Forum Oddities: PSU GotY Edition

2010 is coming to a close, and the Web site MMORPG.com has opened the voting for its annual MMORPG of the Year award. Instead of limiting voters to a small list of games, the site has provided a huge list of currently active online RPGs to select from.

The list really is quite large, so I guess it shouldn't be that surprising that Phantasy Star Universe is somehow on it. I've never even heard of most of the games on that list. (Ignore the fact that PSU is not technically an MMORPG and therefore shouldn't even be a choice.)

However, I was a little surprised when I came across this thread on the official Sega forums asking PSU players to vote for the game as the best of 2010. Why would anyone want to do this?

The game is over four years old and struggling to maintain its player base, thanks in large part to Sega's day-to-day decision making and management of the servers (and the community in general). In just this past year, the community endured a continuing lack of updates, sporadic network outages, billing issues, and a permanent server shutdown.

Then there's the issue of server population. At any given moment, the number of people playing PSU online is equal to less than one percent of the population of people playing World of Warcraft, Aion, or any of the other large pay-to-play MMOs. That's not even a scientific estimate, but it's probably accurate. PSU is a niche game, and will remain that way forever.

Finally, you could make the argument that Sega is not really releasing new content for PSU anymore (meaning new environments / enemies / etc). Yes, the supplemental update has been released and is providing players with some new equipment, but Sega is not doing anything to expand the PSU world, and that probably won't change now that Phantasy Star Online 2 has been announced.

That said, if you'd like to think you're being clever, or if you want to try and screw with the results a little (good luck -- see the server population discussion), head over to MMORPG.com and cast your vote for Phantasy Star Universe as MMORPG of the Year 2010! (You have to have an account there to vote.)

Absolute Zero is Live

Absolute Zero officially began today, and an event site listing the kill count and unlockable rewards is now available. This event differs from recent ones in that much of the reward information is already displayed, but the kill counts required to earn the rewards is unknown.

In a move that I found to be surprising, Sega of Japan has decided that Absolute Zero will run for a ridiculous seven weeks, until January 21, 2011. That's just enough time to get bored with the event missions about five times over. Whatever happened to the short (i.e. month-long) events, anyway? Is Sega just trying to get players to hang around as long as possible?

Oh, and one last thing -- it seems the Xbox 360 is incapable of handling some of the Absolute Zero missions, as evidenced in this warning by PSU GM Edward. Apparently you might (read: will) experience massive slowdown in the first block of Frozen Flowers. According to Edward, the mission is "much better" by Block 2 (though I'm not really sure what that means).

Of course, to fix the slowdown problem, simply play the mission with the camera pointed at the ground the entire time. That's a lot of fun! Or, you could play the PC vers- oh, I'm sorry, I forgot -- you can't. What a shame.

For more information on Absolute Zero, check out the event page linked at the top of this post.