A Mushroom On Fire: Quitting MapleStory

what's going on fellow maplers I haven't posted in a while and that's because I've been out of the country visiting my brother in Colombia had a phenomenal vacation and plan to come back with a fully scripted positive video highlighting why I think at its core maple story is a fun game with the potential to be a staple MMO but to no one surprise Nexon is incapable of keeping their feet out of the I'm sure many of you already know but specifically GMS received a comprehens ensive list of Nerfs identified in the test servers for the new age patch this has been covered extensively by the rest of the community so I'm going to summarize the initial controversy then go into thoughts on the community response nexon's response and finally conclude talking about the direction of the game and the phenomenon that is quitting maple story so let's lay the foundation for the latest controversy next on was set up for Success new age has been hyped out the Wazoo you know every orice the player base abs absolutely brimming with dopamine so much so that there's a somewhat loud portion of players that ignore the repeated Nerfs bugs lazy updates and overall deteriorating player experience however this all came to a head when all Nexon had to do was nothing literally like an inverse Avatar when the world wanted them gone the most they appeared it was discovered within the GMS test server that Nexon had placed a few little Easter eggs to be discovered when the new age update drops on the 29th these Easter eggs came in the form of some pretty hefty Nerfs specifically to the global versions of the game there are three main points here the first is soul era the new resource for the six job had a cap placed on it the second is that higher tier boxes which dropped Oz Rings were seemingly nerfed but this was confirmed to be a typo and finally frenzy totems a regular server spawn booster were broken by the new instance map system obviously this sparked some severe backlash from the community and rightfully so people were outraged that the way they played the game was limited in a nutshell the incentive for endgame grinding became non-existent why train pass the cap on a given day after riding the heels of pre Nerf XP rates and insane events like night troop when now you are also time gated on progressing your sixth job anyway this in no way benefits the player experience and to top it off a paid for booster was leaked this would slightly increase the amount of Soul ER you could attain each day for $30 a month this ties into my repeated jokes about the regular server now everyone including reboot got a little jump scare of what it would be like an in-game system was designed solely with monetization in mind a cap was placed to the detriment of players so that players would feel the need to buy the booster to reduce an arbitrary time gate this is essentially the core philosophy of the regular servers design develop a monetization model and create gameplay that incentiv devises purchasing that model and I know there will be people that hate that I point this out but it's true it's also completely reasonable for players to want updates that simply improve enjoyment of the game by offering more content that's what new age seemed to be however Nexon couldn't hold back and the new update was deemed sewage or sewage it's kind of crazy to me they don't seem to realize that growing their game and creating healthy monetization options will result in Greater long term profit and it's even Wilder to me that people seem to defend Nexon by saying they must make money somehow like you little worry about having fun and your enjoyment of the game you don't need to take a stand for Nexon they'll be fine your job is to express what you want to see as a consumer and it's definitely not this and finally the real kicker this was implemented despite Korean maple story not having these limits in place now this is what players off the deep end for some reason and this also baffles me to no end there's an almost cult-like belief that GMS must be and should be a replica of our KMS counterpart so much so that people defend Nerfs and poorly implemented updates by imagining non-existing constraints on the global version of the game the servers are not the same should not be the same and the decision making shown in this update and many other updates too highlights that Nexon sees the global market Market entirely differently and has the capabilities to make region specific changes which should be obvious while this works against GMS in the context of the latest changes this is actually very good for the game GMS will only get better if Nexon recognizes the differences in the domestic and Global markets and develops them in the context of those markets however this only works if the direction Nexon takes for each region makes sense this is where I think the the core issue of maple story lies and I'll revisit this in a few minutes but back to the community response all the meme responses that have absolutely zero effect on the decision- making of a business ensued the player base threatened riots truck protests temporary Hiatus on spending till all is forgotten and the V pet drops or you know I need to upkeep my current pets essentially all the stuff that says hey look we little man babies making a loud noise but nobody really cares let me give you a fun analogy for the player base's version of retaliating to Nexon imagine this is the wild west back to back the player base and Nexon take 10 Paces apart from one another they turn around awaiting the draw the player has water pistol spray painted black to look like a loaded gun Nexon has a normal Revolver They draw of course the water pistol shoots a nice stream 3 ft forward as the bullet from nexon's revolver rips through the heart of the player base leaving them dying in a pull on the floor but you see this has been the story of every controversy Nexon knows the player base is bluffing with a water pistol the consequences are non-existent to Nexon so they happily show up to every duel the outcome predetermined on top of this nexxon comes prepared for the aftermath they bring a Lifeline along to the duel like Battlefield they utilize a defib and magically revives the player base in the form of a maple memo the player base ever grateful for the assist reaffirms their Stockholm syndrome and Praises Nexon for the half-ass solution to a problem entirely manufactured by them like holy guys you dropped your dignity on the floor go pick it up speaking of that Lifeline for not so insignificant portion of the player base this particular update meant the end of their 2D mushroom Journey their High came to an end this was the last straw hell freezing over Ragnarok the magnum opus of fuckups at least for 24 hours until they did a full 360 back to supporting the game and hey I'm all here for this I love it this cycle is entertainment gold I'm a bit surprised the level of up this relationship between Nexon and his player base is hasn't reached a larger audience so let's get into what changed their minds nexxon released a beautiful statement in the form of a maple memo just pure poetry approximately 4 days after the outrage you know the player base simmer for a little bit over the weekend expertly done to really highlight my points and make this more entertaining let's turn this into a fun game of bingo I'll put a sheet up on the screen and link to a randomized version you can use down in the description so you can play along with me and before we start feel free to knock off that juicy free Nexon space right in the center now let's dive in they start out by saying we understand that there are a lot of concerns about information that that was recently revealed regarding the v246 new age 6 job update first we would like to truly apologize for causing concern due the lack of Prior information regarding new AG's six job content oh boy let's pause here as we open with an apology so you can mark that second freebie on your bingo sheet now while this is pretty cliche opening and suggest they might understand player concerns I think we need some more context before we touch anything else let's continue we would like like to clarify the development intentions for the parts our maplers are currently worried about and share future plans ah there it is it's a hollow apology you see it's not that Nexon did anything wrong they get your concerns they really do but they just want to explain where they were coming from without saying the exact words this is essentially the cliche of I'm sorry but and that's two more tiles knocked off the Bingo sheet they then jump into the first of two topics the six job advancement Solera as we prepared the six job advancement update our goal was to provide motivations to our players for character growth and enhancement as well as provide content that players would be able to use actively and flexibly without being limited to only mobbing oh okay guys you see they did it out of thought for the player experience they knew how boring the core of their game is with grinding they can't have players doing that by placing a cap on solar they aren't restricting your options in fact they are providing you with flexibility to play the game in exactly one way through daes that's clearly fabricated player needs and reframing the narrative everything they said would be more true if they just never included the cap in the first place we continue we wanted to consider the appropriate daily material acquisition rate and Method taking into consideration our existing players behaviors while also taking into account the difficulty level where newer players wouldn't feel like they would be too much of a hurdle we wanted to mitigate the negative aspects to the gameplay experience such as illegal tool usage or paying for services for other players to farm that occurs as a result of having an acquisition method that was mainly focused on mobbing and there's the fake problem statement mixed with saying something that makes absolutely no sense this change would not have resolved any of those issues whatsoever all incentives from before are still there if someone was doing it before they're also doing it after regardless of the cap this change hurts everyone and does not tackle the issue of botting and paid for services whatsoever you know what does do that banning players who do these things I feel like Nexon references these issues because they know players who do this are pretty much universally disliked but the action is not appropriate for the issue and in fact worsens the player experience for everyone continuing with these goals in mind we wish to lower the burden that our players might feel regarding play time and increase the accessibility for casual players by Distributing the soul ER energy and the Soul Ur fragments through the daily Quest additionally we added the daily cap because we wish to narrow the Gap that depended on play time between hardcore players and those who could not dedicate as much time to the game again it doesn't make sense to make people feel like they don't have to play as much you give them additional dailies that they feel like they have to do in order to continually progress if you miss a day you are behind this impacts casual players or their nice way of saying those who could not dedicate as much time to the game before as much as after how can the definition of a casual player be someone who plays maple story every single day which is insane the perspective here is so warped rather than play based on your own schedule now you're encouraged even more to be on every single day with even more daily tasks to complete we can mark this as obscured intentions misdirection and omitted contexts as around the time of this statement's release it was discovered they had also planned to monetize the cap by increasing the amount you could achieve each day clearly the intention was not to improve the gap between hardcore 280 plus Grinders and Casual players it was to further monetize GMS again we trudge on we were planning to monitor the ACT ual acquisition time of our players the play time and adjust the cap as needed we understand that seeing changes like this being shown in gameplay videos and streams without detailed context from our team has caused a lot of anger and frustration with you all we would like to apologize to our maplers once again since the design intention for this part has not been explained enough in advance well there's the second apology regardless of the design intentions we understand that there are many aspects to these changes that you were understandably concerned about so in addition to the Daily Quest that will remain we will remove the cap and explore separate Improvement measures for parts that could be harmful for the gameplay experience oh my God the first Rave Sunshine breaks through the storm an actual corrective action I'm a little concerned about the separate Improvement measures that they reference but they left good parts in the game which are the daily quests and remove the bad parts which is the cap I'll give them a w here and mark off corrective action continuing also we would like to share that we have no plans to release the soul ER booster at the same time as the six job advancement update we will review the progress of our players six job advancement and determine if and when there is a need to further augment the ways in which players can obtain Solara ah they eek in a little reference to the booster and they were very care careful to say not at this time so I'm sure we can expect this in game soon enough thought they'd slip it in to cover their bases and then move on to the next topic frenzy totem we would like to confirm that contrary to some information being circulated in the community frenzy totems were always planned to function as they normally do outside of instant maps and is intended to remain the same in the New Age update there was a bug in our test server regarding this functionality and we did not properly address the situation before the information was discovered and spread within the community okay so at least they recognize there's a bug but seriously why 4 days to address any of this I mean it just looks so bad back to the response as mentioned in the v246 patch notes released yesterday the instant maps are provided during the New Age past duration for sacred power fields and the way the frenzy totem Works in these instant fields are as follows frenzy totem effects will only apply to the hunting map of the character that used the frenzy totem the effect will disappear once the character leaves the instance map ah so they missed the real problem that frenzy is a major service in the regular servers and this massively Nerfs grinding on sacred Forest maps that are now considered instan on top of that this is for servers that are pretty low population and aren't that competitive for maps in the first place so why implement this here they are definitely admitting the actual problem and describing it as a feature not a bug while also doubling down on the design change uh triple whammy and damn I just got double victories on my bingo card but who really wins here certainly not the players and finally they wrap up with we understand that this kind of communication should have come out sooner and the context for why we made these changes should have been delivered at the same time we Ann announce them we hope that this memo can at the very least give you insight into how we Implement design changes to our service like Godot damn that's an unsatisfactory conclusion what do they mean at the same time they announc the changes I think to this day these changes have not been officially announced only addressed in this apology for being discovered before the actual release date on the 29th the messaging from Nexon is incredibly concerning it's just so out of touch are blatantly lies in the hopes that most people just move on and to be honest that's the case I mean they really only backpedal one thing which was the ER of cap makes you wonder how the hell did this communication save maple story I mean I guess it resolved the issue that was entirely manufactured by Nexon but the core issue is still glaringly unresolved the truth is people are so deep into the sun CA fallacy that they just can't let go of the game it's a true addiction which brings me full circle to the core issue I referenced earlier the direction of maple story is in a rough State many people will say this is the best time to play maple story I wholeheartedly disagree let me explain beyond the obvious which is the glaring issues with Nexon and the player base explore in the first half of this video and my prior videos there's a very tangible problem with player retention this is obvious by Maple story's own ingame statistics the number of players that join the game and make it to 2 200 is 46% I mean that's not that bad half the players make it a fifth job then you look at the amount that clears Loman which is about 12 1 12% nearing the end of the early game and nearly 3/4 of those players drop off the amount that clears Lou Will is a little over 3% which is nearing the end of the mid game with Arcane gear and another 3/4 of that group drops off under 5% of players even make it to 260 this is including plenty of time of having the hyper bir burn event and other hyperb burn events up to 250 effectively New Age applies to less than 5% of people that ever pick up maple story and the other New Age boss content and areas apply to a fraction of a percent of players new age is not gamechanging for the state of maple story whatsoever and the temporary spike in players is just that temporary I think this somewhat common opinion that this is the best time to play maple story is primarily driven by it undoubtedly being the fastest time to progress in maple story but I don't think this necessarily defines a fun experience or drives the type of interactions that create long-term players the major goals in this game are bosses everything you do is to reach the damage threshold for the next tier the next difficulty the next drop right now you bypass many of these achievements in the early game it's a shame that bosses up to CRA and Loman are made trivial by the number of free upgrades gear and account wide levels thrown at players I can't even begin to describe the excitement when I killed CRA for the first time to get the massive upgrade over penciler or normal Damian with seconds left on the clock for those first apps laab pieces now a few of them are just handed to you hell even clearing normal bosses for Boss accessories was a struggle and a great accomplishment when starting out these are the experience that had me buy into maple story for the long run and support the game if players are bypassing these critical moments I have some news for you the grinds get longer the progress gets less noticeable and farther apart and the bosses offer less meaningful rewards less people will buy into the game rushing to 260 and hitting that wall faster and that's if they even make it there to experience the content of new age in the first place I personally felt that wall in the six job hasn't fixed it look I'm not saying making endgame bosses more accessible and abundant is bad but rather that the early and midgame experience have been neglected and needs a lot of work there have been a lot of updates that have and I'll generously say unintentionally made this part of the game less enjoyable I have individual videos on each of these the 5% bossing requirements and reboot neres and also one which I haven't talked much about a push towards bigger and better events and dailies which all have these unintended consequences on new players that create negative experiences and narrow gameplay options there has been non-existent indication from Nexon that these systems are ever going to be Revisited and improved we are just stuck with them as they are released at least for the next several months overshadowing all of this is the horrendous QA testing and accessibility issues their cash shop is known as the crash shop for a reason server instability is awful at times and they seemly can't get an update right even when they have 6 months to prepare for many of them following suit from KMS it's actually wild let me run through a list of bugs I came came up within a few minutes from recent memory six star chapters 3 4 and 5 had broken tasks and Tool tips that did not match the challenges the cash shop up with unintended Choice hairstyle coupon which they quote unquote fixed but still had the wrong description unintended release of pets into the game which provide buff to characters and reboot acknowledgement of the issue and then the greatest joke of compensation ever imagined Miracle time tickets that list dates from 2022 released months ago and is still unpatched in the game Sunny Sunday pet box not working ticket drops from The splan Ring event not working as intended Shades burst breaking the Cali quest line missing translations amongst many other quest lines that have never been fixed one of my personal favorites is the princess s Quest that would constantly break to the point where you had to individually click skills from the skill menu to even attack anything then after years of issues finally allowed the quest to count as World clear and then having further issues with that implementation like let's get back to the basics it really shouldn't be this bad in any game all right so taking a pause on all the critiques some things I'm looking for Beyond just pointing out problems is more Innovation from Nexon honestly what we get is just more of the same the game is a void of content to fill in the early and mid game if Nexon wants us to just blow right by it I want to see this in both their main gameplay aspects bossing and grinding for bossing there's very little diversity for the bulk of the game pretty much all bosses are narrowed down to three types of attacks fing debris directional attacks or area effect attacks sometimes there is a gimmick which overlays these attacks but there hasn't been much Innovation at least until very late in the game on these mechanics just a bigger health bar and new animations I think one major thing they could add is modifiers to existing bosses with new loot to keep them relevant for for example imagine if in chaos zachum a boss you only clear for a crystal you could add custom modifiers like new move sets or mechanics new phases player debuffs boss stat Buffs and restrictions that all add up to certain thresholds when reached it would open up new loot tables you could have multiple tiers of loot tables with gear to fill the many level gaps from 140 to 200 or given on drop chance of something highly rewarding like special potentials Flames or unique Buffs specific against the boss to reach higher modifiers you know add something to keep bosses relevant and provide other progression paths than pensier a normal boss Gear to absab to Arcane and higher tier boss gear this could be done to all bosses now let's talk about mobbing mobbing is incredibly monotonous especially at higher levels where there's like one map you train on for hundreds of hours I think new age was good at providing alternative things you're looking for while grinding which makes the cap so confused but it doesn't actually improve grinding itself one idea I had was adding Maps separate from the current ones that require a higher level of effort for greater reward they can experiment with things like map wide attacks that have to be avoided or you get koed mini bosses with actual mechanics you know optional things to add variety to gameplay all we really have now is you reach a new map that has greater damage requirements and time gate so it's more XP when you achieve that so putting all all these pain points together I feel like they continuously improve events and dailies to cover for what the game is lacking where you might be getting bored of the monotony Nexon fills the void with more rewards and incentives so you power through the events keep getting better and better dailies are more incentivized to make you feel like you need to return the next day and the next or else you're missing out events with insane Buffs to progression like shining star force and Cube Sails are spread strategically so you feel like you constantly need to save for something it's an ingenious incentive structure but at some point you have to think it only works if they keep one-upping themselves or maintaining the same quality of events so there's endless power creep which I guess is part of the reason the early and mid game have fallen off the funny thing is the best time to actually play maple story from a progression standpoint is 10 years from now or when it dies and you don't have to progress at all what I'm trying to get at is that nexon's focus is on player retention retain the long-term players of the game and hope a few new ones trickle in you can see this by the push towards content that only really applies to players already invested in the game and incentivizes everyone to stay in game every day this is also visible when they don't even think to capitalize on something like a new server to expand their player base which I talked about in my prior video this strategy is also terrible when their continued choices actions and Communications drive away those same long-term players I don't think Nexon sees the value of their own IP in the global market and why would they they continually erode the likability of themselves and by extension their IP maple story it's not the game's fault it's the captain at the Helm of the ship I don't think it's ever too late for Nexon to flip the script especially with such a dedicated player base that will somehow still crawl back to them after literal years of this what it would really take is someone to take charge of the global version of maple story that actually values the game maple story at its core is a fantastic game the best 2D MMO out there with a lot of potential I'll dive into that on the next one to wrap up let me tell you what I plan to do with this channel I myself am no longer going to play maple story which I guess means I'll see you in game tomorrow however I have a lot to say regarding the game so this is not a good buy on that front there are three directions I want to take with my channel the first is I have been absolutely loving old school runes escapes leagues which is a temporary game mode that you should all try if you haven't yet if you didn't know from my profile picture I'm an avid player of osrs love the game and I want to Branch out into content for that the second thing I want to do is to continue to provide topic videos for maple story I want to discuss the problems that need to be addressed before I return to the game cover drama because it's fun for me and explore topics that I feel need some additional perspective and finally while I'm highly critical of maple story I still think you can have a lot of fun with it I want to build a resource to help newer players get into maple story and understand mechanics and enjoy whatever time they do end up spending there before they move on so stay tuned for all of that if you made it this far and haven't liked and subscribed what are you doing join the party there are also links to Discord and if you want to go above and beyond to support the channel become a channel member till next time

Channel: Jamoosin

Views: 5,696

Keywords: Maplestory, MMORPG, MMO, Reboot, GMS, Maplestory Protest, MapleStory New Age, MapleStory SewAge, MapleStory Nerfs, MapleStory Drama, MapleStory Quitting, The Current State of MapleStory

Id: kQVtfZUvcdU

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023