does.

[Aleron Ives]

Welcome to Sylverant!

1) Generally we want to encourage people to play online, so we don't offer the online quests for download. Some of them (especially quests with bosses) will break your save file a bit if you play them offline, so downloading unpatched versions can be problematic.

2) Saint Rappy and Hallo Rappy still appear during the Christmas and Halloween periods, and there are some seasonal quests that offer the Mag Cells, too.

3) Yes, you can still play Challenge mode, although it's generally a good idea to make dummy characters to do it on GC if you don't have save file backups, because Challenge mode can partially break your character data on GC sometimes, due to Sega's usual incompetence.

4) You lose your unequipped items when the game crashes online, due to Sega's shoddy atttempts to prevent duping. PSO isn't the most stable game and can crash on its own, even though the server did nothing wrong. The patch prevents the game from deleting your items when you crash. See here for a list of patches.

5) Special server-side drop charts will happen eventually, whenever BlueCrab has time to fix the drop system for GC. For the time being, the client always controls the drops.

6) You'll usually find players in the evening US time. Generally speaking, Sylverant is a fairly vanilla server that gives you closer to the original Sega experience. The GC population is split between several servers, and Sylverant is on the low end, but it's the best place to be if you want to play legitly. Other servers have more players, but also more cheating.

[renzokuken99]

Thanks for replying! All of that sounds cool.

Could anyone tell me the lay of the land for online PSO these days? Like what is Ephinea, what is Altimira. Is this server friendly with Schtserv? I'm not sure if talk of other servers is allowed but it would be SO HELPFUL to just know what all these are, where people are playing and on what platforms (DC, GC, PC). If this kind of talk is not allowed on the forums I would greatly appreciate if someone could PM me.

Also because Easter is coming up does this server run anything for Easter? Yes, I am hankering for a chance at a rare mag cell! I have put at least 1000-2000 hours into PSO all considered and have never had a rare mag!! I'll make another post introducing myself/characters once I'm fully set up, but in short one of my last pipe dreams is a Robochao mag. I just managed to snag my Lavis Cannon (0/25/0/25/15) last year, which was a major goal, so rare mags became a huge driving factor towards getting online. But anyway.... should I mark the calendar for Easter?

[Aleron Ives]

Ephinea is a server for Blue Burst (PC) only. Altimira is my ship (a part of Sylverant) that has my custom quests and mods on it. We're not affiliated with SCHTServ, but we're on good terms with them and share information. Most of the TA players are on there, because it has a lot of timed homebrew quests that only experts can beat. DC players playe exclusively on Sylverant, as there are no other servers that cater to them very well. We often get some 20 V2 players on Saturdays. Most of the GC players on Sylverant play here for my content, such as the custom Super Hard difficulty that can replace Ultimate in many quests.

The Easter theme is already up, but Egg Rappies drop weapons, rather than Mag Cells. If you're making FOmarl or FOnewearl, then picking up Marina's Bag from them is a good idea, though.