Phantasy Star Online 2 is one of my favorite games of all time, I've played it for hundreds of hours, if not a full thousand when taking the Japanese servers I started on into account. I want to make this clear here, though I have talked about my love for PSO2 elsewhere (See YouTube Video that I'll have at the bottom). I was a huge hype man for New Genesis. I actually bought a better PC in preparation for its release. So, needless to say, when the game launched in its frankly awful state, I was crestfallen, to say the least. I put in my hours, got to level 20, and then stopped playing.
That's not the end of the story, of course. I came back the day the Retem update dropped. I had a lot of fun with it, but again, I played through the story, hit max level, and then a couple days later I stopped playing. I've been wondering why I play this game like this for a little while now, because I certainly didn't play the base game like that, although, I also have never reached max level in base PSO2, that EXP curve is ridiculous. But I always had fun with base PSO2, whether I was really "getting anywhere" or not, and I feel like I've come to some thought on the cause(s).
This is something of the Elephant in the room. in Base PSO2, it wasn't all that difficult to find useful weapons and units as you levelled naturally. Best-in-Slot would be a treasure hunt, of course, it is an MMO, but there were reasonably easy-to-get, somewhat powerful weapons littered throughout. NGS has something of an obsession with rarity for weapons. Hell, maybe this existed in base as well, but I never noticed because weapons were tied to progression. The move from levels as the main form of progress for difficulties to a sort of equipment "power level" system has made this tedium more apparent. in Base PSO2, once you hit level 20, most of the game is open to you in some form. New Genesis, on the other hand, by using ever escalating power levels that mostly focus on gear and equipment, draws a lot of attention to the fact that drop rates are awful, and they have been probably since Kvaris, I think. When a new, exciting Emergency Quest drops, you have to gear up a pretty crazy amount (speaking as someone who generally plays when story chapters drop) to even try. And then, because max level is achieved pretty quickly, and the story finished even sooner, that means all there is to do is to try to get better gear.
I've done this twice, first during the time around launch, before Retem came out. I spent hours on mount Magnus where I had been led to believe there would be better wands, and I never got it. The second time was the Akroselio series, which uses materials to upgrade previous weapons, I thought to myself "oh, that's pretty generous, actually, I'll actually try to gear up with that" before the math of how long it took to get those materials started to weigh on me. I played consistently for two weeks and didn't get close to an Akroselio Wand. I barely managed to get a Duo Selio wand before I gave up.
The sort of band-aid on this issue in NGS is that every event shop has what has become known as "welfare weapons". These are weapons (and units) that can usually get you into just about any of the current content, but they usually have budget augments and some weird augment that only works for the seasonal event. I have been known to use these because, well, it's good enough.
All that doesn't even get into the real tedium that is augments. It is... so incredibly hard to find good augments on their own. To this day, new content will often have enemies drop early game augments. So what do you do? You have to trade the augment capsules up to form better augments, through several stages, because you can't just make a Technique 1 into a Technique 4, you have to go through 2 and 3, at a ratio of 10:1 per level you go up, so for 10 of a level 4 capsule that you only have the level 1 of, you would need 40 of that capsule, and that doesn't even get into the advanced capsules that require very specific other capsules from that "series" and you only have so much inventory space unless you buy more with real money. And this problem only gets worse as they keep adding new augments.
Now, this was also a problem in base PSO2, but this goes hand in hand with the previous issue. There is too much shit being thrown at the player all the time in this game. From all the augments, to the special currencies that used to relevant, aren't anymore, but still drop for... reasons (Again, I know this was in Base PSO2, I don't think it was good there either). Inventory management in this game leads to either opening up wikis to understand what you actually need to keep, of just saying "fuck it" and tossing anything you aren't 100% certain you need (This is how I deal with augment capsules nowadays).
On some level I feel like this is done on purpose, as a sort of way to get people to buy inventory expansions or the rental storages, but on another I feel like its some sort of incompetence on the dev team's part. It's a sort of "Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity" situation. The result, either way, is that a newer player to the game or someone who hasn't played in a good bit is going to be overwhelmed, and then, by the time I've done one exciting thing, the resulting inventory management tires me out and I usually cut my play session there.
From the way I always talk about New Genesis, it's easy to think that I hate the game, but I really don't. After a month or two the good memories of the game outweigh the tedium. The game is fun, I've made a few friends in it, but I just... can't play it consistently the way I've seen others do. Granted, this is... kinda just the way I play games, I tend to jump around to all sorts of games all the time. I feel a little worse about it with PSO2 because I used to play the base game consistently enough to usurp a sizable alliance... and now that alliance is gone.