Greetings, Maple Community!
We’d like to give our sincerest thanks to all 1603 of you who participated in our MapleStory Community Survey. Additionally, we’d like to share the results of the survey to you along with our plans. The results of this survey had confirmed many of the content and planning we had already prepared to improve our transparency and communication to the community. Our ultimate goal is to establish greater communication from us to you and provide more ways for you to communicate to us.
Here are the results of the survey:
We started the survey with an open question on how we can be more transparent and many of the answers we received reflected the statistics shown above. A very large portion of the collected responses requested that we provided more transparency in regards to hackers and bans.
Maplers provided feedback such as:
- “Full disclosure of evidence and procedures during ban appeals.”
- “Provide information as to how hackers and botters are being handled.”
- "Give more information with how evidence is gathered."
However, we withhold information related to ban evidence because it can be used by hackers to avoid future detection. Additionally, an official post was made with further reasons as to why we cannot disclose the evidence:
As players have mentioned in this thread, there are various reasons as to why we do not publicly share the evidence:
- We wish to ensure fair treatment for all players whether they're vocal or nonvocal. Presenting an individual case to the public doesn't give the case entitlement over others. For a widespread issue such as this, we gave equal attention for all accounts banned from the Arcane Umbra exploit.
- We don't promote public defamation. Making an example out of a player is not a method we endorse to deter players to follow the rules. By presenting the evidence of banned individuals publicly, we'd be encouraging peers to attack and harass individuals found guilty.
- Bans and ban appeals are between the investigations team and the individual that was banned. The community at large is not the jury that decides whether the banned are innocent or guilty. The reason for this is because evidence presented by the appealing player will always be skewed towards their favor. Due to this, the community team would need the evidence and proof acquired by our investigations team and that evidence cannot be made public for the reasons stated above.
In our efforts to provide more transparency with the banning process, we have plans to set up a Q&A session with our Customer Support (CS) and Investigations team.
Another large portion of the responses in regards to transparency voiced feedback such as:
“Being more involved in the community and listening to the suggestions made.”
“More transparency regarding bugs and what issues are known.”
“Providing more information on concerns reported by the community.”
Listening to community feedback, suggestions, and responding to them has always been the Maple team’s priority and this hasn’t changed. Communication is a two way street and the sentiment from our community is one of our indicators for the direction to take.
It’s through clear communication not only from our team, but from the community as well, that allows us to relay feedback and act upon them with the rest of the team. For example in the past few weeks, Maplers provided constructive criticism and helped bring to our attention various topics, such as:
- Introduce Buff Freezers into Reboot
- Making it so skills hits could register 1 damage onto Frankenbalrog
- Ensuring Maplers entered on the left side in the Maple Leaf High rooms
- Adding the Shop function on Lotusroid
- Reducing the drop rate of Easter event related consumables
- Increasing the carry limit for each Easter event consumable
- Reducing the Golden Rocker Rider Animations
The list above is only a
handful of examples of how the community assisted our team and this isn’t including even more suggestions that are being worked on.
According to the survey results, over 50% of those who participated in the survey wished to see Developers Notes and more presence on fan sites.
Our aim is to provide answers on various concerns within the community through more communication from our producer and developers.
Fan sites are a great resource to gauge the sentiment of our Maplers that we’ve been using, and we will continue to grow our presence on various fan sites. Currently, the bulk of our presence is on our official platforms, but interacting and responding to more Maplers on more channels is within our plans. We’ll be sure to swing by fan sites often, but please visit our official platforms for important notices and information.
We’ve also noticed that the majority of the respondents do not visit the official forum as seen from the results:
Many Maplers have expressed that they don’t visit the forum for a wide array of reasons
Comments from Maplers consisted of:
- “It’s faster to obtain an answer in chat rooms than to wait for someone to post.”
- “Not a fan of forum and prefer quicker responses.”
- “There’s not a lot of activity on the forum”
Due to the lack of interest, it’s clear to us that the forum is not serving its purpose as an official platform where Maplers can interact with both fellow Maplers and staff as much as they had hoped.
Much of the feedback emphasized that responses are scarce due to the low activity, and that many prefer instant means of communication such as chat-rooms.
From the responses we gathered, we decided that we’d plan to put together a platform which could:
- Allow for more open and faster conversations between staff to Maplers on an official platform.
- Foster a helpful and friendly community to assist Maplers with questions and concerns in real time.
- Keep Maplers well informed and updated in real time.
To hit all these points, we will be introducing the Official MapleStory Discord server this month. There’s still much planning to do with the server, but ultimately, we would like to bring our Maple team under one roof with you. This doesn’t mean we’re dropping the forum or planning to pay any less attention to fan sites as well. We value all the suggestions, feedback, and even the constructive criticism posted onto the forum and it will remain as valuable platform for:
- Events and contests
- Updates and special announcements
- Documenting Feedback, Suggestions, and Bugs
- Guides and fan creations
We asked the community where many of you would like to see the most improvement in regards to the game and over 40% of the responses wished to see improvements to the overall sever stability.
We have and will continue to do our best when tackling server stability and content that Maplers cannot access due to disconnections.
We have addressed a number of stability related topics and we’re currently working to resolve existing ones. Here are some of the topics we’ve fixed in the past few weeks and ongoing topics we’re working to fix:
- Dragon Rider Party Quest and the Soaring skill causing disconnects.
- Reducing the lag Maplers have reported to experience during 2x EXP events.
- Created a buffer time between double miracle cube time and cube sales.
- Investigating all possible causes for the Event Hall lag and applying multiple changes to mitigate the lag.
Again, these are ongoing cases that we are working to address.
We’d like to thank you again for providing us with your feedback on how you wish to see MapleStory improve. We will continue to do our part and listen to the feedback provided by the community and provide even greater transparency through our plans we have shared with you.
- Arwoo
