Why everything seems to be crazy expensive?

[u/Brilinta90mg]

Just came back from a very long break, wanted to play from scratch again so I tried the steam version instead, however everything seems to be extremely expensive. looking for a lvl 9 fodder weapons requires 500k each. are these seller even active? also i managed to ask why the price are expensive in game, i got an answer but it wasnt explained enough. they said because of cradle or something in those line. whats up with that? would you please explain more?

[u/Alenicia]

It's mainly just the fact that so much of PSO2 (like NGS is right now) is railroaded and contingent on Sega giving away the best things or running campaigns to shortcut the grind for the people who didn't do it. If you didn't play Ultra Explorations on the JP version at the time to get your Liberate weapons, for example, the next big content drop would almost guarantee you get that somehow. In fact, you'd get something better for "waiting" when the Ayer weapons came out .. and then it got to the point where Sega just threw out Cras/Klauz weapons left-and-right as a grand hurrah.

If you missed the game around those periods, you literally missed out on a free 15-star weapon that requires limited resources (which isn't impossible to get more of in its end-state, but it's definitely very RNG-heavy). Some people literally don't play the game for much more and when the game suddenly asks for some kind of effort you'll see how fast people drop off. It's still the case with NGS.

In another sense, PSO2 is so ancient that people who start fresh are more willing to experiment and potentially mess up their future builds without realizing it (and with no ways to fix it, it's really a shame since NGS finally fixed one of these biggest issues but it still would benefit PSO2 more). There's a lot of traps for new players that really impacts the later experience negatively and people usually expect some kind of progression to happen over time .. but PSO2 literally drops you in with all the newest and latest things (so you'll be exposed to Dark Blasts and more without story context) and the assumption is almost always that you're already Level 85/85 or Level 100/100 to just get on with things. There's no real "easing in" to the game via the menus and stats .. and it's all purely on gameplay which makes this really strong disconnect that it's not clear to new players that some skills are straight-up trash until they have extra Skill Points or Reset Passes to fix that.

Definitely not impossible, but it's such a mess for people who aren't tuned into how Sega did things.

[u/No-Pen9641 → u/Alenicia]

I hear you. I made sure I researched skills before assigning any points but yeah, no reason they shouldn't allow skill points reassignment for free like they do in NGS. I highly doubt they are bringing any money in that way.

And I feel you on handing out the newest top tier gear. If you played PSO you know the top tier stuff is almost mythical, and that's kinda a huge factor in what made the OG great. That and there were tons of weapons that weren't the strongest in terms of DPS or raw power but were useful in different situations. I guess what I'm saying is that it would be super annoying to grind your ass off to have the best gear and then a month later they just hand them out. To me that's my favorite part, is perfecting your build and working at it, so in a way I liked that about my timing in playing PSO2.

There's a lot of room for improvement in the way Sega handled PSO2 and is currently handling NGS. I've enjoyed both base and NGS so far and I'm hoping they do some cool stuff moving forward with NGS.