To whom it may concern -
The Global MapleStory (GMS) Community pleads that you consider the feedback below with sincerity.
Severely alarming information has come out from the Bean Brigade GMS Tespia streams regarding the upcoming New Age update. This information casts a very ugly stain on what was set to be one of the most anticipated updates to this game in its history and has led to community outage on a scale of which has not been seen since the massive flame scandal that landed the Nexon Corporation in very hot water. As a company that prides themselves in their commitment to "Player Satisfaction is our End Game", the decisions made leading up to this point seem to be headed towards a different end game of completely losing trust and a significant amount of your Global player base.
The decisions to make major adverse adjustments to the New Age update have already been a disaster for your customers and customer facing staff with your shareholders set to face the result of the backlash. Black Friday is one of the highest grossing financial segments of the year and is currently marred with a perception of consumer fraud based on the complete lack of communication and intent around the changes, the means in which the timing of release was modified as a direct insider knowledge and impact of the changes, and the way the community had to find out about about them. As a result of the current reality, there is a rapidly growing potential to set in place long term ramifications for GMS both in quality and general service delivery.
The following is a list of grievances that need to be addressed, several of which have been unresolved for months or even years, and please bear in mind these are not all grievances the community has with the game:
## 1. Censoring your Customer/Client base's feedback and suggestions
Your Community Managers do not have sufficient information or training to properly handle their operating environment. Invest more in your customer facing staff and provide them with the appropriate information and guidance on how to properly address player feedback more effectively. More effective Community Managers fosters a better experience for the player base and leads to less confusion and vitriol when significant or questionable decisions are presented.
## 2. Sol Erda Energy Cap
Many decisions met with backlash from the community have been justified as "to keep in alignment with KMS." This system has no reason to be changed from the Korean version of the game. Placing a cap on this system completely removes the purpose and benefit of farming in games centered around farming. The proposed capped system would take roughly 630 total days of dailies and weekly bosses up to Kalos, which has a global completion rate of 0.19% in GMS Reboot for the first time clear, to complete what is currently released and does not include the HEXA Stat mechanic. Each unreleased Mastery Core takes 83 days and each unreleased origin skill takes 145 days for completion. The limitations proposed are at odds with a good player experience. There are already significant time gate mechanics in place for the Sacred/Authentic Force system that serve as a daily login and player numbers driver, so introducing more of these systems has no purpose other than to compound FOMO, fear of missing out, and further the gap between players. These metrics are very valuable to the company and stakeholders, but introducing inconsistent systems that limit player return will ultimately lead to a decline in player engagement.
## 2. The Sol Erda Booster Ticket
This is newly released information from MapleStory South East Asia server patch notes, and is a new microtransaction item. Whose goal is revenue growth through a subscription style format via the in game Sol Erda and Erda Fragment resources. This ticket is currently set up to be $30 USD per month. The function of the item is to reduce the amount of time taken to finish the currently available HEXA Matrix and HEXA stat systems by 20-25% based on current estimates. to the total cost to the player of $540 USD for just the HEXA Matrix assuming it will reduce to roughly a year and a half. Whilst this appears to be a very good way of generating money per player over the course of a number of years. This also creates a significant imbalance between the Korean distribution and Global distribution, which is not coherent with your company's previous statement of wanting to bring the different versions of the game closer in alignment with each other. If you are required to implement a microtransaction for the sake of profit you may want to consider implementing the direct purchase of Sol Erda in the “regular servers” of the game. This is how the Korean version has at the moment, at least then you have the foothold to stand on if you are aligning the regions closer to each other which has a much larger chance of being acceptable, however given the current circumstances may not be.
## 3. Frenzy Totem and other Non-KMS Items
This is a topic specific to "Regular Servers" (Reg Servers) and is integral to both the economy and upkeep of said economy of those servers. By implementing instanced maps on Reg Servers with hamstrung Frenzy Totem functionality, the Reg Server economy is likely to collapse as the game forces players out of the Arcane River zones and into Grandis. Frenzy Totems were changed in the past to stop functioning in level 300 and beyond zones over two years ago. This change effectively drops the limitation from future level 300+ to all current level 260+ Grandis Zones. Before this change, the item had an insurmountable value to the players in Mesos and also shows a lack of faith towards Items not present in KMS such as Breath of Divinity, Lucid Earrings, Battle Roids, and others. All of these items have potential and real costs in the thousands of dollars with all coming exclusively from gambling systems like the Marvel Machine. It appears that a lack of understanding between the differences between the GMS Reg Server economy and the Korean Reg Server economy has led to a potential collapse of GMS Reg Server economies. There are many players whose current plan is to move away from Reg Server options and switch to the newly announced "Hyperion" Reboot Server which will have further consequences to the economy. By keeping the current functionality of Frenzy totems and working towards a more long term solution might serve to retain players in Reg Servers.
There is a large portion of your customer base boycotting spending on your game. Addressing and reassuring your customers should be your number one priority, especially as we enter what should be a lucrative financial season. It would be very sad to see a complete toss of the 10% recovery so far in Fiscal Year 2023 and further declines into Fiscal Year 2024. I wish you the best of luck with this as I would hate to see you disappoint your shareholders further after just recovering from a 10% decline in value. I would hate to see it crash further once again, in spite of being poised to drive back towards your all time high with current updates. Would be a shame for you to throw it away with bad decisions for one of your core products such as the ones shown on the test client, and in recently announced patch notes.
As a final note, if money is an issue, there are many more options that you can explore should you want to go down that route. We as the community would be more than happy to explore those options, at this time however Nexon Corporation has lost that good faith and opportunity. Should that be something that Nexon Corporation wants to explore, reach out to the community at a later time.
Sincerely a Very concerned Mapler, and community.
Edit: Forgot to thank Panik on GMS Reboot Kronos for assisting me with organizing this write-up.
and 27 others.
