MapleStory 2 – Patch Catch Up and Winter Update!
A few days ago, I noticed that I haven’t posted about MapleStory 2 in a while (like… 3 months haha). It’s because I don’t play it anymore, but I wanted to let you guys know about stuff that has been added since the Season 3 update back in August! I skipped some details and some of the smaller patches though.
In addition, they have released information about the Winter update which includes a new job!
September 22 Update
First of all, Chaos Mode has been added to certain bosses including the Shadow Shaman Devorak and Captain Mock. They are much stronger than the Normal or Challenger modes but give enhanced rewards.
They wanted to diversify the ways you can level up, as many people tended to just hunt in fields or do party dungeons but neglected quests. So, all quests’ experience rewards have been increased by 200~300% on average!
You can also now gain experience when entering new maps, finding new taxi stops, telescopes, treasure chests, and when participating in minigames in Queenstown.
Quest icons are now different colours on the world map based on if they are Epic quests, World quests, or repeatable quests.
New 1 person party dungeons have been added: Polluted Garden (level 17+), Hen Rescue Battle (level 24+), and the Site of Valor (level 48+).
A new party find system has been added. This will allow you to choose various dungeons and bosses and look for others who wish to challenge them. You can name your parties, whisper leaders, and more.
To encourage party play, you will now gain bonus experience when hunting in the same map with a party. And party members’ kills will count for your quest objectives.
The maximum number of people in a guild has been increased from 25 to 50 but you have to pay mesos to expand your limit.
A new type of ‘bulletin board’ has been added, ad balloons!
New hairs and faces have been added as well.
October 29 Update
The Enchant system has been updated. The probability of success of each enchantment has been increased and the stats given per enhancement have been increased as well (the graph shows the stats you get per enchantment).
In addition, you can now enhance your weapons and armor up to +15.
Pilgrims will now randomly appear at certain dungeons, giving you their blessings before you enter, increasing the time limit by 20 minutes.
The Damage Meter has been changed. You can no longer see other players’ damage, only your own. This was because damage became a large part of seeing who would be in a party or not but there are other factors which should be taken into consideration.
New 1-person dungeons have been added: Flowery Trail – Dangerous Hide and Seek (level 29+) and Watchtower Walls – Attack of the Pigs (level 37+).
Those who have reached max level tend to only participate in 10-person boss dungeons so they wanted to give incentives to do other types of content.
New 1-person (Dancing Sand Tomb, Hardened Waterway, Yultan Mine) and 4-person dungeons (Miraculous Box, Shimmering Marble Hall) have been added for those level 48+, with new rewards.
The salesman from an unknown continent Aliyar has appeared. He sells Excellent equipment, special ridings, skin items, souvenirs and treasures for a new type of currency called Lu. You can collect Lu by completing daily quests and high level 1-person and 4-person dungeons.
In addition,the Trophy Pendant salesman Lotfi has appeared. If you collect certain trophies, you’ll be able to buy Excellent rank equipment from him.
When you collect 1000 or 2000 trophies, you’ll get a special title and a Trophy Mania mark.
Your HP and SP will no longer be reduced when you die.
You can now restore your SP and EP using orbs. Boss monsters in fields, dungeons, and elite monsters will drop SP orbs when defeated. Interactable objects in maps will drop EP orbs when destroyed.
You can now choose which quests/dungeons you would like to see on the world map.
You can also choose which icons you would like to see on your minimap.
Mounts have been improved. They are no longer cancelled if you make contact with water, the delay to summon them has been decreased and you can press the ‘attack’ key to move faster while on them.
When designing items, previewing equipment, and previewing Merit Market items, you can now choose between 3 different poses and the gender of the mannequin. You can also change its skin colour and rotate it by right clicking and dragging.
Winter Update
They released this image to tease the Winter update a while back!
November 12 Update
The Maple OX Quiz Show has been added! You can participate from 5pm~10pm on weekdays and 1pm~10pm on weekends.
Answer up to 10 questions in a row correctly in order to gain experience, mesos, trophies, and medals!
The experience rewards from events in Tria (Trap Master, Final Survivor, Spring Beach) have been increased by 6x~10x.
The rewards for the minigames entered through the magic hat have also been increased.
A few quests have had their completion requirements lowered to make them easier.
November 26 Update
This update focused on optimization! This was a very large concern for players because the game was really, really laggy whenever you would enter an area with a lot of people.
They talked about their improvements in specifics but I’m not a super technical guy so I’ll just explain the image above.
Before the update, they used to handle all of the game requests in the game loop at once, leading to the main thread freezing when it would not complete. After the update, the main thread only handles the game loop and uses the loading thread to handle requests instantaneously so it doesn’t have to freeze.
Here are some videos the MapleStory 2 team released to show off the improvements in optimization.
MapleStory 2: New Enemy
Today, the MapleStory 2 homepage updated with the name of the Winter update: New Enemy. It will be split into 5 parts over December and January.
The first patch is on December 3 and is called Seed of Darkness. I can’t really tell what the image is supposed to be haha.
The second patch is on December 17 and is called New Hero. This is definitely the one with the new job!
MapleStory 2’s first new job will be the Rune Blader! Not sure what class it will fall under, maybe thief?
The third patch is on December 31 and is called Forgotten Land. I think it’s going to be a new area.
The fourth patch is on January 14 and is called Light and Darkness. This guy sorta looks like Magnus lol. I think this will be a new boss or something, probably why the update is called New Enemy.
The fifth and final patch is on January 28 and is called Descendent of Light. To be honest this looks like it could be another new job as well haha, but it might just be story related.
Orange Mushroom's Blog 
first
First <.<
Looks like the descendant of light might be Mika
Just curious Max, do you still play this game? Till now, I find language being a major problem
I haven’t played in a long time, the gameplay doesn’t really appeal to me haha. I think movement in the game is really slow because of the big 3D maps/EP limiting your movement skills.
This is soooo much better than MS updates
Why can’t this game come to the west any sooner? I want to play this game so bad right now.
I’m quite dissapointed they still at least have not recognised or ADRESSED the western fanbase. It is actually quite insulting.
Even if its December 2016, at least let us know. I mean at this moment we don’t even know IF it is coming. Way to treat your fanbase Nexon.
Because there’s no guarantee. The game is super low population in the KR servers right now. Unlike MS1 there’s really not a whole lot to do if you’ve capped. You can go fight the same bosses you’ve already beat a billion times for horrible gear, or you can wait 3 hours for a world boss to spawn.
Don’t even try to bring up PVP either, anything that lets you pay to win that deliberately is trash. The only chance the game has at making it out of the east is if the chinese version is a mega success. Otherwise i’d be surprised if the game made it through 2016 with how little content is being pushed out so soon after launch.
My point is that there’s no guarantee the west will get it, saying you’re “disappointed” in them for trying to salvage this horrible mess of a game that no one wants to play before they ship it off to other areas is just silly. Wait to see if the game survives where there’s an actual development team and GMs that care about before you start protesting that it’s not coming to the west.
I don’t think that game have super low population, it’s on 20th position on MMORPG ranking (popularity) and 54th on overall (and It’s going up). I know it isn’t great but its much better than Black Desert which is coming west soon, and have already Japanese and Russian version. It’s hard these day to make popular MMO in Korea most players play LoL, Sudden Attack and TOP 10 MMORPGs are the old ones like Lineage, Aion, MapleStory or ”newer” Blade&Soul.
I realize you’re trying to make a point but to say that something will be popular or unpopular in the West depending on how people like it in the East is a very bigoted statement. We by far have different likes and dislikes. For example MS2 will be a bigger hit than MS in the West simply because it is 3D whereas both MS and MS2 can survive on equal footing in the East. In addition, you only hear “complainers” ask for new content so readily in the West (which is a smaller portion of the population than people realize we just give everyone a big voice in the West). Most Westerners will try to max out almost every class, finish all quests, and achieve all dungeons before asking for new content. That’s like a “thing” in the West: finishing; complete victory; beating the game.
You’re not exactly in the right there. I can count on one hand the games that have failed in korea yet succeeded in the west. A large majority of the time if they even release a commercial failure outside of KR it’s an established IP. Only even then sometimes it’s just not salvageable. I don’t know if you knew this, but dragonball online existed. Was around for about a year and a half, maybe 2 years, under netmarble. They tried SO hard to get it to the west, even out of korea, but the chinese version was pretty bad, so bad it never even made it to japan. I know nexon and netmarble are very different publishers, but the principle still stands.
MS is not nearly as large of an IP as dragon ball is. My point is that nexon may or may not be willing to risk their money localizing MS2 for a market that makes up less than 5% of their worldwide revenue (http://pdf.irpocket.com/C3659/Q8aV/UUxv/hfxW.pdf). All signs point to them testing the waters with the chinese release. Seeing how it fares, then going from there. But to remain optimistic under the assumption that “the western market is different” is silly. They know that, and still, even when they try to adapt games to a western market, they don’t fare well typically. Need I remind you of DFO’s fate? Trying to appease the “different mentality of the western market” killed the hell out of that game. Now it’s back and again, already failing, only this time because they refuse to adapt to the western mentality. The west is basically a roulette wheel for your money for eastern developers.
As you said, the mindsets are very different. In the west (generally speaking), players are more goal-oriented, you’re correct. But at the same time, the goals need to be visible. There’s trophies in MS2, which are nice, but by and large provide no benefit. The bosses released early on, much like more traditional western MMOs (WoW chiefly), are absolutely worthless, and an enormous waste of time to bother doing once you reach better content. Why? Not because the equipment is useless (it is, by the way), but because you’re limited by how many dungeons/bosses you can run by a horrible mobile game-style energy system in the form of “keys”. Of course you can recharge them with real money though. So, even if you have a few perfectionists, or people just enjoying the content, by and large the community will be scrambling to sit in world boss maps, waiting for a respawn so they can get good gear and be prepared for the new patch.
tl;dr maple 2 is a gigantic bandwagon mess with a fluctuating playerbase even more drastic than maple 1. If they can fix that, it might stand a chance. But i’m not hopeful.
Why are all the classes female canon?
Because equality. Get over it.
All the classes being canonically female =/= Equality,
Hi girls 😀
A magic swordsman, new it’s happen eventualy.
Hi Orange!
Where do I look in order to stay posted of a release of the English version of the game?
Thanks!
// MynX
Not sure if there’s a specific site you can go to but when its announced I’ll definitely make a post about it here!
Can i please know when can i play the game? I live in Singapore
Hi Max,
Do you know any stats about the populations/profits of Maplestory 2 vs Maplestory 1 in Korea at the moment?
Was curios if anyone could help me make an account, so I can play some maple story 2. Getting super antsy about it and its not GMS 2 yet -_- why must life test my patients at a time like this.
I want to play this game but how ???
please how ???
Jannat, I fear theres no way to get into the Korean version anymore. It requires a Korean Phone number. The only way is buying an already existing account. (which you’ll probably share with many other unknown players) Anyone outside Korea is IP blocked. Although Nexon HAS confirmed that there WILL BE a world wide release. There is just no release date yet. So we will just have to remain hyped and wait. 🙂