FM shop space...

Because the core gameplay of maplestory revolves around platforming, using your character's skills, killing monsters, picking up loots, not dying. People should be rewarded for diligence in THAT field.

Not so much in boring... scan scan scan... hovering mouse over items, reading numbers, browsing through thousands of items.

 

No, that makes no freaking sense at all.

And I'm not saying it's bad we have lots of people buying and selling stuff, but what I am saying is we need a way to search through everything faster and more economically than wasting all your daily nx on owls.

 

Just an update:

FM01: 100%
FM02: 100%
FM03: 100%
FM04: 100%
FM05: 100%
FM06: 100%
FM07: 100%
FM08: 100%
FM09: 92%
FM10: 100%
FM11: 100%
FM12: 100%
FM13: 100%
FM14: 88%
FM15: 100%
FM16: 100%
FM17: 100%
FM18: 100%
FM19: 100%
FM20: 95%
FM21: 100%
FM22: 90%

So I think it's a safe assumption that the entire free market in channel 1 is occupied, give or take a few blank spots that recently opened up and have yet to be filled.

Now, in channel 2:

FM1: 100%
FM2: 40%

Other misc rooms: 3 shops

 

I wouldn't say the economy is booming, it's just there's more players. About 1.5 years ago, the entirety of the FM was about half full. When legends was nearly dead hovering around only 50 online, we couldn't even fill up FM 1-6. And now with all these new players coming, everything is overflowing to other channels now.

So proportionally, I'd say with more players we have more for sale. And we have more buyers too. But the problem is to search through the FM it takes longer and longer. Imagine if it were a computer algorithm, where we have N players and each player has a shop, so as we get more players, N players looking through N shops, that is N^2, a very inefficient algorithm. As we get more and more players, it becomes a quadratically-increasing waste of time.

Well it's hard to judge the motives of people with money. It depends on a lot of things like what level they are, what gear they already have, the skills they have unlocked, whether they are a gambler... Of course, people with lots of money have it because they have saved it, but the point of saving is to spend it eventually anyway.

And obviously everyone will want to buy for the lowest price. But eventually, either you find the item for the price you will pay, someone else beats you to it, or it just sits there.. eventually to be undercut by someone else.

But you are right that money isn't flowing as fast. We have more players; more items, more demand, more mesos, but more to look through. So it takes longer for a sale to happen.

That may be true. If not 10%s and whites, they're still forced to either 30% a ton or just save and buy a godly item for ridiculous amounts. But some people do still scroll for fun.

What you seem to be forgetting is that new/low-level players are also the biggest consumers for 60% and 70% scrolls. They may be producing through gachapon, but they are also still consuming. It's just that it's becoming harder and harder to buy and sell things.

The owls cost too much precious NX, the price guide can't always be trusted and doesn't even cover everything, and the forum section is a jumbled mess.

Do I need to bring up again how you couldn't walk ten feet in maple without running into some kind of hacker, botter, or other foul-mouthed immature kid? Or how about the moneygrubbing pay2win model Neckson used with 2x cards?

This isn't a strawman. You want to say that's how maple WAS? Well, that's how it WAS. Maple was a lot of things back in the day, and it's up to us to choose what was good from that and what is bad.

And I'm telling you, trying to buy and sell stuff from the FM is only going to become more and more a pain in the ass.

Yeah, that seems about right.

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Consider how a certain group of players are overly protective of their FM1 spots. Those first few FM rooms are important because most people do tend to start from there if they are searching for a specific item or just browsing. This gives those players with shops there a huge advantage because many other players are impatient and don't want to waste time searching for the absolutely cheapest price. 1) because it's boring, 2) because time is money, 3) because if you do find a price to your liking and continue spending another hour looking through all the shops, someone else might just buy it by time you come back.

So there's actually several problems with how this economy is working:

Positioning of the shops is key, giving massive advantage to the guys who hog the first FM rooms and penalizing others out in the boonies.

Price fluctuation is more rampant and it's hard to pin a price on something, since in the first FM rooms an overpriced item might get sold, but an underpriced item might not.

It takes longer to buy something at a low price, longer to sell something at all. To quickly buy a scroll at the lowest price, you'd have to use an owl. To buy some scrolled gear... that makes even owls obnoxious to use in many cases.

Finally, I'll reiterate again that I just think all this FM shopping is a boring time waste. The core gameplay of maplestory is killing monsters, looting their items, and platforming. Searching through a monotonous mountain of stuff, the majority you probably aren't even interested in, isn't.