Hi all, I’d like to address some of the recent topics that have been brought up by our community following last week’s v190 Nova: Liberation of Cadena update. Recently, there has been a large concern in the community about players being falsely banned when playing the game normally. This concern has been exacerbated this past week with several players submitting ban appeal tickets and posting on social media about their bans. First of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that we are aware our banning policies and methods may have caused legitimate players to be unjustly banned in the past. For those players who are inadvertently banned, we do our best to correct the situation as quickly as we can. As some of you may know, we update our detections and methods constantly to adapt to the various ways players are exploiting, hacking, or using third-party programs while playing MapleStory. Following any banning policy or method changes, we closely monitor and investigate ban appeal tickets to look for any bans that may have been made in error. This has been the case with the recent increase in discussions and ban appeals we saw starting last week. We have looked at the data, the type of activity being monitored, and have discussed the nature of these bans with multiple internal groups over the past few days. After our analysis, we have determined that the recent bans were indeed the correct course of action. These bans were the result of the previously mentioned ongoing improvements that we instill in our methods to detect various activities that violate our Terms of Service. If anyone still feels strongly that they are being banned unjustly, we encourage you to send in a support ticket with as much information as possible so that we can continue to look into your case more closely. We would also like to address the concerns about recent issue fixes and bossing changes we made, that reduced the amount of options players previously had to obtain mesos. We are fully aware that Reboot players are particularly upset that this change happened suddenly and without consideration of how it affects the player behavior in Reboot world and we apologize that these changes were not communicated well to our players. Initially, our intent with fixing these issues and making changes to the boss rewards was to improve the overall balance and health of the game, by discouraging botters and farmers from further abusing the economy. However, we understand that more work is needed to ensure that the impact to legitimate players is less severe. We have seen the constructive discussions the players have been having regarding this and have also been discussing these issues and concerns with our internal teams. In the short term we are considering ways to provide more mesos to content rewards to help alleviate this transition. In the long term, we are considering additional meaningful changes we can introduce to the game as a whole to help provide more ways for players to obtain mesos. While we understand that swift action is often desired - and sometimes that is very much possible - some issues require a more thorough discussion and plan before we begin to roll out significant changes. Please understand that we will continually discuss and improve this situation until we get reach a place our teams and our players are happy with. Lastly, we know that overall there were several other issues and unannounced changes introduced with the v190 update that has negatively impacted your experience. For these issues, we are planning to address them as quickly as we can starting with this week’s maintenance and continuing with our upcoming v191 Nova: Winter Bard update next week. The full list of fixes for these maintenances will be announced as we confirm them, but please check back to get the latest updates regarding these issues. We regret that these topics have overshadowed the other meaningful content we added, changes we introduced, and rewarding events we have lined up for our Nova update. We hope that you continue to enjoy the rest of the content and improvements to MapleStory as they are released, and continue to provide us meaningful feedback about the upcoming updates as they are introduced. Thanks, Dennis "Savage Ace" Bernardo Producer - MapleStory View on the Official Site
Another round of "we wanted to stop botting so instead of keeping byebye going as a honeypot we now have that closed off so they can go everywhere in the game now and be that much harder to track without automated tools and a playerbase that is mostly contained to town maps and a handful of arcane river maps" I'll believe the reboot meso changes when I see them, I hate to spew cynicism to every single post I comment on but I'm getting rather annoyed with the idiotic excuses this company comes up with. They're completely blind. D3 tried to enforce scarcity of the common progression currency and fight botting while keeping the game hard, it didn't work, players don't want to work 10 hours to get a handful of cubes to watch them all fail because gambling to catch up to friends sucks. Not that there's much reason to catch up anyway with solostory how it is. I don't get nexon, you have 40+ classes now, a system to encourage progressing multiple characters, yet you seem to think your endgame is over after one character so you feel a need to drag this shit out to absurd lengths that would make fucking FFXI shudder with your time vampire sadism. I can't wait for arcane river to be over so nexon can get a clean slate and stop being so fucking stupid about progression and actually explore merit-based progression like a sensible MMORPG would rather than half assing it. EDIT: That's not even including spitting in the face of the legits you banned with your hacked together garbage system and GMs that aren't worth the office chairs they sit in (Let's face it they're probably not even humans and it's just some algorithm that spits responses and random names)
I feel like in general alot of game devs have recently lost sight of the idea behind the grind. grinds are good, chasing the carrot is good, cause you get the carrot and are like "yeah I got the carrot fuck the man haha!" But lately every game I play has getting these wide sweeping nerfs that make the grind longer and longer and longer, The carrot gets farther away, and they seem to think that people will just chase the carrot forever, but we become wise to the ways of the man and just dont chase the carrot anymore. people who defend this type of shit generally say "oh this just means its more of an accomplishment when you do get it!" which is total bullshit, anyone who plays rng games or games with long grinds where you grind get a small boost of power then grind again, the highs you get from the power boost are fleeting, and the lows of the long grind are lasting. Honestly they just need to make party play way better so grouping to boss with ur now shit range since you have no mesos isnt just a massive dick slap to your already shit meso income.
The game does need to feel more accomplishing. I trained to 250 and it didn't feel nearly as satisfying as I thought it would. 250 isn't really an "end-game" goal when you can't even hit the amount of Droplets needed for one piece of Arcana equipment in the time that it takes you to grind to max level. I think that by making it harder to reach certain thresholds it does actually feel better when you reach them, but it needs to be in a reasonable amount of time. The grind is simply too much now and all they're doing is prolonging it by nerfing the shit out of everything beneficial without providing any alternatives. The way Nexon is going about it is completely wrong; they can extend progression all they want, but trying to slide the scale backwards only hurts people who haven't reached a certain point. Nerfing drop rate didn't really hurt the people with thousands of nodestones/hundreds of droplets/max level symbols as bad as people without it that could potentially use drop gear to catch up. Supposedly "increasing" their drop rate is bullshit and literally doesn't compare to amount you would get by making or buying your own drop gear. Fixing Nerfing Non-KMS maps makes sense because it was a bug. A long lasting bug that was commonly abused, but it was never intended for those mobs to continue dropping money outside of their level range. The fact that it ever got to a point where it became normal to spend more time playing on a mule than your main character is stupid. Reboot's progression was never designed to be that fast, but I think this just shows us that the real issue is the RNG rate of acquiring certain potential lines or star enhancing tyrants that has caused the exorbitant amount of meso needed. It's further amplified by the fact that you need an insane amount of damage in order to even contribute to some end-game bosses. You could argue that it's needed to 1-shot in Arcana/Morass, but grinding doesn't need to be "absolutely 100% or don't bother" optimal. They at least attempted a non-fix to nerfing drop gear by (wrongfully) suggesting that base drop rate of items would be increased. They haven't bothered to address and adjust cubing rates or enhancement percentages since the mechanics were introduced. Of course they don't though, because they make money from people buying NX for cubes, and cash-shop scrolls (superior shielding warding/returns/whatever else). I have no idea what the concerns are with nerfing boss entries, besides waiting an additional day or two to get something you need. KMS doesn't have the same Boss EXP that we do (it's much lower), but I don't know why we never received that change when we still got this one. On the topic of picking and choosing certain changes, let me bring up the issue with Kanna's Kishin. JMS removed the additional spawn rate & amount from Kishin, it's just a simple skill that does damage while summoned. In GMS, we removed it as well, but that exact same patch we also received the Frenzy Totem, probably one of Nexon's most abhorrant tactics. After the large amount of complaints, Kishin was reverted back to it's previous version. Now every single time we copy-paste some Kanna skill update from JMS, Kishin is "nerfed" again, to what it's meant to be. However, every single time, there's a large uproar and it gets "fixed" again. We all know the root of the problem is the default spawn rate of the mobs, which clearly is able to be increased through some method. It isn't even feasible for Nexon to simply fix the underlying issue anymore by increasing the base spawn rate of the entire game because they make so much money from people buying Marvel Spins/Philosopher Books attempting to obtain a Frenzy Totem. People may think, "Oh p2w doesn't affect Reboot at all!" but it does. It shapes the direction of the game as a whole, and is the reason why Reboot's progression is slower. They want to give you the option of playing the game without being compared to others who do get ahead by paying, but it specifically shows you exactly how you could progress better, and faster, if you were in the normal servers. Player satisfaction isn't a priority to the company developing MapleStory. This is painfully evident to all of us because we see how bad they handle the community. The false bans, horrid customer support, lack of transparency, even the way they've addressed the community in this Maple Memo/Producer's Letter are all examples that make it very apparent. Nexon's priority is looking for ways to make money. Once upon a time this was a real game with humble intents, but the gaming industry has shifted so much to micro-transactions, and we all know Nexon is the king of micro-transactions. Their goal is to have you playing as long as possible while putting you at such a disadvantage that you're tempted to give them money.
I dont actually mind the boss entry limit, I just found it crazy that they actually hurt the income from them when it was low to begin with even comparing to my normal vanilla rates, ffs im a fucking bishop who two hits VJ, and Im still able to make around 30/35m an hour while farming nodes, no kishin, with kishin I could prolly see 60m, my kanna can get around 80m an hour no meso gear at mp3 with suboptimal play(im a lazy ass bitch) previous to the bossing changes I was getting around 50m a day from bosses, I currently get around 35m now and have to fight some harder bosses. So its pretty much like my daily bossing is kinda worth about as much as an hour of gameplay that takes me maybe a combined 20 minutes, Which is kinda lame. I feel like bosses should be the rewarding content in maplestory, you kill mobs to get exp/nodestones and kill bosses for $$$. But I guess nexon feels different in that regard. I am one of the players who simply wont play for too long if the rewards are not obtainable, if you told me "hey if you daily boss for 3 months, you might beable to down CRA" id be like "wow thats not really that bad sure" but instead its more like never with daily bossing. So it begins to get into the territory of why bother. But meh, Guess we just wait and see, I pretty much just afk/do some grinding/bosses currently since its not really worth my time investment to go ham on grinding in ms right now since I agree that playing on a mule is just boring, and would really like to see them reward you spending time at the end game content, even if they doubled AR mesos for most people not lucid tier, it would hardly matter :(
Basically reads the same as arwoo's response to the drop nerf changes. "We understand that you're upset, but we're doing it anyway"
What an absolute load of fucking shit. There is no solution, and of course the letter would undermine and updates and events that the developers brought forth, why? Because IT"S GAME CHANGING. And regarding the bans, go check reddit. There are multiple posts, and even a sticky regarding bans that took place.
This is the main issue for me. I could handle a decent game with a shit customer support, if the game is decent enough from the start then the odds are I wouldn't have to bug them about bugs and stuff in the first place. I can also deal with a low tier game with amazing support as they might change to become better. Maplestory though don't offer anything that I can't just get from literally any other MMO. Only reason I even play Maplestory is that I know the early game decently well and it is an addiction at this point. They won't change to make the game better and the game is already shit from the start. The game in terms of gameplay is flawed from the start, no reason to do quests, barely any reason to do bosses now which was until recently the main reason to play Maplestory (ignoring the fact bosses in terms of gameplay design often suck anyway but opinions) what exactly do a player gain in terms of a hanging carrot from playing Maplestory? Runescape give you skills that slowly unlock options and quests which in turn will unlock even more opinions. There is always something to earn may it be as minor as being able to craft your own willow bow or making a Godsword. FF14 offer multiple classes just like Maplestory but all on a single character so if you want you can focus on a single character but still be rewarded with extras if you try different classes. Like every game I seen had a nice carrot for me to aim for at the end but also a few baby carrots along the way. Maplestory give you new skills at 30, 60, 100, 200 and that is it. Just pure grinding otherwise and even then after the 200th monster the skills animation kinda lose their punch. You can count Maplestory's carrots on one hand. I would love to be able to enjoy leveling on Maplestory but the game offer nothing in content that doesn't feel worst than the baseline of just grinding to lv250. Doing all quests on Maplestory can be seen as a challenge run where on any other game it would be the recommended. Only joy I get out of Maplestory personally (and the main reason I start playing the game pre-BB in the first place) is the neato looking items, monsters and skill animations but after the 1000th kill of the monster, wearing the same item for the 10th hour and using the same skill during all of that time it kinda lose that "wow" feeling. Maplestory doesn't even know what it want out of the players, well beside for them to spend money. I would be a lot more forgiving if the game ran like KMS but in English but GMS have it own issues that just intensify the anger I feel just by playing the damn game. GMS is the only game that feel like the client/company itself is trying to discourage you from even playing the game. Jesus fucking Christ.