tl;dr: Make color prisms easier and cheaper to obtain + bring back Steam Market = Happy players and more money for you
The Problem
The current sales model of color prisms (all variants) is prohibitively expensive and painfully gated behind several layers of RNG transactions to the point that even whales hesitate to spend money for them. Even if color prisms were to be redeemed by whales (via Mythic Star Style Box or Atelier Reliquary) they are mostly done so in limited quantities. I state this as a self proclaimed cosmetic whale on
Kronos with over $18k USD in spend over just the last 15 months. I’ve hit the 0.01% Atelier Reliquary jackpot (100 feathers), I regularly buy PSSBs when they have items I find attractive, and I still struggle to justify the costs and the time required to obtain enough prisms for the outfits I want to create.
Personally speaking, I have so many outfits that I want to make with each outfit needing different pieces of NX to be dyed but the current system just takes way too much work (having to open Atelier Reliquaries for Feathers or Premium Surprise Style Boxes to turn into Star Stamps). Given the number of items I would like to dye the amount of effort required to create an entire outfit is very high. In addition the monetary cost of dying any individual item is also high with entire outfits potentially requiring several hundred dollars in color prisms. It has gotten to the point where I need to pick and choose what outfits I want to make and try to limit my outfits to only requiring one or two dyed items at maximum.
This is not acceptable. The process of customizing a character should not be this difficult and the barrier to entry should not be this high. With the current state of customization monetization in MapleStory the entire process of purchasing NX and using said purchased NX to customize one's character has become a chore. Normally I would be willing to spend even more money on cosmetics than I already have however the current method of obtaining color prisms in conjunction with the recent less than stellar cash shop updates (PSSB rotations and Black Friday sales) has caused me to reconsider where I spend my money.
In addition, even if I had unlimited color prisms there are many outfits I want to make that I simply cannot because specific items are no longer available. It is great that
~2000 items became available for dying in the most recent update however many of the items are simply not available to me (because I play on Kronos).
Proposed Solution
If color prisms--especially pro prisms--were available at a reasonable, fixed price, I would likely purchase 5–15 per week without hesitation. Making color prisms (even if just the regular and premium variants) more easily accessible helps breed creativity in the playerbase and encourages more people to spend money on cosmetics. The color prism system is also highly complimentary to the previous Steam Market system that was recently discontinued by Nexon as being able to dye NX equipment means more people would be willing to spend money purchasing items on the Steam Market just to dye them. Anecdotally I myself purchased a handful of items off the Steam Market purely out of speculation that they would become dyable in the future (which they did). I believe that Nexon should re-introduce the Steam Market (or some variant of it) and leverage both the Steam Market and the color prism system to create a flywheel that serves as
an additional consistent revenue stream that also appeases many of the playerbase's concerns over how cosmetics are being monetized and made available.
How does this flywheel work?
1. Color prisms encourage people to seek out additional NX equipment for the purpose of character customization: people would go to the Steam Market to buy items that were released in past cash shop updates
2. The Steam Market would encourage people to buy more color prisms since if they find an interesting item on the Steam Market they may potentially also dye the item
Both systems would create additional demand for each other while achieving:
1. Increased player happiness due to more accessible character customization
2. Increased revenue for Nexon as color prisms are essentially a mechanism with which additional value can be derived from items that were already previously sold via NX equipment package, PSSB, etc (this is basically a double-dip for Nexon)
Moreover, if the Steam Market were to be re-introduced in some variant and especially if Maple Points were used (ala IGN Auction) then Nexon could potentially achieve even higher revenue. This new revenue stream would also be resilient to less popular cash shop updates as players would still be purchasing dye prisms and NX equipment off of the Steam Market.
Conclusion
The way that color prisms are being monetized is egregious as prisms are locked behind tedious and prohibitively expensive loot boxes (e.g. the Atelier Reliquary and Mythic Star Style Box) such that most people will only obtain a limited quantity of prisms (if they can even afford it), and even if people have prisms there are a lot of outfits that they might want to create that are quite literally impossible due to certain items no longer being unavailable. Nexon needs to re-evaluate how monetization for cosmetics is done in general and consider how monetization can be better implemented while satisfying the needs of the playerbase. This flywheel model I outlined above is only a suggestion and I encourage Nexon to explore other solutions in addition to what I suggested. Overall what I would like to see out of cosmetic monetization is the following:
1. A system that encourages player creativity instead of stifling it
2. Reduced friction in player customization
