Fuhreak

Nexon isn't going anywhere. We just had a major server merge, for MapleStory alone.
If you check https://ir.nexon.co.jp/en/ here you'll see that Nexon actually just acquired a young company to help drive the western market.
You can see that Nexon is doing fine for themselves if you check their quarterly earnings report.
Nexon of America isn't doing that great, but they're not about to just give up on the western market after spending a lot of money to retake it.

WONDERGUY wrote: »

When you want to quit just go with
Taskmanger - MapleStory.exe - right click end process tree

Quit been broken for a while like that ( also you can avoid that survey/ad's ...annoying popup spams)

An alternative way that you might find faster is to just type in "Maple" and hit Alt + E.
Make sure MapleStory is the process you're actually ending though.

It's a bit curious as to why the rates for all stat don't match the rest, for classes that don't use it, main% is better.
All a lower all% does is lock more Xenon players out of better items.

https://strategywiki.org/wiki/MapleStory/Potential_System#Potentials_List

Weight determines the chance to obtain the line in a particular set. Some legendary potentials' weight may be inaccurate. To find the exact chance please apply: (Weight of Line)/(Sum of weight of all possible lines)

STR % Increase
Weight: 3

DEX % Increase
Weight: 3

INT % Increase
Weight: 3

LUK % Increase
Weight: 3

All Stats % Increase
Weight: 2

So the rate doesn't seem that much lower, but according to the stratwiki, it is still lower.

нσяιƶεη wrote: »

.All I've been doing so far is frantically googling guides, browsing through wikis, watching Youtube tutorials, etc.

They absolutely need to improve on this and I think Nexon is somewhat experimenting with this idea.
You can see evidence of this with some of the newer events basically being "how to" guides that try to cover most of the ground.
A swing and a miss imo.

[...]makes me wonder if it's actually worth the effort.

MMOs are time sinks with lots of content. If you aren't prepared to learn a lot and spend the next few months of your life playing... Then no, don't bother.

A few of the mildly infuriating things from the above are: screen freezes when going through portals, crashing randomly for no reason, long periods of black screens, unresponsive controls...

This is due to the way MapleStory stores files. Inside of your MS folder there are various .wz files, these files are archives of a sort which contain all game assets.
I'm not keen on how these files work exactly, as I'm not a programmer, but basically due to their dated design, it takes awhile to search through the file and load the correct asset.
The only way to fix this would be if Nexon redesigns the system that loads files within MapleStory, something I'm sure they'd rather just avoid for various reasons.

It's also annoying that the little cutscenes, the ones where you have voices and such, are unskippable. I just want to play the game, I could care less for the story- and while this is an appeal factor for some, it's not one for all so adding a skip button shouldn't be too much to ask for, especially for the cutscenes that last for quite awhile.

You really should give the story a try. It's pretty good imo but I can see how if you've already seen it once it would be nice to be able to skip.

I also do not like how they removed the option of directly running MapleStory, it all has to be done within the Nexon Launcher. [...]

You can try running the game via steam, but I'm not sure if there's a way to link a Nexon account to a steam account.
I know the reverse (Steam into a Nexon account) is possible, however.
So basically, I'm not sure but if you want away from Nexon Launcher, Steam is your only option and it might require you to restart.

I also don't know if the graphics properties actually do anything, decreasing or increasing quality values seem to have zero effect on performance. I still freeze, I still lag- basically, I can see no visual difference in performance between the highest and lowest settings (aside from lowered quality).

Most likely the graphical option will do absolutely nothing. At the end of the day, it still has to render all the layers on top of each other which is the most taxing element of this process, iirc.

This is purely my opinion, not sure if this matters to some, but when creating a character, while there still is a short description provided, I feel that it's still far too insufficient for new players to read and understand the capabilities of that specific character. I honestly don't think the descriptions do the characters justice, so much is missing on what they do, what they can do, and how players can play them, that I'm still largely in the blind when and after creating a new character. I thought it'd be cool to have a little showcasing video, maybe a minute long- doesn't really matter, within the description that players can watch to see what that specific character can actually do in terms of abilities.

I agree completely.

If you've read through all of this, you either really like the game or have too much time on your hands

Why not both?
Aside from above comments, I'm just wondering why you didn't put this in [Suggestions, Feedback, and Requests]

нσяιƶεη wrote: »

PS: How do you manage to get 120% drop rates? I'm assuming it's something that involves RL cash, in which case I can't do anything about it but if it's an accumulation of things that don't cost cold cash, what is it?

If you're on a normal server, it's going to cost cash or a lot of reward points and crafting/farming/whatever, not exactly sure all the methods to earn cubes on those. (Reboot buys with mesos)
Rings, Face/Eye Accessories and Pendants all have the ability to get "Drop Rate +20%" at the legendary tier if they're level 120 or higher.
Having the Ability +20% as well as 5 items with drop rate 20% gave me a total of 120%.