Hello all, my name is Jay. I have played Maplestory for a year during my childhood that I can barely recall at this point and started playing the game again in 2018, setting in NA Reboot server.
Originally, I have promised myself to not make a discussion post like this and keep some serious thoughts to myself. I was not going to bother making another post in this forum given the general negative mentality toward Maplestory forum and the likelihood that any feedback will be heard and be put into actions (and this problem has continued to persist and curtail the game's reputation and overall quality). While I am nowhere near being a veteran player to provide the worst examples, specifics, or evidence of this game's flaws to fully support my frustration, it is more than clear that those who must truly pay attention to this game's condition are out of touch, and as a result, are considered ignorant by the majority of the playerbase.
The purpose of this post is not to call out on specific people that players resent over, but to address concerns that I, or the community, have had over a long time, because the majority of people in my social circle believe that this game is continuously going downhill and the authoritative users and developers are the people who are directly responsible to be aware of the game's situation and communicate with the playerbase. While I do not believe that figures like Anna or Maplestory devs, who people commonly refer with discomfort, grudge, or even insults, are entirely responsible for every problem that is currently plaguing this game, but being a person who has enough interest in this game to put time and value social interactions within, my main concerns are majorly related to how the Maplestory HQ is handling dissatisfaction from the playerbase, how the HQ is making plans to refine, remove, or fix certain contents of this game, and how the HQ majorly impacts what players read from Maple Memo - that has been nothing but a major disappointment at least for months - and the figures I have mentioned are in charge for these.
I doubt it would be any surprise that I would be mentioning the recent change that includes Kishin Shoukan change as someone who plays in Reboot. Let me start by saying that regardless of what the changes have done to the game, I am still giving the benefit of doubt that Anna, devs, and anyone else with big and small influence from GM Maplestory team are holding some degree of interest towards the Kanna's influence on the game (particularly towards Reboot), Beast Tamer's functionality, and Fury / Wild Totem's purpose. However, I believe that the proposition from Nexon from the last memo (
http://maplestory.nexon.net/news/58068/maple-memo-v214-update-may-29) is incredibly lacking in the knowledge towards the gameplay and makes no sense whatsoever. When Nexon claimed to "reduce the gap in efficiency between classes in a way that highlights the style of each class", the patch only resulted in immensely disappointing newer players that were looking forward to be adapted to the game, making countless errors with Beast Tamer, making room for doubts about nerfing Beast Tamer instead of revamping, and once again messing with the spawn booster in the game in a way that players decided to mock it as "3 PC meta". Is Nexon making "efforts to make the game balanced and healthy" when Phantom Forest became a place where players originally had to do dailies for an astronomical number of days to make equipment that can even attempt to compete with existing variants? Is it an effort when familiar revamp was clearly proven to not have been tested properly with its functions and impact to the game and only ended up causing collateral damage to everyone who have been enjoying benefits from old familiar system that is nowhere enough to be compensated by a Bebe Box distribution or two? Is it an effort when the latest patch is now referred to as "3 PC meta", a patch that broke Beast Tamer in the worst way, and still made Kanna an undisputed and more mandatory farmer in Reboot?
Another concern I would like to address is the instability of the server and the way patches carry over to GMS every time. What's my point? It is very predictable and simple. The game is constantly laggy, and the boss run has been a very perilous activity of the game because it is more common to have runs where at least one person disconnects. Existing problems with boss runs being extremely laggy (particularly for boss Lucid) now transitioned into almost every component of the game, making the game reach to the point where legion boards get messed up the moment we think we are relieved, logging in essentially turned into a slot machine, and even the owner of the server I moderate made a joke post about uninstalling the game to combat the instability. Our hopes for new updates can only help so much when every maintenance get extended to the point where "DMT" is now more commonly referred to as "Double Maintenance Time". Ghiblee has been posting known issues in Maplestory official Discord server's announcement channel as they have always been with just about every updates involving maintenance, and that alone gives the playerbase enough reasons to question the capability of a person who is responsible to implement changes to the game. Throughout the last few months, I have disconnected from Hard Lucid 9 times, Hard will 7 times, and at least 56 times when I have been leveling up to 255, and all I have left with is "We apologize for the inconvenience". Now, I understand that coding is a challenging job to deal with, and American infrastructure isn't the best thing in the world. However, it is clear that Nexon is never apologizing for an inconvenience when we hardly see any signs of regretful acknowledgement about the game's overall stability and hear about automated answers from players' ticket submission.
I have tried to address what I think are the primary examples to show that this game is going downhill with the ones who are supposed to be responsible for this game's welfare. Once again, I am nowhere near the best person to ever discuss this issue in a proper way and a player to provide the most helpful insights about this game's past, present, and the future, but I believe there are more problems in the game than the ones I have mentioned, but with this game as a whole. It is difficult to run a game that has - or more precisely, once had - everyone's nostalgia, hopes, and expectations, especially during the time where a lot of new or returning players are looking forward to going back to playing mushroom game, but I think so many things could have been gone better.
All in all, it always worries me whenever the discord message or Reddit post for mocking Nexon's current management of the game comes up, because it's always a recycled collection of Nexon hardly ever matching their reasoning and decisions related to gameplay - even if they are sometimes not represented in civil way or may include exaggerations - because for the most part, the satires and insults that happen on regular basis are result of the relevant aspects ot the game that points out to the problematic situation and the people who suffer from the flaws day by day.
I get it is really ****** to blame Anna alone for the flaws of the game that may not have been entirely from her decision, and sometimes people take it too far with being toxic while attempting to express things. She could be obliged to fulfill satisfaction from some people who expect her to combat the problem of the game that lasted during the days SavageAce was here. But I believe this game is getting out of control, and my feeling for this has intensified as I have heard a lot of players having struggles ever logging into the game in the first place. It is time for Anna to be either more considerate about this game or put in more efforts to improve the devs if they ever turn out to be an equivalent or more relevant group to improve this game.
As for the playerbase, I sincerely ask you to be civil with pointing out existing and potential concerns about the Nexon, because I will do my best to be civil as well even if it requires patience beyond the bounds of the capability we imagine. We are all fed up at this point, but the way we prove that we are worthy to be listened to and that we are capable of providing better insights about the game will never be found if we continue to express egregious and defamatory claims in unsightly ways. If none of you will, I will still give a benefit of the doubt that this post will be read. Even if Nexon employees turn out to be completely unreachable, completely ignoring the playerbase, and acting like superiors who consider we aren't worthy, I will at least try - so that when I move on from this game one day, I will know that I have at least tried.
Thank you for reading.
and 3 others.
and 3 others.
Comments
I really enjoyed redig this post, its so well written, i fully agree with you.
I've played a lot of games since Maplestory, free to play games as well, and I've never seen it this... Bad. Where incompetency is normalcy and problems are not acknowledged and broken things remain broken or imbalanced for an indefinite amount of time. I've never seen a playerbase view the publisher and devs in such a negative way for such a long time that it becomes a decade old meme. Heck it's only the Maplestory team, other nexon games are fine compared to Maplestory. Well, Maplestory2 is gone but it was still better. Yeah sure Maplestory code is old and crap, but that isn't the real issue, the issue is we need more communication, more transparency, more action needed. I find it upsetting that so many beast tamer mains are switching or quitting, mourning how such a fun and unique class became unplayable because of this so called revamp, and there weren't that many beast tamers to begin with.
In a lot of free to play games, there rarely are any detrimental bugs or things broken in game, and when there is, it's addressed ASAP and a time is set for a fix (when is illium job advancement gonna be fixed? RIP people trying to teraburn it before Adele drops), then there will be compensation. In some games the compensations are so great or at least worthwhile that players would HOPE for an extended or unscheduled maintenance, but they know it won't happen because it's RARE. Now the key isn't good compensation, slapping a bandaid of good compensation on top of constant failure won't steer the game towards a good direction. The key is to keep your player base happy, because broken things shouldn't exist and shouldn't be normal, but if things are broken then you should sincerely apologise, and work towards fixing it in a way that the playerbase can see. It's the attitude nexon should have with it's playerbase, and it should be transparent and sincere. At the very least we should at least be able to LOG IN AND PLAY and not constantly crash, lag sucks but is whatever at this point. What are you gonna give us 2xexp coupons for when logging into reboot is like roulette?
I wish we could open a panel or discussion between the players and the devs like some games do in game conventions, because player feed back online is full of anger and profanity and I don't think anyone would wanna sort through all that to find actual constructive ones. If the Maplestory team could just sit down and compile all the concerns players have for the game and create a long term plan to implement changes for the betterment of the game while consulting the playerbase, which many developers have seen positive results from employingthis strategy, then I can see Maplestory surviving for a long, long time to come.
It's hard to spend money on a game that you feel is failing. I'm happy to spend regularly in other MMOs because it's fun and worthwhile but I won't spend money on Maplestory, why would I spend money trying to upgrade an already sinking ship where the repairmen that I've called for are never gonna actually fix the ship? Like yeah they regularly do some patch work.. but with DUCT TAPE. As much as I'd like to support my beloved mushroom game.. I need a reason to, and right now there's nothing but reasons not to.
And telling people to stop buying nx won't work, because yeah sure majority of us aren't, but there are those KRAKENS that out spend even them whales, who don't necessarily care about the longevity of the game, but are probably the ones that are keeping KR from just pulling the plug on GMS.
So maybe we can't stop normal server whales, but the majority of GMS players are on reboot. Since its free to play, reboot can afford to stop buying NX.
There are a lot of reboot players that spend hundreds and some even spend thousands on NX. An NX boycott on reboot would remind them that they have an unhappy playerbase.
Otherwise, I don't see Nexon changing at all. They only respond to money.
Nexon, as a company, has never been transparent from the very top. They barely listen to their own players in KMS, so it's logical that they'd give even less of a crap about GMS when we're only roughly 5% of the total profit of the entire game. They're not interested in what the players have to say, only what they assume will increase their profit margins, and it's incredibly disappointing. However, I don't believe anything will change, as Korean companies are notorious for being as transparent with information as a brick wall.
Unless players respond by refusing to buy NX during awful updates.
Philo books, marvel machine and miracle time would all like a word with you.
- Make a decent kishin node. Boom, no more 2-3 pc meta, and kanna is no longer a mandatory farmer that everyone must make.
- Get rid of afk events. If the servers are already packed, why do you need to inflate your numbers with BS afk events?
- Lower SF cost. If you're going to nerf our farming into the ground to make GMS more like KMS, then make our SF cost more similar too.
The thing is, people like the feeling Kish brings, Lots of mobs, high density, so your big impactful spells kill a LOT of things. There's a reason why people go to Arcana to farm, and which maps are selected in Esfera. For some reason Nexon has the idea that BIG MAPS ARE BETTER, but everything in the game says it's trash.
Big map pros -
-able to spawn more monsters
-takes a bit to clear the full map, so the next wave already spawned
Con -
-mobs are so spread out and low density it's terrible
-Low mobility classes are trash at it
- Reliance on summons to help clear the map
- Limitations on how far you and the summons can be means you can't actually rely on them
- Mobs de-register if you are too far away so long attack range skills/ Mostly summons actually don't hit anything if you go to far
While they keep adding more summons to the game, It's actually not that helpful for farming the bigger maps, simply due to how they treat bigger maps and how the game is set up for bigger maps.
Setting my opinions about the recent changes aside for now, the technical issues with the game that are constantly getting worse are what aggravates me the most;
It's gotten to the point where I feel like doing a single daily or capping coins feels more like a chore than my actual chores at home, and it's truly sad for me because I've been playing this game at least every summer for the past 13 years and I still love it. I know the code for the game is really really old and it makes it that much harder to fix it with every new patch, but at this point I really think shutting the game temporarily is the only solution to actually fix the game, which is unrealistic obviously.
Getting back to the changes made to the game itself, I don't like most of them, like most of the playerbase, and that's fine, I don't have to like every feature or balance nexon makes (Except for the command system for Kaiser I beg you to return it to glory), with that said, it's clear a lot of the changes are made to convert as many players possible to paying customers by slowly nerfing F2P aspects.
I am in no way saying that trying to get players to pay for content is bad, this is a business after all, but when some changes make F2P progression THAT much slower or complicated, most of the players will just be pushed away.
I know there is no way on earth this will ever happen, but I genuinely think the best way to fix the game is to
1. fix the code of the game even if it means a week long maintenance.
2. create content that makes paying players enjoy MORE, instead of making free players enjoy LESS.
3.maybe make the game a bit more social again? Scale PQ or give some actual incentives to play together?
I've seen insane amounts of people on reddit saying they just got back to playing during lockdown and are already thinking of quitting for good and I'm really sad for it.
It's the same story every time: Some random, left field change comes through a "Maple Memo" that actively makes the game less enjoyable right before a big patch. Ends up ruining the whole patch for a bunch of players, and then never gets spoken about by the people in charge again. All in a day's work, I suppose!
This game has too much potential to be a great MMORPG, and being the last of its kind with no competition it has no reason to actively try and be one. They're only interested in keeping the money around with calculated seasonal updates that are indistinguishable from each other. The staying power of Maplestory as a game is a blessing Nexon never deserved to receive.
It's frustrating. Imagine being someone who plays Path of Exile and Maplestory and seeing the astronomical difference between the people handling the game. I could sit here for legitimately an hour typing up the differences between the two. But it's not worth it, because nothing will ever change.
Oh well!
It's perfectly fine to dislike the direction the game is going in. However, to say that the game is dead, dying, "going downhill", or anything in between because it's deviated from what you feel to be the right path is disingenuous.
Except the game is quantifiably dying. It's obvious that the player base for GMS is nowhere near what it was. This is to be expected in some regards but the rate at which the games player count dwindles is only accelerated by changes that aren't good for the game. I'm sorry but nerfing kish to the extent that it has now been nerfed should have been done YEARS ago. No the game isn't dead but it is very much dying. Reboot was supposed to be the server for F2P progression. Yet they keep adding little P2W mechanics. Sure you can get Maple Points with meso but that requires you to actually invest time into a server that you don't want to play on. So the only other alternative is to use money to skip arcane dailies or to do all your runs of tour. I'm honestly baffled how you can make the claim that the game isn't going downhill is so disingenuous considering the constant instability of the servers. Then there's the constant instability of the game itself. Do you know how demotivating it is to pop your 2x, get your mvp, pop your gold pot and totem only to crash and lose your buffs. I doubt it, actually I doubt you even play the game.
Except OP never mentioned anything about the game being "dead" or "dying." All OP is saying is that the game is going downhill, which is true to him and many other players.
I have always wondered if Nexon or whoever internally is responsible for maplestory, has ever considered the notion of a complete recode of the game to ensure longevity from a performance and stability standpoint (And fixing the seg faults). Of course, this would be a monumental task and require weeks if not months to complete. But I really would be interested to see if a lot of the problems they are having could be ironed out by such a decision.
the rest is fine for me, VPN solve quite lots of problem about lagging, but GMS not accept 3rd party like VPN, hope they have some solutions to solve the lagging problem so I particularly dont have to purchase VPN to play the game
From a business perspective, why would they invest money into something that's making them so much money while it's still a mess and everyone on every server constantly complains and demands transparency/quality of life changes that'll never come? That's all pocketed cash they don't need to spend.