Hi everyone, It's been a while since we last published a Maple Memo, so I apologize for the long gap. Over the past several months, many of our team members (myself included) were busy planning and making preparations for MapleStory Fest, finalizing details for some of our announcements as well as trying to lock down other content coming later this year. But today I’d like to discuss more details about some of the topics that we mentioned during our Q&A session last Saturday. Reboot Meso Drop Rate As part of our internal discussion regarding the Kishin changes and how this will affect Reboot players specifically, we decided to make a change to ease the transition into this new skill. Currently, the Reboot world drop rate for mesos is already higher than that of Non-Reboot worlds; with the v205 update on June 12, we plan to further increase this number so that Reboot worlds will provide a meso drop rate that is 6x higher than Non-Reboot worlds. World Merge During the Q&A session on stage last Saturday at MapleStory Fest, one of the things we briefly mentioned was that we plan to have a world merge this year. The reason we couldn’t reveal any more details until now was because we were still discussing our overall roadmap for this year, and weren’t sure yet when this world merge would take place. A change as large as this takes a considerable amount of work and testing, and we needed to ensure that we could realistically achieve these goals within the year. One of the other considerations we needed to make was that for this world merge, we wanted to not just create bigger alliances, but to essentially merge alliance worlds so that each world will become one single world. For this world merge, we plan to merge the following alliances into two new worlds: New World #1 Broa Khani Galicia Renegades Arcania Zenith El Nido Demethos New World #2 Windia Mardia Yellonde Bellocan Chaos Kradia Nova Due to some of the considerations I will explain below, we plan to increase the max character count from 46 to 50 during the update later this year once we merge the worlds. When the world merge update occurs, we will merge all characters from each world within each alliance into their respective new world. The character selection screen will display up to 50 characters, so for those few players who have a large amount of characters in multiple worlds within the same alliance, they will need to select which of their 50 characters they would like to display initially within the character selection screen. The 50 characters they choose will be displayed in the character selection screen and can be accessed normally, while their excess characters will be temporarily inaccessible. After these players remove some characters from their character selection screen, they will be able to use this newly added menu again in order to select characters again to replace the ones they removed. We plan to offer this menu initially to players so that they can choose which characters to display, however this menu will only be accessible for about 6 months. After this time, these impacted players will still only have access to up to 50 characters within their account, but the excess characters will be added to their character selection screen once these players start removing characters from the 50 that are displayed. As far as a time frame, we plan to make these changes after our summer updates towards the end of August/early September. There are far more details to share regarding how this will affect characters, and we will prepare a guide before then to share more information. However in the meantime, we wanted to let you all know the potential impact to characters and their inventories so that those few players in these alliances who have a large amount of characters can begin consolidating their characters and equipment so they can access them later when the world merge is officially implemented. Lastly, we plan to hold a community poll in the near future so that players can choose the final name of these new worlds from a selection that we provide. Reboot Pets with Buff Skills Recently, we had an issue where pets released as part of the Mysterious Easter Basket sale were released in Reboot world with buff skills. Since we did not intend to release these pets with buff skills in Reboot world, we quickly removed them from the sale and adjusted the pets. We also investigated our past Reboot pet sales through the Surprise Pet Box and discovered that there were pets released in the past who also unintentionally contained pet buff skills. As part of our efforts to be consistent and fair with our resolution of issues, we have decided to remove these pets from Reboot world. We will be offering those players who possess these pets a new 90–day non-buff version of the same pet along, with two Premium Water of Life coupons for each pet that is replaced. These are the pets that will be affected by this removal: Kiwi Puff Berry Puff Mango Puff Craw Adriano Bonkey 14th Street Big Bang Store Updates As you may have seen from our updated patch notes, the start times for Big Bang Store 2 has been adjusted to align with our maintenance next week. Even though Big Bang Store 1 will end on May 21 at 11:59 PM UTC, some items that are available in both stores will still be obtainable when the first Big Bang Store ends and before the second store begins. However, certain items from the Big Bang Store 2 will not be obtainable until after the May 23 maintenance. Return To Adventure Fairy Bros Counts There has been some confusion regarding how the additional Fairy Bros rewards from the Return to Adventure event will function, including questions about when rewards will be given and how the Fairy Bros completion counts will be accumulated. We’ve provided information to clarify the distribution times in our original web post here. We also wanted to clarify that the number of Fairy Bros quests completed will be counted from the start of the May Fairy Bros calendar; so any Fairy Bros quests completed between May 1 and June 10 (when the site closes) will be counted towards the event. Recent Banning Efforts As many people have noticed, we’ve continued our efforts to combat illicit activity in MapleStory, and have internally been seeing positive results. In the past few weeks alone, we have been able to identify and permanently ban over 43,000 accounts. With large numbers like these, we’ve also seen some players mentioning that their specific bans may have been unwarranted. As always, we’re processing all ban appeals through our Customer Support team as quickly and as thoroughly as we can. If any players wish to appeal their specific ban, please submit a ticket here and our Customer Support team will review the appeal. Before I end this memo, I just want to say that it was amazing to meet so many of you at MapleStory Fest last week. It took a lot of planning and preparation to get everything ready for the festival, but our team was so excited to be able to celebrate our 14th Anniversary with our fans. We hope to meet many more of you during these types of events in the future! Thanks, Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo Producer – MapleStory View on the Official Site