So I am writing this out of concern for not just the european community but also for the general attitude of the staff behind this game as of late.
I just feel like the people behind GMS are just not feeling any love for the game. The disconnect between the community, the game and the staff is just sad.
There are some points I would like to hit on in this post that I feel need to be adressed. I will try to keep it short and not drag on about every single thing.
-Lack of communication
-Compensations
-Having a clear vision but not being able to reach it properly
-Neglect
Lack of communication.
Places like reddit and discord are always screaming suggestions and memeing the hek out of yet another thing that nexon won't listen to and we get ignored in most of it.
We have kindof grown to accept and expect this kind of behavior because it just all feels like we are yelling at a stone wall. Being able to laugh about it is just another way to cope with this endless loop. But this is an even bigger concern on the Luna server. Like with the flames neb bug that happened now. We only got told about the maintenance ingame 5 minutes in advance and after maintenance started we didn't get an official notice on the website until half an hour after the maintenance started, but that notice only said that there was a maintenance. There was no ending in sight for it yet, no description on why it was happening and not even the VFMs could tell us what was going on because they didn't get told anything either!
Compensations
The standard answer for any inconvenience seems to be Bebe's color palette of boxes.
They are all filled with the same kind of ingame boosters every single time and honestly, it's outdated.
I will only be hitting on the current one for the sake of keeping it short but this is something that clarifies the disconnect between the nexon staff and the game.
The box contains :
2x EXP Coupon (1hour) (x6)
2x Drop Rate Coupon (1 hour) (x6)
Special Medal of Honor (x5)
Safety Charm (14 day) x7 Coupon
Respawn Token (14 day) x7 Coupon
Trait Boost Potion
Storm Growth Potion
Miracle Circulator (7 day) x5 Coupon
Now this is not going to be some kind of spoiled bratty post saying that we deserve more than this. It's simply to point out that most of these items are just not needed by the bigger and most active portion of the game.
The 2x exp coupons and drop rate coupons have tonnes of replacements of which we have many ways of getting. We get blue 2x coupons thrown at us for not playing the game, for not moving in the game, we can buy them with legion coins, they come from hot week. we just get them so often that alot of them just expire.
The special medal of honor is a nice thought for people that need to work on their abillities, but with the way inner abillity works this will probably just bounce you between 11 str and 30 wdef a bunch of times rather than actually giving you anything good. With a locked legendary and first line this would give you 3~4 resets, but besides that we can buy them. Just like the safety charms and respawn tokens. Sure, unlike honor medals, they are limited with a daily purchase, but they don't expire and we can stack them up because we don't necessarily die daily in an area where you lose exp.
Trait boost potions are a mixed feeling kind of thing. You can have all your traits maxed within a few months of actually playing the game and grinding them out. For anyone that doesn't feel like doing that, you can buy trait boost potions in every event shop ever and have then maxed within a year still. Compensations like these only add up to that to the point where we just burn it on a mule which we won't touch again any time soon.
Stormgrowth potions are a nice gesture too but with almost everyone in the game having atleast their main on or over level 200, this just becomes either another burn item or (like in most cases) if it's untradeable, we wont be able to use it and that too becomes worthless. And if I'm not wrong, you can only use certain storm growth potions once on a character anyway, so eventually they would be completely obsolete.
Miracle circulators are useful for people that havent gotten their legendary abillity or prime line on a max stat yet but aside from that it's just a gamble on whether or not you are going to get one of the tens of thousands of combinations you can get in the right order that you need. But, they are still welcome for most people unlike alot of the other gifts.
All of these items would be useful if you were below level 200 or if you were trying to level a mule, however, most of us lost playtime on our mains and the chance of doing our dailies/get the event coins on time. Even now not only did the maintenance last 24 hours and 30 minutes (but who is counting right? xD) making most people miss 2 days of dailies and ark coins, and ofcourse missing 1 or 2 days of dailies isnt the end of the world, but we also don't actually have a solution for the problem. So what did we really wait 24 hours for? A blockade on our items.... which brings me to the next subject.
Having a clear vision on what to do, but not being able to reach it properly
I am aware that the title is a bit long, but for the lack of being able to find a better wording for it, please bear with me.
Nexon was already aware of the flamed items on Luna yet this still went wrong. And I get it, this can happen with a game built like a 13 year long ongoing game of Jenga. But why wasn't this tested? Last time I checked nexon had QA people. Then again, throwback to the time when we saw nexon staff playing maple, a guy didn't know that blue potions didn't restore PP on kinesis and that it was perfectly possible from the map that he was in, and the same guy didn't realize why he couldn't equip a shade secondary while being attacked by mushrooms. So why did we not whip out the good ol' test server again but this time with Luna characters actually added to it. Just another thing that we got cut out from. It was rather inconvenient trying to test 200+ things when you had to level the classes from the start of 1 free level 150 but we tried our best anyway. There was a way to find out what would happen if you tried to apply your update if you had just created a flamed item and put a nebulite on it in any kind of testing area and then see the end result after the update. I feel like the return of the test server and/or some ACTUAL QA testing could save nexon and the players alot of headaches.
Personally, I feel like alot of things could've prevented this outcome but it didn't happen. but there is no use in crying over spilled milk, but we can take this with us to the future to learn from it and prevent this from happening again.
Neglect
Now this one weighs down on me a bit more than the other ones.
Honestly, in Luna it seriously feels like we are the unwanted stepchild in a new marriage. We don't have actual GMs, we only ever really see GMs come by to play omok, monster card or host events. Luna isn't the biggest of servers so we would only require a minimal amount of supervision, but that seems too big of a thing to ask for. our entire economy got destroyed after coming here because there are no GMs to ban kanna hackers / mesofarming bots. NX rates are at an all time high, on EMS we went up to 1:100 and that was already a pretty decent amount for what we've had up until then, but in a matter of months we doubled that and after a year and a half we are now up from 1:100 to 1:700.
We aren't asking for our own nexon team but atleast a GM or 2, that's not toomuch to ask is it? Even if they are just home GMs stationed in europe instead of in-office GMs in nexon america's HQ we require some kind of supervision. This really just feels like the game that we all loved to play and progress in got completely dumped into a garbage bin because we got adopted by a family that didn't really want us anyway. And I get that we kindof got forced upon you, but we also didn't ask for this. So let's just try to make the most of it while being considerate of eachother. We just want a reason to play the game that we all love and have loved for many years, but the sorry state that our server is in now just makes it hard to muster the motivation to do so. Even after hearing on one of the maplestory streams that the chance of a reboot 2 starting for north america was on the table but a reboot for europe was shelved was just another promise that ended up being a kick in the face.
I'm certain that there are things that I forgot to mention here and feel free to write your own concerns or anything you didn't see in here in the comments.
I would also like to suggest that we set up something like a change.org petition or anything of the sorts for the return of the /find command since we lost that simply because KMS did eventho the reason why KMS removed it doesn't occur in GMS. Sorry for the long post, believe it or not but this was the short version of it mainly focussed on the current event that took place. I really hope that us Luna peeps can just be embraced a little more by nexon america and that nexon america can learn to love their game a bit more again. I really have been feeling a lack of love for the game in the recycled events and mandatory returns of cash grabs and such. It makes the game feel alot less alive.
TL;DR
State of the game is meh
EU peeps are having an extra tough time
/find needs to come back
Nexon america needs to find the love for their game again.
Comments
Not going to comment on anything else but I 100% agree on the compensation side. Small rant incoming, but I was one of the handful of people wrongfully banned in January (http://maplestory.nexon.net/news/28617/an-update-regarding-recent-blaze-wizard-bans). For 2 months of being falsely banned and insulted by "support", all we received was this Bebe's Box:
It's funny, I actually was pretty happy with GM Cheezpuff's letter, especially with how he mentioned as a player his "biggest fear, both in playing a MMO and in real life, is to be punished for something I didn’t do and have no one believe my side of the story." That was exactly what we were all going through and it was refreshing to see someone from Nexon with a shred of empathy for us. Unfortunately this all went out the window with the "compensation". How can someone claim to know exactly how we felt, yet hand out that garbage and pretend like it fixes everything? It was honestly incredibly insulting, and further solidified my belief in never supporting a Nexon game again.
While I am used to the abuse as an European gamer, this is just going too far. Bebe's box isn't even a proper compensation for the 24 hour maintenence. Which we were kept mostly in the dark for fearing what might happen to us.
It's inexcusable.
not entirely related but itll bump the thread and i agree that this is all really bullshit. i'd just like to share my experience with riot support and the fact that i have been falsely banned for intentionally feeding 3 different times on different accounts. ENTIRELY due to my teammates trolling me. i send in a ticket about it the first time thinking it'll be no problem cause if you watch the game for 15 seconds you can see im not the one trolling im the one being griefed. they refuse to look into it at all. i spend 3 hours litearlly 3 hours talking to someone at riot support during which he says multiple times if he experienced the game i experienced he would have broken his keyboard and been screaming in his house. okay cool good signs right? he completely agrees im being bullshitted. he says he will look into my account and watch the vod. ok cool thats all that needs to happen. but i try to log in the next day and it doesnt work. then i wait 2 more days and im still banned? okay so i send in another ticket to get them to actually check out my account but they send my ticket to the wrong guy who IMMEDIATELY closes my ticket and says that their ban system can't be wrong. ok cool thats useless have to wait another 36 hours for my ticket to get transferred to the right person who will then take 7 days to reply to my message and his reply is 'sorry i cannot look at the vod of your game because the client has updated making it impossible' and then refuses to do anything about my account and theres nothing he can do because the vod is gone. even though he waited over 10 days IN A 14 DAY BAN to even attempt to check on my account. after it took me 3-4 support tickets. they said 'no our system is right you were intentionally feeding' and i was like but i've literally sunk 30 hours of my **** life into trying to prove that i wasn't trolling to you guys and you said 'well i see that you typed words but im not going to read them, you are banned'
this happens a second time but this second time they dont even give me the benefit of talking to me they just send automated responses to tell me that i was in the wrong and am a bad person and need to be banned.
so it could be worse. you could have rioters working at nexon. those guys arent even humans.
I'm just back into the game for three weeks(?), and to see there is no GM around for the Kanna bots, is worrying. I was a Pre-bigbang player and when we saw a GM every so often, it was cool to see someone. Now we are happy where we can train without a Kanna getting in the way. Sad thing is I want to make a Kanna, but I'm to scared to make one in case they want to ban a lot and see me as a bot... ( I don't know if that is realistic, but still).
The compensation is really weird for me, like yeah, my main is now 161. All fun and all but I know that a lot of the players are 200+. How does Nexon think giving a compensation to people 200+ is compensation? It should be given to you to make up for something, but I won't give someone a dead rat because something bad happened. This kinda feels like it for 200+ players..
We also lose the ARK coins now for 2 or 3 days, but okay there are worse things, so that doesn't really bother me, but it is still something we won't get now.
Before the merge, this response time would have been a lot slower, but the actions taken would have also been a lot more drastic. I remember a few instances where we had some pretty big changes made to keep the market clean (I think I remember one were everyones meso got reduced by a huge amount, and I think I remember a few rollbacks as well)
I'm sure its really hard for Nexon to have thought about all of what could have happend, we kinda already had double flames with both nebs and flames being a thing in Luna in the past few years and what happend today has been a thing thats been on my mind ever since seeing how bonus stats were treated with star forcing weapons post-migration (being counted as scrolled stats instead of bonus stats that are supposed to have no effect on star force)
I'm going to be honestly suprised if they manage to fix everything (Especially after seeing that there are also issues in other servers with the nebulite converted bonus stats changing scrolled stats)
I honestly do believe that Luna does need someone with knowledge, is active, just focuses on making sure we aren't left in the dark and keeps the team informed about what happens in our side of the game. I would even wanna do that and I'm sure there are a few other people that could have such a role.
But then again, I feel like I'm talking to a brick wall. Its so bad that I don't even want to post stuff here because it'll get ignored anyway. I've reported a few issues in the past and of them only a single one got fixed (A bug with the Nova sharing website, which that in itself shouldnt happen if their website sharing code wasn't so bad, had a friend with issues on the Ark one as well)
Lets hope they will listen to us and do something about this
- DhrGR (Giovanni)
Quick edit:
The more active patrolling GM's isn't just an issue in Luna to be honest, I've seen enough streamers from the NA servers to know its infested over there as well and hope Nexon starts taking the game more seriously. The market prices over here are literal 30 times as much as they are on KMS in terms of meso
By the way, I think one of the reasons they're so off with the player base stats (we can see it clearly in the cumulative attendance event, where the top tier was absolutely unachievable) is because they have absolutely no idea how many bots they have in-game. So they see "oooh we have X active players, X*300*days of event = Y so this is how much we have to ask for" when actually a lot of the so-called active players are just entirely automated bots, creation to level 200. They used to at least change channels in the past, but there are so many of them now they occupy the whole channel spawn for quite a few maps (good luck questing there, not to mention good old grinding).
Also, I thought I was the only one that missed the /find command - anyone may please explain why was it removed in KMS?
And I agree with the attendance event, the biggest problem is that the attendance stopped once you had reached all the rewards. Meaning that we only had 12 days per account making it even harder than the anticipated 20 days per account. Aside from that if you do some rough math assuming that everyone that participated in the attendance actually finished it you are looking at 63m / 300 / 12 = 17.500 meaning that 17.500 players did the attendance. the math is not 100% accurate because not every player completed the attendance. not everyone cared enough for it. but to have reached the final goal we wouldve had to done this with 180m/300/12 = 50.000 players!!! how are we supposed to reach that???
Maybe start compensating for waste of limited items in NX Cash AND missed events for each unscheduled maintenance that lasts over 2 hours?
I like Trains.
But as the OP put it, Neglect is a huge part of the problem. Not just in Luna, but everywhere that Isn't Bera / Rebot (Reboot)...
It's quite a shame, you'd think at least the storm growth potions would be tradeable imo. Some of us have a use for storm growth potions for a character called Mercedes.
But overall yeah, the compensation boxes at times could be a bit better.
There's no GMs anywhere not just luna
Nexon America never has any foresight about anything they do and this time it's massively backfiring on luna but it's not a specific slight against luna...
Well untradeable sgps are just quite useless. And merc isn't even that bad in the end.
NX problem in compensations is that they are mostly untradeable and even with expire date so they have to be used right away to have any use at all+ they have to be accepted on right char (ik you should read what those boxes have before accepting them, but accidents happen).
gms meso economy is just horrible. Probably every game got more or less problems with hackers and bots and they just deal with them. kms hackers are quickly dealt with before dmg is done. gms hackers can hack without anyone doing anything so there's plenty of bot meso and some drops that are used on late game items or just crafting. another thing that works in kms is that there is the so called meso-sink (25* starforce) so their system uses quite much meso and therefore there's less floating meso in market. gms 1 guy might use several b:s of meso on starforcing but in the end most of the meso in game just goes between characters-->so the meso pool keeps growing and creates chaos in prices. kms noone needed even the 10b cap before AU items and then they raised the cap to 30b which is more than enough there for 99% of trades. gms 30b is nothing, 100b is something decent endgame and best stuff costs several hundreds of billions. And then there's items like frenzy totem which market value is so high that noone really has that many meso yielding to real money trades which is bannable, and somehow nx bans those quite strictly while there's plenty of hackers loose which are the reason for that chaos.
Another problem that nx has is that it's so clear what they are doing with the game. If cash shop has little problems, they are fixed right away. Some gamebreaking bugs are just neglected. Flames could have been added to gms 2 years ago when the merge with ems (which had flames) came. nebulite system was just so nx based that they couldn't let it go at start. it seems like 25* systems problem is that with it tyrants will be quite much replaced with abso/AU. 15* tyrant (if starforced to 10* first) requires theoretically 229 guardian scrolls which are 2,4k ea (1,8k with discount)--> 550k nx (500€/item), if 14-15 is that last 200€ then nx get's around 200€-300€ for each endgame tyrant, while 25* sf yields them basically nothing from sf.Also Hqee comes from gacha/philo/marvel... so those are nexon gold geese. Another thing is that 25* system gives ppl stronger base items so no need that great potentials which are rng based. Being greedy just ruins the game, gms wanted to be different and now when they want to unify with others again it creates problems. And it's now bit too late since most who were quitting due to chaos already quit. This is probably not related here but just wanted to point it out
Another thing nexon should stop doing is those very bad timings. Add flames and 2 days later start marvel, not the worst but since marvel messes the economy up for couple of months and flames mess prices up for good (that i remember from ems when flames came out), so meso value is quite much not determined for quite some time due to that marvel event. The most insulting thing was when Luna was still down during yesterdays maintenance, they announced nx discounts. Basically they said "We have no idea what we are doing but you could still buy some more of our stuff."
The false bans (or bans from ridiculous reasons) are just bit annoying that nothing is done to them. RMT isn't really worth perma ban and i wonder who would do it if they aren't buying or selling something really valuable, which quite much comes from the meso values that are messed up. And since quite many times the buyer want's to keep playing and they have spent probably more than the trade value to nx during their playtime and seller is just quitting, the buyer gets ban and actually the seller is the real criminal. Then i know couple of cases with banned characters who got ban without knowing what they did wrong. And nx refused to give that information, so basically their system is never wrong and players are always wrong. And the banning system has more flaws than pros. Nearly everything leads to permanent ban, even though most of the times something like 2months would be enough to teach the lesson. Reporting system should be taken serious so when hackers got several reports they should be investigated. Before i sometimes spent time looking for hackers and reporting them, but since it seems nothing is done to clear cases even after several months, i just don't see the point anymore.
I bet there's plenty of ppl who could be voluntary GMs and atleast handle the hackers away from servers. Atleast I would do it if I could. Maple used to be great game and i don't see why it couldn't be great again. Something is just needed in between players and development.
they seem to not think about what they are compensating. if nexon was insurance company it would seem they'd give body bag for life insurance, motorcycle for someone who lost both legs and gasoline for someone whose house burned.
2x coupons worked well before since they basically compensate time. now there's so much dailies going on that those need compensation aswell.
during 1 day i get around 1.3k rew points, 40 different arcane symbols, 1.5b exp when i'm not grinding, and something extra like meso, trait pots, occult cubes, etc.
wouldn't even be that hard to compensate the losses. basically 1k rew points 5 arcane symbol selector/reached area along with 2x coupons would do the trick. giving out something what is going to expire before using isn't helping anyone
I am also rather frustrated with how Nexon is throwing a bunch of events at the same time at us at once, essentially making us choose. Not sure how we're expected to grind for Arc coins on our mains and do two burning characters at the same time but that's not entirely relevant.
I came back last November after a long hiatus and it didn't take long to notice how far downhill the game has gone in terms of treating the players fairly - some of which drop a LOT of money. We're rewarded for downtimes, constantly having to change channels now for channel resets, lag, game crashes, etc with...new cash items and the same 'rewards' over and over. They don't seem to care really.
I contacted support and they just went "nope, sorry - keep waiting". THAT would've been a ****ing great compensation, but nope. I get a 3rd day of ruined plans.
I mean, it's great they fixed a bug, but the whole fix was at our expense AND on prime time too!