LLV

Hello all, my name is Jay. I have played Maplestory for a year during my childhood that I can barely recall at this point and started playing the game again in 2018, setting in NA Reboot server.

Originally, I have promised myself to not make a discussion post like this and keep some serious thoughts to myself. I was not going to bother making another post in this forum given the general negative mentality toward Maplestory forum and the likelihood that any feedback will be heard and be put into actions (and this problem has continued to persist and curtail the game's reputation and overall quality). While I am nowhere near being a veteran player to provide the worst examples, specifics, or evidence of this game's flaws to fully support my frustration, it is more than clear that those who must truly pay attention to this game's condition are out of touch, and as a result, are considered ignorant by the majority of the playerbase.

The purpose of this post is not to call out on specific people that players resent over, but to address concerns that I, or the community, have had over a long time, because the majority of people in my social circle believe that this game is continuously going downhill and the authoritative users and developers are the people who are directly responsible to be aware of the game's situation and communicate with the playerbase. While I do not believe that figures like Anna or Maplestory devs, who people commonly refer with discomfort, grudge, or even insults, are entirely responsible for every problem that is currently plaguing this game, but being a person who has enough interest in this game to put time and value social interactions within, my main concerns are majorly related to how the Maplestory HQ is handling dissatisfaction from the playerbase, how the HQ is making plans to refine, remove, or fix certain contents of this game, and how the HQ majorly impacts what players read from Maple Memo - that has been nothing but a major disappointment at least for months - and the figures I have mentioned are in charge for these.

I doubt it would be any surprise that I would be mentioning the recent change that includes Kishin Shoukan change as someone who plays in Reboot. Let me start by saying that regardless of what the changes have done to the game, I am still giving the benefit of doubt that Anna, devs, and anyone else with big and small influence from GM Maplestory team are holding some degree of interest towards the Kanna's influence on the game (particularly towards Reboot), Beast Tamer's functionality, and Fury / Wild Totem's purpose. However, I believe that the proposition from Nexon from the last memo (http://maplestory.nexon.net/news/58068/maple-memo-v214-update-may-29) is incredibly lacking in the knowledge towards the gameplay and makes no sense whatsoever. When Nexon claimed to "reduce the gap in efficiency between classes in a way that highlights the style of each class", the patch only resulted in immensely disappointing newer players that were looking forward to be adapted to the game, making countless errors with Beast Tamer, making room for doubts about nerfing Beast Tamer instead of revamping, and once again messing with the spawn booster in the game in a way that players decided to mock it as "3 PC meta". Is Nexon making "efforts to make the game balanced and healthy" when Phantom Forest became a place where players originally had to do dailies for an astronomical number of days to make equipment that can even attempt to compete with existing variants? Is it an effort when familiar revamp was clearly proven to not have been tested properly with its functions and impact to the game and only ended up causing collateral damage to everyone who have been enjoying benefits from old familiar system that is nowhere enough to be compensated by a Bebe Box distribution or two? Is it an effort when the latest patch is now referred to as "3 PC meta", a patch that broke Beast Tamer in the worst way, and still made Kanna an undisputed and more mandatory farmer in Reboot?

Another concern I would like to address is the instability of the server and the way patches carry over to GMS every time. What's my point? It is very predictable and simple. The game is constantly laggy, and the boss run has been a very perilous activity of the game because it is more common to have runs where at least one person disconnects. Existing problems with boss runs being extremely laggy (particularly for boss Lucid) now transitioned into almost every component of the game, making the game reach to the point where legion boards get messed up the moment we think we are relieved, logging in essentially turned into a slot machine, and even the owner of the server I moderate made a joke post about uninstalling the game to combat the instability. Our hopes for new updates can only help so much when every maintenance get extended to the point where "DMT" is now more commonly referred to as "Double Maintenance Time". Ghiblee has been posting known issues in Maplestory official Discord server's announcement channel as they have always been with just about every updates involving maintenance, and that alone gives the playerbase enough reasons to question the capability of a person who is responsible to implement changes to the game. Throughout the last few months, I have disconnected from Hard Lucid 9 times, Hard will 7 times, and at least 56 times when I have been leveling up to 255, and all I have left with is "We apologize for the inconvenience". Now, I understand that coding is a challenging job to deal with, and American infrastructure isn't the best thing in the world. However, it is clear that Nexon is never apologizing for an inconvenience when we hardly see any signs of regretful acknowledgement about the game's overall stability and hear about automated answers from players' ticket submission.

I have tried to address what I think are the primary examples to show that this game is going downhill with the ones who are supposed to be responsible for this game's welfare. Once again, I am nowhere near the best person to ever discuss this issue in a proper way and a player to provide the most helpful insights about this game's past, present, and the future, but I believe there are more problems in the game than the ones I have mentioned, but with this game as a whole. It is difficult to run a game that has - or more precisely, once had - everyone's nostalgia, hopes, and expectations, especially during the time where a lot of new or returning players are looking forward to going back to playing mushroom game, but I think so many things could have been gone better.

All in all, it always worries me whenever the discord message or Reddit post for mocking Nexon's current management of the game comes up, because it's always a recycled collection of Nexon hardly ever matching their reasoning and decisions related to gameplay - even if they are sometimes not represented in civil way or may include exaggerations - because for the most part, the satires and insults that happen on regular basis are result of the relevant aspects ot the game that points out to the problematic situation and the people who suffer from the flaws day by day.

I get it is really ****** to blame Anna alone for the flaws of the game that may not have been entirely from her decision, and sometimes people take it too far with being toxic while attempting to express things. She could be obliged to fulfill satisfaction from some people who expect her to combat the problem of the game that lasted during the days SavageAce was here. But I believe this game is getting out of control, and my feeling for this has intensified as I have heard a lot of players having struggles ever logging into the game in the first place. It is time for Anna to be either more considerate about this game or put in more efforts to improve the devs if they ever turn out to be an equivalent or more relevant group to improve this game.

As for the playerbase, I sincerely ask you to be civil with pointing out existing and potential concerns about the Nexon, because I will do my best to be civil as well even if it requires patience beyond the bounds of the capability we imagine. We are all fed up at this point, but the way we prove that we are worthy to be listened to and that we are capable of providing better insights about the game will never be found if we continue to express egregious and defamatory claims in unsightly ways. If none of you will, I will still give a benefit of the doubt that this post will be read. Even if Nexon employees turn out to be completely unreachable, completely ignoring the playerbase, and acting like superiors who consider we aren't worthy, I will at least try - so that when I move on from this game one day, I will know that I have at least tried.

Thank you for reading.

It honestly depends on preference, but in my case, the most important thing I consider for any character is mobility. This means I did not have too much fun raising Luminous or most Mage classes (had to use Mega Burning on Luminous months ago for Link Skill). When raising characters for Legion / Link / other purposes, for the most time, I consider classes with some visible flaws 'forgiveable' if they have mobility and reasonable damage output because at least that meant that I didn't have to see a class having a significantly different mobbing speed depending on the region of the map or other factors.

Bowman branch classes are something that I tend to not play as well. I don't have anything against Bowman in all honesty but I don't remember touching on any class except Mercedes because I was more interested in trying out Night Lord when I was newer. Who knows if Pathfinder release in GMS will change my point of view, but for now, I just see most Bowman as 'eh'. Not something undesirable, but not too appealing in my point of view either.

Lastly, I don't like classes that 'don't reward you for leveling'. What I mean by that is, a group of classes that don't have a particularly good legion effects after leveling and lack Link Skill. Classes like Dual Blade (I used to love this class when I was a child and had 0 idea how Maplestory worked), Pathfinder, and other hard-to-raise classes that have legion effects of stats that my main doesn't care about at all. Raising classes like Luminous, Kinesis, and Kinesis, the former two that have Int legion bonus and the latter that has dex legion bonus, I was okay with them because raising them had merits of Link Skills that I will permanently stick with. But if I look at classes that are painful to mob with (especially in low levels) and have irrelevant legion effects and lacks a useful Link Skill, I stick my tongue and pass on.