Hi Maplers, I’d like to provide you all with an update on the current state of MapleStory, including the Reboot stability issues, the recent announcement regarding changes to the ‘Kishin Shoukan’ skill, timelines regarding the release of certain content this year, as well as address a few other topics we know you are concerned about. Lag and Server Instability Issue Over the past several weeks and during several periods over the last year or so, we know that server lag and latency issues have been an ongoing problem in the Reboot world server. First of all, we sincerely apologize that this is still happening and that our teams have not been able to mitigate it yet. As many of you have reported and discussed within the community, although these issues seem to be most severe during our summer and winter updates when there is a larger influx of players, the server lag also persists in between these updates and the severity of the issue seems to be different between Reboot channels. We are continuing to conduct a thorough investigation with several of our teams to see if the issue is caused by certain contents or systems within the code, or our server infrastructure. However, we are not able to find the root cause yet. We highly suspect that the lag is caused by the increased amount of information that has to be handled with the increased number of players. But we are also investigating other potential causes, like if there is particular player behavior that has become more prevalent recently, that may be increasing the amount of information needing to be handled by our systems. We are utilizing various performance monitoring systems at the moment to investigate this issue further. In parallel to this investigation, we are also looking into ways to optimize several aspects of our systems, in an attempt to mitigate the lag as soon as possible. Again, we apologize that it is taking a long time to look into this issue, but I wanted you to know that we will be continuing to look into this issue with a high priority. Although we understand that alleviating the server lag in Reboot is ultimately the goal, we do want to provide you all with a small token of our apology and appreciation for bearing with us as we continue to work on this. We plan to provide all of you with an apology gift that you will be able to claim once per account when you log into the game after our v.230 game update maintenance, currently planned for February 9. The specific contents of this gift for all players are the following: Magnificent Growth Potion Typhoon Growth Potion Extreme Growth Potion (x3) Symbol Selector Coupon (x100) Sherbet Pet (30 Day) Coupon Master Craftsman's Cube (x5) Meister's Cube (x5) Maple Tour VIP Pass Coupon (x30) Kanna’s ‘Kishin Shoukan’ Skill As many of you know, the ‘Kishin Shoukan’ skill has undergone several updates within the past few years, and internally we have been constantly reviewing the effect of these changes and continuing to discuss the future of the skill. In late 2018, I had mentioned that changes to Kanna and Kishin were inevitable due to the stress this skill was causing to our server processing and the unintended ways this very powerful skill was being used by players, which conflicted with the overall direction of the game. The first of many of these changes occurred in 2019 when we reduced the overall effectiveness of the skill’s monster respawn time altering effects to combat illicit use, as well as introduce other ways to encourage players to take advantage of the benefits the skill offered. Then in 2020, we made further adjustments to this skill to reduce the effectiveness even more. Again, we felt it was necessary to make these changes since we saw that our initial changes in 2019 had not really addressed the core issues we wanted to address. Even though this skill had negative ramifications on the game balance and server processing, we took an incremental approach to adjusting ‘Kishin Shoukan’, since the skill was so powerful. We wanted to gather more data after these changes to help determine a course of action that would align with the overall health and direction of the game, while considering all the feedback from players. Behind the scenes, we discussed at length all of the feedback you provided regarding this skill and the changes we made, reviewed data on how this skill was being used and what effect it had on the overall balance and future direction of the game, and what sort of effect these would have on the new player experience. After our recent discussions, the next step we plan to take for this skill is to remove the monster respawn time altering effects of the skill and replace it with a 10% increase to EXP gained. We plan to introduce this change in our summer update later this year. Although this decision has been made considering the health of the future game environment and new player experiences, we will continue to adjust other Kanna skills in order to ease the transition of this change for those who play Kanna as their main character. Upcoming Content Plans One of the many things we failed to communicate to you is clear information about our upcoming content plans. After my last memo, I know there was confusion about the plan to release 64-bit client and Yeti x Pink Bean World content in Global MapleStory. Both of these things needed to be reviewed more carefully, so it was difficult to confirm the schedule at the time. However, today we can confirm that we plan to release both of these in our March update this year. We also see a lot of questions and confusion about when certain content will be released in Global MapleStory and why it may not be released within the timeline that you may be expecting. As you know, Global MapleStory has years' worth of content and specifications that all need to work together smoothly. So that large amount of content needs to be taken into consideration when introducing even small changes and Quality of Life improvements that may seem trivial. We plan our content roadmap based on the timeline we need for several parts of this process. This process includes reviewing how long it will take for us to implement this content to fit within Global MapleStory, discussion within our teams on how this content will interact with other Global MapleStory content, while allowing ourselves time to iterate on the changes if necessary. In order to clear up some confusion about when some content will be released this year, please see below for a tentative high-level timeline for when we are planning to release certain content for Global MapleStory. February 2022 Tower of Oz content and reward improvements Additional Quality of Life improvements and bug fixing for: Guilds Skills Abilities Various Reboot world content Chu Chu Food Festival Event Cube and flame adjustments Increased availability of flames from Elite Monsters and Elite Bosses for all worlds Removal of cubes and flame related items from sources that contributed to less than 1% of overall players’ acquisition methods Adjustments to the set effects of AbsoLab and Arcane Umbra Equipment March 2022 Yeti x Pink Bean World 64-bit Client Summer 2022 Reboot world Intense Power Crystal price increase from 3x to 5x compared to non-Reboot worlds Additional revamps to Boss Rewards Kanna skill adjustments To Be Determined in 2022 (January - July) Reboot world sale of pets that can obtain items in a broader range than other pets Player Housing content Lower Star Force Enhancement costs by 20% Please note that for the sake of brevity with this memo, the above list does not include all the content and events to be released in the future and we also will not be going into too much detail about each item listed above yet. We simply wanted to provide a high-level look at the major content and changes in the near future that you may have questions about. We will provide more details about these items in the future. There are many more discussions and content planned for this year, however we aren’t ready to discuss or talk about them yet at this time. I know it may be frustrating to hear, but we want to do our best to provide you with accurate information so that it doesn’t cause more confusion. As we mentioned in the brief statement last week, we also know there are many more topics you are concerned about, and questions you may have even after reviewing the information mentioned above. We won't be able to answer all of your concerns at once, so please continue to let us know your thoughts and feedback and we will try to address as many of them as we can. Thank you, Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo Senior Producer – MapleStory View on the Official Site