So apparently Phantasy Star Online 2, a game that had Americans waiting for about 3 years for an english version dropped the IP block on it's only english version a few days ago. I found out about this and the game's population literally tripled overnight according to long time players ingame. Many die hard Phantasy Star fans including myself simply did not question it and created accounts for the game and tried it out.
It turns out that the ip block being lifted was just a temporary measure to try and fix a connection bug or another and the IP block just got reinstated. While I hadn't, thank Armok, many of my friends paid for 30 days premium status on the game. There was no word on this, word from asiasoft, who is apparently running that version, not even any kind of notification ingame when it became clear that their population numbers just exploded, with only one possible cause, and tons of media coverage.
My major WTF is why the hell are they so allergic to money? They doubled their income and injected new life into a dying game for three days and then just decide "Nope, their money is not good enough." And shut very willing paying customers out. Most of my friends got no replies to their support tickets, but admittedly it has only been a day. One claimed that they got a response citing the ToS that mentions that Asiasoft can cancel service at any time and without warning.
The only real reason I can think of that they would do this is a literal bait and switch cash grab, let westerners in for just long enough to convince them to pay money then put up a wall. That's like paying an entry fee at the door to a club and then being told that they never said that they would let you in. There was even multiple media outlets saying the ipblock was down for good. But even then I can't think of the logic in it, they'd make just as much keeping the ip block down, possibly more, and not risk a scandal.
Maybe they didn't have the hardware - like servers or something - to support a sudden influx in players like that and they decided to stick with the plan of debugging rather than release early.
I suppose that's a possibility. But during my time of playing no server ever went above yellow population status. Some of the lobbies were full, but only beginner help and chat. there were at least 10 more lobbies with plenty of space. I don't know about the backend, but from the player viewable side of things it looked like the population could double again with little issue.
I wish the IP Block stayed dead. Fuck the economy on SEA, sure but I could really use some more friends - active friends on the server that doesn't kick me away every few updates because of patch error.
More on the topic, SEGA is still poising themselves to releasing PSO2 on NA (it being a "TBA" for god knows how long), so I suppose the IP Blocks are more of SEGA being paranoid about stuff.
But the IP Blocks don't really make sense; AS could upgrade their servers to include the western influx of people, but no, let's stick in a server that's mostly 3/10 blocks full, each ship.
Why can't we have good things?
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14918796 times)