It should have been a fun little thing, merging the Sonic franchise into Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, but like offering people a delicious ice cream cone and jabbing the pointy end into their eyes, Sega decided to take a nice thing and turn it into a source of player agitation.
Here’s what’s happening: The game is running a crossover event that’s offering up cosmetics, boost items, and stamps for completing a variety of different tasks, whether it’s retweeting a tweet, joining an alliance, or speaking in party chat. However, there’s one particular set of cosmetics as part of the “Treat Chao’self” series of tasks that can only be earned by spending upwards of 10,000 AC; for the record, buying enough AC to spend in order to earn all of these items requires a $100 purchase. There’s also emotes that can be earned only through buying a Premium Set.
Needless to say, players are displeased about this portion of the event. “You could buy Sonic Colors Ultimate twice for that price and still have $20 left. Absolutely ridiculous,” reads one reply to the Reddit thread. “I don’t have the energy to be snarky, so I will just say that I am immensely disappointed in NGS’s direction so far,” reads another player’s response on Twitter.
On top of that, there are reports of unexplained account bannings making the rounds. The assumption is that players are being targeted with mass reports of harassment via numerous alt accounts (aka red boxing). It was also assumed that bans are automatically applied but Sega has flatly denied this. All in all, it’s not a fun time to be a fan of NGS.
