I hope everyone is doing well amid the COVID19 crisis.

This past year has actually been quite busy for me. I was juggling work and grad school application, which meant that I was playing MapleStory on and off. After months of hiatus I finally decide to come back, and I am thrilled to find out about the new familiar system. I see several of my guildies flexing their gains such as 100% boss damage and 40% IED lines, and I’m sure I don’t have to emphasize the significance of these stats: they are approximately equivalent to having 5-6 additional legendary potential lines on Weapon/Secondary/Emblem, the three gears whose importance far outweighs that of every other gear in the game.

So, I begin my grind for the familiar system, only to discover that my common and rare rank cards yield massively inferior lines compared to the old epic familiars (Oda Warriors, Fairies, Jr. Boogies) of my guildies. I crunched the math and learned that to obtain one epic rank card, I had to either:
1) Farm 200 common cards, extract them, and buy a Roro’s familiar booster pack for a ~50% chance at getting an epic rank card in the third slot, OR
2) Fuse 100 common cards to a rare card, grind familiar exp by hunting level range mobs, then rank up at a success rate of 80%.
Either way, the rate at which I would be acquiring epic cards is incomparably lower than prior to the patch. Even though my Kanna has +160% item drop rate from gears and was using various buffs and consumables such as lucky winter (+100%), lv30 decent holy symbol (+24%), and wealth acquisition potion, it took me two days of farming roughly 5 hours each to obtain 6 epic familiar cards. In other words, it would take tens of thousands of hours for me to farm the same number of epic cards as my guildies, for whom it only took a few days of intense farming. And even if I did somehow manage to go through this impossible grind, the odds of having the same end result were astronomical due to the recent nerfs on the potential lines of epic cards.

As much as I am distraught by these numbers, they represent a much greater issue at stake: the notion that some players in the game will ALWAYS be stronger than other players, as there is no realistic way of acquiring these same stats anymore. One may argue that same applies to Sengoku badges and Wondroid Hearts; yes, the 6 potential lines of main stats is important in the game progression. But as precedence shows, at least one of these events will likely return in the future. (The upcoming AWAKE coin shop is said to have a pottable lv100 Android Heart as well.) More importantly, however, it has more to do with the degree of importance: 6 potential lines of str/dex/luk/int are simply not as significant as 6 potential lines on Weapon/Secondary/Emblem. The estimated fold-increase in damage output per potential line from W/S/E is far more superior (especially for early-game players) than that of str/dex/luk/int. If you believe otherwise, I will provide detailed math in the comments taking both an early game player and a late game player as examples.

When I look at the familiar system in its current state, I see a major balance issue that will not only deter the influx of new players, but also lead to the efflux of existing players. Furthermore, I learned that the origin of the present dilemma is none other than internal coding errors, which caused the system to deviate from the original JMS familiar system and allowed players to take advantage of this loophole. And due to this fact, as the copyright owner of the familiar system is not experiencing this same issue in their Reboot world, the GMS admin is further limited in their options. Regardless, GMS online forums and discord servers are inundating with heated discussion regarding possible solutions to the matter – it is an urgent call for the game administrators to take action. In this thread, I want to discuss three of such solutions: 1) Red familiar cards in Reboot, 2) increasing the drop rate of epic familiar cards, and 3) suspicious fauxmiliar card revamp.

1) Red familiar cards in Reboot
This is a popular solution being discussed in the MapleStory community. Despite the fact that the familiar system caps at unique rank in Reboot, many people have expressed concern that having yet another P2W content turned into a F2P element may attract the current non-Reboot players to migrate to the Reboot world. While I want to emphasize that the point of playing Reboot is to enrich the player experience that involves game progression & solo player contents and has little to do with the game being “free”, I still acknowledge that non-Reboot players may feel uncomfortable allowing the familiar system, for which they must spend hundreds of USD, to progress easily in the Reboot world. Yet, the addition of Red familiars to Reboot seems necessary considering that the familiar system is now a core component of game progression. To have the familiar system in Reboot without one critical component (re-roller item) is nonsensical.

2) Increasing epic rank card drop rate
While increasing the drop rate of epic cards in Reboot will solve most of the aforementioned issues, the problem with this solution is that the initial high drop rate of epic rank cards was not intended by the GMS admin. To bring the epic card drop rate back up would be to let a glitch take permanent effect in the course of game development, which is not ideal for both game developers and players in my opinion.

3) Suspicious fauxmiliar card revamp
As of now, suspicious fauxmiliar cards do not serve a major role in the Reboot world, as their function is to provide rank-up points for scarce familiar cards, such as those from field bosses or those only obtainable through the familiar booster pack. And they do so in the least efficient manner possible, costing 5,000 familiar points and yielding only 30 rank-up points. In other words, they are practically useless in Reboot (since even if you rank up, say, a Lotus familiar, you have no way of rerolling its potentials).
Revamping the function of suspicious fauxmiliar cards so that they become the “occult cube” equivalent of the familiar system, meaning they are able to reroll and increase the rank of familiar cards to the maximum rank of epic, would be an ideal way to give a new purpose for this item while also resolving most of the issue Reboot players are experiencing with the familiar system. Of course, to make this solution work, the daily limit and cost of suspicious fauxmiliar cards must be adjusted appropriately. Changing the cost from familiar points to meso might even work. This was in fact the first idea that came to my mind when I heard of the phrase “suspicious fauxmiliar card”, because it literally translates to the KMS translation of occult cubes, i.e. 수상한 큐브 - suspicious cubes. (Did you know that the “x” is silent? Faux, pronounced fō, is the French word for false. “Suspicious Fōmiliar Cards” - what a clever pun!)

Admittedly, all of these issues could have been avoided if GMS admins decided not to implement the JMS system in the first place, which even in its correctly functioning state is a vastly unbalanced component of game progression that eclipses legion and other stat sources in importance. But it seems unlikely that GMS will take the familiar system down.

TL: DR – Add Red familiar cards to Reboot. As an alternative, revamp suspicious fauxmiliar cards to “occult” familiar cards and keep the ease of familiar progression in Reboot at epic rank.

I hope that the GMS admin team and their director Anna can see reason and take this suggestion into serious consideration.
Thanks for reading, and stay safe
Shuryi