Older players may remember that, in the past, Maplestory had a "loading screen" that showed a hopping orange mushroom.
You'd click "Play" and then watch (or not) the Wizet/Nexon logos and that mushroom for a while, and then you'd get the login screen (if GameLauncher) or world select (if web launch).
As the game grew bigger and heavier, the loading time became longer. Sometimes that mushroom would be bouncing for five or even ten minutes before we could start playing.
So Nexon changed the loading process. The game would only load the bare minimum it needed in order to display the world/channel select and character select, and keep loading more in the background while the user typed and clicked. Sometimes the users are still faster and have to wait after entering the PIC, but sometimes not. Over all, the client startup process got faster, or at least felt that way. The time from clicking "Play" to being able to move your character around got shorter.
For a while all was well.
But V/Unlimited broke something.
Launching the game became a challenging boss fight in its own right.
If you just click "Play" and then afk, you will invariably die (come back to a crashed client).
You must carefully monitor the beast's behavior, clicking the right spot at just the right time, if you want to progress to the next stage. The slightest misstep and you're dead, if not right at that moment then later, after you've clicked and typed a bit more.
It shouldn't be like that. It's absurd. I can't remember the last time I used any kind of program or app, and it wouldn't even launch without constant handholding. Crashing while running, sure, that happens. Bugs and glitches, can't avoid them. But launch? A program that crashes before the user even input anything? While it's still in the perfectly predictable and reproducible start-up phase? No, that should not happen to anything that is out of Alpha testing.
And yet, the Global Maplestory client has been this way for two months now, and it appears that Nexon isn't even trying to do anything about it.
So, after this incredibly long-winded preface, I get to my suggestion: Go back to foreground loading. Bring that jumping mushroom back. Don't try to load "just what you need" out of sequence or in the background, because it obviously doesn't work anymore, and you equally obviously don't know how to fix it. I'd much rather press "play" and then go make a cup of tea while the mushroom toils, than have to fight the Launch boss every time I want to play the game.
(But oh, do please make the client not crash every time we change character... or channel... I'd probably get caffeine poisoning if I got a cup of tea every time it did that).
Comments
I don't remember it having a timeout at all. It could take a long time, especially on older and weaker computers, but I don't remember a timeout as such. Even if there was one, it could be increased if necessary. It certainly didn't affect anywhere near as many players as are having launch issues now.
at least I have some other sources
I remember it also started getting worse before the change to the new loading protocol
I guess you're right. I wonder why I didn't remember anything beyond the annoyance of waiting 5-10 minutes for it.
Oh well, guess that's not a solution, then.
Back to the drawing board.
Personally, I think that the new loading method is way better than the old one with the jumping mushroom.
It used to take my old computer about 10-15 minutes to get past the jumping orange mushroom, if the game just didn't crash on me. Plus there was the time in which a bunch of players including myself couldn't even get past the "mushroom of death" for several days due to a glitch that affected some players.
I don't remember which patch it was that this glitch happened, but those affected players were left in the dark for quite some time before the issue was addressed, if memory serves me correctly..
It was due to this issue that I created a meme of the jumping orange mushroom with a troll face, edited over the usual happy face the mushroom typically has.
But, yes the new loading system does load up the game a lot faster than the old system since it doesn't try to load up all of the game files all at once. However, the game doesn't load up as fast as it used to ever since the split server screen, that allows the player to choose between the European server and the usual servers was added.
Personally, I think that if nexon added Luna in the same list as the other servers, got rid of Europe/Global server select screen, and added a black message that informs the player of the latency issues for playing on the server depending on location, if the player hovers over the server, akin to how EL Nido informs the player that they are playing a EST server, if the player hovers over the server name.
By doing so, it would probably help reduce the latency issues that the game currently has abit since it wouldn't have to load up another screen before, loading up the actual game.
oh, no doubt the new loading system is better than the previous one, the issue is that it now has bugs that make it harder to even get into the server selection which is what this thread is mostly about. all nexon would have to do is make it work like it did previously, before whatever they changed to make logging in a tedious job