The burning event is bad for players. It's FOMO cranked up to 11. The temporary CRA gear was not enough to get this done, and I had to use a tremendous amount of game knowledge to always be out-playing the terrible gear options I was stuck with. Gear wall at 160? Power through by carefully selecting maps your class can 100% cheese. Content drought at 180? Suck down literally four thousand potions to power through with your bad gear on maps enemies can 2 shot you from across the stage in.
That's ****. It feels miserable, and making that the primary focus of the summer is a cancer surgically designed to get players to quit.
Every time burning event happens I do it, and every time it's an unmitigated disaster. I busted my ass to get a link-skill job, that I hated every minute of playing, up to 200. I'm not even going to 5th job it. Too much work to get it caught up to the standard of gear that Arcane River demands. It'll straight up be faster to go to somewhere like Twisted Aqua Road (I know it's removed but there are still similar areas) and catch combo orbs until I want to kill myself. Bad game design that's toxic to the players is bad for the game and needs to go.
Edit: all my Hyper Stats were in EXP Gain with the left over stats saved for Arcane Force that I'm not going to even bother with now.
Image added to prove that I didn't just quit half way through to wine it was too hard. I did it and it legitimately sucked ass.
Old leveling events had the good sense to stop before the gear wall they absolutely were not going to prepare you for. Not this one. New players who don't have the game knowledge required to power through are going to hit that gear wall like a train going 3x faster than normal. I literally ran into a half-dozen players who didn't even have accessories trying to do Cygnus pre-quests (because they came up in journal for their level range). Three of them stopped to ask me why my damage was 2x theirs. Damage that was still pitiful. I had to tell them I was wearing twice the gear they were and how they could catch up.
The players who didn't really know what they were doing cited the expedited leveling process, saying that so many new quests and notifications were coming at them, so fast that there was no way to know what was important and what wasn't. It's not like the silent crusade in any way telegraphs that it's got gear for players. Except the shop button, which doesn't become available until after starting the quests, and players don't know to look for in the UI as a new key that's not assigned when granted. It's just at the bottom with all the other 'useless keys'.
One player I talked to in-depth about it said they knew they didn't know what they were doing, but didn't know how to get the info required to figure out what to do. They said they felt the game should have better explained what it wants from them but it never did. Making an event that speed-runs the first half of the game tells the new players that nothing important happens in that part of the game. That the game starts at end game like every other MMO. But maplestory never prepares players to start the end game after speed-running through everything else.
The reason we need the crusader codex, and I imagine the reason it was even introduced in the first place, is because the game is so old finding any reliable information about mob drops outside of the game has proven virtually impossible. However, the crusader codex is the longest running joke maplestory presently has to offer. It's been broken for so long, and in so many ways, that I just assumed Nexon forgot all about it. That is until Monster Collection was pushed out, which is basically a gigantic middle finger at anyone who still wants the Crusader Codex to function and function reliably.
So, please, either fix the codex, or replace it's functionality by rolling it into the monster collection system.
