Phantasy Star Online is quite an old game even at this point; originally released for the SEGA Dreamcast in 2000, PSO would feature a lot of systems and structures that a lot of action RPGs would follow for many years after. In 2003, a version of the game would be released for the Nintendo Gamecube with some updates and an expansion, and that is the version I would come across at a friend’s house eventually, and later would personally acquire for myself.

I spent many hours in the game, running the missions to learn the setting and hunting rare items to build my characters the way I wanted. This was around the time the internet was becoming more widely available and information sharing online was coming into form; I came across PSO-World and was informed of hidden gems within the game I’d never even considered, and exploring them just added to the flavor of the world in my eyes. I got two of my friends well into the game, and introduced it to a number of other friends. It was the kind of experience where we could sit down and talk about all the neat things about the story we liked or hunt for the rare items we wanted for whatever reason; PSO was the factor that gathered us together quite a few times for overnight gaming.

While PSO was fun, the game was already showing its age when it was brought to the Gamecube, so my friends were quite ecstatic when news came out that there would be a successor game called Phantasy Star Universe. The shorthand on our relationship with PSU is that Ethan Waber absolutely ruined the experience for my friends. I was spared this opinion because I didn’t actually play the game until later, starting with Episode 2: Ambitions of the Illuminus. The story was alright, but the setting clearly lacked the polish and mystery that Ragol had in PSO; there wasn’t a lot of information to gain by exploring and background information on the areas was provided by NPCs you interacted with rather than you finding tidbits and insights from the setting itself. I personally found the experience subpar compared to PSO, but the gameplay was enjoyable enough to play through and get to a fairly decent level. Either way, it was very clear that the team working on PSU had opted to try marrying the Phantasy Star setting to a more anime~esque storytelling experience and setup which made it very different from its predecessor. There were a few games between PSU and the next real major installment, but I didn’t play them because they were on game systems I did not own. Then came PSO2…

It was summer while I was in university; I had met another person that enjoyed PSO and brought up PSO2 to them, and they decided we should look into trying it out. We hopped on, enjoyed the game, and ended up rounding up a group of buddies to join us in our adventures on this new installment of the series. It did suffer the same faults as PSU, but the action felt a lot more fluid and the gameplay was much better overall so SEGA had obviously learned some lessons in design between PSU and PSO2. That said, the game released with very little in the way of content, having only the Forest and Caves and only a bit of story that was hidden behind this intentionally labyrinthine setup to pad out the time taken to get through that bit of story. Due to this lack of content, my friends that were along for the ride over the summer fell off and eventually it was only me and my good friend that played PSO with me the most by far decided to join me on PSO2.

This is where details start to matter a bit more. When we started playing PSO2, the game was officially only available in Japan, though SEGA didn’t seem to take any particular measures to stop players from accessing the game outside of Japan for a long while. This influenced our choices when joining the game; specifically, the in game servers are called “Ships”, and we had read that English speakers were playing on Ship 1 and Ship 2, so we decided to play on Ship 7. This is due to a few things really: I prefer a more insulated playing experience because playing with people can be fun but can also be tiring because you have to manage relationships where your only insight into people are interactions in this specific context which can give a very biased view to how they are, the game was supposed to be Japanese-only, so we felt it would be intruding to just go around their space using a language they’re not all familiar with, and I believe the English community had generally demonstrated a general lack of respect for other people in the game at that very early point in time and I really didn’t want to deal with any of it. With those considerations, we chose a ship that was away from the unofficial English space assuming there wouldn’t be many other English speakers there, but we did see a person or few every now and then with clearly English names though we very rarely saw English used in open chats. So with our other friends not returning to the game, but us still wanting to play, my friend and I decided to openly recruit other players.

Our first recruits were actually pretty wild. The brief of it is that they were part of a small English speaking team that had moved forwards from PSU if my memory serves. Thing is that their other teammates had a pretty extreme mentality when it came to gaming; PSO2 was essentially a co-op PvE experience with no real direct competition except Rankings which didn’t occur particularly frequently, however these teammates demanded their definition of perfection at all times and would severely reprimand the two players we had come across if they as much as sneezed in an unsanctioned manner. As an example and an experience I will never forget, we were doing Time Attacks; special Quests set up in a static manner that tests how fast you can perform the tasks required to get to the end (often combat focused, sometimes they have puzzles to deal with on the way; they required more than 1 player at this time). Thing is that how the base game works, if a player dies, they get a prompt with 2 options: “Chat” or “Return to Campship”. If anybody chooses “Return to Campship” the game treats it as a forfeit for the entire party, you’re all taken back, and you need to start over; rudely punishing if you happen to misclick. Well, in one particular instance, we were chatting while doing the TA, which is normal, and one of the other players we’d been playing with incidentally hit “Return to Campship” when they died and were trying to continue the conversation. For me, personally, the only problem I had was the whiplash from being in the thick of combat to standing in the Campship, and really all it took to shake that off was realizing that somebody had probably incidentally punted us back; no problem, we just go again. Knowing my longtime friend, his thoughts were probably about the same, however the two others we’d been playing with were absolutely mortified. Both of them were apologizing profusely in chat, at least one of them had started crying if they both weren’t crying, I don’t quite remember, but they were clearly both extremely panicked and my friend and I had to spend a considerable amount of time walking them both off the emotional ledge. Once we had them calmed down a bit, we started probing them about their response and they told us about their teammates and how their teammates treated them. It was wild to me that I was having to tell people that like, while the quest was challenging and the game is set up in such a way that getting ejected like that is a total loss, what we really lost was some 20 minutes of time and nothing more, and it wasn’t like we weren’t chatting and having a good laugh during all of it, no worries. I have retained chat logs from that time showing their “friends” abusive behavior and I don’t have the heart to reread them; it was soul retching levels of disgusting from people that theoretically cared about them. Before this, I had been reserved about recruiting, but that experience set me firmly on my course; I would eat the risk and recruit people as a Team Leader so that way I can guide peoples’ experience in the game so they would hopefully never have to deal with that kind of environment.

So we sniped those two. The fallout was extremely toxic, but I think it highlighted to them how little their prior teammates cared for them as people. Our recruiting efforts would get more aggressive and more forward from there. My favorite interaction was my friend and I went to an in game concert, and he managed to find 2 players out in the crowd and recruited them. We recruited as many people as we could find and played with all of them, helping them make builds they liked, sharing theory on how different things in the game would interact, offering ideas on which weapons would be best for their styles. Our team grew, and grew, and grew. That was until we came across a player in a 2-person Team that said they would only dissolve their Team and join once we had 98 people; one for their friend, and one for themself making them our 100th recruit. We hit that number pretty quickly, and with that, we had hit 100 members…

Something I didn’t know at the time was that 100 players was actually the maximum number of players you could have in a Team, which was why our last recruit wanted us to get 98. I wanted to recruit more players to continue helping people have good, positive experiences with the game, but we were at our limit. Conveniently at this time, we had come across other decently sized Teams with positive environments and were able to refer English speaking stragglers we found to them. While I remember this time fondly, it was also a very rough patch of my life; I had always been somewhat sickly, but my ailment was getting worse and worse. The university medical staff I went to for diagnosis kept asserting that I was stressed, but I knew stress had very different effects on me. I was effectively bedridden as doing anything even as simple as going to to the store to shop would take up all my energy for the day and I would sleep for 10 to 16 hours, when normally I sleep for 6. I would pass out at random times waking up hours later, and had a constant migraine. Due to all these problems, I spent most of my time on PSO2; I would wake up, drag myself to my computer, and sit there playing until I next passed out. That last recruit also happened to spend all their time on the game, and before I knew it, we had played together every day for months missing a single day because they had a dentist appointment. There were others I played with quite frequently though not every day, but the thing is they all helped me get through a pretty rough time in my life, but I don’t know that the thought ever occurred to them. To them, I was probably just chronically online helping everybody I came across grow stronger and enjoy the game. I would only start to get better when I called up my mother and said I wanted to give up on University; she suggested I go home and see a doctor she knew. He was an allergy doctor and tests didn’t show any weird allergies. When we were about to leave, she told me to tell him my symptoms, so I did; he suggested I was lactose intolerant, gave me a list of foods to avoid, and that interaction right there changed my life. By avoiding lactose or eating supplements when I came across small amounts, I was able to get well enough to graduate from University (although my GPA was simultaneously low enough that I was expelled at the same time). I probably would have given up much sooner if the Team I had built with my friend wasn’t there, and I didn’t have a reason to push myself up every day.

That’s not to say our time in the game was completely smooth. We had our fair share of ups and downs, Team drama and inter-Team drama, among other problems and complications; all normal things when you get hundreds of people from a bunch of different countries together in the same room and ask them to behave. But my general belief is that people experience growth through adversity and can find strength in diverse ideas; I hope that everybody that ever crossed my path came out better for it. I do recall some notable instances of conflict though…

One stems from be honestly being kind of a downer in a way? Thing is that even at that time, I was aware of how difficult application development is and how much effort goes into even small choices. The problem was that the math and mechanics of how the game worked at best had clearly not been though through, so around Episode 2, there were builds that were mathematically superior to other builds meaning there was a right answer as to how you should build your character, and the difference in power from like the strongest build to the weakest build were like orders of like multiple times more damage. There was also the fact that skills weren’t balanced between classes so there were classes that were superior subclasses and main classes that essentially required specific other classes to be their subclass; it was all really a hot mess, and everybody had their own idea of what changes should be made to the game to fix the problem. It wasn’t just my team; people made forum threads and chatted about it all over, the “simple change” that could fix the whole issue. While I wasn’t intentionally being malicious or anything, when somebody would propose their own idea about how to fix the game, I’d challenge it and carefully note the complexities of implementing their ideas that would make them unfeasible or point out gaps that existed in their proposed solutions. One time somebody proposed an idea and I refuted it in this manner, another player actually challenged me on that and asked me if I would change something to fix the game, what would it be. I had honestly not thought of it until that moment, so I gave it a minute of thought, then came back with a list of recommendations split up into changes I would make to the game’s current state to bring things back in balance, bonus changes I’d make if given the extra development time, and a list of core changes I’d made to the game if I had the opportunity to redesign the entire experience. I think that interaction assuaged anybody with the concern that I was being a malicious downer; I did understand the development process, how complex it was, and the changes people proposed were complicated and did little to address the underlying problems. The reason I think that was the case was because people stopped talking about how they’d fix the game and started framing their ideas as additions to the game, which I was perfectly fine with entertaining in conversation. Related to that though, when Episode 3 was announced and the Director changed, they came out with a list of balance adjustments to make to the game to bring everything back into balance and the list was almost exactly all of my suggestions plus a few bonus changes I’d considered too complicated. It was a surreal experience for me and everybody joked that SEGA just stole the changes from my list. This joke would be even funnier when I incidentally got myself banned playing with VPNs which is a different story for a different time, but the joke became SEGA banned me so I couldn’t expose them for copying my homework. Also related, the changes that were made in New Genesis can also be mapped directly back to that list I made of things I’d change if I got to rebuild the game from scratch; I suggested methods of restructuring the Skill Trees so classes could more easily serve interchangeably as main or subclasses and players would be freed from these mathematical right answers which were incorporated into NGS, completing the copying job. To be clear, I do sincerely doubt that SEGA noticed this specific interaction in a sea of chats from different people across different channels, especially considering this whole exchange was in a chat specifically for our Team, but it is outrageously hilarious that the changes they made followed my list point for point; it’s more a reflection of how well I understood the underpinnings of the game and could guess at which changes were most reasonable to make and why.

Another notable point of conflict dealt with how I managed the Team. How Teams were set up in PSO2 is that the Team Leader has all powers, Team Managers have most powers that the Team Leader does save a few very specific functions, then you have essentially standard members and then recruits. Those are the only roles that can be enforced mechanically; everything else from there depends on how you decide to engage with everybody, so Teams would frequently have some level of hierarchy or what not, but mine was different in that I essentially treated everybody equal; everybody on the Team had a voice and I’d consider as many people as I could on decisions, and having a Team Manager take some administrative action was more or less a formality. I was also extremely careful with how I chose my Team Managers because while the entire Team was consulted on decisions, I wanted people that would abide by those choices and not use their position to just do things. I also wanted players that were genuinely interested in helping others, so really my Team Managers ended up being players that supported and lead the Team rather than commanding them around. Well there was a rule that if a Team Leader didn’t log in for 30 days, that a Team Manager could take their position. When my first account was banned, I obviously couldn’t log in and was trying to recover my account, and during that time, one of the managers sniped my position. It really didn’t change anything, and they later admitted that they wanted the Team Leader position because they thought it conferred some level of prestige, but realized that it wasn’t the position that gave the prestige, but the person doing all the interacting and negotiating. The thing was if they had waited, we were considering handing off the Team to them anyways, but this maneuver ended up just leaving a sour taste in everybody elses’ mouths.

Another kind of funny interaction that’s much less strife was how our Team interacted with other Teams. We were essentially the loudmouth Team; we were always down for a good time, and it was extremely common for us to die because we were typing a message (something we’d come to call Death-by-Typing). I have only ever met one player that seemed to be able to play the game and send messages at the same time, and they were not on my Team; the rest of us would have to just be vulnerable either auto-running in a direction or standing still when we typed out our messages. Now, another thing of note is that we would frequently run inter-Team Multi-Party-Areas (MPAs), especially for major Quests called Emergency Quests that only come up at certain times. The game is generally played in parties of up to 4 players, but areas will frequently allow for multiple parties until the number of players hits a threshold, which was commonly 12, so you could have like 12 1-person parties or as few as 3 full 4-person parties all piled together in the same area working on the same objectives. Other Teams wouldn’t always have enough people online to run EQs together, so instead of all of us staying in our silos and trying to party up with random groups, we’d get all our players across all Teams together and try to arrange ourselves into groups that could competently complete the Quests. For the longest time, this whole process went off, no issue, that was until the first Mining Base Defense Emergency Quest came into the equation. The unique thing about the MBD EQs are that players are ranked based on actions in the game, like the amount of damage you deal to enemies has an effect on your final score among a list of other more minor actions. So! We all get together for a inter-Team run of the second Mining Base Defense EQ. We play through the first round same as always, the other Teams being a bit more serious, my guys dying by typing all over the place; the top 3 spots on the Leader Board are all members of my team. We play through the second round, still being as jovial as before, finish the round; spots 1, 2, and 4 on the Leader Board are all members of my team. Everybody, and I mean everybody in the area gets notably more quiet as we go through round 3, we finish round 3; all four spots on the Leader Board are all members of my team. Somebody finally decided to ask about it in the most respectful way they could think to, asking in our Team chat if anybody else had noticed the Leader Board; my response was something along the lines of “Not a word!” Then finally one of the other Team Leaders started talking about how we were all sitting at the top of the board and we all resumed our normal chatter from there. After that EQ, the other Team Leaders mentioned they had the feeling for a while that our Team specifically felt like we were really the driving force behind success with our inter-Team MPAs, and that run of MBD2 was really just a formal confirmation of their feelings. I can’t express how rewarding it all felt, not that we were the best Team or anything like that (I really don’t care about being “the best”, just that everybody is having a good time), but that all the time and effort that both me and all my Team Managers had put into helping everybody on the team be the best they could be had very clearly paid off; even our members that felt they weren’t so great at games and weren’t our “most powerful” were considered valuable allies to our sibling Teams.

Anyways, hopefully that all illustrates just how long and storied a history I have with both the game and all the wonderful people I played with. PSO2 was my life for a very long time, the people I met in the game have continued on to be some of my most precious friends, and this all is what keeps me playing the game, even if all those experiences are behind me. Unfortunately I do not approve of the general direction the development of the game has gone, but it’s not my ship to steer, so I’m really only along for the ride watching how things progress and hoping for the best every step of the way.

So now, New Genesis is here. I’ve re-established the Burning Rangers on the Global Servers on Ship 3, but haven’t really been recruiting; maybe that will change now that I’m actively working on building a community once again, we’ll see. Just always wanted to sit down and write up at least a sliver of the experiences so here we are and hopefully you’ve found them either insightful or interesting.