Sega's PSP Launch Party

Sega is celebrating the release of Phantasy Star Portable in the United States with a special event on the PSU servers.

According to Sega GMs, the event will span various time periods throughout the day on Friday, March 6. Participants in the event during the designated times will receive a phrase to say in-game, which will allow players to receive the Holy Ray/D and Pumpkin Trick weapons.

Event details are available here. It will be interesting to see how the "special phrase" part works. I imagine it will probably be similar to the "Happy Birthday Sonic!" event Sega runs each June -- and if that's the case, what stops participating players from receiving the phrase and spreading it around to everybody?

Finally, I'm going to use this space to pick on an event page typo:

Helga could be anywhere across Gurhaul

Gurhaul: the moving company used by Guardians across the galaxy...

Name the Next Event

The end of the Winter Mission Carnival is still two weeks away, but Sega is already looking to the next major community event.

In this thread on the official PSU forums, PSU GMs have set up a poll that allows you to vote on the name of the next event. Known as Shred the Darkness on the Japanese servers, this dark-themed event ties in closely with the Ambition of the Illuminus storyline and features special story-based missions for parties and solo players.

Voting ends Monday, so head over to the forums to see the choices and cast your vote!

Script Kiddies Attack

In other PSU news, a small pack of monkeys has escaped from the zoo. The monkeys are allegedly stealing valuable high-end weapons from open player shops.

PSU GMs say that they are looking into the issue. In the meantime, just lock your rooms for awhile and wait for the bans to come. The monkeys will be back in their cages before long, and everything will be fine.

Whining About Bans

Earlier this evening, a thread popped up on the official PSU forums in which a player claims he/she was unfairly banned from the game. This spawned a new debate about Sega of America's banning practices.

Many players are claiming that the actual account owners are not the ones getting banned; instead, phishers are using the players' account information to take control of the account and get it banned. When the actual player contests the ban, Sega upholds it without providing further information. This, apparently, is "unfair" and "unprofessional".

Sorry, folks, but I'm afraid I side firmly with Sega on this one. That argument is a load of bullshit. If you're stupid enough to give away your private account information to a complete stranger on this game, you deserve anything and everything that happens to you. It's not like these phishers are hacking into Sega's servers to access account information. If that were happening, then players might have a case regarding unfair bans. As of now, you only get phished if you physically tell someone your account information via in-game mail, e-mail, PM, voice chat, etc.

You wouldn't willingly hand your credit card information over to strangers. Why would this be any different?

So for the people that were dumb enough to give away their account information: get over it. You screwed up, and you paid for it. Take it as a learning experience, and start over. Just quit bitching about how you were "unfairly" singled out by Sega.

One final point: Sega's bottom line is to make money. PSU is one of the methods through which they try to make that money. For each player they ban, Sega loses another monthly fee and potential profit. Do you really think they would ban somebody just because they "felt like it"?

Good lord. Get a clue, people.

Authentication Servers Down Again (Updated)

For the third time in two weeks, the game's authentication and login servers are down. Attempts to access the game servers are resulting in the familiar "Error 60" message.

This issue was first reported on the official forums at about 3:30 PM Eastern time, and has not yet been fixed. Sega has not provided any information on the cause of the downtime.

You'd think that at some point somebody at Sega would try to come up with a permanent fix for this problem. People do pay to play this game, so these kinds of mid-afternoon outages really are unacceptable.

UPDATE: Access to the servers was restored around 7:30 PM Eastern, four hours after the problem was initially reported. Do I really have to say what I think about that?

Carnival Extension

In this thread on the official forums, GM Edward has announced an extension of the Winter Mission Carnival. The event will now run until Friday, March 6.

Apparently the reason for the extension was primarily to keep the length of our event on par with the Japanese version, which also ran for six weeks. I'm also willing to bet that Sega didn't feel like doing maintenance two weeks in a row.

According to the thread, "many" US/EU players had also requested the extension, but I haven't seen much support for an extension among forum posters since the event began. Personally, I think six weeks is too much for a one-dimensional event like this. Let it die and move on.

No Surprises This Friday

As expected, Sega will be adding the final Winter Mission Carnival update this Friday. World of Illusion: Alpha will be rejoining the mission lineup this week, and boss stages will be added to the end of both bonus missions.

The complete set of Crystal Central exchange items will also become available after Friday's maintenance.

The Winter Mission Carnival comes to a close on Friday, February 27. No information has been given on post-event bonuses at this point.

In addition to the Carnival updates, Sega will also be adding (late) the Valentine's Day lobbies, meaning that seasonal Rappies will be appearing in missions for a limited time.

PSU Kart 64

Boredom can make you do some interesting things sometimes.

After running the main Mission Carnival mission a few times earlier this evening, I decided to kill some time in the airboard racing area. Then I thought it might be mildly amusing to replace the race music with something else.

To demonstrate the results, I've created my first-ever PSU video! Other than showing off the fact that I might play the racing mission a bit too much, it shows the mission music replaced with the theme from Mario Kart 64's Kalimari Desert (complete with final-lap music).

Apparently I forgot to disable the cursor when I shot the video, so try not to get distracted too much!

Auth. Server Outage (Updated)

According to this announcement posted on the official PSU site, the PC/PS2 authentication servers are currently offline. Players attempting to log in are receiving Error 60 messages.

Apparently this outage started at about 1:30 PM Eastern time. No word yet on when access to the servers will be restored.

So how many more times is this going to occur before Sega finally decides to permanently fix the issue? It's not like this is the first (or second, or third) time that this has happened...

UPDATE: The servers are back online as of 7:00 PM Eastern.