Orange Mushroom's Blog

A week after the test world update, Director Kang Wongki and Planning Team Leader Kim Changseop did a livestream talking about the 6th job update, feedback they’ve received, and the things they’re working on. They apologized probably no less than 20 times (and Changseop even apologized for apologizing so much lol) but it did seem like a pretty sincere discussion about the shortcomings of the patch.

I expected this to be a short post of bullet points but I actually really enjoyed watching the stream so I ended up writing a lot more lol. Changseop in particular was very honest about the mistakes they made, their reasoning and intentions, their goals, and they are clearly taking into account the players’ point of view now. Obviously I can’t translate it 100% but I tried to include as much detail as possible for the most interesting notes.

Introduction

• Changseop talked about how they were really happy to see players were enjoying what has already been released, such as the new event format and growth changes. After the first test world patch, they received a lot of feedback and were excited to see how invested people are in MapleStory gameplay.
• The goals of the livestream were: 1. to give a meaningful response to player feedback to the patch, and 2. to talk about what they’ll be adding soon, a lot of which was brought up to Wongki when he visited various streamers over the past month.
• For the 6th job skills, although the development team worked as hard as they could have, there were still some errors and awkward details about the new skills that made it confusing for players. Also, the numerical values for the skills were not meant to be finalized numbers (which he did mention in the Developer Notes) but they still should have been worked on more. For these reasons, they apologized for an unsatisfactory test environment.
• He said that he won’t be talking about specific job changes so they’ll be grouped up into various overarching topics, and the detailed changes will be included in the test world update next week.

Origin Skill Party Shared Cooldown Removal

• The 60 second shared cooldown for Origin Skills was intended to push MapleStory away from the ‘burst meta’ that it currently has.
• They also wanted to give everyone a ‘main character’ experience by being the only one to use their powerful cutscene skill.
• However, given the feedback from players, they decided that it would be better to remove it.
• Having to coordinate the skill usage and potentially spreading out party synergy skills would’ve been complicated and not very fun.
• They think the new Absolute Bind feature can still provide some of this variance in combat in certain boss battles and they will continue to try and find ways to help diversify MapleStory’s combat.

Origin Skill Absolute Bind Changes

• In the next test world update, regular binds will be able to overwrite Absolute binds. Currently, only the other way around is possible.
• They originally made it this way because getting to bind a boss for 20 seconds straight is extremely rewarding in boss battles so they wanted to make it a little harder to do. The ending of the Absolute bind effect even shows the timing of the bind wearing off to allow for better chaining of a regular bind.
• However, they saw the feedback from players and decided to change it. You can now give up a couple seconds of either bind to chain the other or still try and keep the timing more tight. This gives players more options on how to use the skills and they didn’t intend to limit it in this way.

Mastery Core Changes

• A key part of Mastery Cores was to preserve the usage patterns of existing skills as much as possible.
• However, certain jobs have been affected negatively due to errors in the numerical values. For example, Ark’s usage of Lef/Spectre Mode has changed. There may also have been some issues on the planning team’s side in terms of class skill experiences, such as Bowmaster’s Shooting Mode. Some classes’ skill action delays have also been accidentally changed, like Luminous’ Absolute Kill, which will be fixed right away.
• They did not intend to cause these significant differences in skill usage patterns and will work to fix them in the test world and even after the changes are implemented in the official server.

Improving Synergy Between Origin Skills and Existing Skills

• For some classes, the Origin Skills don’t synergize well with existing skills.
• For example, Kaiser, Luminous, and Illium have stacking buffs/gauges that fall off during the Origin skill cutscene time. They will be extending these buffs’ durations during the Origin skill.
• Another example is Hoyoung and Ark, which require some prep work before they use their Origin skill. They will be improving them to instantly complete the necessary preparations when used.

Improving Effects

• They are trying to incorporate players’ feedback about the skill effects to the best of the development team’s abilities.
• Next week’s test world update will have more changes and this will continue even in the live server update.
• Since it’s tough to gauge the reaction to effects beforehand, they want players to check them out as they are released and give as much feedback as possible so they can make the necessary changes.

6th Job Skills Future Plans

• In terms of numerical values, they will continue to change them until they are reasonable. It would be great if they could have the ‘correct’ numbers right away but realistically, the only way to get a good result is through multiple passes. This will continue even after they are added to the official server. Although sometimes it seems like they’re ‘slow and reactive’, the scope of data is very big and they need to confirm a lot of data before they can make good changes.
• For Mastery Cores, as mentioned in the showcase and the Developer Notes, they were designed to have 4 in total. When all 4 Mastery Cores are available, the 6th job advancement will be complete.
• Naturally, you would want all four of them to be released together, and he, as a developer, would love for that to happen as well. However, with the limited time and resources they have, and the fact that they didn’t want to change existing skill structures, they could only choose and add 1 Mastery Core at the moment. Inevitably, there might be differences between classes until all 4 Cores are released. He said the only thing he can ask is for players to be patient and is extremely sorry about this situation. The development team is currently working through the night and on weekends, and as the planning team leader, he is heartbroken but apologizes to the players.
• He said that players who have been playing since 5th job was added can recognize this situation when comparing 5th job skills from then to now, it’s a completely different level of experience, and he is sure that 6th job will be the same. Even the love and attention that players are giving the game now are greater than back then, so they hope to have better quality and faster updates than 5th job.
• They will be prioritizing updating Mastery Cores to complete 6th job as soon as possible.

Additional Improvements

• The following changes were not planned ahead of time, but after Director Wongki visited streamers, he collected their requests and feedback to work on as fast as possible. They will be implemented in the test world next week.
• They will be adding a Small Wealth Acquisition Potion (30 minute duration). You will be able to craft them with the same recipe as the regular Wealth Potion. This was a highly requested change and it will help players feel less locked in to play time (similar to other changes made in this update). This was intended to be released at the end of the summer but because of the large increase in newer players, they moved it forward.
• They will be increasing the base number of inventory slots from 24 to 48. Recently, they’ve been giving out a lot of Slot Expansion Coupons to help newer players but they thought this was a sort of workaround and decided to make a change to the default slots. All existing players will receive this increase as well. It’s not a big change but Changseop talked about how if you have played MapleStory for a long time, you get used to some of these awkward or inconvenient things and explain it as “that’s just how MapleStory is”, but for new players, this can be a barrier that they want to improve. They’re hoping to be more aggressive in making these kinds of changes to make MapleStory less outdated and more fun for new players.
• For now, they will not be increasing the maximum number of inventory slots. They are looking into it but it will require some work on the database side.
• They will be changing Arcane River daily quests to be the same as the new Grandis daily quests, where you defeat any of the monsters within each area to complete them. They realized that they were too focused on higher level areas and should’ve made this change as well, since finding specific maps can be tough in lower level areas as well. Changseop said this is similar to the previous point where existing players know where to go, they can use a Teleport World Map to go to specific places, finish the quests quickly but for new players, this can be a frustrating experience.
• They will be expanding the number of hunting ground maps for Odium and Shangri-La. There was a lot of feedback that there weren’t enough maps, and this is an inevitable situation in MapleStory where as players reach the highest level area, there’s not enough maps for everyone. For Shangri-La, they will be using the most popular hunting maps (the #3 maps, which for the record are full basically 24/7 now) and adding two more of each of them in each season’s area. They will also be improving the #1 and #2 maps to make them better. They didn’t receive as many requests for Odium but they looked at their data metrics and decided they needed to add some there too.
• A lot of players were asking about Monster Life changes. They said they would be lying if they said they didn’t know what players want and they’re definitely going to improve it.
• They will be changing game options to be saved to their database instead of your individual PC to let players keep the same ones across different environments instead of having to set them up from scratch every time. This change was made because a lot of players are playing from multiple computers like in PC Bangs now.
• They will be changing the default placement of hotkeys. Again, existing players don’t really think about this but some of the default placements aren’t very intuitive for new players. For example, the Function keys don’t actually do anything functional as they’re used for emotes. They will also be adding hotkeys for the daily quests and event quests. Wongki and Changseop said they’re both Alt jumpers and people in the chat started sharing their key, one person said F11???
• For the Cash Transfer feature, they will be adding the ability to see the class name when sending items to characters.
• They will be taking players’ feedback and requests for the hairs/faces they want to see in the Premium Hair/Face Coupons. This will begin starting next week’s rotation.
• They have received a lot of requests to update the Mileage Shop, and also to make Mannequins more accessible. They will be doing both by adding new items to the shop, including being able to purchase a Mannequin with Mileage once a month.
• They will be improving Mannequins for Angelic Buster, so that normal and Dress Up modes share the same ones.
• They will be adding class skin coupons in the Cash Shop for Elves (Mercedes/Adele), Khali, and Demon.
• They will be adding new Cash Shop throwing stars, including Core Gemstones, Dark Bats, and one more.
• They will be adding a PC Bang event where you can get 2x Experience Coupons.

Conclusion

• Although many things have happened over the last couple of years, Changseop said they’re getting an overwhelming amount of love and support from players now which is the only reason this is all possible. He said its impossible to make an update that has everything that everyone wants, but they have a clear direction now.
• Whether its in an update, a showcase, a live broadcast, or Wongki appearing in a stream, they know what they have to do and they’re doing their best to meet players’ expectations.
• There will be a Vision Talk in August about the direction of the updates in the second half of the year. They will also talk about the Monster Life changes then.