Maplers have been asking for an "Old School" server for quite some time now. Runescape started Old School Runescape WoW is going to have WoW Classic Is now the time for Nexon to release an old version of MapleStory?
I mean, nostralius (the pserv this project was based on) was popular but I really don't know how big an official classic server will be. Being that its technical roots were a free to play version and the best of its kind. For wow this is huge because pretty much all the vanilla content is either pointless (the raids are solo adventures to get pets to battle with and old mounts and that's it) or gone (the entirety of the cataclysm revamp, the fact it's beyond the AQ gate opening) How much real clamor is in an old school ms? I'm not really wanting to go back to a time where it takes longer to level in third job than it currently does for me to level in fifth and an era where bloodbuilding was a necessity to survive bosses. Unless it makes the game not run like garbage like the live version does, then I'll probably play it in a heartbeat. It probably doesn't help both "classic" servers are periods of time where a class/spec I liked were trash for the most part. I wasn't part of wow casinofury enhance shaman and have no real desire for it.
I wonder how many people would really play old school ms after having experienced GMS now . Frankly , it was such a chore to reach even level 30 , let alone 3rd job. Old MS was awesome despite all this only because of the pqs and community. So unless somehow nexon can increase playerbase I dont know how good it would be
Kinda strange, if this were announced back in MoP, I would've been completely against it. But given the amount of questionable design choices Blizzard has been making with their recent expansions, hearing this announcement made me really excited. I look forward to it. That said, I have no desire to return to Pre-BB MS.
People will play an oldschool server purely as a break from current-version servers. No one is going to actually devote their entire playtime to an oldschool server. I mean, the two most likely suspects aside anyway. To put it plainly, old maple was shit. The only reason it's looked back on so fondly is because the community was more tightly-knit than it is now. You needed to party with other people to make any sort of progress faster than a slow crawl. But beyond that, it was garbo.
Closely knit + having a sense of achievement from leveling + not having to pay $$ to get good gear are what make it for me. Hitting level 200 nowadays isn't even a chore. Sure, it might take you a few months to get to 250 from there, but the lack of content for you to work towards makes it a non-point for me. Leveling to be able to go to new areas and fight new monsters is more fun. I miss my suicide runs to the dead mines to see my friends when i was level 50.
Do you consider Arcane River a lack of content to work towards? Each area has it's own questline that culminates in access to the entire zone along with some type of available repeating daily quest. It's reminiscent of the times when people were sectioned off in different areas based on their level. While 1-200 nowadays is essentially 1-30 before, 200-250 is eerily similar to what 30-120 felt like back then. Lucid & Hungry Muto PQ having two difficulties and still requiring high Arcane Force was a step in the right direction pushing players towards party play again. Arcane Force requirements for zones forces you to put the time/damage in much like before because you can't simply skip over Arcane Force like you can the majority of the other content in the game.
I think one of the answers, is the lack of emphasis on party play because there arent any high hp mobs where 3+ people mobbing leads to a better exp return than soloing. Granted ogms didn't entirely have this either unless you were one of the immobile classes. Maybe decent nodes and smaller maps with the power creep of fmas were a mistake?
What I used to love about maple was the community like Zelkova mentioned. Sure I may have never reached lvl 50, but I still enjoyed making friends and doing PQ with parties. From personal experience, in my opinion, leveling from 1-200 is extremely unsatisfying, purely because there is nearly 0 community interaction. By the time I did reach 200, I had enough, knowing there was 50 more levels of mind numbing grinding. People may suggest joining guilds, but what good does joining guilds do when you aren't high level enough or have the proper range to help with guild bossing. That being said, my opinion may be biased due to me having a negative experience from my 1-200 jouney, so take what i say with a pinch of salt.
I think that's more an issue of the changing of the times as well. Back when ogms was more of a thing, you really didn't have that many accessible ways to talk to people over the internet. You basically joined an mmorpg to try and make friends. Finding a community hub for a game was comparatively a lot harder and generally the ones you did find were a niche community. Nowadays, with things like discord and reddit, the barrier of socializing is lower, and the need to use in game means to find friends is even less.
They really don't. They just go REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE PAY-TO-WIN REEEEEEEEEEEE CUBES REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE OLD MAPLE REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE COMMUNITY REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE NO PAY-TO-WIN REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Most, if not all, of them fail to remember that potential, and summarily cubes, were added before big bang hit. It might not have been too long before it, but the fact remains that big bang did not add potential and cubes. If you want to pitch a bitch about updates ruining the game, a better starting point would be unleashed, since that's where the damage cap and boss HP began to rise while the timer became almost cemented-in at 30 minutes. It's still happening now, but exponentially worse than unleashed ever was due to limitless increasing the cap from 50m all the way up to 10b. Boss HP just continues to go higher and higher and higher while retaining the same 30 minute time limit through and through.
I played since 2006 never made it past level 50 in ye olden days. Fast forward to reboot, I started playing when reboot came out, I ended up taking on cRA bosses in a 6man party and it was the most fun I ever had in MS, I learned there, that all the casuals who complain that bosses are too hard, or that the game is barren are just really not trying enough. But its super cyclic in the senses that the game feels unrewarding to party, so people dont, which leads to more people being off solo instead of looking to party for bosses or grind, which makes the game FEEL more dead, which in term makes more people turn to solo etc etc etc. Group bossing in this game is extremely rewarding, you can kill bosses much sooner and with much less gear if you are able to find 5 other bodies with similar range to you. But these days most people just solo everything and if they cant, they just brute force it with grind or cash which is really unfortunate. tl;dr it isnt really the game that is doing badly community/partyplay wise, but more so that people only wish to play what is most efficient which in most cases is solo. You have to be careful and communicate in bossing groups in terms of drop/profits etc and make it fair, which is alot of hassle and most people generally avoid. I play alot of mmos, and for some reason there is a trend of majority of people despite playing an online game, of not wanting to party and rather brute force it through solo, be it for honor, shy, etc. If more people WANTED to group boss and party play, then there would be parties.
Sadly in maple most efficient tactics wins, and due to power creep and map design this mostly encourages soloing the content or at most, 2 person. Anything more than that is usually a carry with the exception of end game bosses. Party quests used to be better for leveling not that long ago, namely romeo and juilet pq for alts, but they nerfed the exp of that so now everyone just goes on their merry way. The only party grouping map I really ever see are some of the second job-level areas and drakes. This is also compounded possibly by leveling from 1-200 not taking that long, with the curve really only slowing down to the old ms era around 21x. At that point the maps are small enough and character abilities usually cover entire maps so a party of anything more than a person using kishin is rare. As well decent nodes and some potentials/nebs made it so you don't even need to seek players out for some QoL buffs like you may have in the old days for haste/hyper body/holy symbol. For something like CRA, where people may ask why don't you struggle through it, it's seen as a waste of money/meso when players can just get a carry to gear that is actually worth investing that kind of effort into. Though a lot of OGMS is seen through rose tinted glasses, because I remember 100 more "CC plz"s instead of people trying to party and socialize on those maps. Also despite the crud it gets nowadays hacking still isnt as bad as it was back then.
Yeah i remember the rage people would have if you wanted to share maps. I much perfer new maple. This is another reason being a bishop is nice, people let you come play with them more often. Thats also a huge issue is the maps, god new maps these days are small and just bad.
Im thinking more on it and i may know where people are coming from with og mmorpg server requests. This opinion wont cover 100% of either games vanilla end game but im trying to hash out what the appeal might e On one hand, general training was harder, but individual responsibility would be lower in an end game group/raid setting, which allowed people to be possibly below average and a dilution of impact of people failing certain mechanics. So in a way people were a lot less strict to each other. Im really only picturing wow's molten core/bwl and ogms's zak and ht with this, where mechanics were basically simple and it was rather easier to cheese it. I think a lot of new age frustration with raiding is the skill level expected from each single player to play nearly perfectly and work as a group and having a massive weight of worry about messing up. A lot of people want to go back to an era where, in a way, it was a bit more casual aside from the time investment to get in. Player psychology is weird, i prefer more technical fights but i can see the appeal to something like old school raid fight
I'm super hyped for classic servers. Runescape did this, and the classic server did better then expected. I imagine a similar situation with vanilla wow :D.