During CMS 21st anniversary offline event on July 19, I told CMS director about the idea of revamping existing The Far East world tour area. After he read the article I organized, he agreed that the Far East content is aging, and he will inform Nexon about the idea.
So, I decided to share the article here. This article is mainly based on the perspective of CMS, as The Far East was originally released in CMS (known as Dōngfāng shénzhōu in CMS, or Eastern China in MapleSEA), Situations in GMS, MapleSEA, and JMS will be covered too, and it will use the terms in GMS unless a content is unavailable in GMS.
In CMS, the very first version of the Far East was introduced in 3 parts: the Bund on April 17, 2006, Yu Garden on August 21, 2006, and Shaolin Temple on September 19, 2007. These 3 areas have brought us fond memories despite the game back then was primitive.
With CMS v129 update on November 4, 2015, a new version of the Far East replaced these 3 areas with a night city themed Shanghai with ghosts and Jiangshis, and a demon haunted Shaolin Temple.
10 years have passed, and this region never receives Quality of Life updates. Showa Town from JMS had received complete renewal during Glory update (GMS received it later in Rise update), New Leaf City in GMS became an area with historical relics, then Singapore and Malaysia from MapleSEA became into Level 230-259 area with Arcane River stat monsters.
But what has been improved for the Far East in CMS since its initial release in 2015?
From what I can remember...
1. On October 23, 2019 with the CMS v166 update, we can buy a Yu Garden Guardian Medal from Liuyi at the cost of removing Beasts of Fury.
2. On January 11, 2023 with the CMS v195 update, Merchants in Yu Garden no longer sells Mastery Books. That’s it.
That means, we never receive a major update regarding to Chinese exclusive world tour area since 2015. JMS also removed the Far East recently, which put the fate of this area in danger.
So, what are the issues in this region?
1. Requirement Level
The requirement level of the Far East is 140-149, but monsters in this area are not counted into quests that require hunting monsters in level range.
Since any player can get to Level 200 effortlessly nowadays, it would make this area forgettable. Although the Maple Support System introduced in CMS v170 update slightly makes up for it, as it requires the player to clear various of quests (including both Shanghai and Shaolin Temple) to gain points for unlocking trade features and many important rewards for newcomers.
2. Questlines are in a mess
For Shanghai area, once you finish few prequests, there are 5 questlines you’ll have to deal with at same time, instead of one by one:
- Helping Tomo who travelled to Shanghai get his luggage back, then buy a ring for a random Chinese girl called Tae Hee.
- Helping polices in this area beat ghosts and Jiangshis.
- Helping Chef Huang Zhen for food supplement from faraway farm.
- Helping the reporter Zhang Wei to find out the secret why Shanghai is haunted with ghosts and Jiangshis.
- Attempt to get rid of Jiangshis with the scammer Fung Hak On.
Rewards from clearing these quests aren't worth spending time: titles to unlock more daily quests, and nothing else. Not to mention that you can do daily quests directly without clearing these quests.
On the other hand, questlines in the Shaolin Temple area are much better – they are cleared by specific order.
3. Bad mini boss respawning frequency
Some aforementioned quests require you to kill a specific quantity of mini bosses, or collect a specific quantity of leftover items of mini bosses.
Unlike other bosses who were placed inside of a special boss map, Diabolic Jiangshi and Mammoth Centipede still use old school respawn rate, where they get spawned in every 15 minutes. Some players would wait at maps where they are spawned and kill them instantly so other players can’t kill them for clearing quests.
Sometimes during random elite monster spawn, the elite variant of these 2 mini bosses may get spawned as well, making them almost impossible to defeat before they get despawned for average players at Level 140-159.
4. Bad monster drops
Other than regular leftover items monsters would drop, they also drop items that should not drop, including:
- Equipment that’s not in level range (Level 70-85)
- low level HP/MP recovery item
- Arrow for Bow/Crossbow
Before MapleSEA received totems, monsters would also drop old monster park ticket pieces.
An important reason why players come to this area is the Antique Totems. Drop rate of antique pieces is extremely low, most notably
Ming Dynasty Bronze Incense Burner. To make matters worse, these antique pieces are not stackable in inventory.
In the Shaolin Temple area, regular monster drops are completely useless other than occupying the player's inventory.
5. Bad totem renewal options
For regional servers with The Far East region available, Antique Totem Sets are the best totems for average players who don’t want to spend money on doing lotteries. When you receive antique pieces from monster drops and exchange them into totems, they last for 30 days.
When you throw away your existing totems before they expire, you can’t renew another immediately from NPC until the time when the totem was supposed to expire comes.
In CMS and MapleSEA, you can get permanent variants of antique totems from the in-game lottery system, and they can be traded, but they are unavailable in GMS. Both factors reduce players' interest in farming them.
6. Possibility of making pranks to existing players
Extremely old players should know that they can get an item named summoning sack from certain quests. While most summoning sacks introduced by KMS are eventually nerfed in KMS, summoning sacks obtained from overseas contents are usually not nerfed.
The Far East region also introduced a summoning sack named “Diabolic Jiangshi Summon Scroll”, which would summon exactly the same Level 150 Diabolic Jiangshi boss you’d encounter in the Bund upon use. Normally, they can be obtained from Suspicious Alchemist by exchanging 10 of Diabolic Jiangshi Talismans. Also, these summoning sacks are not stackable in inventory.
In CMS, they can be used in towns unless a certain restriction is applied in that town. Therefore, whenever a new job was introduced in CMS, some players would move to that job’s starting area and summon Diabolic Jiangshi there.
Players from MapleSEA, GMS and JMS also imitated it, but only GMS applied extra limitations for not allowing a player from using it in town and nearby portals.
7. Outdated special coin shop
Black Market merchants along with forementioned Suspicious Alchemist would appear during 20:00 – 22:00 (CMS, MapleSEA, JMS) or 18:00 – 2:00 UTC (GMS) to allow you to spend “Yu Garden Bronze Coin” for exchanging somewhat useful items.
Not only are they selling different items in every day, but also selling different items in different channels.
Stat gains from “Golden Flower” equipment set are extremely low, and the Golden Flower exclusive enhancement scrolls are worse than Karma Accessory Scrolls you would obtain from events – less stats boost (1-3 ATT/MATT) and 80% success rate, and they’ll destroy your equipment upon failure.
There’s a chair named “Jiangshi Hunter Chair” which is sold for 350 Yu Garden Bronze Coins, but when you sit on it, you will not see the chair itself, as it would look like sitting in midair.
You can get Mr.Orlov’s hat and sword and they claim to have an effect to allow you to use Jiangshi capture skill, but that skill is absent at all.
You might think these 2 items (
) exclusive for CMS are rare, but they can be dropped by average monsters with decent drop rate. So basically, most of the items they’re selling are garbage items.
In GMS, these merchants don’t sell the Yu Garden Guardian Medal at all, but they still sell Mastery Books despite its removal during Destiny update for regions other than CMS.
before JMS removed the Far East, outdated items including Mastery Boxes are still supplied.
8. Random daily buff that’s not helpful
You can spend one Yu Garden Bronze Coin for getting a random buff from a NPC called “Suan Ming”.
It may sound good, but what are the effects of these buffs?
Buff 1: Bonus EXP +50%
Buff 2: MaxHP/MP +1000
Buff 3: Move +20, Jump +10
Buff 4: ATT/MATT +20
Buff 5: Meso drop +50%
All of them would only last 30 minutes after receiving, and you can only get one buff per day. Obviously only 1, 4, 5 are considered useful, but the duration is too short.
9. Poor of polishing
The background of the Nanjing Road section is the same as Kabukicho in Modern Tokyo area in JMS.
Most NPCs in Yu Garden Town and Mount Song Hamlet are totally not functional. Obviously old NPC assets from the original version of The Far East were repurposed, but clicking on them does nothing. They don't even want to guide you to Big Headward or Plastic Roy. On the contrary, NPCs from Showa Town would inform you to find Big Headward or Plastic Roy.
Shaolin Temple also reused monster assets from the original version, and issues from these monsters remain unchanged, such as broken hitbox, misaligned animation, which are covered on Leaf Archives’ China Recreated video on YouTube.
Unfortunately, newly added monsters still inherited these issues, with flash blinking death animation, broken hitboxes, etc.
There’s a strange 9px width platform on Maple TV, and it still remains in all other regions without Maple TV, including GMS.
Shaolin Temple itself has an invisible roof, so we can’t see the full appearance of Sutra Depository from outside. It can be only seen on the mini map or data extraction.
I understand the old Sutra Depository was shorter than nowadays, but what’s the reason for placing an invisible roof?
Compared to the Shanghai area where it’s trying to make itself into a daily content, Shaolin Temple only has few rewards that’s worth getting, and all of them can be only get once per character.
Chief Priest has some notable boss patterns and is much more finished than old Martial Artist (known as Wǔlín yāosēng in CMS). However there are still something missing comparing to bosses nowadays:
- Death count
- Cannot enter this boss with as a party, even single player party
- After defeat, he drops some potions, some meso bags, and sometimes a Nine-Tailed Fox Totem, then you’ll get teleported to the exit map after 10 seconds instead of letting you open the box at the exit map.
Then what do I want for this region to improve?
I totally accept making an entirely new oriental themed world tour content to replace aging Far East content, but I believe it would cost a lot for Nexon designing it.
But if we only want renewal of this content, these are what I would like to have:
1. Increase the level requirement to 210-229.
This would align all other world tour contents that increases level requirement better. The Ximending region’s requirement was already increased to 200-219 in 2019 (but unavailable in regions other than TMS and JMS), and the Southeast Asia region’s requirement was increased to 230-250. Therefore, placing The Far East to 210-229 would be a suitable option for existing players, as getting to Level 210 isn’t that hard.
For Shanghai area: Level 210-219
For Shaolin Temple area: Level 220-229
While accounting monsters in both areas into monsters in level range, monsters can also have stats from either Dark World Tree or Arcane River, and can even consider to place flying AFK monsters.
2. Monster exclusive leftover items can be only dropped when accepting a quest requires them.
Other than removing leftover items that shouldn’t be dropped, monster’s own leftover items should be categorized into untradable quest items, so the inventory space can be effectively saved.
3. Increase drop rate of antique pieces, make antique pieces stackable in inventory and transferable via storage, and optimize the procedure of exchanging totems.
I believe this only needs a minimum of effort for Nexon to do, and it would be better if it allows players to exchange another one for their secondary characters. The drop rate could be set to the same as droplet stones.
4. Making the quests linear and worth doing.
Like QOL changes of Twilight Perion before final revamp, the entire quests should not be that messy and allow the player to do one thing at a time. Besides, the quest should not be time gated, which will allow players to clear quests anytime in case they’re living on different sides of Earth. The Yu Garden Guardian Medal should be rewarded when all quests are cleared.
5. Place items that’s valuable and useful for players.
Mentor system introduced in the Chaser update is a good example of placing useful items. Similarly, the Yu Garden Bronze Coin shop should have useful items to adapt player’s needs nowadays. For example, it could place symbol selector coupons (4/1) up to Carcion, Core Gemstones, EXP Exchange Coupon, 100% Pure Clean Slate Scrolls, Karma Eternal Rebirth Flames, Star Force Scrolls, Cubes, etc. The Golden Flower set can be kept untouched, but do not supply outdated Golden Flower Scrolls anymore.
6. Remove unstable factors that would harm the player's experience.
In this case, both Diabolic Jiangshi and Mammoth Centipede should be placed inside of a mini boss entrance map like Level 30-59 theme dungeon bosses, and this will ensure players can always hunt them without worrying about being unable to locate them.
In the meantime, the Diabolic Jiangshi summoned via the summoning scroll can be the nerfed version similar to monsters from Ludibrium Summoning Sacks, where the monster would hardly harm players and die automatically after a minute.
7. For the Shaolin Temple area, make Chief Priest as a major boss like Capt. Latanica and Krexel from Singapore.
While fixing buggy monsters and removing useless rewards, the Chief Priest could be a daily or weekly Level 230 boss with 5 death counts like other major bosses. Defeating it can also reward Yu Garden Bronze Coins, and an intense power crystal. And of course, you should open the box at the exit map, instead of giving you 10 seconds for picking up rewards before you get teleported.
The revamp of Singapore/Malaysia in MapleSEA has given a new possibility of how the world tour map could be updated to adapt players' need nowadays, and I honestly wish The Far East would be the next world tour area that will get revamped.
