Removal of the Free Market!
Not actually a KMS patch but Nexon just posted a notice on the MapleStory homepage with a very shocking announcement: the Free Market is being removed! There’s not too many details yet but I have translated the notice.
Hello MapleStory players.
On November 23, a patch will take place to improve the in-game trading system.
As a result of these improvements, the Free Market will be removed and all Cash items used in the Free Market will stop being sold on November 13.
The details of the trade system improvements for more smooth and convenient trading are as follows.
Trade Activity Improvement Details
1. Transaction Fee Unification
- In order to prevent unusual transactions, all trades (regardless of method of trading and amount) will have a unified fee.
2. Centralized Trading Location
- To reduce the inconvenience of having 2 trading markets, the Free Market will be removed.
3. Auction House Convenience Improvements
- A Market Price feature will be added that allows you to search for recently completed trades in the Auction. house to see item details and prices.
- A cart feature will be added that allows you to save desired items from items on sale and items in a Market Price list.
- The convenience of searching, selling, and buying items in the Auction House will be improved.
4. Maximum Stored Meso Cap Expansion
- To support high value item trading, the maximum amount of mesos you can hold will be expanded.
Free Market Cash Item Sale Notice
- Refunds for Free Market Cash items will be detailed in a later notice.
- All items that have already been bought can be used until November 23.
End of Sale Time: November 13, after the Cash Shop maintenance
Items Which Will no Longer be Sold:
- All Hired Merchants
- All Store Permits
- Owl of Minerva
- Owl of Tott
We hope to provide better game service to all MapleStory players.
Thank you.
I assume they will be pushing these changes to KMST soon (probably next week) so we’ll have more details then.
Orange Mushroom's Blog 
I’m shook.
Maplestory will never be the same again
1
Do they not realize everyone will just spam trade related stuff in other towns then? People will spam chat with trade requests, and use message stand things like match card and yut minigames to advert like a store.
I don’t believe any of that is the point of the change. I assume a major reason is nowadays very few people buy shops to sell items. Most shop buyers are listing items to take offers. I’m personally disheartened when I try to look through FM shops and most of them are just listing unbuyable items. Sure, you can Owl for specific items (which I think in KMS those still cost NX), but the days of going room-to-room skimming the FM are long gone due to the shift to majority “taking offer” shops.
Summarized as that the Free Market is now just a display case for the elitists.
Good!
“Maximum Stored Meso Cap Expansion”
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES
A little too late, these updates should have been implemented 5-6 years back when people still play this game. now it’s dead and just too late, time for maple to die out
Maple is top game on korea man, maybe u refering to GMS.
The FM was great a great meeting place, also. I wish they kept the entrance just for socializing
They might, we don’t know what they’ll do specifically yet 🙂
Any word on where they will move the NPCs located inside the Free Market, generally speaking, the Meso Market and Cash Equip exchange ones as the Storage/Expired Shop item holder npc are going to be presumably removed?
Meso Market is accessible through Quick Move already. As for the Cash Equip NPCs, those aren’t in KMS, so we’ll have to see what GMS does.
Yeah, KMS has the new Boss Crystal Collector NPC there (as well as some shops run by Inkwell and Goldrich) which aren’t available anywhere else so they’ll probably either keep the entrance map or move them somewhere else.
End of an era
RIP fm
The only place to meet people getting removed haha, MapleStory is pure bs now hahaha, imagine of they remove trade system as black desert online hahah, Nexon is bs as always
And nothing of value was lost.
I wonder if GMS will follow suit given the obvious backlash they’ll receive
That struck me as odd too, but they finally put in the auction house and this made me say “Oh, now it makes sense.” So who knows. It’d definitely hamper bots a good amount.
rip maple story
it was a fun ride
Wow, I haven’t played this game since 2014/2015, and coming back to this site just to see this is shocking AF! No more Free Market is almost like no more hunting grounds 3…nothing will be same. Although I HIGHLY doubt GMS will follow the same footsteps.
Good. Didn’t need the FM to have fun playing Maple Story anyways.