I'm curious but when was that? I'm saddened if the community became harsher because I still remember that time where I started on it and people wanted to help to grind TTF (a quest with every bosses in a row) and gave me semi-rares (aka the most common red box weapons) freely as well as Mesetas (like 100.000).
I wish I knew and had PSU back when online was still on for them... I feel like I've missed out but I'm glad I've been on PSO back when it was online on the Dreamcast.
As for when I played Scthack, this was late last year, around the holiday. I got nostalgic but it didn't go well. I did play there eons ago, like real eons ago, and back then it was pretty big and you met a lot of folks, but I didn't see that now. I have been trying to get two friends of mine from work to play it with me, but they aren't very gung ho and keep forgetting about it. Ahhh well.
As for PSU, when it launched, it was HUGE. I remember the main deck of the ship being CLOGGED with people. The first month was an absolute blast. The problem started when Sega determined US gamers were blowing through the content too fast and decided to dribble everything out in tiny bits over months/years. A lot of people, myself included, quit after a month since we hit the lv cap of 20 and had all the C rank weapons, which were the best ones at the time. We'd all come back 2-3 months later and barely see anything new added.
This pretty much killed the game, IMO. As the years went by, more and more content was added, and new players who didn't know how sparse and plain vanilla the game was for those first couple of years were blissfully unaware of what the early adopters went through. Especially when the meseta hack hit and mostly everyone's bank was wiped (Not mine, but that's another story)
I'd play off and on with PSU, but it was never the same. All the guys I knew were long gone, and the people on the server were all teens or early 20 somethings, and here I was, a guy in my late 40s. Everyone was speaking in memes/CAPS and spamming emotes nonstop thinking it was funny. (I know it's not bad, just not the way I like to communicate in games) I ended up playing alone or in random groups quietly supporting people and kicking rear. Had the best items in the game and was over level 100. Kinda want to play it again. Maybe I'll install Clementine on my new PC and give it a go.