Stacona

This will have improvements for the star force system for All Worlds, Interactive Worlds only, and Heroic Worlds only. The main goal is focused on improving the star force system for new players by almost entirely removing punishment for star forcing super early game equipment, the rest is an overall improvement for everyone, but mostly long-term players.

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All Worlds / New Player Experience:

This is simple:
Reduce the total mesos cost for stars 1-10 by 90% (10% of the current mesos cost).
Reduce the total mesos cost for stars 10-15 by roughly 30% (roughly 70% of the current mesos cost).

This will make all equipment below 10 stars almost free to star force so when a new player stars their equipment, they are not punished for doing so when they find out equipment quickly gets replaced within the before level 200 experience.

The 10-15 stars range reduction is to smooth out the mesos cost curve a bit while still fulfilling the goal of the first 10 stars experience reasoning, but to a much softer degree.

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Interactive Worlds Only:

To reduce the burden of needing a ton of mesos to upgrade your equipment in Interactive Worlds, allow for the option to:
Choose to either pay, for example, 100% of the mesos cost OR click a check-box to discount the mesos cost by 50% at the cost of consuming Spell Traces per attempt.

Spell Trace cost, if enabled, will be based on the equipment's level and what the current star rank attempt is being performed.

This also feeds into Interactive Worlds motto of being able to upgrade character progression through a variety of means while Heroic Worlds is simplified to mesos (and levels) only.

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Heroic Worlds Only:

Since Heroic Worlds does not have trade, and certain items are very random dependent (to the point that some equipment you might never see even a single copy of let alone more than one). This star force improvement will be a way to repair destroyed items without needing another of the identical equipment to repair it, at the cost of a very hefty mesos fee or the player can choose to sacrifice an identical equipment to repair for no mesos fee as it currently works.

To be clear:
If an equipment is destroyed, a player can choose to sacrifice an identical equipment to repair the destroyed item.
OR CHOOSE TO:
If an equipment is destroyed, a player can choose to pay a hefty mesos fee to repair the destroyed item in the same way it would be repaired if they sacrificed an identical equipment to do it. Cost based on Equipment's Level.

Example Values of Mesos Repair Fee:
~ Level 250: 10,000,000,000 (Ten Billion) Mesos
~ Level 200: 5,000,000,000 (Five Billion) Mesos
~ Level 180: 1,500,000,000 (One and a Half Billion) Mesos
~ Level 160: 1,000,000,000 (One Billion) Mesos
~ Level 150: 750,000,000 (Seven Hundred and Fifty Million) Mesos
~ Level 140: 500,000,000 (Five Hundred Million) Mesos
~ Level 130: 250,000,000 (Two Hundred and Fifty Million) Mesos

This way the player is not soft-locked out off progression because they only ever found one Pitch Boss Equipment over years of playing and was destroyed before it ever saw 22 stars by being able to brute force their way to 22 stars as long as they have the mesos to do it.

Meanwhile Interactive worlds can rely on the lucky players that have an over supply of equipment through trading and the mesos market for backups. Heroic Worlds does not have this luxury, and if a player sees one of that pitch boss equipment, that might be the only time they would ever see that equipment ever again. If it does not star force all the way to 22 stars the first time then the progression train comes to a screeching halt and never starts back up again.

One pitch boss equipment is insanely rare already to the point that it may never be seen by many players.

To be clear, the early game leveling is from levels 1 through 200, but 1 through 210 should be included here to really get a character started.

Old Reboot days was so much more fun and enjoyable with leveling where the monsters had significantly more HP and gave a lot more EXP to compensate, but you had to fight monsters near your level.

This was fantastic as it made every map before Arcane River viable to train on which let the player to explore and create their own journey (story) and made the game way more fun baseline. Where players can come and level a character at any point of the year - not needing to wait for an event to instantly get to 200 - and instead had a slower experience to really appreciate the job that they are playing and take everything in without it being too slow or have any awkward moments of not having any good training maps to go to at a certain level point since you were not locked to starforce maps.

I tried playing a Corsair again over at Hyperion for fun and it was not an enjoyable experience since the efficient EXP is done in such an unintuitive way where you need to fight monsters way above your level instead of the common sense way of fighting monsters near your level. This was something that Old Reboot fixed (and is now broken), with just fighting monsters near your level to get the most efficient EXP which GREATLY improves the new player experience.

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Two options to fix the issue:

1. You can make the before Arcane River maps, every single one of them between levels 1 through 200 (and little bit above this because of Dark World Tree and Scrapyard and the like), reverted to the Old Reboot HP and EXP values - either for only Heroic or for both Interactive and Heroic - while making the final damage formula from character level to monster level the same as it used to be for Old Reboot if the character is level 1 through 199 (levels 200 and above would be the level final damage formula it is currently).

OR

2. This one would be more effort, but can be improved for both Interactive and Heroic Worlds.
~ The total EXP required to go from levels 1 to 100 is reduced by 50% or greater of an EXP reduction.
~ The total EXP required to go from levels 100 to 200 is reduced by roughly 20%.
~ The total EXP required to go from levels 200 to 210 is reduced by roughly 40%.

~ All monster maps from levels 100 and above that are not Arcane River maps or higher will become Starforce Maps, greatly increasing the HP and EXP the monsters give. Emphasis on ALL monster maps below Arcane River and above level 100 (when you acquire 4th job power, the extra power helps you kill these stronger monsters).
- This will serve as a natural tutorial to teach new players about the importance of Starforcing and getting used to hitting minimum map requirements for hunting maps for when they reach level 200 for 5th job advancement and Arcane Power requirements, rather than learning all of this at level 200 and being overwhelmed.

~ The final damage formula from character level to monster level will become the same as how Old Reboot had it since they made character fight monsters near your level rather than way above your level, for characters that are levels 1 through 199. Character levels 200 and above will receive no changes to the formula as it currently is.

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I really want the early game leveling experience to go back to how it was for years since this was so much fun to create and level up a brand new character! As long as the early game experience provides an enjoyable and good experience, then the game will continue to grow, if this experience is not enjoyable then it will turn off new players from sticking around.

Extra inventory slots for the Decoration Tab inside of your Inventory Window would be so nice to have, especially set up where we can easily organize everything.
My Decoration Inventory is full and I don't like keeping the items in the Cash Shop itself, so I just don't buy new cash shop items until there is way to hold more items in the inventory window itself.

How I would set up these Inventory Bags is:

~ The hard cap to how many bags you can have is equal to the maximum number of inventory slots in the decoration tab, minus 41 (forty-one).

~ The bags can be purchased with mesos only.

~ There will be multiple different kinds of coloured bags available to help with organization, whether you use the coloured bags to place all items of that same colour within it or use the different colours to categorize what type of items go into that bag or for players just like that particular colour, the choice is the player's to make!
Bag colours being things like:
- Brown
- Black
- White
- Gray
- Red
- Blue
- Yellow
- Green
- Pink
- Purple
- Orange
- Light Blue
- Dark Blue
- Etc. and so forth.

~ Each bag can hold up to 40 items each.

it is the 5th and last character to be made for the Flora jobs.

We got Nova mage as well to be made still.

And Anima Archer, Anima Warrior, and Anima Pirate.

1. Why are we gutting Bishop? [Rhetorical.]
- And Divine Punishment (skill where swords of light rain down from the sky in front of Bishop) we don't want it to have a longer recharge time, less charges, and more damage per strike.
The opposite is true where we want it to have a shorter recharge time and not increase the damage per strike and not decrease the max charge count.
This skill is great for mobbing and reaching bosses that would be out of reach otherwise, the skill always being available allows this to happen whenever we desire.

2. The solution to not have Bishops become super desirable and wanted all of the time is not to nerf Bishops and remove their unique utility providing effects for the party, but it is to add in more true supports into the game and increase the support value of existing jobs which then...

- A. Increases the variety of support utility in more jobs with different playstyles which then increases the supply of supports in the game.

- B. More true supports at Bishop's level, or close enough to, that can also provide different types of utility that Bishop does not even offer increases more playstyles and themes of jobs to choose from which widens the support pool.

Now parties don't need to look for specifically a Bishop, but rather they can look for any support to help them boss better. And with more variety greatly increases the support player pool which makes it significantly easier to find a support to boss with.

Embrace supports and support playstyle instead of trying to snuff them out and remove them, this will just hurt the game short and long term by doing this, but making supports clearly distinct from other jobs helps grow the game with completely different unselfish jobs to play - rather than everyone being "look how big my numbers are to your numbers".

This direction for the game of just making every job solo self sufficient blurs them to much together and makes you question to why there is any more than only one job to play?

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UPDATE (September 6th, 2024):

To add, there is not anything to look forward to coming to the game from KMS, but we keep getting news that brings dread to the game's future that people are not looking forward to.

Basically, we need another Inkwell's Note soon and it has to have something in it - even if it is super vague - of brand new exciting stuff to come. I would love a new GMS Job added to the game to make up for the lost of Jett, and Mo Xuan does not count even if he does get added to GMS, talking about an actual new job!

In addition to fun new things and updates to old GMS content to make them relevant and fun for modern MapleStory!

I need something to look forward to for GMS because KMS keeps just delivering more and more dread coming in the future...