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Check out the v.254 - Midnight Carnival - Ludibrium Patch Notes
here!
An Open Letter to Global Maplestory Management
Comments
There's clearly a lot wrong with the system. In this case, as much as my use inventory is crying right now, I'm glad that they're taking their time. I'd much rather them do that than re release a rushed and flawed product.
Which I'm pretty sure is what happened with the initial release.While I have a strong opinion about this update, I will disagre with you there
My team is smaller and we'd still have to go through these steps :
1) Director board meeting to figure out what other projects will be delayed and what budget we got
2) Assemble a team and match it to a project manager
3) Schedule meetings, assign roles, compile feedback and bug data
4) Try to replicate every single one of them and figure out why and how
5) Go through the first analysis dozens of time and find multiple solutions that match schedule, budget, player feedback and the company's vision
6) Build documentation for each of these solution
7) Countless meetings where the VP/Director of finance crushes your dreams with finess
8) This is where the dev team comes in (we may be at this stage right now depending on how much they're changing)
9a) Magic happens and changes are tested individually then sent to QA
9b) QA tests individual changes and send it back if it doesn't match the documentation
9c) Changes that pass QA are sent to another test environement that's closer to the live servers. Many tests are performed across many features to make sure all new content works as intended and old content still work
9d) Usually, go back to 9a) and, if things go very wrong, step 5)
[optional] 10) Private test
11) Pre-production and IT stuff
12) Update live servers
The bugs and Gollux stuff requires pretty much the same but with less meetings and testing
This is happening while GMS is weeks away from a big summer update and a new class which, I assume, they still want to push after the Anniversary content so I wouldn't hope for much
It seems like you are arguing from the perspective of nexon instead of the players perspective, which is more important anyway. Nexon can't do this because of that, Nexon does this because of that. How about: players have been left with a buggy unfixed familiar system since it has been updated. The game is still very unstable and players are crashing all the time. You still cannot respawn in gollux, and if you try to enter without a key you will not be able to enter for the whole day. Horntail is still very messed up with crashes and its spawn bug. And with this state of the game, players are still left in the dark with awful maple memos.
Thats really unfair to say, you dont know how a company works, you probably donnt know how programming works, how can u say theyre sitting on their butts doing nothing? Thats such a childish way of thinking. Do you think a million dollar company is run by people that do nothing? Come on, you have to be kidding ...
Do I literally mean that they are doing nothing? No.
First of all, Nexon is a multi-billion dollar company. Second, there are many unfixed bugs and changes to be made that have been around for weeks. Unacceptable at best. Some bugs are even around for months, and I cannot remember a time where the game was stable and did not crash multiple times a day.
Maple memos is just another issue, which was addressed by OP.
I can understand revamping the familiar system itself, but the complete removal of the codex system with nothing to replace the function is a tragedy. It just wipes out so much time people put into it, and forces them to find the info offsite.
As for the familiar system revamp, I like the mechanics they have. Find multiples, fuse them, get some random potentials, it all sounds pretty good there. The drop rate being total garbage, the likelihood of many monsters being bugged, and the coupling of the codex's set bonuses into familiar collection where everyone has to farm all the same monsters for the drops a second time to get what they had before is infuriating.
When nexon removes a mechanic of the game that literally everyone who played utilized, weakening the entire player base universally, it feels needlessly punishing. It also feels insulting, as the time and effort spent earning that mechanic can be yanked away at any time, and not compensated in the least.
This isn't like an overpowered new item or a skill tweak. It isn't an exploit for power. Hell, it isn't even like the nebulite system removal where it only affected a small portion of the higher-end community. This was a well liked system of collecting the mobs you fought and being rewarded with information about them and their drops, and gaining a small power boost for that time and effort as well. The removal impacts every player, and it is incompetent how it has been handled.
The handling of it just makes every start to ask themselves "If they are willing to steal that from the players, what is next?"
And that in turn makes people ask "why should I invest my time and money sticking around to find out?"
Its a whole lot of bureaucracy yes, and unfortunately. However most of the issues that the game currently has have been present and spoken too in several mediums for years now. Outside of Gollux and Familiars we still have poor server stability, legit Kannas getting banned, bots everywhere, the memos addressing no issues whatsoever, outdated content, poorly balanced content, and a whole lot of frustration in the community. I wasn't present but it seems Glory was just as bad. In the last 5 years, even before Black Heaven there hasn't been a time were there were this issues hasn't been present. That a whole lot of time, and a lot of product releases.
What is Global doing really? All they do is copy paste KMS and add some of the Overseas Maple stuff, but manage nothing and let it rot. I doubt that translating content that has already been tested would take the entire of the team's attention, specially when they have a 5 year old backlog of issues that are still relevant.
A few whales and Twitch/Youtube players won't keep your boat afloat for long, eventually even those who are too invested to stop have to break, nothing lasts forever, and if they don't replenish their whales by making people happy there will be loses. Its 2020, MMOs are not doing great in the West and keeping people attention in the flood of great games, F2P MMOs and Gachas is becoming more and more difficult. KMS has that Korean magic that makes these kind of games work, but Global does not. I want MapleStory not only to survive but to be healthy, because its not fun playing a game that's nothing more than a shambling nostalgia corpse.
This is exactly what I mean. These people are making excuses for Nexon for some reason. It is especially annoying because they are using hand-wavy arguments that say "of course they are working on it" and "but there is a process they have to go through." What they do not understand is that Nexon is a multi-billion dollar company that company that fails to meet the expectations of their players time and time again. By now, it should be clear that GMS issues are neglected and are not given nearly enough priority.
"Multi-billion dollar company" is irrelevant, smaller companies can meet the needs of their customers and companies even bigger than Nexon are worse about delivering promises.
You do hit the nail on the head though that GMS issues are neglected and not given enough priority.
This is the main reason I don't like non-KMS content. It's buggy, overpowered, has design issues, goes untouched for years, etc.
If Nexon put the same quality into GMS content that KMS got, I wouldn't really have any problems with it.
One could argue that GMS doesn't really bring in the cash, thus it doesn't warrant that much attention.
But Nexon has claimed several times that they want to corner the western market and recent overhauls to non-KMS content shows they're trying.
Nexon seems to fail to understand the core of these non-KMS contents though as they just slaughter them.
By the time Nexon gets to the actual game development step of the GMS content, they should already understand player issues and what they want.
I forgive or make excuses for Nexon very often, but I still don't like the way they screw over GMS players.
Balancing these things without pissing off the majority of your player base should be possible, Nexon.
"Multi-billion dollar company" is perfectly relevant. A multi-billion dollar company has more resources than a multi-million dollar company, obviously. Besides, it was just a response to darik.
Because of how tight lipped they are with who develops what we don't even know if it is another team making mistakes or not, which is still weird because if you are going to have a secondary team developing and deploying content, and you have a lot of money then it would make sense your team would have better organization and a source of truth to follow so that something like the Superior Gollux Belt being stronger stat wise than the Dreamy Belt doesn't happen.
Its a shame we lost so much non-KMS content like Blackgate, Alishan, Twisted Aqua Road and such which had a lot of potential simply because of poor design and management. KMS isn't perfect either but it works, it doesn't break a second post release. How can this keep happening years after the fact is beyond logic at this point.
My point was just that even indie devs have better transparency and organization than Nexon.
Having all the money in the world doesn't mean anything if you don't spend it properly. That's why I said it's irrelevant.
But I understand what you meant, Nexon in theory should have no excuse.
Sometimes these companies need less money and more time with customers.
I mean look at their glassdoor review. Even the good reviews say their upper-management is bad news for developing a quality game.
https://glassdoor.com/Reviews/NEXON-Reviews-E143099.htm
Edit: Apparently the letter was passed to the devs, I think it should be passed to the executive officers because according to those employer reviews clearly the devs have warned them about the dumpster fires but can't do anything because the management ignores them.
"Upper management/executives are clueless about what makes a game good and the Western market in general"
You don't say. Wouldn't surprise me then that the dev team already has a whole stack of fixes done but its thrown aside because... who really knows honestly.
You honestly think that nexon is going to fix the product? Nexon is completely incompetent.
Since things like these forums and support tickets generally never reach the management, maybe these managers need to be blasted on twitter (Either Anna herself or whoever she answers to)?