Nicely written post, captures most players' sentiment of the current state of the game.
I've played a lot of games since Maplestory, free to play games as well, and I've never seen it this... Bad. Where incompetency is normalcy and problems are not acknowledged and broken things remain broken or imbalanced for an indefinite amount of time. I've never seen a playerbase view the publisher and devs in such a negative way for such a long time that it becomes a decade old meme. Heck it's only the Maplestory team, other nexon games are fine compared to Maplestory. Well, Maplestory2 is gone but it was still better. Yeah sure Maplestory code is old and crap, but that isn't the real issue, the issue is we need more communication, more transparency, more action needed. I find it upsetting that so many beast tamer mains are switching or quitting, mourning how such a fun and unique class became unplayable because of this so called revamp, and there weren't that many beast tamers to begin with.
In a lot of free to play games, there rarely are any detrimental bugs or things broken in game, and when there is, it's addressed ASAP and a time is set for a fix (when is illium job advancement gonna be fixed? RIP people trying to teraburn it before Adele drops), then there will be compensation. In some games the compensations are so great or at least worthwhile that players would HOPE for an extended or unscheduled maintenance, but they know it won't happen because it's RARE. Now the key isn't good compensation, slapping a bandaid of good compensation on top of constant failure won't steer the game towards a good direction. The key is to keep your player base happy, because broken things shouldn't exist and shouldn't be normal, but if things are broken then you should sincerely apologise, and work towards fixing it in a way that the playerbase can see. It's the attitude nexon should have with it's playerbase, and it should be transparent and sincere. At the very least we should at least be able to LOG IN AND PLAY and not constantly crash, lag sucks but is whatever at this point. What are you gonna give us 2xexp coupons for when logging into reboot is like roulette?
I wish we could open a panel or discussion between the players and the devs like some games do in game conventions, because player feed back online is full of anger and profanity and I don't think anyone would wanna sort through all that to find actual constructive ones. If the Maplestory team could just sit down and compile all the concerns players have for the game and create a long term plan to implement changes for the betterment of the game while consulting the playerbase, which many developers have seen positive results from employingthis strategy, then I can see Maplestory surviving for a long, long time to come.
It's hard to spend money on a game that you feel is failing. I'm happy to spend regularly in other MMOs because it's fun and worthwhile but I won't spend money on Maplestory, why would I spend money trying to upgrade an already sinking ship where the repairmen that I've called for are never gonna actually fix the ship? Like yeah they regularly do some patch work.. but with DUCT TAPE. As much as I'd like to support my beloved mushroom game.. I need a reason to, and right now there's nothing but reasons not to.
And telling people to stop buying nx won't work, because yeah sure majority of us aren't, but there are those KRAKENS that out spend even them whales, who don't necessarily care about the longevity of the game, but are probably the ones that are keeping KR from just pulling the plug on GMS.
Same, I spent so long in the yut game just to get 0 coins and be banned for 15 minutes; I can't even play pixel skies, every other run I get kicked out, it really sucks.
I bet nexon knows, so they put very few 'serious' items in boxes so people would roll a lot more trying to get those 2 specific items.
I mean that's one way of doing it but if there were more items people wanted, casual spenders (me) will start spending too. Dunno how much revenue they get from whalers trying to whale that one thing vs casuals dropping a couple 20s to try their luck. Right now it's just not worth it for me.
