Marmalade

Unfortunately, as much as supporting JP and EN at the same time is something we would prefer, it's difficult for a few reasons. A fair amount of the text is sent by the server and it's stored in the quest and zone that essentially defines the area or mission. Only a handful got logged from JP, which is why you might see the odd untranslated thing from time to time. But supporting JP completely means translating every mission, every variant of that mission, and every difficulty. As well as the counter it occupies. This can get very heavy very quickly, and mass text replace hasn't worked out terribly well in the past. Besides translating all of that, there's also the problem of the server not really knowing what language you would prefer. Since 14.30, the language option was effectively disabled, and no ones looked at re-enabling it as far as I know. I don't even know if there's protocol support for it now either, but there are probably work arounds. If anything, it would be a future endeavour. Sorry if it's not ideal, but it's what we've got to work with for the immediate moment.

Keep up the good work. It's a lot of effort to do, but I'm glad to see people tackling this c:

Just wanted to make a quick post to let players know that there will be a small booster event running until the 20th of September. We hope to be able to deliver the JP Photon Arts some time next weekend, but until then this is for you. 1.5x EXP 1.5x MP 1.5x Meseta 2.0x PA 2.0x Rare Enemy Rate 1.5x Rare Mission Rate 10% Additive Grinder Success Rate 5 Silver Voloyal Coins Daily Additionally, clear boxes on S and S2 difficulty will drop 2 items instead of 1. This is experimental though, so if it doesn't work then please let me know. Thanks!

Most of this is addressable and can go in with OUF rebalancing. The one thing that isn't so easy though is this: Up until fairly recently I believed that the stat modifiers for enemies were consistent, so Sword being enabled would always be Sword for any enemy, and sadly this isn't true. Instead of it being Crown, Sword, Shield, Staff, Boot, etc, it's more like Crown, Buff 1, Buff 2, Buff 3, Buff 4, where the buff is specific to the enemy in question. This means a Pannon can have Buff 1 be Sword, while a Bal Soza can have Buff 1 be a Staff, and a Rogue Jasse has Buff 1 as a Shield (or something like that... I forget, but I remember it annoying me). Until we find a way to identify all of these buff types for enemies then there isn't a lot that can be done. I suspect it's more an enemy type thing than an individual enemy thing, so most of the enemies should be ok. It's just a few that are different, I guess? Cross referencing them with Official would help in some places, since I have a better chance of knowing which buff is set or unset for that enemy back then, and what it corresponds to. If anyone wants to do that... feel free. I would need to know the Enemy, what Buff(s) it has, and in what mission/rank. Generally speaking, once it's set from one mission then it should apply to all of them. Just keep in mind that the buff is set by the mission, so an enemy might have Sword in one, but Sword and Shield in another. Having them be as isolated as possible gives the best chance of recovering them. If an enemy has two buffs applied, it's going to be difficult to know which one is which. I have this vague memory of them freezing in White Beast, but I think I'm remembering the blue fire... huh. That means Turrets potentially have a flag to enable or disable inflicting a status, but again, kind of need a mission that had that behavior... Thanks for reminding.

Unfortunately there's no apparent way to have more or reskinned bosses, so having it be visually obvious that it's a rare variant might be difficult. Back end I could work some kind of magic to change the behavior of certain bosses if they're considered "rare", but not really sure how far something like that could go... Outside of giving it more HP or buffing other stats. Adding more boxes dynamically wouldn't work, but spawning items where the boss died, or near the crystal, might be a solution. Sucks because there's not much room for something like an Ultimate Mode, as cool as it might be. Reskinning certain areas is doable, but enemies not so much. At best we have contamination variants of some enemies, and the alternate models (Pannon, Bel Pannon). I suppose with some kind of magic, we could put De Ragnus into the De Ragan arena, but yeah... boundaries and mission edits.

Looks like there was a limit of 10 per day? Probably only became apparent now that there's a lot of liking going on. Let me know if it still happens?

So you can only post or DM when you're in incognito mode? I haven't had anyone else complain to me about issues like this, but if clearing your cookies and whatnot doesn't help... er, let me know, I guess? Although I'm not sure why that would be. Does it give you any kind of error when you try to do these things?

Keeping in mind that all of the boss AI had to be rewritten from scratch using reference material, a lot of them most likely won't act exactly how you remember them acting. Enemy speed modifiers don't tend to do much to bosses except speed up their animations. I believe the problem you're experiencing is that Dimmagolus and Onmagoug think logic is too fast, especially for C rank. This is something I noticed about a week or so ago as well. By the time you get close enough to attack, they move again, which makes for a frustrating battle. I'll slow down their think and movement logic in the future so hopefully it will be a more enjoyable battle.

@Dakkon You're fine to post these things on the forum, generally it's better to do it here than on our discord where it can be sunk with relative ease. While I don't know if any of this stuff will come to pass (I keep my hands off balance these days), I did at least want to pass mention to some things in regards to: Over the course of Clementines development, proper hit flags and enemy responses have been a fair bit of challenge. Up until recently there was one important hit flag that was missing, which people call "phase", aka "interrupt". This is the soft flinch that was present on things like guns, dam techs, and striking PA's in general, which interrupt the enemy but don't push them back out of range. It's the correct flag to replace what is the frustrating hard flinch, which makes combat feel somewhat awful for all, that's why it was removed in favor of no knock back. After next maintenance you can expect to see phase be active on guns, technics, and striking PA's, which brings it way closer to how the game officially did. I'm told from testing that it feels way better than things do right now, so I'd like to hear from you after that update whether it helps your concerns with guns or not. I hope it's another step in a chain of many to bring the game back to feeling like it always had. Thanks! c:

Speak for yourself. The problem doesn't lie in the community, except for ridiculous and unhelpful nonsense like this, which seems to only ever serve to drive people away further with lies. Are you trying to help solve the problem, or make it worse? I could hazard a guess. If I'm a shitty owner then so be it, but unfortunately I'm what you landed with and I apologize for that. But there are plenty of amazing people in this community who are passionate about a game they love, as am I, and we've all always done our best. If I didn't care then I wouldn't have spent as much time as I have working on this project or fighting the fights. I would have left years ago with the rest of them. I try hard because I love this game, and I owe it to the community to get PSU into as full of a state as I possibly can, even if it drains me dead some times. Please don't forget that we actually have to reverse engineer all of this, and we're confined to the limits of what is realistically possible. We don't have any resources or packets from JP, so there is very little reference data. Lastly, there are no more wipes! I don't know where people keep getting this idea, but blathering it out blindly doesn't help to reassure new players reading that. Most of what Selphea has listed we're already aware of and started working toward solutions. Being that it's likely to be a major update, it will take some time to get going but you can expect a couple of helpful tweaks next maintenance at least which address some bad feels and bad smells. The problem for me is that the game isn't fun right now and fails to scratch certain itches. It's grindy as hell to catch up, running the same mission is boring, nothing rewards your time and effort, and it isn't friendly for new players to even begin. There's little to no stimulation. Rather bafflingly, there's also an entire game here that isn't... here. All of which are problems we're aware of and have been working to address for quite some time now. Last patch introduced huge changes to how the drops system worked back-end, which was massively from community demand, but also sets us up to solve many other problems over time. Now drops can be filled into boxes without the worry of them being full, since in the past they were limited to 3 items, as well as allowing boxes to roll multiple items instead of 1, which will be utilized more in the future, as is the hope. We'd introduced the guardians quests which, while I'm aware they're not enough still, are a step in a better direction for helping new players get into the game. I know early game Meseta is an issue, as well as leveling basic types, and generally gearing up. We've already kicked into action and are experimenting with this specifically since 2 weeks ago. I'm happy to tell you that it feels a lot better than it did, and I hope it will help players ease into the game in a much more natural way, when the patch releases anyway. Realistically, and if I'm being honest, there's a very real barrier between what we can do, and what we can be allowed to do. I could list off many things that could help to resolve these issues and make the game fun for new and old players, but would it be accepted and allowed? The general standing for a lot of us for a long time was that change = bad, but maintaining an old RPG in 2021 with unpleasant mechanics will only bring in temporary nostalgic fans, who will inevitably leave either way, and thus we have "50 players" all the same. If I'm to maintain a server, if I was in Sega's position, shouldn't I make some effort to resolve these issues with more modern and generally accepted changes from this era, to align with what current gen players expect? Well to some extent, yes? if we want new players to come in anyway. The important thing is that PSU maintains its charm and character, and I can already identify many things that directly violate that, and hope for it to be resolved sooner rather than later. Although not all of the changes Clementine has introduced are inherently bad. On a closing note, people will come and go from Clementine, others will wait for something to release or to be resolved, and others will take breaks from time to time. It is the nature of private servers. I'm painfully aware of the people that have moved on, why they did, and the ones making complaints about Clementine not being like official (and the others making complaints it is like official), whether in features (again, working on it), or overall feel. People often think I'm oblivious to it, that I want it or ignore issues with it, but I can tell you that the biggest waves of depression that come from Clementine, for me, are from some of the changes it's had. Half of the problems that exist come from things being changed and "balanced", but can you believe that going backwards is harder than going forwards? at least in some aspects of these changes. Naturally I want to fight it, and I do when I have the energy to. Thank you to all of you for taking time to share your concerns and ideas. While I might not reply often, I do still read them all and think about them. Rest assured, we've been working ridiculously hard to resolve issues and bring in more features, and I hope to be able to write up about it soon. I hope people will continue to work with me to resolve issues. As always, much love

Thanks! This should be resolved today. It's an issue with the seasonal Neudaiz lobbies, and a fix I did months ago to try and resolve out of bounds issues. Oops.

That's an odd one... Assuming they're using the installation from our forum. Do they have any anti virus software that might try to block the domain after an initial connection? You can check their anti virus or firewall for psu-clementine.network Additionally, you could also do an nslookup to see if the domain resolves. Most likely it's being blocked by something after game uses it the first time.

This is a fairly common occurrence, more with Defender, but I wouldn't be surprised if other anti virus software's flag the installer. If you're in our discord, you can see other people that had the same issue, but worked past it. As long as you're downloading Clementine from this forum ( see: Downloads ) then it's as clean as can be. Nothing has changed with Clementine on the client end in the past however many years, aside from a domain name update is all I can really recall. The reason your anti virus may be flagging the installer is for a few reasons. Our launcher is susceptible to false positives because of the Windows Defender cloud-based detection, and we never got very far with Microsoft to resolve it. It went resolved for about 5 hours, actually, and then it came right back. This is a problem that's popped up quite viciously in the past year, not just with Clementine, either. Rest assured the launcher is clean, and most likely only gets flagged because of the optional mods it applies to the game client (custom resolution, faster start up, farther viewing distance, etc). Because it directly modifies game memory, it's seen as suspicious. The other one is that the client is modified to point at the Clementine domain rather than the now defunct Sega domain. Essentially the game client is "tampered" with, so it too is suspicious. In reality, all that changed was the redirect, but it's enough to cause concern for most anti virus software's, which tend to go with "Better safe than sorry", which is fair. You've got every right to be wary of it, and ultimately it comes down to whether you trust it or not. I can only really explain why it gets flagged, and leave the door open for you. It sucks that it's a problem we need to fight against, but unfortunately it is what it is right now. Also, if your anti virus is going hard on it already then be ready for a bit more trouble down the road. The most common issue people run in to (again, see Discord if you have it), is that the client will open and close immediately from Defender blocking it. If you have any other concerns or questions, feel free and I'll do my best to answer them when I can!

Hey, I wanted to make this topic for players to throw ideas into the pot for new missions. Generally, because I still need to put time in to figuring out more with mission functionality and the sort I figured something good may as well come from it. I'd like to know what kind of areas in the game people would like to see more missions of, whether it's lobby or mission scenery, as well as the kinds of enemies you think would be exciting to see more of. Obviously these are going to be basic missions, so nothing terribly crazy can happen with them (no cut scenes or scripted events). Just A to B, kill enemies, maybe a boss, and loot. Want to see more Beach missions? Maybe more Moatoob missions? Let me know if you have any preferences.

Yes I agree, we'd had concerns about it being too much of a drag after the first few times. It's worth noting though that there is still some things that need discovering about enemy spawns and their behavior, specifically their spawn size and radius. Spawning anything inside of those corridors or tight spaces often ends up with enemies out of bounds. This is partly why a lot of these areas only have one or two enemies, and the larger rooms have fuller spawns. Unfortunately it's a bit too late to go back and change some of it. I was going to move the key for the first Grass Assassin box closer to the console a few days ago, but it would have only confused players more after having figured out the puzzle. This one isn't quite in our hands, because these maps are still Sega's. They were just changed to be sundown and midnight. If you run BBB and you get lucky with the variant, you'll notice that Block 2 in IC is about 80% the same as BBB. This wasn't really our intention, but when the map was loaded and most of the walls, gates, and spawns were in place already, it just came about that our initial plan wasn't far off what Sega had already made in the past. Block 1 is another beach area, but I don't know if it was used in any BBB variant. Most of the beach maps we found were unused, which might be saying something in the way of "too open" lol. I'll admit though that Block 2 is my least favorite of the blocks. Yes, you most likely will die at some point by some stray bullets or an unfortunate Groode stomp or missile, and I don't want to be lame and fall back on that we did say it would be a difficult mission, and that running in a team is somewhat preferred. People have solo'd S2 just to see if they could do it, a lot of them had to restock on consumables. I will say that S2 is overtuned, and as was discussed in the Discord last night, we're aware of that and it will likely get re-tuned before too long. Specifically because, if it's going to have items that people want, which aren't available in lower ranks, then it's not aligning to the original idea for us. Just like Zeta back in the past, S2 was effectively going to be Master Mode with higher reward, but somewhere along the line that got sidestepped, and now it's a weird smashy bit in the middle. But! From the S2's that I have run, yeah it hurts, but with a party it isn't unbearable in my own opinion. Yes Grinna Bete is terrifying especially if you forget to change armor, or you're solo, but in a group their aggro can quickly change to someone who isn't you, opening up huge opportunities to get damage in. With that said, leading in to this... This unfortunately is something I want to disagree with. Yes Renvolt and Howzer are difficult, and in solo it probably is the worst thing to be dealing with and I doubt it's very much fun. However, in every party I've ran with, the boss arena is by far the easiest part of the mission. Howzer, Renvolt, and Seed Magashi aren't enemies that do well against multiple targets, they're not really designed for it imo. Not being able to CC Howzer and Renvolt probably sounds awful on paper, but there's a few things I want people to at least acknowledge. Howzer and Renvolts AI both (that is client controlled) have built in flinch and stun when you catch them during certain frames or inflict a threshold of damage. It's quite possible to interrupt both of them by getting hits in. Unfortunately, fighting both of these isn't the same as fighting regular enemies. You can't get into a rhythm of jabbing with your weapon and hitting a Dimate or Trimate, depending on whether you get hit, and what by. You have to play offense and defense with these bosses, and I know PSU's combat isn't really designed for this kind of play, but it isn't painfully impossible either. All three of them have massive openings, and a lot of their attacks are avoidable. Howzer has warnings on pretty much all of his attacks; Megid, his round kick, dive kick, his jabs, and his laser attacks are all openings for you to get behind him and deal damage, and potentially flinch him so he goes down for even more damage. The same can be applied to Renvolt! a lot of his attacks are major openings, and you can get behind him and stun him. If you're in a party then chances are he isn't even coming after you, and if he is, or if you can't get close, then just wait for an opening and play defense. I know this might not be "the PSU way", but just because it's different doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. I can appreciate that it's probably frustrating, however. SEED Magashi is the biggest joke of a boss, since you can stun lock him indefinitely and that's honestly all people do in every party I've ran. I want to say that, for particularly a boss fight, it should be allowed to be a boss fight. What fun is it when you can bind all three of these bosses to the ground with endless knock down, and wail on them? they would be no threat, and instead boring jokes that don't even try to fight back. Sure there are people that might enjoy that, and to feel powerful, but it's not much different from switching their AI off at that point. As for the traps, yes I agree. The boss fights alone are fine enough, it didn't really need anything extra. This unfortunately falls into the "Out of the players control" frustration category. Imagine someone walking up and taking your controller every 10 seconds, and giving you the cheesiest shit eating grin. No thanks. This isn't the mindset, but there are a few things going on. There isn't much in Clem that I would even consider wanting to be "difficult" or "hard". In terms of PSU in today's world, there is a lot that can absolutely be improved. It's worth keeping in mind that the whole damage formula thing was reworked to fix buffs, debuffs, and DFP in general and this ultimately alters how the game feels. Not to mention that there are still some unknowns about enemies and how to really stat them up correctly. However I'd still like to flip this on its head and say that, us having a mindset of "difficulty = fun" and everything must be difficult, isn't far off being the opposite of people in the community saying "PSU isn't hard, it can't be hard, so it should just be easy". Every mission would generally be the same. Specifically, not every mission or content we make needs to conform to the easy nature that people expect from a mission. Just because people don't believe that PSU can be engaging or difficult in or outside of combat doesn't mean we can't try or experiment around, or worse put it off completely. I personally, and I know others, wouldn't really want to just give up the idea of a challenging mission because something might be too frustrating or too annoying. There were absolutely scenarios like this on the official server, where getting slapped around by enemies wasn't shocking. That said, I agree and also think IC has overshot the mark that we were trying to land, and I'll get in to everything we've learned and everything to take away from it shortly. In terms of difficulty vs frustration, what's the line here? I feel like frustration can stem from "difficult" really easily. I think frustration comes from situations or scenarios where you're either forced to play or learn to play a certain way, or scenarios where the control is completely stripped away from you. That's frustrating, and I can see how some parts of IC are this way. But what I can comment on is that while some parts of IC are challenging and difficult, many parts of it are not. For instance, a lot of the enemies seem to be placed around and geared toward the big maybe scenarios. Maybe you can stun Bead Groode, and maybe you can drop a Freeze EX, therefore they should be tuned toward such a scenario where it's you or the enemy. That, in my honest opinion, is foolish. At that point, the enemies and the overall experience is no longer tuned toward the relaxed or casual play style, and more tuned toward the types of players that know every nook and cranny of every enemy. Not everyone has the tools to disable Bead Groode, and even if they do, not everyone wants to be forced to incorporate that play style into their own. No, enemies won't go above Level 200, and their HP on S3 will be the same as what it was on Official, or so I'm told. Although it's important to mention, quite a lot of S3's weren't logged, and they had to be remade based around lesser difficulties, which runs into a handful of issues. Unfortunately there's no way for anyone to know what kind of mission modifiers these enemies had in place. It's all good knowing the base stats, and the enemy specific modifiers, but there wasn't any information about the individual mission itself apply modifiers. In essence, while C, B, and A could have a 90-100% HP modifier on enemies, S+ could have had 80, 70, 60, and so forth, to bring them into some level of comfort. Most of these missions being made from lesser ranks runs the risk of S3 having higher HP modifiers than what was officially set, or intended, and it's something we'll most likely have to address over time once we get there. I would greatly encourage people to call this stuff out, please. I know there are plenty of people who would sit silent and hope it changes, or complain about it where I may not see it. Milestones are good on paper, but generally this whole thing is a test. Up until recently, it wasn't possible for us to apply a lot of this stuff in real time, and is partially why it's gone through this system. I want to point out though that we're not quite at the level of custom exchange missions, which is why this one might be a bit short in the way of rewards. Differently to official, these are active during the event and apply globally, not just to the event mission itself. We did it this way because we already knew that forcing people to attend IC for 4 weeks straight wouldn't be ideal, even if it was a fun and enjoyable mission for the majority. We wanted this event to benefit you in your day to day as well, which is generally preferred and encouraged. Don't think of it as a bad thing to go somewhere else to farm for an item, or MP, or whatever you might be looking for. The event enables people to do that, so I'm at least glad for that. Generally what I'm getting from this is that you went on the hardest difficulty and then got discouraged because... you went on the hardest difficulty, and then you just didn't try it ever again. Basically, you haven't played the event. I'm not saying that disqualifies your opinions on it, far from it, just that it kind of boils down to that you got discouraged, which I can understand. Here you also said: I can't help but feel that your best course of action would have been to learn the mission on S, and then when you were comfortable to continue, take it on S2 with or without a party. This way you know what to expect on the hardest difficulty. There's no shame in going on a lower difficulty to learn the ins and outs, and what to expect. There is no fundamental difference between the difficulties, so what you learn on C, B, A, or S, also applies to S2. To compare this to another game, say like Resident Evil, for the very first time would you pick Nightmare mode and then complain that all the enemies do too much damage, there's not enough ammo, and there's no healing items, aside from not really knowing where anything is or the dangers that lurk. Inevitably putting the controller down and saying, "Man, Resident Evil isn't fun". I've already covered this up above, but the gist of it is, these bosses are quite possibly the easiest part of the mission. Would you also push for De Ragan to be consistently stun locked, poisoned, frozen, or paralyzed easily? They're bosses, not another spawn at the back of the room. They're designed to make you move and be cautious, and play defense once in a while. We do this already! the level cap always get raised to 1 under the up coming content requirement, so that people can access the next tier of missions for the least amount of work. While IC S2 requires Level 100 to enter, you can level to 104, because the next set of S2's (when drops are finished for them) is at 105. Unfortunately it's not simple for us to let the level cap go past certain tiers of missions, it would end up causing too much confusion and headache for everyone. ALSO! I want to point out something important here that was discovered the other day... And going back to this comment: There's a bug going around where your equipped line shield isn't actually a line shield. There have been a few players with Synthesis Boards or Materials as line shields when players check their equipment. I'm supposing this is another sync issue, possibly tied to armor switching with less slots than the previous one. This means that you may not even have armor on at all. This has likely been a thing since... forever, and rather frustratingly has probably not helped with balance at all. Until I can find more leads on this one, it might be worth uneqipping your units, then your armor, and then equipping it all again to make sure you're still synced up. Nothing in IC should be doing 2-3 hits. Now here are my thoughts... I wrote this whole post a few days ago, but I didn't post it because I wanted to further confirm my thoughts before anything. Since then, S2 has already been tweaked further, and the enemies are now no longer as strong. Having played the event quite a lot since it started (and still am), I hope that my input can be taken as another player, and seen just as valuable or taken into consideration. I have to agree in some instances that S2 can be quite rough. IC was designed to be a challenging "party focused" mission and will probably only be one of very few that come about, but still I don't think this was entirely the intended outcome. Currently there are a handful of problems that blindside us here. First is the armor bug that was recently discovered, where your equipment can become desynced and your armor ineffective at times. The second is that the whole damage formula was changed to incorporate DFP better, so that armor and buffs were effective. The third is that enemy data is just too basic and misunderstood right now for proper enemy balance, but this will soon be fixed as I've been researching a lot more into it. Things like iframes on players don't exist either, and it's a major problem because you can get hit many times while you're being knocked down, and it's out of your control completely. That, or you can get launched again while you're still recovering from one already. If it's of any use, I'm an Acrofighter, and my equipment isn't so good due to time, but I still manage to do alright in a party despite it being harsh for melee players. I haven't found myself sighing in disbelief, or getting annoyed because the sponge with legs won't die. Honestly, I've actually been having a lot of fun with the mission, and it's been making me smile and laugh. Not in a sadistic kind of way, but most of the people I've played with are chill AF, and laugh when they get ultra-clapped by a coconut or one of the bosses. It's honestly just the Bead Groode x Rogue Mazz combo that make me think twice, because you can't equip any elemental armor that will protect you. You have to hope that the maybe scenario comes around, and someone manages to get the Groode stunlocked. Outside of that, it's either 1.5k from the Groode with range, or 1.5k from the Rogue Mazz's normal attack multiple times. Either way, you're getting that hit, and it's going to take a Trimate or two. In terms of the event itself, it was a cool idea and I don't hate it, but I'm also not big on the overall thing. The design didn't really go how I'd have expected it, being that it was meant to be more of a scenic summertime mission with icecream (at least in my mind), it took a darker turn at the end and became somewhat of a story... thing. Admittedly I don't think any of us on the team plan to or want to make any kind of story related event mission again in the future. It's fun for a 1 or 2 time run, but after that, it just becomes a pain and it isn't fun. Unfortunately I don't think the mission I was hoping IC to come out as will ever come about, at least not soon, just because the maps and all have been used and seen and it's meh. It was also to be a more rewarding mission, but unfortunately as is the curse of Sega right now for us (and will soon be fixed, thank god), boxes are far too limited when it comes to item space, so it becomes difficult to put in something for everyone right now. Rest assured, these issues with enemies and boxes are next on my list of things to improve drastically upon, and it will open doors for the drops team to fix a lot of the problems going around right now (I.E Base C in S rares lmao) For future events, depending on how soon anyone would even want one, this is generally what I've learned and would honestly prefer to be the case: Length is OK, but it's only OK if there's something good at the end of it. The reasons I wouldn't really opt for lengthy missions anymore is both: 1. If it isn't highly rewarding, or at least some guarantee of a good outcome, then it's incredibly draining. 2. Peoples connection stability doesn't work so well with a long mission. In fact, I think boss gates and blue gates will be avoided as much as possible from now on. For future custom events, I'm feeling that a better approach would be to have multiple shorter missions, and either let them all be run by player choice, or if an event ends up running for as long as IC, perhaps released them on a weekly basis to keep the event from going stale. For example, we would make 3 or 4 different stand alone missions, each with different maps, enemy layout, and rewards, and then release one for week one, another on top for week 2 (so you'd have parts 1 and 2), and then another on week 3. This way, there's something new and refreshing, something to look forward to, and hopefully naturally rewarding for players. Difficult enemies I don't mind, but things like that should be restricted to secret or side rooms. As Skinny mentioned above, the final secret room with Grinna Bete and Bead Groode is kinda rough, but It feels alright. In instances like that I think it's fine, but when it's the whole block, erm... not so much. Secret rooms and puzzles we're all for, but we're all definitely feeling that making them required for S rank isn't a great approach at all, especially if some of those secrets aren't fun to do on repeat. Any future "secrets" are likely to be optional instead of required or forced. Real time milestones I honestly am not sure I will be doing again. As mentioned, a lot of these boosts can generally just be enabled for the event overall, and most likely will be. Dealing with the milestones ended up being more stress than I was expecting, or really willing to deal with even if it is once every however long between events. I would much rather they were just on, and any "milestones" would be for after event rewards. Balance it around feel, rather than the woulds, the coulds, and the numbers on the sheet. One of the biggest problems that arose about IC S2 was that a lot of it seemed to have been balanced around this idea that players might do something, and was assumed that most players would do it, which isn't good at all. There also seemed to be a lot of changes based around the idea and the numbers, rather than how it actually felt to play the thing. At this point it's difficult to really fix IC S2 completely, but it has had some improvements since. For the future I will be pushing harder for game feel rather than the math behind the scenes. I think this is honestly the most important thing, and now that I've got more time to actually play PSU, I'm hoping to get us all on the same page as everyone else. Obtainable rewards is important. If the mission is to be incredibly difficult for players then it also needs to be incredibly rewarding for players. Difficult to play + difficult to get loot isn't a combination that should often exist. When it comes to rewards as a whole, I would much rather that it was a guaranteed approach, similar to how IC is now with its guaranteed tickets for item crafting. Just a little less... demanding? It isn't the end of the event just yet, and I will likely be expanding my thoughts on the whole thing once it's all said and done, but I would still like to hear feedback during or after as well. When it comes to events, I wouldn't hate working with the community to make something fun or exciting. Sorry that this is huge, and I also couldn't get to every point :( Thanks for taking the time.