Hello, I’m FutureChris, otherwise known as AxeChris. You might remember me from such threads as “Arcane River Droplets need a revamp” or from such videos as “[Reboot] Lucid Run #2 – 6-Kaiser Boogaloo”. Jokes aside, I’m here to today to present a major, glaring issue for Reboot world that’s only grown bigger with the introduction of Bonus Stats and the 25-Star update to the starforce system. First, I’d like to quickly catch people up to where we are now.
Back in November 2015, Reboot world was introduced as a method to play Maplestory with a bit of a different playstyle. Quoted from the news post by SavageAce: “In Reboot, the focus is on fighting monsters and earning the gear and meso you need through monster drops and progression...” Without any kind of economy at all, the idea is to work hard towards the gear you want, rather than just buying it from people. A new chance for some, like myself, to actually start anew and have a chance to become strong without having to shell out up to thousands of dollars.
Everything started off well until more and more players reached the point where they got their Chaos Root Abyss sets and had to start farming in order to put stars on it, as well as focus on getting everything to a legendary potential that had two lines of Mainstat%. People discovered that using a Kanna to farm meso at maps in places like the Ghost Ship, Alien Base, and Mysterious Path 3 were greatly beneficial to getting hundreds of millions of mesos per hour with full meso gear. Tedious and a bit questionable, we accepted the fact that it was part of Reboot’s “Meta” to make a farmer.
Fast forward a year to v190. The drop rate formula was changed so that mobs that were in the level range of the player would drop items and meso. Because of this, Alien Base farming was completely gone. Players who had leveled a kanna past 150 or 172 quickly found themselves faced with going hard and becoming a clp farmer or completely starting over and becoming a “Suicide Kanna” and trying hard to stay at a certain level.
In a Maple Memo put out on December 13th (
http://maplestory.nexon.net/news/27281/maple-memo-an-update-regarding-mesos-in-reboot-world), SavageAce describes how the change was to “mitigate further abuse and harm to the game balance due to players exploiting a bug that had been left unfixed for a long time.”
Prior to the bug fix players favored training in a small selection of maps, and with certain jobs to accumulate their meso earnings. This situation left very little choice for players on how to efficiently gain mesos and we felt this may be unhealthy for the game in the long term. When discussing ways to address current players’ concerns regarding the loss of options for meso generation, we made it a priority to find ways to encourage players to explore other maps and provide a reason to participate in the ongoing events we have scheduled.”
This change unfortunately led to a lot of public outcry and drama. Even with the changes made, people still used the same general maps to grind and farm in. People still do bosses and 2x Ursus to scrape on by, but generally it always comes back to Suicide Kanna farming in order to afford cube packs.
We arrive to the point where we’re at now; just getting over the introduction of both Bonus Stats and the full 25-star Starforce system. Both features have been heavily requested in the past, but many didn’t realize just how much having both systems at once can be on their wallets.
The way I see it, Reboot is quickly coming to a boil when it comes to progression. The standards for being considered “end-game” are quickly rising, especially with content being introduced, such as the Will fight and eventually Tenebris and Limen with their respective boss fights. The costs of getting flames and stars to raise ranges to even attempt these bosses are sky high and only getting higher with the best method of getting cash is to farm for hours on end for low rates in the long run.
After thinking on it for a while, I think I’ve come up with something that would keep the original intent of Reboot in terms of meso rewards, as well as keep kanna farming a reasonable side-method.
Instead of suggesting things that would seem slightly outlandish, such as maps designed for farming at 200+ or having higher level mobs drop more than one meso bag, my idea would go straight for the one thing we all have as Reboot players: The passive skill. The description of the skill, for those who don’t know, is as followed:
[Current Level 1]
Increases meso drop rate by 5x, increases boss monster equipment drop rate.
Max HP +200, Max MP +100
ATT & Magic ATT +5
Damage increased by 1% per 2 levels
It’s quite simple:
Add levels to the passive.
Much like Legion blocks, the Reboot passive skill should level up when a player reaches certain levels. With these levels, the 5x meso obtain will be boosted by 5 per level, and would follow this chart:
1 /5x
100 / 10x
150 / 15x
200 / 20x
To get a general grasp on the type of numbers that would be seen with this upgraded passive, let's take a look at a rather high example. Take CLP mobs, for example. On average, they drop about 9.5k bags, something you’d imagine would be dropped by mobs in VJ. However, if I were while factor in the theoretical rate of a 20x meso obtain (and a 3% from Phantom),I'd get this:
But what would happen if I happened to have meso gear on?
Sounds great for CLP farmers, if you ask me.
Speaking of farmers, what would a Suicide Kanna get with only 15x?
Whether or not Suicide Kannas would be needed or not would be up to Reboot as a whole. Personally, I’m hopeful that they wouldn’t be needed if this change were to occur.
The reason why I think this should be implemented is simple, and I briefly touched upon it in the introduction: Reboot is quickly becoming too costly to truly progress in nowadays without creating a suicide Kanna to farm on. In my opinion, I believe the fact that suicide kannas are a thing is a large red flag. A player shouldn’t have to be forced to create a class that they may or may not be interested in and sit around in certain maps for hours on end, keeping at a certain level range otherwise they’d have to start over. It’s not healthy for the server, nor is it healthy for players. I’ve noticed on a few occasions where I looked over in the Maplestory discord and saw that some players made a comment that they had lost weight while farming for God knows how long.
Furthermore, mesofarming can eat hours of one’s time when they could be using said hours to actually enjoy time on their main character. I feel one could make just as much, if not a bit more if the passive were to be boosted.
Another reason why I’m pushing for this passive change is because, as I also said before, I fear that most of Reboot isn’t ready for the content coming after Will. In order to even stand a chance, we’re going to need crazy good flames and most likely get our equipment to at least 17 stars. All of which could easily cost upwards of 10-20b on a good day.
To put it simply, having the passive level up and increasing the obtain rate of meso in integers of 5x per skill level would help players catch up to the quickly-rising costs of mid-to-late game progression, as well as being in the spirit of Reboot as to allow players to progress while not taking time out of their life to sit around and farm for days just for a few fleeting moments to star something or buy a few packets of cubes before going right back into the grind. Instead of making the grinding:reward ratio be about 85/15, why not just even it out to 50/50?
SavageAce may have intended the flat 15% boost as a sign of good faith in hopes that a better, more outstanding meso change was coming for Reboot, but that post was made in December of last year, back when the biggest expenses to worry about was black cubes and tyrant starring. Now that we’ve added Flames and 25* to the mix, that 15% flat boost acts like a drop in a bucket to douse the fire. It’s still unhealthy for both the game and some players, and I would hope that this idea would remediate this problem.
Thank you for reading, and I look forward to reading your responses!
Comments
That is true man , i'm 240 db with 100% meso gear and 80% drop rate and the best rate i make is 180m/h with legion buff, but in my suicide kanna i make about 420m/h.
So the amount of mesos that we need to evolve is so much that we end up spending more time in suicide kanna than in our main.
To be honest, I only considered 225 to be the cap to keep things fair, but let's try something different. If say, the passive were to be able to go up to 10 instead of 5, I'd think it look something like this: If we raise the level cap to 10 and have the max multiplier be 50x, I'd imagine it to be extremely easy for a player to deal with the end-game madness, perhaps even become more interested in starting to work on their legion considering how easy it'd be to fund mules, making the idea of a 6k/8k legion that much more plausible to them. Let's take that chart and apply the average drop of a higher level mob in normal servers and apply those multipliers:
While the idea of getting up to 50x mesos might be a bit insane (
110k bags of cash from a Dark Executor though), people would have to consider that it's not like there's be an economy to be ruined. In today's Maple, billions upon billions of meso can be burned within a timespan of 10 minutes, but might take 10 hours or even 10 days to get back up to that saved amount. So instead of being locked in a "CLPrison" (Shoutouts to "sips bleach seductively" in the discord for that term), why not just jump back to it in considerably less time? Like in the initial post, I think things would be a bit more fair if the grinding:reward ratio were 50/50, instead of 85/15.However, Getting up to 50x would probably be a high-speed overkill, considering getting nearly-500k bags would be a bit overkill now that I've sat on the idea for a day and realized it'd be a bit too radical.
The only issue that would still remain is the poor mob spawning. People would still be farming on Kanna or with a kishin mule but that is something that also needs to be addressed (and I say that as someone who actually mains Kanna).
There's also that issue where you can just perma farm at Arcana at 250, taking up maps for actual players that are training there. That's why buffing certain areas idea is on the table.