Has it been a year already?....
Today marks the first year the server opened it's doors to the public, when I finally decided to embark on this journey on creating a proper vanilla PSOBB server, and during this last year I've met mostly downs and very little ups. Most of the negatives are related to the current stagnant PSO community numbers, theres simply not enough people playing this game anymore, and the ones who do are gathered into small pockets of communities catering to specific tastes and ways to play this game while at the same time aren't willing to challenge the current status-quo with new ideas to bring more people to enjoy PSO.
But today is not the day to talk about the bad stuff and bad actors, rather I want to celebrate the milestone that means keeping an online service alive despite very low traffic and diligently maintaining it weekly to have a server always ready to play for anyone wanting to have their PSOBB fix for the first time as SEGA intended it to be.
It might sound silly but despite being at sub 10 players it is a responsability to make sure all the services are working as intended, the player data is correctly backed up daily, the server host isn't being bothered by DDoS or unwanted traffic, testing each newserv update in case theres a regression or a bug or something that was previously working is broken now due to X or Y reasons, and the list goes on and on...
Recently I also learned some players are coming here like ninjas during the nights and for those I'm very grateful as I know that they will enjoy PSO as it's best so for the time being Kiyomizu will help fill this niche of players that want to play the original game, or just as a place where they can quietly play.
I debate myself with the idea of advertising the server more and risk attracting unwanted people or just leave it as it's currently is, running as a small island on the internet. And seeing the current environment I believe the latter is the better choice, quantity doesn't always means quality. But at the very least please leave me a message in the Guestbook to know that you have safely arrived!
PSOBB Kiyomizu Operations
Nol Rinale