As stated previously, Director Changseop did a live stream yesterday called the Maple Now LAN Virtual Tour! He said it would be a mini-showcase and it was definitely that (or even more) with all the stuff he announced. This year’s anniversary will take place over the next three months (March, April, May) and they have prepared lots of content both in-game and in real life (such as the MapleStory theme park)!

After the Maple Now stream, the test server was opened with some of the changes which will be coming to the live server next week. Recently I’ve only been doing live server posts so I probably will end up continuing that, it’s just easier to take my time over a week+ instead of having to rush to finish the test server as fast as possible then have to do more work for whatever is different in the live server patch a few days later.

The Maple Now was divided into four sections:

• Events
• Gameplay Reorganizations
• Economy Related Changes
• Newly Added Content

Maple Attack! with Lotte

• General
  • The 23rd anniversary theme is Maple Attack! with Lotte.
  • MapleStory’s cute monsters will take over every corner of the Jamsil neighbourhood in Seoul, and players can meet them in real-life from March to May.
  • The in-game event map Maple Island was designed to look as close as possible to the real-life version.
  • There’s a stereotype where usually events centred around monsters don’t tend to perform very well, but they were happy that players’s initial response to this concept was quite positive this time around so they’re hoping that this anniversary event will be different.

• Mascot Parade
  • The main event remains mostly the same with a one-click attendance check. You also must defeat 10,000 monsters per week (up to 100k monsters), but this limit will accumulate over the weeks so even if you start late, you can finish the event all at once.
  • The special part of this event is that every four weeks, you can receive 1 time-limited Luna Petite pet (vac pet).
  • More importantly, when you finish the whole event, you can receive 1 Luna Petite pet that you can keep forever! This will only be available to claim once the summer update begins on June 18 and can be claimed in any world.
  • The reason why they are suddenly giving a vac pet as a reward is that currently, at least one vac pet is basically a requirement when hunting in MapleStory now. But they’re pretty expensive and many players that don’t have one, so they wanted to provide the experience to them. In addition, when coming back to MapleStory after a long time or starting anew, the best time is definitely the summer. But for people coming back to the game now, they can participate in this event, use these vac pets, and work on getting the permanent one for the summer update.
  • Of course the event also has other parts such as temp stats and rewards.

• MapleStory & BTS Jin
  • BTS Jin joined MapleStory as an intern in 2022 and will return as a planner. They won’t show all of it off right now, just some of the highlights.
  • Jin’s Mysterious Garden
    • There are special rewards such as the Jin Hyper Growth Potion (gives 1 level up from level 260~284), Jin Extreme Growth Potion (randomly gives 1~10 level ups from level 200~259), and Advanced EXP Vouchers.
  • In April, there will be a Hot Time event held directly by Jin.
  • In May, there will be a new ‘Jin’ event. This event will have a new structure/format with a new type of gameplay. Compared to the previous BTS Jin event, it will have more rewards and be easier to participate in.

• Hyper Burning Booster x Tera Blink
  • It’s just a given at this point.

• Change Burning: Lucid
  • This is a new type of event being released for the first time.
  • It’s a new concept for Burning events which are usually based on creating new characters. This one is different in that it is designed to help you grow your existing characters further.
  • You can transform into Lucid, hunt monsters, and complete missions.
  • They did it this way because previously, some people weren’t motivated by events that had special classes like Saitama or Tanjiro because the characters would disappear at the end. But at the same time, there’s a unique fun to playing a new or event class that can level up quickly. Therefore, with this event, you can enjoy playing a new class while still growing your own character.
  • The first character chosen for this event was Lucid. Before her, they thought it would be fun to transform into a monster. They were also thinking of either Black Mage or Will. But to match the Lotte World aspect (Lucid Dream Festa was held there previously for the Dreamer update), they decided on Lucid.
  • Lucid has her own level and stats. There are also weekly and seasonal missions.
  • The main rewards are experience related of course. When you hunt as Lucid, additional monsters will appear like VIP Booster monsters.
  • There are special Cube and Flame items with a blue dot in the corner. These are new ‘Adversary’ Black Cubes, White Additional Cubes, and Abyss Rebirth Flames. They can only be used on Genesis/Destiny weapons or Astra subweapons. They created these so that they can give them out in larger quantities than previous events without a big effect on the market’s economy. They’re planning to give out about 200 of each.
  • Lucid has her own special content called Nightmare Forest, which is like Monster Park. She can also acquire her own Dreamy Equipment and upgrade them with special Dreamy Crystals.
  • Lucid has her own special content called Dreamy Trials. You must defeat various bosses including an exclusive boss Helena (Athena Pierce), who is Lucid’s ‘rival’.
    • Zakum
    • Vellum
    • Lucid
    • Helena
    • Helena (Nightmare)

• Offline Events
  • From Lotte World to Seokchon Lake to Lotte World Tower to Lotte World Mall to all of the Jamsil neighbourhood, it will be covered in MapleStory.
    • Starting today, Lotte World will be decorated with MapleStory themed areas and photo zones.
    • Maple Island, the MapleStory theme park, will open officially on April 3.
    • In May, a giant Orange Mushroom balloon and Slimes will appear in Seokchon Lake.
    • The park itself will become Henesys Mushroom Park with special AR enhancements.
    • There will be a pop-up store in Lotte World mall, as well as a collaboration with Uniqlo’s UT line and special food/drinks with MapleStory themes.
  • They have rented out all of Lotte World for April 29, MapleStory’s birthday.

Gameplay Reorganizations

• Their main goal was to fix/implement the things that players needed to have fixed by the time they return for the summer update.

• The required experience from level 200-260 will be halved.
  • As more and more level 260+ content has been added to help level up, the level 200-260 range became a bit neglected and overly slow. There’s no point in adding extra content in that range now so they decided to just halve the experience required.
  • In Challengers World, there was a big bottleneck starting from Sellas so they wanted to make this entire range easier.
  • It’s not every single level that is halved (e.g. level 200~210 is unchanged) but the further you go, the more it is reduced. Overall it ends up being halved.
• 2x Arcane Symbols provided from daily quests and weekly content.
• 1.5x Authentic Symbols provided from daily quests.

• Boss Pattern Reorganization
  • Seren
    • In Normal/Hard Mode, the Death Count will be increased to 8.
    • The Sun’s Sword Wave and Sun’s Rage difficulty have been lowered. (The Sun’s Sword Wave is the banana slash, it moves faster now. The Sun’s Rage is the pillars that erupt from the ground, they don’t blind anymore and you can avoid them by standing in between pillars now)
    • Phase 2 Dawn’s difficulty has been improved. (The Nerota’s Power orbs will no longer inflict reverse keys, and their HP has been drastically lowered so they can be defeated. The deer’s knockback attack cooldown has been increased.)
  • Kalos
    • In Easy/Normal Mode, the Death Count will be increased to 8.
    • The interference removal difficulty has been improved.
    • The Watcher’s Rage pre-delay has been increased. (Eye lasers)
    • The Watcher’s Roar (Extreme) difficulty has been improved. (FMA)
    • The Watcher’s Punishment/Watcher’s Judgement stun duration has been adjusted. (Knockback swipe)
  • Kaling
    • Pattern pre-delays have been adjusted, and you can attack Qiongqi/Kaling while they are flying.
    • In Phase 2/3, when the boss is bound, the forced teleport pattern will be removed.
    • In Phase 3, you can only hit the Peril in the area that you are currently in. (Ascents will still hit all 3 Perils regardless of which area you are in) This was done to alleviate the difference between classes that could hit multiple Perils at the same time and those that could not.
    • In Phase 3, the monsters’ HP have been lowered.
  • Limbo
    • You can now use the Purifying Energy while using Ascent skills and Origin skills.
    • In Phase 3, the map’s upper ceiling height has been adjusted.
  • Jupiter
    • Certain pattern effects’ visibility have been improved.
  • All Damage Reflect/Damage Ignore status effects have been removed from bosses.
  • When a boss uses a rush attack and hits a wall, there will no longer be a lingering hitbox where you still take damage even if the rush ends early.

• Special Skill Ring Reorganization
  • When they first added the Continuous Ring, they wanted each type of ring to have its own benefits and reasons to use. However, over time, as they added new skills that favoured one over the other, and added the polishing system, it became an issue where players constantly had to swap between the two. They wanted to fix this going forward.
  • He knows that it’s risky to drastically change the value of these items but they wanted to do it as soon as possible to alleviate it before new skills are added in the future.
  • The existing Ring Exchange skill and the reserve skill ring slot will be removed.
  • Instead, there will be the Additional Special Skill Ring system. This extra slot will only appear if you have a Restraint Ring level 4+ or Continuous Ring level 4+ equipped. You can have one ‘active’ ring and one ‘passive’ ring equipped at the same time.
  • All rings will be classified into active or passive, but naturally the goal is just Restraint + Continuous.
  • All Special Skill Rings’ stats/properties will be adjusted.
    • Continuous Ring: The buff reactivation cooldown has been removed. When you use a skill, a 30 second duration refreshable buff will be activated. The boss damage boost (at level 6) has been decreased from 195% to 54%.
    • Restraint Ring: The area range has been increased. You can now reinstall the area. The attack/magic attack boost (at level 6) has been decreased from 95% to 85%.
  • Generally, if you are currently using a level 4 Continuous Ring, the goal is that you will be dealing the same amount of damage by equipping a level 3 Restraint Ring. (or vice versa)
  • They don’t want people swapping rings anymore, so even though the Ring Exchange skill has been removed, they have also added the condition that if you equip a Special Skill Ring, the skill’s maximum cooldown will be applied (so even if you double click to switch your ROR to a WJ, it won’t work because it will be on a 2 minute cooldown).
  • From now on, only Restraint Ring and Continuous Ring can be polished.
  • You can now use 10 Grindstones of Life + 5b mesos to have a 100% chance of polishing a level 4 ring to level 5. You can now use 20 Grindstones of Faith + 20b mesos to have a 100% chance of polishing a level 5 ring to level 6.
  • If you have a level 5+ of any other ring, they will be turned into level 4 rings and you will receive the corresponding amount of Grindstones/mesos based on the 100% success rate materials.
  • Starting from the June update, the feature where you could swap Special Skill Ring polishing levels will be removed because it won’t be needed anymore.
  • In Challengers World, players that chose the Weapon Jump ring will have it replaced with either a Restraint Ring or Continuous Ring.

• Training Ground
  • This is a system to make more effective balance patches.
  • Previously, there have been instances where they balanced based on damage cycles that players didn’t actually use which was a mistake due to lack of understanding. To prevent this, they decided to make this system where they can clearly see what players’ rotations are and balance around them.
  • You must be a character with 300m Combat Power or higher to enter (considered a baseline to have a certain amount of knowledge about the job). After entering, you can hit the dummy and use your skills to record a damage cycle. Other players can then recommend your rotation. The cycle with the highest number of recommendations for each job will be considered the ‘actual damage cycle’ and the development team/players will be unified.
  • There are Training Ground-only buffs, which are the only ones you can use. When you start your recording, the buffs will be applied automatically to be standardized between all players.
  • You also need to meet certain conditions for your record to be registered. If you don’t meet them, your replay will not be registered.
    • Use the Origin skill 1 time.
    • Use the Ascent skill 3 times.
    • Use your 2 minute cycle skills 3 times (except utility skills).
  • You can view other players’ replays, and see their detailed information such as:
    • Character equipment.
    • Character settings and stats.
    • Skill usage details.
    • Battle Analysis.
  • When viewing other players’ replays, you can see:
    • Complete recording of their replay.
    • Skill input timing.
    • Key setting information.
  • To recommend a replay, you must have soloed at least Easy Kalos on the same job (to avoid noise and make sure players are knowledgeable about the job before they can recommend a damage rotation).
  • All results will be provided through the Open API as well.
  • If there’s ever a balance patch or new skill or something like that, the records will be reset and you’ll have to do another replay. When this happens, the players in first place in recommendations will be provided Maple Points.

• A new bag will be added that holds boss loot, Symbol Vouchers, and personality trait items.
• 60 slot Ore/Herb/Crafting Material Bags will be added.
• 2x Experience Coupons will be removed. All 2x Experience Coupon sources will be changed to provide 3x Experience Coupons.
• An option to prioritize displaying your character and monsters above skill effects will be added.
• The cooldown and buff duration display will be improved.
  • You can now choose to display the remaining cooldown/duration in seconds or minutes:seconds (e.g. 90 seconds or 1:30).
  • It will display the cooldown timers for 5 seconds and less. This won’t be 100% perfect but they’re still trying to fix it.
• The following buffs will be added to Practice Mode and Foggy Forest Training Centre buffs.
  • Weather effect
  • VIP Buff (Stats)
  • MVP Superpower
• Other various gameplay improvements:
  • Union Buff visibility improvements.
  • Daily quests and weekly content Symbol claiming convenience improvements.
  • Soul Enchanters will be sold in general shops.
  • The Pocket item slot unlock conditions will be removed.
  • You can now bulk use Monster Park Day boxes and Eternal equipment pieces.
  • The Maple Guide/Meisterville teleport cooldown will be decreased from 7 seconds to 3 seconds.
  • Custom illustrations will be introduced as permanent content.

Economy Reorganization

• The goal is to strike a good balance between the production and consumption of goods. This is to make sure that the production activities and the value of the goods created from them is maintained at a certain level for a certain period of time. It’s a key aspect of MMORPGs.
• This time, they will only be touching the consumption related aspects.
• When they provide growth related factors that can affect the market, they have to try to minimize the impact from ‘parked players’ (those who reach a certain power level then stop upgrading all gear and simply sell everything they collect for real life money). But it’s difficult to target and reduce rewards only for those kinds of players.
• In this process, they have collected and installed lots of logging and made significant changes to their operation policies to be able to catch and restrict these cases of multi-accounters/abnormal production and supply.
• They want to make consumption of goods to be more comfortable and meaningful. They will continue to touch both production and consumption going forward, but it won’t be as fast or intense as they did in the past.

• Cube and Flame Reorganization
  • All in-game cubes and flames will be changed to have the ‘Memorial’ feature (being able to choose between before and after). This will remove the risk of working on your own items with these cubes.
  • Craftsman’s Cubes will become the Silver Cubes, Meister Cubes will become the Gold Cubes, and Strange Additional Cubes will become Bronze Additional Cubes.
  • Powerful Rebirth Flames will become Blazing Rebirth Flames and Eternal Rebirth Flames will be removed/replaced with Black Rebirth Flames.
  • Boss rewards will also be reorganized (in terms of cubes). They will now drop the following cubes that can only be put into storage, can only be used on level 200 or lower equipment, and will restrict the equipment that they are used on from being traded for 30 days (‘Memento’ feature).
    • Memento Silver Cube
    • Memento Gold Cube
    • Memento Bronze Additional Cube
  • When they do things such as adjust boss crystal prices, there’s always a dilemma where players that are levelling up and trying to get stronger to face higher bosses end up lacking mesos to upgrade their gear. Now, they will be able to use these materials to gradually upgrade their own gear without risks. The 30 day trade restriction is to emphasize that they are meant to be used directly on your own gear, not to sell to other players.
  • These rewards will drop from bosses between Hard Damien to Easy Kaling.

• Star Force Enhancement Reorganization
  • When you destroy an item when Star Force enhancing it, you can now use additional spares and mesos to restore the trace to the star that it boomed at (up to 22 stars).
  • For example, for level 200 equipment:
    • 15 Stars: 1 equip, 433m
    • 16 Stars: 1 equip, 1.05b mesos
    • 17 Stars: 1 equip, 1.77b mesos
    • 18 Stars: 1 equip, 4.01b mesos
    • 19 Stars: 2 equips, 6.65b mesos
    • 20 Stars: 2 equips, 11.8b mesos
    • 21 Stars: 3 equips, 14.8b mesos
    • 22 Stars: 4 equips, 24.2b mesos
  • Star Catching will be removed and the increased success rate will be added to the base rates.

• Bonus Stats Enhancement Reorganization.
  • You can now reset an items’ bonus stats (flames) with mesos.

• Auto Enchant
  • You can now automatically enchant potential, bonus stats, and Star Force.
  • You can set a goal and it will keep going automatically until the goal is reached or you run out of mesos or materials.
    • Potential: You can set 4 different possibilities.
    • Bonus Stats: You can set the desired values for the different bonus stats.
    • Star Force: You can set the desired star you want to stop at, as well as if you want to protect it at 15/16/17 stars.

• Bonus Stats/Potential Transfer Scrolls
  • The Bonus Stats Transfer Scroll lets you transfer an equipment’s bonus stats to another of the same exact equipment (the original equipment will be destroyed). It costs 49k NX.
  • The Potential Transfer Scroll lets you transfer an equipment’s potential (not additional potential) to another of the same exact equipment (the original equipment will be destroyed). It costs 99k NX.
  • The goal of these two items is to make it easier to work on your own equipment directly and to be able to complete items while avoiding RNG elements.
  • Trading is a key part of MapleStory and even previously, many users could come together to work on a single item. These scrolls can help with that as even if one person rolls something really good but can’t upgrade the rest of the item to its full value, they can use these items to extract those stats and sell them.
  • When making your own items, at some point you’ll hit an RNG wall where you just have to brute force it to finish a part of it. These scrolls are another option to do that without having to resort to RNG.
  • This is a very big change so they will be examining them closely and make additional changes if necessary.
• Along the same lines as the above addition, Complete Under Control and Mitra’s Rage can now be traded using the Platinum Karma Scissors 5 times.
  • There’s definitely players that have had the experience of getting a 60% attack Mitra’s Rage which is very good, but then later on, to try and upgrade it to 63% attack, you would have to either cube it yourself or buy a completely new one. Now, you can resell without disappointment.

Newly Added Content

• World Archive: Arcane River will be added.

• Sol Janus & Erda Fountain
  • These skills’ damage will be adjusted to have different damage values for each job (just like Sol Hecate).
  • Previously, all jobs had the same damage % but there’s obviously differences in passives for each class which need to be accounted for so they can use the skills effectively with a similar efficiency.
• Sol Hecate
  • A feature to change Sol Hecate’s appearance will be added.
  • You can choose between the following:
    • Sol Hecate: Amicus
    • Sol Hecate: Zephyr
    • Sol Hecate: Nebula
    • Sol Hecate: Draco
    • Sol Hecate: Helia
  • Lots of players shared the opinion that Sol Hecate was ugly when it came out. Originally, they wanted to release this skill with these skin options at the same time but didn’t have time.
  • You can customize your Sol Hecate’s appearance and colour to whichever you want.
  • It costs 1b mesos to customize it.
  • They may sell more fancy designs later on but they haven’t confirmed that yet.
• 3rd Common Core
  • The 3rd Common Core will be a powerful transformation of the common job branch 5th job skills. (similar to Mastery Cores)
    • Blitz Shield
    • Arcana Overdrive
    • Evolve
    • Ultimate Dark Sight
    • Pirate Flag
    • Cygnus Phalanx
    • Freud’s Wisdom
    • Call Mastema
    • Resistance Infantry
    • Pantheon
    • Magic Circuit Full Drive
    • Transcendent
    • Another World’s Afterimage
    • Lotus Flower
  • Most of these skills are quite useful but they may be lacking in design or combat performance. This Common Core will enhance them and upgrade their visual aspects to match each separate job.
  • They will be revealed in the April update.

Roadmap

• March 19
  • Gameplay Reorganizations
    • Level 200~260 experience required halved.
    • Boss pattern reorganization
    • Special Skill Ring reorganization
    • Auto Enchant system
  • Economy Reorganization
    • Enhancement reorganization
    • Boss reward reorganization
  • Training Ground
  • World Archive – Arcane River
• April 16
  • 3rd Common Core Update
  • Sol Hecate Appearance Change
  • Sol Janus/Erda Fountain Reorganization
• May 14
  • Pre-Summer (coming soon)
• Events
  • 23rd Anniversary Maple Attack – Mascot Parade
  • Change Burning: Lucid
  • MapleStory & BTS Jin (Jin’s Mysterious Garden/Jin’s Hot Time Event/New Jin Event)
  • Hyper Burning Booster
• Offline Events
  • March 14: MapleStory in LotteWorld
  • April 3: Maple Island Opens
  • April 29: LotteWorld All-Day Rental
  • May 22: LotteWorld Tower/Mall/Seokchon Lake Special Displays