xMrMeow

In my opinion, and the opinions of a handful of my friends who I've recommended the game to, there are 2 main things Maplestory struggles with that turn off new players
- The burden of picking a main class + fear your choice of main might change later and you'll end up stuck in the sunk cost fallacy
- Start-up tasks of getting early-game legion/links is very annoying to new players who just want to pick a main and get right into it without having to wait for events to train up new characters they don't even like just for some bonus stats

I think these 2 features would greatly help mitigate these issues, and thus bring in a lot of new players that would normally be turned off by their first impression of Maplestory:

- Class trial mode:
This would allow you to play any class in the game in a sandbox simulation area.
The area would have a handful of different popular mobbing maps and a boss simulation room that lets you enter all the earlygame bosses (NLomien and below).
The class you pick would have some basic early game setup similar to a standard Bossing Mule, including:
1. Character lv 230
2. Armor: Boss 9 set, 3 set CRA, 5 set abso, 3 event rings
3. Upgrades: WS has 12% atk, 30% boss, Emblem has 12% atk, 30% IED, unique 1L stat on everything else, 70 flame score on gear except wep which has T6 atk flame, all 17*
4. 2K Legion with all KMS classes that give good links, and the top 10 bossing link skills in KMS being applied
5. LV 10 skill and boost nodes with ideal setup: 2 most important bossing skills are selected, A and B, and the boost nodes are set up like so: ABC, BAC, CAB, DAB, EAB. 6 boosted node slots are used for the 4 class specific skill nodes as well as boost nodes A and B (this setup allows boosted skills A and B to be at the max lv of 60)

- Everyone starts with 10 "New Player" Tera Burninator Coupons
1. They have all the standard benefits of triple levels to 200, rewards up to 220
2. The coupons and effects are non-time limited, so not only does the tera burn effect/reward for leveling not expire, meaning you have unlimited time to level and claim the standard rewards, but also the CRA set would not expire (although it has fixed stats so you'd want to replace it as soon as you can)
3. All existing players with <10 lv 220 characters would be able to claim these 10 (-1 per lv 220 character)



My Justification for these features:
While I fully understand why Legion and Link Skills exist in the game, encouraging players to try out every class in the game and invest time in actively playing more different characters and classes the game has to offer, it is a huge burden to ask new players to train many new characters to lv 200 or more to get started on a main character, and it does feel necessary to do so as much of the content in the game is heavily balanced around having all the bonus stats provided by these 2 systems.

Even midgame is considered to be around 4-6k legion, so I really don't see any problem allowing players to boost to ~2k Legion to start out. While you could sell these sort of coupons, I think offering it for free would go a long way towards roping in new players.

As for the class trial mode, in a game with ~45 classes in KMS / ~50 in GMS, it's very difficult to pick a class, and most active players will tell you that you can't really decide how good a class is until you not only get access to their 5th job skills, but also gear them up well enough to do some bosses on.

Some may feel great training, but you hate bossing on them, or they may be terrible at training until 5th job, or you may hate training until you get some good gear, or numerous other reasons you might pick one class and regret it later and quit due to feeling you wasted your time on a class you don't like and not want to go through the trouble of training and gearing up another character only to not like them again.

A class simulator would totally get around this issue by letting players try out any class in an ideal testing setup with all the most important types of content to test with (a handful of different bosses and training maps)

Let me start off by saying obviously I don't want region exclusive content to be removed from the game, in favor of improving it or leaving it as is instead for the most part.

However as a fellow Programmer myself, I very much do understand that something you made initially expecting to be able to support for many years and quickly become a thorn in your side that regularly breaks and isn't worth the time/effort to maintain.

As a player I also do acknowledge that GMS has had numerous extremely powerful region-exclusive features added that totally throw off the balance of the game, and while it will always leave a bad taste in someone's mouth if you give them something great, then take it away, I think a good handful of the content and features here trivialize lots of other content in the original game and don't really feel right to keep in the game in their current state.

Basically, I understand that the game is better off in the long run sometimes to remove content, even if it hurts to rip the bandage off.


As far as communicating these changes goes, I personally think these would be the best in order, Both done at least 1 month prior to the content being disabled in-game
1. Announcement + Livestream Q/A schedule -> Q/A session -> Updated removal plan with player feedback taken in account -> Followup Q/A Session to address remaining concerns -> Final Removal Plan
2. Announcement + Player Feedback survey, including open ended response prompts -> Updated removal plan with player feedback taken in account

The current communication of
Announcement -> Reddit/Discord Feedback -> Minor adjustments with many major concerns being left in the dark until the changes go live
I believe is the biggest issue with content being removed.
I think in most cases, the communication is more of an issue than the actual content removal.

Examples of poor communication:
- Jett removal being announced extremely soon before having creation disabled in-game, and the details of how character transfer works not being clear until a few days later (how nodes/gear transfer will work; some other things still aren't clear)
- Commerci Transposing flame change being shown in patch notes while/right before game is down




Let me close off by listing a few Regional Exclusive content/feature examples and what I think the best way to go about removing them would be if it ever comes to that, and also note that I don't think permanent legacy items are ever a good solution:

- Class Removal (including Jett):
Allow players to change jobs to ANY other job. It's only fair that players that carefully decided who to main / invest heavily in to make a bossing mule should be able to pick a different one of their choice in the event it's removed.

Make it clear from the get-go that Skill nodes will retain their level in transferring, all upgrade stat bonuses including Potential, Bonus Potential, Flames, Scrolls, etc will be changed to make the target class's Primary/Secondary/Tertiary/Quaternary stats, and core quests like Liberation will be properly transferred alongside your weapon, to a weapon of your choice if your class has multiple options (for example, Hero can go with various 2H or 1H melee weapons).

Players that didn't switch in time, will have their character defaulted to the closest explorer class to the class removed as a temporary measure, prompted of what happened while they were gone on their next login of the affected class, and will be given the option to switch (some people take long breaks from the game and I don't think it's fair to them to come back after a 1-2 years and see their Jett was turned into a Corsair or Beginner without them having any options).


- 0 Attack Speed:
This one is a bit tricky since a number of classes are significantly stronger with 0 AS in the game compared to in KMS. For this reason, it's sort of in the same boat as class removal where players who main certain classes may be heavily inclined to switch mains after the change, and because of that, I think those classes should be given the option to do so.

Since this change would affect quite a few classes at the same time, but I don't think it's a good idea to just let everyone change every one of their characters to any job they want just because all classes are technically affected by attack speed, I think the best approach would just be to gather some data on what classes are the most different DPS wise from KMS compared to GMS using only KMS exclusive gear on both test characters for each job, get the median difference for all jobs combined between servers, and then any classes that are more than 5 or 10% above that median value are given the option to switch jobs similar to the Class Removal process above, perhaps just limiting it to the top 5 or 10 classes that are significantly better in GMS than KMS due to attack speed.


- Gollux:
Nerf the set bonus Superior to 10% Boss/IED (so the set bonus is clearly worse than Pitched 4 set and the legacy items will not be BIS), or buff Pitched 2 set and 3 set bonuses to be 30% Boss Damage / 30% IED respectively (although I think I'm more in favor of aligning with KMS, a lot of players would prefer this over nerfing items they already worked for).

Players would also most likely receive the removal of Gollux a lot better if it was done AFTER a pity system were added to make obtaining Dawn/Pitched boss set items more accessible and consistent.


- Commerci:
Since the Transposing mechanic was already heavily nerfed, I think the main thing people still use this content for is getting Face/Eye/Pendant Accessories that are most consistent to obtain than Dawn/Pitched Boss set items, so I think this is in the same boat as Gollux where I think it'd be more positively received if it was done AFTER a pity system for not only those 2 set items, but also the Papulatus Mark Eye accessory rare drop.


- Familiars:
Since players in regular servers spent money on theirs, I'm not sure you even legally could remove them.

On Reboot, even where players couldn't pay to enhance / reroll, players have no only grinded hundreds of hours to get good familiars, but they've also deprived themselves of better EXP rates by farming in Limina instead of Grandis maps that have much better rates, so to many players would've been many levels higher than they are now if they had been training on the best map they could access instead of lower leveled areas to get cards. That being said, I think anything short of some exceptional compensation such as a handful of level potions that work up to 280 or 20-22 starforce enhancement scrolls scaling with number of super rare familiar effects you have probably would leave players a lot of players very unhappy with how much time they wasted on that system.

Certain bosses are trivialized severely by healing familiars as well such as Hard Will and Hard Verus Hilla, but I don't think there's really any great answer to this problem of players being used to these bosses being much easier on our server...

This is the only one I think have no obvious solution that wouldn't leave a lot of players feeling like they wasted hundreds of hours of time or lots of money.

I'm surprised I never thought of this before, but Maple could really use Keybind Wheels.

By that I mean a circle of 8 keybinds that will show up when pressing / holding down a key, ideally allowing you to select an option on the wheel with either the mouse or the arrow keys.

This would just be so helpful for cutting down on excessive amounts of keybinds for all the random stuff.

Example stuff you could compress onto one wheel:
- Facial Expressions / Emoticon
- Chat options: all chat / party / friends / guild / alliance / whisper
- Loadouts: Link Skills / Legion / Familiars / Regular Skills / Equipment

Definitely agree.

Those event equips helped me a lot back in the old days of me playing on regular servers. I remember getting a big boost in damage and training way faster with the event tube in the early days of maple.

In context of today, we sort of see this with the Frozen set, given to every burning character, however it's basically a gimped version of stuff like the Override set. Burning isn't just good for the free level ups, but also for the free gear that helps a lot in gearing up new characters.

This matters especially on reboot where you can't just buy all your gear. You don't realize how much time it takes for a solo player to get some starting armor that isn't god awful until you train someone up without burning these days, hence why so many players just opt to only make new characters during burning events.

I bet if stuff like yearly anniversary item sets came back, then people would be a lot more willing to get into the game as they'd be able to try many different classes in the span of a single event and build up their legion in the process instead of just the usual 2 burnings per event (2 tera and 3 normal for non-reboot).

I started reboot during the override event and I've got like 15 or so characters geared up with the override set, so it's clear as day to me that it helped a lot in getting started on a new server.

The best part about that set in particular was you could also use it very early on and it scaled up as you got stronger up to lv 100, where the whole set is a good deal better than frozen set.

How bout this, instead of bringing back Ghost Ship Exorcist badge or Sengoku Hakase Badge, how bout just make the main existing badges potable in gms since these other badges have existed in the past?

Maybe give ventus badge like 10 max SF and BM badge the full 25 SF as well since these 2 unobtainable badges also have SF (although their SF doesn't give WA/MA until like 20 stars I think)

It always leaves a bad taste in players mouths when unobtainable items are BIS by a big margin, and this is definitely the case for these badges, so I think some solution is definitely warranted...