In my opinion, and the opinions of a handful of my friends who I've recommended the game to, there are 2 main things Maplestory struggles with that turn off new players
- The burden of picking a main class + fear your choice of main might change later and you'll end up stuck in the sunk cost fallacy
- Start-up tasks of getting early-game legion/links is very annoying to new players who just want to pick a main and get right into it without having to wait for events to train up new characters they don't even like just for some bonus stats
I think these 2 features would greatly help mitigate these issues, and thus bring in a lot of new players that would normally be turned off by their first impression of Maplestory:
- Class trial mode:
This would allow you to play any class in the game in a sandbox simulation area.
The area would have a handful of different popular mobbing maps and a boss simulation room that lets you enter all the earlygame bosses (NLomien and below).
The class you pick would have some basic early game setup similar to a standard Bossing Mule, including:
1. Character lv 230
2. Armor: Boss 9 set, 3 set CRA, 5 set abso, 3 event rings
3. Upgrades: WS has 12% atk, 30% boss, Emblem has 12% atk, 30% IED, unique 1L stat on everything else, 70 flame score on gear except wep which has T6 atk flame, all 17*
4. 2K Legion with all KMS classes that give good links, and the top 10 bossing link skills in KMS being applied
5. LV 10 skill and boost nodes with ideal setup: 2 most important bossing skills are selected, A and B, and the boost nodes are set up like so: ABC, BAC, CAB, DAB, EAB. 6 boosted node slots are used for the 4 class specific skill nodes as well as boost nodes A and B (this setup allows boosted skills A and B to be at the max lv of 60)
- Everyone starts with 10 "New Player" Tera Burninator Coupons
1. They have all the standard benefits of triple levels to 200, rewards up to 220
2. The coupons and effects are non-time limited, so not only does the tera burn effect/reward for leveling not expire, meaning you have unlimited time to level and claim the standard rewards, but also the CRA set would not expire (although it has fixed stats so you'd want to replace it as soon as you can)
3. All existing players with <10 lv 220 characters would be able to claim these 10 (-1 per lv 220 character)
My Justification for these features:
While I fully understand why Legion and Link Skills exist in the game, encouraging players to try out every class in the game and invest time in actively playing more different characters and classes the game has to offer, it is a huge burden to ask new players to train many new characters to lv 200 or more to get started on a main character, and it does feel necessary to do so as much of the content in the game is heavily balanced around having all the bonus stats provided by these 2 systems.
Even midgame is considered to be around 4-6k legion, so I really don't see any problem allowing players to boost to ~2k Legion to start out. While you could sell these sort of coupons, I think offering it for free would go a long way towards roping in new players.
As for the class trial mode, in a game with ~45 classes in KMS / ~50 in GMS, it's very difficult to pick a class, and most active players will tell you that you can't really decide how good a class is until you not only get access to their 5th job skills, but also gear them up well enough to do some bosses on.
Some may feel great training, but you hate bossing on them, or they may be terrible at training until 5th job, or you may hate training until you get some good gear, or numerous other reasons you might pick one class and regret it later and quit due to feeling you wasted your time on a class you don't like and not want to go through the trouble of training and gearing up another character only to not like them again.
A class simulator would totally get around this issue by letting players try out any class in an ideal testing setup with all the most important types of content to test with (a handful of different bosses and training maps)
Comments
1 char ....250
1 char...235
5 char 200-217
4-5 char around 180
and 8-9 lvl 100-140
legion power 4k
although i'am a huge no-life
4 hyper burn ticket would be more than enough
1 Ticket to 265(so player can get into current content)
2 Ticket to 250(big legion buffs)
and 1 ticket to 235 would be quite enough for a new//returning player
class simulator is a waste...recommended start up classes guide however is a good thing since they gonna need mass chars anyway to compete in mid-game//end-game content...so may as well provide a chronological order as what they should make first and what class should be entirely avoided untill later
1 of the big issue is that low lvl maps are sort of quite barren.....would be a good idea to limit the amount of channels to ....
5 for characters bellow lvl 160
12 for characters bellow lvl 200
and 200+ all channels open
a game isn't very interesting if you see like no one around
i felt that lonelyness when i returned and that wasn't very motivating despite being someone with patience