Today it was announced that the Closed Beta test will start April 19th, 2012 through April 28th, 2012.

• This date is subject to change due to any unexpected problems.
• The Closed Beta data is deleted after it is finished.

Even though they are still accepting applications for the beta, they have already started sending Beta winner emails. These emails are not sent all in one go, so just wait until yours arrives. They have 100,000 emails to send out and they don’t want all of you downloading the client at the same time so the emails will be sent out in bursts.

When you receive the email, you can go ahead and log in.

Each ARKS Ship is a server. It appears there are 10 servers now.

One of the newest things added into the settings area is Video Codecs, including Microsoft Video 1, Matrox MPEG2 I-Frame HD, etc.

Beta Test Starts:

• EST: Thursday, April 19th, @ 3:00AM
• CST: Thursday, April 19th, @ 2:00AM
• MST: Thursday, April 19th, @ 1:00AM
• PST: Thursday, April 19th, @ 12:00AM
• UK: Thursday, April 19th, @ 8:00AM

 Downloading the client

Click the BIG RED BUTTON, and again on the next page.

「サーバーのHTTPレスポンスが正しくありません[12152]」????? HTTP ?????????????? [12152] Error

• If you get an HTTP Response error, please change the destination folder of the download to the Desktop instead of Program Files.
• Your security software may be blocking access to the download server.

MORE FUN!

The third form of currency in the game is FUN points, whether you are a paying user or not, all players can gain FUN points through the following methods.

All Players Can Acquire Fun Points by:

• Logging into the game
• (If you log in each consecutive day, you could get bonus points. For example, you can log in Wed, Thur, Fri to get bonus points, instead of Wed, then Friday.)
• Sending and Receiving Good Jobs (The amount of FUN you can get in a day is limited)
• When you summon a “Friend Partner” and clear the quest, or someone summons your character.
• Game Ranking rewards

You also get a small percentage of FUN points when you spend Arks Cash. Isn’t it fun?

Good Job is like Facebook’s “like” button. You can say “Good Job” to  any player for any situation. When you say Good Job, you also get FUN points.

In the Character Menu for other players click on “Good Job“

You can also attach a comment, like saying “Thank you very much.” You can also send Good Jobs to players in your “Communication History” like those you partied with before. You could also send it to players who used your character as a Friend Partner.

When you use FUN Points you can spend them on a FREE Gacha called FUN Scratch.

FUN Scratch includes

• Room Items
• Music Disks ( for use in My Room’s  Jukebox to change the BGM)
• Tickets for Accessories and hairstyles
• Special Devices for Mags
• Tickets for additional lobby actions
• My Room 3 day usage
• Limited Time Effect Items (These are not as powerful as AC versions)
• Boost Items (These are not as powerful as AC versions)
• Grinder and Synthesizer

Items you obtained in Fun Scratch can be  given to other players, (he didn’t specifically state, but I’m assuming trading/player shops).

So you saw in the Character Creation demo you had a limited amount of clothes and hairstyles to choose from. But with Arks Cash you can enjoy even more varieties, and more will be added into the game through updates. If you play the Closed Beta you can get more color variations of  clothes. If you look at some of the NPCs in the lobby, you could see some of the future costumes that will eventually come out.

Now certainly you’ve been making many characters in the Demo, but in the main game, you will have one character. You must purchase the right to make additional characters through Arks Cash. (You can try this out in the Closed Beta since Arks Cash is distributed.) For all ships, you can have a total of 12 characters.

[via pso2blog]

Character Creation Contest!

Character Creation Contest!

• Entry: 4.11.2012 through 4.20.2012
• Voting: 4.27.2012 through 5.7.2012
• Winner: 5.11.2012
• Website: PSO2Chara

Grand Prize: Your Character in the Official Game!

Producer Prize: Your Character 3D printed (like WoW)

Arks Prize: Your character drawn by PSO2′s designer.

Rappy Prize: Known locally as the Chogokin Racaseal

• Enter a nickname
• Email Address
• Comments about your character
• Whole body screenshot
• Face closeup screenshot
• Character Creation Game Data

One entry per person, please finalize your character before submitting. You must make an original character, you can not submit a character that would infringe others copyrights. Winners will be contacted through email.

Dengeki Playstation Interview

Shougai posted a new interview about Arks Cash, Playstation Vita, and the Update plans, and Shougai posted another interview with 4gamer.

Arks Cash and FUN Gacha!

• Players can rent My Rooms for 30 days.
• Two kinds of Arks Scratch, one that has costumes, and the other has costumes and consumption items.
• There’s also a free Gacha called FUN Scratch, that uses FUN points.
• You can get things like room items and other items.
• You can collect FUN points through player evaluations.
• Like for example 1 person can say “Good Job” through a menu to someone else and that will increase both of the players’ Fun points.
• ((It is unknown currently what restrictions they have on player evaluations, like once a day or one time per person?))
• You can also collect Fun points by doing quests with Friend Partners.
• *Friend Partners are NPC AI’s of your friends characters*
• You can also get points by purchasing Arks Cash

Rental Features and Packs

• My Room, My Shop, Extra Storage, etc  can be rented for 30 days.
• You can purchase a “premium” pack.
• Features that you can rent will be included in this premium pack as well as other features like trade functions .
• Some of the items in this pack will apply to all your characters on your account.
• (This would make it appear like monthly charges, similarly how PSU premium course has you pay for My Room access.)

Buyable Features

• Additional Characters
• Hold more item in the item pack.
• An additional Skill Tree

Account

• You get 1 character per account, when you want additional characters, you must use Arks Cash to purchase them. You can have up to 12 characters on one account.
• He is considering allowing characters to move across ships (servers) in the distant future, but for now your characters are tethered to the one ship they were created in.

Updates

• Sakai plans to update the game every 3 to 4 weeks with maps, system updates, scratch contents, etc,
• Plans to add new classes later
• The level cap once the game comes out would be around level 40. This cap will increase as the game progresses.
• Initially, players can choose to play up to Hard difficulty, but they plan to have several types of difficulties. You can unlock these difficulties once you meet a certain condition.
• After the game comes out they plan to add super huge bosses in multi-parties.
• These bosses are much bigger than normal bosses, and you can have 12 players fight it.
• They plan to start off with 3 planets.

Matter Board

• As you fill up the Matter Board, new story quests will appear. 
• Depending on the situation, when you replay a story quest, different events may occur.
• Some events can happen outside of story quests.
• Like if the Matter board asks you to collect certain items, you can do so with friends, and an event could occur.

Playstation Vita

• He’s still investigating this, but for now he thinks the Vita version should use the onscreen keyboard.
• He will probably have the beta test for PSO2 Vita start sometime during the fall through winter, but nothing is definite yet
• He’s thinking about the possibility of a separate offline title.

Beta

• After the Closed Beta is over, the data is reset.
• They plan to have you transfer your Open Beta Data to the official game when it starts.

Did you guys enjoy creating your characters, especially now that you can actually read it. Well this post dives a little bit on the technical side of the benchmarking. If you are going to purchase a laptop or desktop for PSO2, this post should come as a handy guide on which graphic cards or computers you should purchase. Before purchasing always check the graphics card to see how it stacks up against others.

Before you read on, don’t get too hung up on your scores. If you saw that you ran 30fps on the setting you were on, then you can still play the game well.

4gamer performed their own benchmark test on their own computers. The results of their tests are based on PSO2 Benchmark Scoring System as well as Fraps frames per second logs. The post below is a quick summary of their results. Their post looks into whether the Graphics Cards or Processor (CPU) affects the benchmark score.

They performed these tests on full screen (1920 x 1080), default graphical level 3, shaders on standard, with high resolution textures.

Nvidia Cards are Green / ATI Radeon Cards are Red

Based on the settings described above, the Nvidia GTX 560 TI outperformed all the cards. The Nvidia GTX 560 and ATI Radeon 6870 came in second.

What’s interesting is how the ATI Radeon HD 7770 outperformed the Nvidia 550 GTX Ti, considering both are 1 step down from their powerful counterparts. (As pointed out in comments, Radeon 7000 is a newer series which is why it outperformed the older Nvidia 500)

The next graph shows the framerates. It looks as if the framerates match up with the benchmark scores.

Using Fraps, they mapped out the average and lowest frame rate recorded. The GPUs with benchmark scores above 5000 have an average frame rate of more than 80 fps.  The GPUs that scored 3000; Nvidia GTX 550 Ti,  Radeon HD 7750, and Radeon HD 6770, all averaged more than 60 fps. (The A8-3870K is kind of unique, it’s an APU where the graphics card is embedded within the processor. This processor has a ATI Radeon 6550D, so the fps is slightly better than Radeon 6450. We’re not quite sure why the FPS says 13.7, it could possibly be a typo since the bar is closer to 28.)

The next chart looks at if the processors made an impact over the benchmark scores. Four different processors were tested using the GTX 560 TI graphics card.

The four processors tested were Intel’s Sandybridge processors Core i7 and Core i3 (with hyperthreading on and off), a 2008 Core 2 Duo E8600, and AMD APU A8-3870K. The Core i3 processor has 2 cores, with Hyperthreading enabled, it turns these 2 cores into 4 virtual cores. Even so, there were hardly any differences with the scores, though the older Core 2 Duo score fell a bit.

For the Sandybridge CPUs,  the number of cores didn’t make a huge impact on framerates. The older Core 2 Duo E8600 still had a reasonable framerate.

With the Nvidia 560 TI Graphics card, you can see that the Shadow Quality has made an impact on the frame rates.

The shadow quality seems to affect the scenery more than the characters themselves. You can see a profound effect on how buildings are highlighted. The benchmark score also seems to have taken a nosedive with shadows at 5.