Orange Mushroom's Blog

A new letter has been posted on the MapleStory homepage, written by the director of MapleStory, Kang Won-ki. Since the Destiny showcase, some players have been sharing their thoughts on the update schedule and the content being added. There were players that were mad the Adventurer remaster would be coming so late, or that they would have to remake their equips for the new level 250 set, things like that.

Director Won-ki’s letter talks about the showcase and how they may have not explained their intentions clear enough.

This is MapleStory’s general director Kang Won-ki.

The MapleStory Destiny showcase was held yesterday on December 23. In order to make the players who love MapleStory happy, we prepared various content in different areas and prepared a place to introduce them. However, immediately after the stream, we heard the voices of many players expressing their regrets.

In the process of listening to these players, I wondered about the reasons for their disappointment and I have come to the conclusion that the development team, including myself, are still passive in our communication with players. We are quite aware of the need to explain the intentions and background information of the development team in detail, and it would have been better if these things had been covered in the showcase, so we are very sorry that we could not match the level of our players.

So, although this is late, we will try to explain our thoughts a little more through this notice.

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1. About the Adventurer Remaster Update Schedule

First of all, the Adventurer remaster update which many players were waiting for was later than expteded, and we did not inform you about the implementation schedule earlier which meant you had to wait even longer. We apologize. In this Adventurer remaster, the design/combat patterns of 14 jobs are being changed at the same time, so compared to the schedule for creating a new job, it required the same schedule as about 5~6 new jobs. Since we first introduced the Adventurer remaster at Inside MAPLE last August, we have continued work on it in parallel with other patch schedules, but as a result, we apologize for the late update.

In the second half of this year, despite the large-scale increase in our development manpower, not everyone was able to participate in this winter update due to the need to adapt and complete the training processes for this project. We are well aware that many players expected the Adventurer remaster to be updated faster but in the current situation, to present the Adventurer update at a satisfactory level, we have no choice but to maintain the current schedule.

The Adventurer remaster requires testing in a variety of situations and the development team is also concentrating on high perfection. In the two test world updates beginning on January 6 and January 20, we will listen to your opinions and actively work with them. As players have high expectations for the Adventurer remaster update, we will definitely repay you with an update that meets those expections.

2. About the New Equipment

We will explain a little more about the new level 250 equipment Ethernel set and the Dawn’s Boss accessory set.

First of all, we briefly introduced that in the Destiny update, the Ethernel set can be acquired through Watcher Kalos who will be added in the 3rd patch and Chosen Seren. We are well aware of players’ concerns that there is a risk of the utility of existing items being changed rapidly when these items are added. However, in order to obtain 1 part of the set, we plan to make it so that it requires a minimum of 6 months or more even when a party with a very high growth level pools their equipment fragments to 1 person. Therefore, we think that it will take much longer for all parts of this set to be widely available when compared to time it took for Arcane Shade equipment.

The reason why we added new level 250 equipment this winter was to present a new challenge goal without drastically changing the utility of each equipment item. We have prepared a long-term acquisition path for these new items, but since it will take a long time to actually acquire them, we would like to assure you that there is no burden of replacing all of your equipment immediately and that your existing highly-enhanced equipment will not lose their utility in a short time.

Next, we will explain more about the Dawn’s Boss accessory set. The levels of the Dawn’s Boss accessory set are intended to preserve the value of the Pitched Boss accessory set, and to make it easier to transfer stats from lower gear through Toad’s Hammer. However, we did not carefully consider the fact that removing the Guardian Angel Ring from the existing Boss Accessory set could cause great inconvenience to some players’ equipment settings. Therefore, when this is implemented in the official server, we will suggest improvement measures for this.

3. About Events

We will provide additional explanations about the structure of this event.

First of all, it was a misunderstanding that the Special Sunday Maple overlapped with Miracle Time and that it was an event that intentionally promoted spending. The Pet/Fashion/Hair Time events are not events that grant additional benefits when purchasing specific items, but instead, everyone will acquire a special reward just by logging in with a chance of getting additional items similar to things like the past Sugar Time event. Shining Star Force Time will also be in a form that provides higher level benefits than the Star Force benefits provided by current Sunday Maple events.

Secondly, we designed the Stellar Pass provided by the Stella’s Starlight Chariot, which is purchased using Maple Points, to allow you to acquire additional reward items for things that already took a lot of time to get and further enhancing the goal of participating in this event. Assuming that you would acquire additional copies of all the rewards, we set the Stellar Pass price to be lower than the component price. We will be adjusting the Stellar Pass’s price from the current 39,800 Maple Points to 19,800 Maple Points so you can get higher utility than we intended.

Also, for the Event Ring Only Legendary Potential Scroll sold in the coin shop, it should have been tradeable within the world but due to an error, it was implemented as untradeable. In the December 30 patch, it will be changed to be tradeable within the world as intended.

In addition to the above information, we will notify you before the official server update with a separate notice next week for any other changes that will be made. Finally, for players who will start MapleStory at the time of the Adventurer remaster, we will prepare an abundance of Adventurer-only events.

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In the showcase, we did a presentation-oriented format to show players a quick glance what we were preparing. However, there were still many shortcomings when explaining our intentions, and players’ opinions were quickly unreceptive. In addition to the information provided above, we will actively listen to and implement opinions from various channels regarding this winter update.

And we will prepare a place where we can talk with players in real time. We will inform you about our progress and preparations through a notice in the future.

Sincerely,
Kang Won-ki