Explanation: Something a lot of people miss, and the game actively makes more efficient not to do is to party up with people for exp gains. Now unless you're a Bishop or a Kanna, people don't want you in their party or map unless you're bossing together. It was a fun experience to party up to make exp gains better and maybe even going to a party play zone. So it's a shame now partying discourages you from having anyone in your party to increase your exp gain unless it's a Bishop or Kanna, because Maplestory can work so well as a social experience with parties, but the game does everything it can to discourage it since if you can kill the enemies in the map fast enough you would actually be losing exp in a party because party members would take your kills (whether accidentally or on purpose). It would be nice for all these classes with other unique buffs to get use out of them in a party besides just bosses too.
The Suggestion: Anyway my suggestion to bring party exp bonuses back without encouraging leeches, is to use a system that already exists in MapleStory as a link skill and apply it to a different buff that's a similar skill that you're given whenever you're in a party when at least 1 other party member is in the same map as you, and gives a bigger buff as more members in your party are in the same map as you. The skill I'm talking about is the Link Skill Solus, and I want the party system to use the mechanics of that skill, to give each member in the party a skill that activates automatically while they maintain a combat state (not a link skill like Solus though, it would just happen whenever you're in a party).
How it Would Work: Basically this passive/auto activating party skill would give you more exp based on the number of stacks you have when someone kills an enemy, as long as you maintain a combat state while in the party. But instead of keeping all the stacks as long as you attack in a certain amount of time before the buff expires like how Solus works, you would lose stacks quickly while not attacking enemies, leaving you with 1 stack that gives you a very small exp boost for most of the time. This is to prevent people from just attacking every once in a while to maintain the full exp bonus.
I don't know what the time limit would have to be to make this fair, but also make this system not beneficial to leeches, but I think some system like this would be a perfect way to encourage people partying up outside of bosses. And if party play areas ever returned if this system was implemented, I think what would make sense is to have the bonus exp in those areas just increase the bonus of this party skill I suggested, and not just give it to people for simply being in the map with a party.
Please consider this suggestion, lately I've seen more and more people complain about the game discouraging partying, socializing, etc, because of how the party system currently works outside of bosses, or reminiscing about the times where partying outside of bosses was fun. Maplestory could be a more social game, but right now it's mostly people just spamming memes on megaphones, it would be nice to have people become friends by partying up when they see someone in a map again, and not only complain that people are stealing their map.
Comments
Aside from Monster Park Extreme, which somewhat fixes this problem at the 260+ range, I think a good solution is to increase the bonus to around the 4/5 members point, where it's still not worth it, but almost worth it, so that when you're at 3~6 members it's actually faster. On Nexon's side I think the real issue here though is that bots will abuse this. So I doubt they'll allow it.
As I have said in the past though, I don't think players should be punished for what cheaters are doing.
Don't get me wrong, there are changes that only hurt the cheaters too, that were definitely good for the game, but I've been noticing more and more changes they made to make cheating less common, that actually had very little impact on cheaters, but a big impact on legitimate players. Like the runes arrow key game for example, now with the spinning arrows it's hard to figure out what keys to press as a human being, yes it stops bots from getting exp in that map, but I'm not a bot and I still don't know what buttons to free the rune sometimes xD.
Anyway yeah wish whenever they made changes that hurt legitimate players just as much as the cheaters they're trying to stop, they would always try to add something else to make up for it for the legitimate players.