Orange Mushroom's Blog

The dreaded blue Maple Admin banner once again… this time it’s comments from the developers about things people posted on the discussion board!

Hello. This is MapleStory.

Before we begin, we apologize to the users who felt frustrated that there were no responses from the development team about the opinions that were shared on the discussion board for not giving our thoughts more quickly. The discussion board is being reorganized to become a more effective place of discussion, but until that reorganization is complete, we will share our thoughts on the opinions of users through a notice at least once a month.

In this notice, we will share what the development team has been thinking about the discussion board posts from 3/9~3/24. During this period, there were a total of 2,961 opinions posted on the discussion board, and the content was the following.

※ The chart has been organized based on the number of posts. ※
※ If a post contained multiple content, it was categorized based on the post title or representative opinion. ※
※ Click the image for full size! ※

First of all, we would like to share the position of the development team on the topics that have attracted the most attention recently from the information collected above, such as the customer conference and the proxy growth titled ‘부주’.

We also had a lot of thoughts about the customer conference, and as we said in the [Sharing the Customer Conference Schedule] notice, we considered a variety of situations and proceeded with the current method. More than anything, we think the main concern from users is that this customer conference will be finished after this one-off session, and there will no room to talk openly with the development team in the future. Once again, we promise that we will have a place of continuous communication rather than a conference which ends after this one time, and that next time we will prepare a place where a wider variety of people can attend.

Proxy growth, titled ‘부주’, is an area that the development team has many thoughts about. Proxy growth is basically very vulnerable security-wise and there is also the possibility of direct loss of goods. In addition, game usage may be restricted due to abnormal game play during proxy growth, and there are situations where the ID owners who do not know the situation misunderstand that it is an incorrect restriction.
Officially, MapleStory does not recommend any type of proxy gameplay, including proxy growth. Since proxy gameplay shares personal information with others, MapleStory has not previously helped with problems arising from these situations and will continue to maintain this stance in the future. Until now, game usage has not been restricted based solely on proxy growth and proxy gameplay. On one hand, our intention was to not limit the various possibilities that could occur in the RPG genre, but it is also impossible to tell whether or not proxy gameplay is taking place based on game usage records alone.
However, starting from this notice, MapleStory promises to actively respond to situations that fall under the Proxy Gameplay Penalty Act. Proxy gameplay, including proxy growth with compensated work, will be subject to investigation requests based on the amendment to the Game Industry Promotion Act (Proxy Gameplay Penalty Act) which took effect on June 25, 2019. We will supplement our operation policy as soon as possible and give a clearer standard on the restriction of proxy gameplay.

In addition, through the [Notice for Major Changes during the Client 1.2.118 Official Update], we talked about the decisions we made based on the opinions left on the discussion boards from players who played the test server. In the future, we will inform players with a corresponding notice for each patch so you can clearly understand how the opinions given by test world users were reflected in the official updates.

We know that from the opinions that users left on the discussion board such as convenience, system, content, and jobs, they are all areas which users feel discomfort from and even a single part cannot be neglected. Nevertheless, since we summarized the opinions of users, we were concerned that this was a limitation that could create a situation where the direction we applied would conflict depending on the content of each opinion. Therefore, for the more critical issues, both users and the development team can first focus and discuss improvements one-by-one.

The first part we would like to discuss with users is ‘level up difficulty’. Levelling up is the basis of RPG games and can be called the key axis of growth. However, for this part, we saw opinions discussing the difficulty, and we also saw situations where the opinions on ‘level up difficulty’ were mentioned during discussions on proxy growth. Therefore, the development team would like to raise the priority on this issue and hear various opinions from users. We request that you share your thoughts on acquiring experience to level up and the level growth experience on the discussion board. We will collect the valuable opinions given by users and inform you about the development team’s thoughts through another notice.
Of course, we will be checking all opinions given to us, and if further discussions are needed, we will make preparations so that they can be discussed according to our priorities.

We think that this process of listening to users’ opinions and sharing the development team’s thoughts on those opinions is part of ‘communication’. Currently, we have many shortcomings, but we will work continuously and show our progress.

Thank you.