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Arcane Force Timegated and Repetative
The current state of Maplestory revolves solely around Arcane Force due to its huge importance for endgame bosses and the significant increase in stats. However this system is broken and in my opinion bad gamedesign.
I think it is bad gamedesign because it is heavily time gated. Take player1, that plays one day per week for a couple of hours, and player2 that plays everyday for 30minutes. Player1 is not able to keep up with player2's arcane force. This is because a player is only able to get a limited amount of symbols per day. Due to the low droprate of symbols when farming it is not feasible to keep up this way. There currently is no other way to gain arcane force. Even if player1 plays everyday, if he starts 3 months later than player2. He will not be able to catch up to player2. To add to this the content is very repetitive. There is usually no gain from doing a daily, other than maybe a nodestone and some exp at lower levels.
Forcing players to be time gated by this kind of super repetitive content and not offering another way around it is bad gamedesign. To solve this, I suggest that symbols should drop a lot more from the general mobs in the area. How much this on average should be is up for debate. I would say around 10 symbols per hour while wearing droprate gear and using kishin is a decent rate. Based on the fact that daily quests take less than one hour to complete. This would definitely not be the fastest way.
I think for an MMORPG it is very important that players are able to sink in time as they wish and be able to make decent gains. If a person wants to grind for 10hours to lvl his symbol up, the player should be able to do so. And not be forced to log in 10 days in a row to gain the same result. I am not looking for a replacement of the current system, but an other way to make gains that is not timegated.
TLDR, Increase symbol droprate from mobs so that players that want to progress faster are not limited by daily quests, but also able to farm at a decent rate.
Comments
The fact that they nuked nodestone drop rate as well as boss entries in a previous patch(insultingly named "tune up") leads me to believe that whomever is in charge of development decisions over in Korea is not interested in making things faster for players.
For that matter, I noticed that they make content that are long burns, rather than being repeatable. Wouldn't repeatable content be better (idk, PQS) in the long run?
Currently maple isn't beginner friendly at all and that's the reason why playerbase is dropping. Some old players get bored to game due to being stuck in some gaps in end game content and new players aren't just coming.
Symbols could be speeded up quite easily, since there's regions you get to max lvl quite early in comparison to others. Those dailies could give symbol selectors after getting lvl 20 so that way it would only be 268 days of dailies (if you reach lvl 235 at the same day as 200 and clear all storylines in that time but close enough) and by buffing the drop rate so you could get 10 symbols/hour (that would take around 1500hours of grinding for max symbols) it would be about half of the year for symbols and after that you could move on with other stuff. Also there's tenebris area (moonbridge, LoS and limina) which doesn't give symbols at all but after 250 it's quite much the only reasonable area to grind. That area should drop selectors too and why not make those selectors tradeable so higher lvl players who have max symbols already could help out newer players with their symbol madness.
Repeatable content is not bad, but if it is the only way to progress it feels like bad gamedesign. Take pq's, there are ways around it to gain experience. It might be slower but it is reasonable. Currently for symbols there is no alternative and reasonable way to avoid doing the dailies.
After maxing a symbol, getting symbol selectors is not a bad idea, but it would still force players to do dailies.
This would be nice since Chu Chu is usually maxed first and VJ will soon have double daily.
I don't like the way Chu Chu is set up or designed to encourage you to party up to get more arcane symbols, and some classes are severely handicapped, preventing them to barely pass in a solo run. I would usually use my arcane symbol selector items on this symbol by any means necessary in order to get around doing the PQ for more symbols. Even if I have enough AF to kill all the mobs in Chu Chu, I still hate the design of the area and the annoying BGM that I have no choice but to turn off. Not to mention that the 1st area in Arcane River is quite bland when everything is white and blue and has the same design base for each of the mobs.
The others are annoying to do, so I usually don't. To each their own.
I will agree with the OP, in that drop rate should be increased to be more viable for farming.
I agree on this, this is actually a cool idea, maybe even drop those in some maps in Darmoor content?
1. It will not be that fast to implement something like this.
2. A Bump, really?
3. Actual opinions incoming:
Personally the only daily I despise with all my heart is Spirit Savior. Why? Because it triggers my anxiety and related issues ending up with me generally having a very very bad experience. I would love an alternative daily or just some way that isn't event based to supplement the inability to do it. I'm not even the only person within my buddy list with this anxiety issue. It's the whole "OH GOD I AM BEING CHASED" feeling that tends to come on and trigger anxiety in people who already suffer high anxiety, whether from a distinct disorder or just being someone who gets anxious in general. Anything that would change SS is a plus in my book.
There's occasionally exceptions like adding flames and 25 star and making elite mobs actually have drops but the overall direction of the game is to make it worse for players.
Symbols are something that should be farmed with dailies available as a sort of 'bad luck' stopgap. Instead they have decided to make dailies the main way of obtaining them. Instead of a game where you have the power to determine your own strength by putting in effort they made it into a daily login for 5 minutes "game."
I personally like the direction the game is going. I think dailies should be the main method, but not the ONLY method.
Drop rate is too low to be considered a method, selectors aren't common enough either.
You can finish all your arcane river dailies in five minutes?
Adventure update has a black mage style event shop and you can get tons of arcane symbols from it so keep your heads up
Reducing the amount of quests does not provide an alternative route to gain arcane force.
Of course the more geared players will have an advantage, that's the reason why people gear. A main selling point in MMORGPs is gearing up, getting stronger.
Also nothing is devalued, it still takes the same amount of dailies to finish every symbol, that value still holds. And event shops are very few symbols, 3 extra per day.
Currently the AF system also does not allow to change mains properly. Changing your main using the catalysts reduces the symbol by 20%. Which is an absurd amount. Changing mains 3 times for example, would net you: 0.8^3 = 0.512. An almost 50% reducement in AF symbols. With other words, all the dailies you've done up until now. Half of those have been for nothing. Hooray fun gamedesign... Forced to do the same quests again...