gamechanger

To add to this. I'm just f***ing tired of Maplestory events that are huge grindfests, and this one is by far the worst. Even disregarding the v coins, if you are only focused on the diary (which, I might add, is a single event), just take a look at it.

We have to abandon our mains to work towards completion.

We have to kill a cRA boss (which takes at least 10 days to even be able to fight them).

333 Elite mobs need to be killed. When training specifically to kill elites (ie just grinding in a map), I find one every 15-20 min at best. I know there are better ways to "elite hunt", but that isn't typical gameplay. At my rate, it would take 111 hours of just pure grinding to just complete this one task for the V journal. 111 hours, of pure grinding, over a ~30 day event. That is almost 4 hours of grinding each day of the event, to complete a single goddamend task in this journal.

Then, if you even manage to finish that, you are required to go through the 4 theme dungeons, yet again. A lot of players have been through some of these a dozen times or more at this point Nexon, stop forcing us to do them for trackers. They are no longer fun to do! They just aren't.

On top of that, you also have to do all of the blockbusters, including FriendStory. When I can even stay logged in, it takes me an hour to do each chapter in FriendStory. That's 6 hours to finish this one task in the V journal (of which there are what, like 40 tasks to do?). Though I guess I should be thankful that it only takes 6 hours as opposed to the absolutely ludicrous amount of time required to kill 333 elite mobs. Now after all this is done, I will have sunk hundreds of hours into a new character that I don't even want to main, simply because I wasn't allowed to do this event on my main character. This is asinine levels of require grind Nexon. Asinine. And the reward isn't even that great.

Why do you continuously add events like this to the game? The amount of grind required makes them no fun. The only solution is to simply not participate in them. Why do you continuously bring in new events that are so grindheavy and have such a small window of time to complete relative to the work required that people are starting to feel as if they are better off not participating at all? That is horrible event design.

Honestly, I have little to no intention to complete the V Tracker(the asinine grind event you're referencing; and don't misunderstand, I fully agree with you), I'm only grinding to 200 for the maple and reward points we're given along the way.

Also, don't forget the absolute tedium that is Black Heaven being a requirement. That mess took me, first time through on my Shade or Wild Hunter or whatever the hell I used, about six hours over the course of two or three days. Simply for quitting at various points when I got frustrated.


Also! You neglected to mention, in regards to the Chaos Root Abyss boss requirement, how utterly impossible these bosses are for the average player who doesn't have funded friends.

Honestly I started the event because I like collecting titles, and the reward is a title. But after realizing what was involved I'm pretty much through. I'm almost to the point of just flat out quitting. I've been playing GW2 for over a year now. They treat their players with respect. There is regular (@OneLetter - Read daily) communication between the company and the players, and its not just 1 or 2 people, the devs routines come out to comment in threads on their forums and on Reddit. They take player feedback and adjust future updates based on what the players have said they do and don't like. But, most importantly, their events are not huge grindfests. You don't have to spend hundreds of hours to obtain the holiday event rewards. You can spend < 5 hours in the game and get 90%+ of the holiday rewards if you work for them. That is just not possible in Maplestory due to how your events are designed.

I realize that no one will care if I do end up quitting. But I've been a devoted player for over 10 years, accused oftentimes of being a whiteknight for Nexon and even once accused of being a secret Nexon employee on the old forums due to how much I defended you guys. I'm just sad that it was all a waste of time on my part.

To add to this. I'm just f***ing tired of Maplestory events that are huge grindfests, and this one is by far the worst. Even disregarding the v coins, if you are only focused on the diary (which, I might add, is a single event), just take a look at it.

We have to abandon our mains to work towards completion.

We have to kill a cRA boss (which takes at least 10 days to even be able to fight them).

333 Elite mobs need to be killed. When training specifically to kill elites (ie just grinding in a map), I find one every 15-20 min at best. I know there are better ways to "elite hunt", but that isn't typical gameplay. At my rate, it would take 111 hours of just pure grinding to just complete this one task for the V journal. 111 hours, of pure grinding, over a ~30 day event. That is almost 4 hours of grinding each day of the event, to complete a single goddamend task in this journal.

Then, if you even manage to finish that, you are required to go through the 4 theme dungeons, yet again. A lot of players have been through some of these a dozen times or more at this point Nexon, stop forcing us to do them for trackers. They are no longer fun to do! They just aren't.

On top of that, you also have to do all of the blockbusters, including FriendStory. When I can even stay logged in, it takes me an hour to do each chapter in FriendStory. That's 6 hours to finish this one task in the V journal (of which there are what, like 40 tasks to do?). Though I guess I should be thankful that it only takes 6 hours as opposed to the absolutely ludicrous amount of time required to kill 333 elite mobs. Now after all this is done, I will have sunk hundreds of hours into a new character that I don't even want to main, simply because I wasn't allowed to do this event on my main character. This is asinine levels of require grind Nexon. Asinine. And the reward isn't even that great.

Why do you continuously add events like this to the game? The amount of grind required makes them no fun. The only solution is to simply not participate in them. Why do you continuously bring in new events that are so grindheavy and have such a small window of time to complete relative to the work required that people are starting to feel as if they are better off not participating at all? That is horrible event design.

Maybe related to this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Maplestory/comments/5gocuh/lost_motivation_to_continue_playing_thanks_nexon/

Either way if Nexon got rid of him, it's the worse decision they could do...

That website has a lot of irrelevant illegal activity that Nexon(NA) doesn't want any part in with. So in other terms he overstepped his duties, but in all honesty it was a trust issue. "You can't spread our devs info onto any 3rd party site", I highly doubt he would ever spill devs codes to 3rd party sites.

We know who's paranoid.

That is absolutely ridiculous.

r/maplestory is a fansite (for lack of a better term) that devs should be actively frequenting and using to communicate with their playerbase. I can think of numerous games ( League of Legends, Overwatch, Planetside 2, and many more) where devs ( or at the very least a CM) use reddit as much ( if not more often) than their own game's forum. I can't even fathom how you can possibly think the maplestory subreddit is a place of 'irrelevant illegal activity'.

If Nexon can't trust its own employees when they're doing an outstanding job, then there's something really rotten up the chain.

Also, I don't think you really understand how much information a CM has access too. A CM doesn't do any software development ( and I have a hunch that neither does anyone at Nexon NA), so they wouldn't have any 'code to spill' regardless. Again, I believe that if Nexon can't trust its own employees, then the problem is in their management.

r/maplestory is an incredibly toxic community. One of the absolute worst I have ever seen, Maple related or otherwise. Its no wonder the devs stay so far away from it. I would too if I ran a game and had a community like that that wanted to talk to me

Honestly you should've known the nerf to the santa boxes was coming, I don't understand why it wasn't capped at 30 coins though.

What I'm more upset about is that this happens with literally almost every coin shop we get. There is always a source of coins that Nexon didn't even pause to think about, so its uncapped. Allowing a few people with no life to gather enough coins to buy out the shop on what is actually an exploit (considering it is always, always patched), while then turning around and saying "Nope, f**k the rest of you, you have to grind your life out to get as many coins over the next few weeks that these guys got in a few hours."

No rollbacks ever come anymore to stop like this. No measures are ever taken beforehand to ensure it doesn't happen again and again and again. Never. Nexon doesn't seem to actually care. If they did we wouldn't face this problem with every single coin shop. If they did we would be getting rollbacks when it did happen so that no one would get an unfair advantage in this game due to having been able to devote dozens of hours to farming coins before whatever limit was forgotten about is implemented in a hotfix.

They hired him specifically so the players would feel he's "one of them", and they let him keep clowning and meme'ing throughout

To me, that's what makes a good Community Manager.
Someone that is able to joke around with the players while still able to be serious when comes the time.
The fact that Michael was so involved with the players and how he went out of his way to help while still being super friendly to all of us made me like him.
The Community Manager should be able to make friends with players but still keep a professional distance from them, especially if they're only players and not Volunteers (but that's still to their own discretion. Obviously no company talk with players only). They should be able to connect with the players. Since Michael has actually played the game before, he was in a position where he knows how frustrating things can be, and I feel like that's why he tried to go out of his way to help more than he was supposed to.
I feel that because of how Michael was towards the players, it made us feel like we were heard, understood, and, to me, that's how a Community Manager should be.

It makes them look human.

This is exactly what a CM is supposed to do. He did his job excellently, whether you liked him or not. He interacted with the community, managed it, and sent our requests/feedback back to Nexon. A lot of players seem to fundamentally misunderstand what a CM does, as evidenced by every single maintenance where someone would inevitably blame Michael for the extensions and problems with patching. Or blame him for the lag. Or call on Michael to fix it, and get pissed off when he doesn't do anything, because there isn't anything he can do about it.

While I did like @Artasi too, he didn't do much managing of the community after the first few months. Michael was the first person we've had in quite a while that was a true CM imo, and its very sad that he was let go