So I am writing this out of concern for not just the european community but also for the general attitude of the staff behind this game as of late.
I just feel like the people behind GMS are just not feeling any love for the game. The disconnect between the community, the game and the staff is just sad.
There are some points I would like to hit on in this post that I feel need to be adressed. I will try to keep it short and not drag on about every single thing.
-Lack of communication
-Compensations
-Having a clear vision but not being able to reach it properly
-Neglect
Lack of communication.
Places like reddit and discord are always screaming suggestions and memeing the hek out of yet another thing that nexon won't listen to and we get ignored in most of it.
We have kindof grown to accept and expect this kind of behavior because it just all feels like we are yelling at a stone wall. Being able to laugh about it is just another way to cope with this endless loop. But this is an even bigger concern on the Luna server. Like with the flames neb bug that happened now. We only got told about the maintenance ingame 5 minutes in advance and after maintenance started we didn't get an official notice on the website until half an hour after the maintenance started, but that notice only said that there was a maintenance. There was no ending in sight for it yet, no description on why it was happening and not even the VFMs could tell us what was going on because they didn't get told anything either!
Compensations
The standard answer for any inconvenience seems to be Bebe's color palette of boxes.
They are all filled with the same kind of ingame boosters every single time and honestly, it's outdated.
I will only be hitting on the current one for the sake of keeping it short but this is something that clarifies the disconnect between the nexon staff and the game.
The box contains :
2x EXP Coupon (1hour) (x6)
2x Drop Rate Coupon (1 hour) (x6)
Special Medal of Honor (x5)
Safety Charm (14 day) x7 Coupon
Respawn Token (14 day) x7 Coupon
Trait Boost Potion
Storm Growth Potion
Miracle Circulator (7 day) x5 Coupon
Now this is not going to be some kind of spoiled bratty post saying that we deserve more than this. It's simply to point out that most of these items are just not needed by the bigger and most active portion of the game.
The 2x exp coupons and drop rate coupons have tonnes of replacements of which we have many ways of getting. We get blue 2x coupons thrown at us for not playing the game, for not moving in the game, we can buy them with legion coins, they come from hot week. we just get them so often that alot of them just expire.
The special medal of honor is a nice thought for people that need to work on their abillities, but with the way inner abillity works this will probably just bounce you between 11 str and 30 wdef a bunch of times rather than actually giving you anything good. With a locked legendary and first line this would give you 3~4 resets, but besides that we can buy them. Just like the safety charms and respawn tokens. Sure, unlike honor medals, they are limited with a daily purchase, but they don't expire and we can stack them up because we don't necessarily die daily in an area where you lose exp.
Trait boost potions are a mixed feeling kind of thing. You can have all your traits maxed within a few months of actually playing the game and grinding them out. For anyone that doesn't feel like doing that, you can buy trait boost potions in every event shop ever and have then maxed within a year still. Compensations like these only add up to that to the point where we just burn it on a mule which we won't touch again any time soon.
Stormgrowth potions are a nice gesture too but with almost everyone in the game having atleast their main on or over level 200, this just becomes either another burn item or (like in most cases) if it's untradeable, we wont be able to use it and that too becomes worthless. And if I'm not wrong, you can only use certain storm growth potions once on a character anyway, so eventually they would be completely obsolete.
Miracle circulators are useful for people that havent gotten their legendary abillity or prime line on a max stat yet but aside from that it's just a gamble on whether or not you are going to get one of the tens of thousands of combinations you can get in the right order that you need. But, they are still welcome for most people unlike alot of the other gifts.
All of these items would be useful if you were below level 200 or if you were trying to level a mule, however, most of us lost playtime on our mains and the chance of doing our dailies/get the event coins on time. Even now not only did the maintenance last 24 hours and 30 minutes (but who is counting right? xD) making most people miss 2 days of dailies and ark coins, and ofcourse missing 1 or 2 days of dailies isnt the end of the world, but we also don't actually have a solution for the problem. So what did we really wait 24 hours for? A blockade on our items.... which brings me to the next subject.
Having a clear vision on what to do, but not being able to reach it properly
I am aware that the title is a bit long, but for the lack of being able to find a better wording for it, please bear with me.
Nexon was already aware of the flamed items on Luna yet this still went wrong. And I get it, this can happen with a game built like a 13 year long ongoing game of Jenga. But why wasn't this tested? Last time I checked nexon had QA people. Then again, throwback to the time when we saw nexon staff playing maple, a guy didn't know that blue potions didn't restore PP on kinesis and that it was perfectly possible from the map that he was in, and the same guy didn't realize why he couldn't equip a shade secondary while being attacked by mushrooms. So why did we not whip out the good ol' test server again but this time with Luna characters actually added to it. Just another thing that we got cut out from. It was rather inconvenient trying to test 200+ things when you had to level the classes from the start of 1 free level 150 but we tried our best anyway. There was a way to find out what would happen if you tried to apply your update if you had just created a flamed item and put a nebulite on it in any kind of testing area and then see the end result after the update. I feel like the return of the test server and/or some ACTUAL QA testing could save nexon and the players alot of headaches.
Personally, I feel like alot of things could've prevented this outcome but it didn't happen. but there is no use in crying over spilled milk, but we can take this with us to the future to learn from it and prevent this from happening again.
Neglect
Now this one weighs down on me a bit more than the other ones.
Honestly, in Luna it seriously feels like we are the unwanted stepchild in a new marriage. We don't have actual GMs, we only ever really see GMs come by to play omok, monster card or host events. Luna isn't the biggest of servers so we would only require a minimal amount of supervision, but that seems too big of a thing to ask for. our entire economy got destroyed after coming here because there are no GMs to ban kanna hackers / mesofarming bots. NX rates are at an all time high, on EMS we went up to 1:100 and that was already a pretty decent amount for what we've had up until then, but in a matter of months we doubled that and after a year and a half we are now up from 1:100 to 1:700.
We aren't asking for our own nexon team but atleast a GM or 2, that's not toomuch to ask is it? Even if they are just home GMs stationed in europe instead of in-office GMs in nexon america's HQ we require some kind of supervision. This really just feels like the game that we all loved to play and progress in got completely dumped into a garbage bin because we got adopted by a family that didn't really want us anyway. And I get that we kindof got forced upon you, but we also didn't ask for this. So let's just try to make the most of it while being considerate of eachother. We just want a reason to play the game that we all love and have loved for many years, but the sorry state that our server is in now just makes it hard to muster the motivation to do so. Even after hearing on one of the maplestory streams that the chance of a reboot 2 starting for north america was on the table but a reboot for europe was shelved was just another promise that ended up being a kick in the face.
I'm certain that there are things that I forgot to mention here and feel free to write your own concerns or anything you didn't see in here in the comments.
I would also like to suggest that we set up something like a change.org petition or anything of the sorts for the return of the /find command since we lost that simply because KMS did eventho the reason why KMS removed it doesn't occur in GMS. Sorry for the long post, believe it or not but this was the short version of it mainly focussed on the current event that took place. I really hope that us Luna peeps can just be embraced a little more by nexon america and that nexon america can learn to love their game a bit more again. I really have been feeling a lack of love for the game in the recycled events and mandatory returns of cash grabs and such. It makes the game feel alot less alive.
TL;DR
State of the game is meh
EU peeps are having an extra tough time
/find needs to come back
Nexon america needs to find the love for their game again.
