Hi, first and foremost, I'd like to note that I am writing this as if the game developers would read and consider making some changes, forgive my wordings but I will try my best to put my thoughts and simple analysis into words in the hopes that they would understand what to improve, if possible to improve. I have been playing for 15+ years now, so yeah I have been through many major updates over the years.
To begin, I'd like to first explain how I play Maplestory,
I used to enjoy playing together with friends, mostly doing PQs together, but that was long, long time ago when the servers were much more populated, I have long lost that feeling and have been playing solo for many years now. I am a player looking for new cool skills to spam and new maps to explore with ease (definitely not fighting my way in), in other words my play style is very, very chill as opposed to players getting brain-wrecked with RNG trying to cube or scroll an equipment to some legendary stats or bonus potential lines. I make a character, use whatever equip I saved up from before or new equip that dropped, maybe starforce a few stars to maintain average levels of damage, and just level up from there, I can usually enjoy this process because of the cool skills and some of the most exciting, most emotional BGM while playing interesting, cute storyline quests, ex. Mushroom Kingdom, Fairy Forest, Golden Beach, Reina Strait, etc.
The main part starts here, feedback on the issues and concerns.
Cool skills aside, thankfully since cool skills from each class are almost entirely unique, the same BGMs and the same storyline quests really get boring after you have been through them for over 20 characters worth of time, figuratively speaking. As simple as my play style is, I was still having fun in my own way as said before, but I now realize even that has reached the limit or the breaking point. Just to be clear, let me give an example, I really enjoy the Kerning City Tower Jake's Idol Group storyline, art is done beautifully, music is well matched to the art/ scenarios and I love the cute scenarios more than anything, I always forget about the time I spent clearing that entire storyline, but the excitement really dies down now that I am clearing it for the 20th time (figuratively speaking), because I know exactly what to expect. The good thing is, Maplestory introduced Burning to help getting past the boredom much faster (three time faster to be exact) and I must say Burning is a Genius Idea, but all in all I feel Burning cannot be the permanent solution, there has got to be some other way this game can still be fun and worth the time playing with or without Burning. Participating in the new events? I am never in the mood for those time-limited events, because I don't like to be told when to play or when to stop, especially with the sign-in or daily monster-hunt stamp thing, but perhaps new storyline quests that permanently stay would work better for me.
I see this has still gotten pretty lengthy, well I have said what I wanted the developers to know and this is the accurate information of how I think of the game right now as well as how I am playing it at this time, hopefully it would be of some use to the developers for overall game improvement, I'll post another one of these if I think of something else, thank you for reading.
Comments
But some things must be clear..
First of all, who reads this are the NA team, who are not developers, so new content coming from our forum's ideas are harder to put in the game.
Second is that this week they had a conference about the game in korea, and for my surprise (not just me, the person who asked the question also got in shock) is that they do NOT have a team for storyline creations. They just get ideas from random employees (they have 180 people working in this game - which is an incredibly low number considering how much money this game provides). So this is why new stories, quests, or anything related comes not so frequently to the game.
Imo they should hire people to specifically do this. We have so MUCH cool content to expand and explore. In example, I lost the Visitors event when it came out, and I still regret that after so many years! I really enjoyed the story of Jett and NLC aliens who were mining in there. They revamped NLC with the aliens as well, and we found out so many intersting things. What about Cerberus planet? I would LOVE to see that planet being added (like the other planets in grandis were), with an extense storyline. I dunno, there is so much cool stuff to expand the game experience instead of adding a "new" way to upgrade our equipments (I mean, come on, we already have scrolls, stars, pot, bonus pot, flames..).
Anyways, I don't have much hope of they creating content by reading this because who reads this is NA team, not Korea. But lets hope for the best.