Short background: This suggestion contains an idea to revamp starforce system. It will only cover the high level and not get into the specific % chances or costs per attempt.
Problem: The typical problem or frustration I hear from other players around the starforce system is the ability to progress backwards or in simpler terms end up with your gear in a worse state than when you started.
New System Overview
Never go backwards on stars.
Attempting to enhance an item will now only ever have a chance to succeed, fail, and break the item into a trace. You made it to 19 stars and you are keeping your 19 stars.
Booms are still possible but the item trace remembers the stars you had.
I believe it is important to have a use for 'clean' items in the game. Booming is frustrating when you return to 12 stars but under this system you would keep your progress.
You can even go for 25 under this system. Boomed on an attempt 22->25? You're a madlad but you're going right back to the star count you had.
New 'maximum' restoration cost. Consider this change as 'optional' there are reasons it could be good and bad.
How this would work is there would be an NPC or option in the enhancement system to restore the item with mesos instead of another base item.
This effectively 'caps' the maximum cost of restoring a lost item. Think of it this way - for very rare items like endless terror, BoD, outlaw heart you
might find it cheaper to pay mesos than buy another item. When there is enough supply of an item meso restoration would not be used because it will be more expensive.
This is really meant to prevent you from being locked out of restoring your item due to limited supply. This could be very expensive.
New chance time.
I haven't given this one a lot of thought. With no ability to fall backwards in stars the current chance time would be gone.
A new chance time could be something like 'after booming or failing 5 times in a row you have an increased success rate on your next attempt."
Meso Cost
This would require careful analysis to roughly match the current average cost of reaching 22. Alternatively they could take the opportunity to make the system slightly more approachable if that is nexon's wish by making it cheaper.
Under this system you can actually 'finish' an item to 25 so it may be desirable to make the final 3 stars very expensive.
I think they already care to some degree about our suggestions. What that degree is I don't know. To me not knowing is the problem.
Does Nexon not communicate because it's not worth it? The game is developed in Korea after all and we're the English overseas server. This means there's a 'cost' in the language barrier and we're also a small fish as far as maplestory population goes.
Maybe Nexon doesn't want to communicate with the playerbase in gms. Their choice I suppose and we're still here and playing despite their behaviour for 16 years.
Maybe Nexon does want to communicate and just doesn't know how. I think we can all agree that the current mode of operation is frustrating to say it mildly.
Personally I think they do hear our concerns but we have these very slow one way channels of communication. We submit feedback on the forums and discord and it disappears into a black box. We then see action (or not) over time from Nexon. The occasional memo is there as well but with the exception of the most recent one generally come off as dismissive and defensive.
False positives are an understandable side effect of trying to improve the anti-cheating in this game.
What's not understandable/acceptable is their support team. Honestly I hope you're not paying people to send these exactly identical responses. You could easily automate ignoring your playerbase.
