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http://www.famitsu.com/game/news/1217947_1124.html

Takao Miyoshi spoke at Japan's CEDEC 2008, bringing to light some interesting facts about the development and management of online games, in particular PSO and PSU, with his lecture entitled "Network Game Development and Foreign Expansion."

Miyoshi begins with a quick history of the birth of PSO. SonicTeam focused on three points when it came to the conception of PSO.

* The game should allow players all over the world to interact.
* It should focus on cooperative play and communication.
* It should play a part in the spread of online game popularity in Japan.

Years of planning and research went into the game to help achieve all of these goals, and inspiration was pulled from numerous sources. For example, Diablo inspired the speech bubble system. Miyoshi notes that while Diablo's chat log was nice, it could be difficult to immediately identify who said what. As a result, the idea of using comic book-like speech bubbles was implemented. As PSO's communications system continued to be developed, symbol chat and word select were created to help remove the language barrier that any normal communications system would face. Panzer Dragoon also played a part in early development. It supplied PSO with a base for its character creation morphing system.

The article goes on to mention that while PSO was a success, it still fell victim to many flaws which could not be corrected due to the lack of a hard drive. One of the largest problems with the game was hacking; more specifically item duping, stat modding and character data corrupting.

Miyoshi then showed a graph which displayed PSO's Japanese user population over the game's first two years. Shortly after its release, there was a sharp decline (attributed to widespread hacking and cheating), though with the release of PSO ver.2, the population made a large jump. This rise did not last, however, as the user base took an almost immediate nosedive the following month and continued to decline at a steady rate for the next year and a half. With all of this in mind, the game staff realized the importance of having countermeasures for hacking as well as giving regular content updates.



Moving ahead, many of the advances made with the introduction of Blue Burst carried over to PSU. These included server-side saving and game patching to help combat hacking and cheating. Furthermore, the game was planned to have regular content updates on top of developing a continuing story from offline. Lobbies which would support massive numbers of players were also introduced to the game. Nevertheless, the game ran into many problems. At launch, the servers were unable to handle the massive influx of players, changes to the billing system caused strife and in general, complaints about the game lit up internet blogs. This of course got the attention of SonicTeam, further reminding the staff of the importance of their involvement and care for the game.

Now for an interesting chart which shows the population of each PSU server over the past two years.



The dark blue line represents the Japanese PC/PS2 servers, green is Xbox 360 and purple is English PC/PS2.

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ローガン　-　LV160　男性のビースト、　マスターフォース　LV20　（日本語のPC版）
Logan - LV158 male beast, Fortetecher LV20 (EN PC ver., retired)

PSU: japanese server - A blog... from the future!

I saw this chart, and was rather surprised by the 360 population. I always thought the game was doing better in Japan - not an FFXI beater by any means but occupying it's own solid part of the market. Guess I was wrong.


And BB was still riddled with cheats. The PSU economy on both PC/PS2 and 360 servers took a hit thanks to illegit Meseta (and hacked S-ranks, although most were swiftly deleted) and the Grinder Glitch respectively.

They've made strides since the bad ol' days of FSOD and Nol, certainly. But there's still a lot of work to be done. It only takes one measly exploit and ineffectual action from those who run the servers to harm, or even ruin a game.


This made me laugh a bit. A lot of the content 'updates,' particularly towards the start of PSOBB, were withheld content that had been freely available from the start on previous versions. Generally only Episode 4 content was truly new.

While Ultimate was released comparatively early compared to, say, level 100+ monsters on PSU (bad comparison, I know, but there's no real equivalent), it still left a bit of a bad taste. Obviously they're talking about the Japanese version here but on US they never even released Respective Tomorrow by the time the server had shut down.

I'm not a big fan of Sega's update strategy, which involves releasing (supposedly) progressively better content, as opposed to just new options. It feels like I'm not exploring the game on my own, but rather being subtly guided to whatever content Sega wants people to do this month. Of course there are exceptions like White Beast, but even then the enduring popularity of that just serves as a reminder as to how unbalanced many of the missions in the game are.

Long story short, I'd like for the principal elements of a game should be released at launch, with new missions and items being released periodically afterwards to expand a completed game, not as a process of completing an unfinished game. That's wishful thinking, of course, but it does intrigue me when people complain about people complaining about updates - Sega themselves created that monster by making their games so dependant on them.

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Checkpoint! - a Phantasy Star Portable 2 blog project

:O at the population graph. I did not expect that.

There must be a lot of Xblock players who have active subscriptions but very rarely play.

Given that you have to call a 1-800 number to cancel, I can believe that.

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‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮US PC: Angra Mainyu | Espoire | Fischerspooner | Arbalest
JP PC: Punch

Good to know the US Pc/PS2 side were only playing with ~5% of the entire game's population for the last year and a bit...



:(

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US PC: Crysteala lv160 FNewman FM, Jigabachi lv155 FBeast GM
JP PC: Digger Wasp Lv180 FBeast FM クリスティーラ Lv55 Fnewman WT AND OTHERS
BROKE THE COWBOY CODE

I forget, is there an additional subscription you need to buy from Sega or is having an XBL Gold account sufficient?

If it's just an Gold account, then the reason that number barely drops is because most people'll use there Gold account for all the other games, not just PSU, and it's a pain to cancel. So after someone buys the game and signs up for an account they're almost permanently counted. LOTS of inactive accounts

And this chart is a strong argument for me finally just giving up on PC/PS2.. I still like the game, but it's dead and just doesn't realize it yet

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"Twin Penetration" always makes me snicker.

G Nohman - lv.81 Male Human, PT 16 (PC/PS2 JP)
Zankokin - lv.150 Male Human, AT 20 (PC/PS2 US)

Yeah, you still have to buy a GUARDIANS License on 360 to play.

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ローガン　-　LV160　男性のビースト、　マスターフォース　LV20　（日本語のPC版）
Logan - LV158 male beast, Fortetecher LV20 (EN PC ver., retired)

PSU: japanese server - A blog... from the future!

Who left that window open? 'cause my initial theory on why the 360 subscriptions have stayed so steady just went RIGHT out it.

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"Twin Penetration" always makes me snicker.

G Nohman - lv.81 Male Human, PT 16 (PC/PS2 JP)
Zankokin - lv.150 Male Human, AT 20 (PC/PS2 US)

Does that include the 360 demo population?

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US PC: Crysteala lv160 FNewman FM, Jigabachi lv155 FBeast GM
JP PC: Digger Wasp Lv180 FBeast FM クリスティーラ Lv55 Fnewman WT AND OTHERS
BROKE THE COWBOY CODE

It doesn't say for certain, but I doubt it.

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ローガン　-　LV160　男性のビースト、　マスターフォース　LV20　（日本語のPC版）
Logan - LV158 male beast, Fortetecher LV20 (EN PC ver., retired)

PSU: japanese server - A blog... from the future!

Actually it looks more like ~7.5% if that's any consolation.

Here's the PSU part of the article that interests me though:


I wonder if this means that, should a similar talk be made in five years time, Miyoshi will be mentioning the importance of not spreading updates too thin. Because that's really what's killed PSU and it seems obvious to everyone else.

Sucks that "MAKE EVERYTHING SERVER SIDE LOL!!!" seems to be here to stay, though it's hardly a surprise considering Japan has 5ms ping from one end of the country to the other :|

It is a tiny bit, yeah. :unsmith:


To be fair I'd rather have the odd mate-lag than someone annihlating mobs for 5 figure damage and never dying |:*. It would be nice though if they would do things to address the problems average latency causes, mate-lag and whatnot.

Net-code that isn't crap, basically.


*oshi- beast fFs are practically doing this anyway legit :B

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US PC: Crysteala lv160 FNewman FM, Jigabachi lv155 FBeast GM
JP PC: Digger Wasp Lv180 FBeast FM クリスティーラ Lv55 Fnewman WT AND OTHERS
BROKE THE COWBOY CODE

So basically he say they learned from their errors? When?

It would be nice if they did learn from their errors, but all they do is make crappy fixes to problems they shouldn't have to begin with. It doesn't take long to notice how much their system design, their handling of bugs and glitches and their overall strategy is completely flawed. If they want to learn from their errors they need to learn first.

Anyway, the graph is pretty interesting. The 270 suffers from various slowdowns that they don't try to fix, and yet it's their biggest server. Strategy, etc.

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• Cool profile.
• Cool IRC channel - #psu @ irc.lunarnet.org
• PSU: japanese server - Cool blog... from the future!

Even if I believed that, I'd like to see a server in Europe so many of us aren't innately shafted.

On another note, I'd also like to see them redo the game's front-end. Currently we're stuck with BB remnants that still can't alt-tab out of fullscreen.

Edit: stuch, lul.

http://www.inside-games.jp/news/311/31104.html

Someone on official pointed out a photo in this alternative article. The photos are generally better aside from the audience (which covers up a portion of the EN PS2/PC line). Also there is an additional slide in here for Gamecube.

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PSP2: Yo PSU, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but PSØ has the best mechanics of all time.
gamertag - katsukiyakisoba
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