Big Bang Update

Maps became smaller, travelling was easier, everything slowly started to become solo, that's including bosses, and the dreaded potential system and miracle cubes. I do know that the potential system came before big bang, but it was what accelerated the descent into the game's demise

 

For me, the game became so streamlined that it lost it's original charm The focus became less on exploring and making friends and more of a solo race to level cap. I remember there were some bits of the past that remained, like old pqs and quests, but they were so outdated compared to everything else that they weren't worth doing anymore. The straw that broke it for me was they changed skills for (all?) the classes, I was a DK and they took away my Dragon Roar ;o; rip

As for the exp you mentioned, I very clearly remember seeing this graph in the update and just wanting to cry lol. It only shows through lvl 70 but you can get the picture of how drastically easier leveling became

 

Big bang also added potential systems, its compared to WoW Cataclysm where is just changed everything, mobs had new levels, damage cap was raised, areas were changed and the game just became much easier

 

To me, Big Bang happened when they decided all classes should have flash jump and full map attack skills. Happened around when dual blades were released iirc.

 

I believe dual blades came just before the actual big bang update, not too sure. Either way that's around the time they changed a lot of things, most notably exp needed to lvl, potential (and just damage in general), and map layouts. I actually think the changes were a lot more progressive than just the single update, but the end result was basically solo-grind all the way to lvl 200+ (since the lvl cap got raised a number of times) in maps that all have the same exact multi-platform layout that any of the 30+ classes can clear out with their movement skills and large AoEs. Only then would you start party play to kill late/end-game bosses with 50 trillion hp as you're hitting 5 million dmg lines and 10+ lines per skill. The Big Bang update just became the start of these more drastic changes. For me, it started getting weird around the time they introduced cygnus knights and every class after that. They added 5 brand new classes all at once that resembled the previous 5, but were stronger and could only reach lvl 120. It didn't matter too much at the time since I couldn't even get past lvl 70, but Cygnus was broken for early and mid-game as they had stronger skills and gained an extra AP every lvl up. Being lvl 120 was essentially equivalent to lvl 150 explorer and they had access to slightly weaker 4th jobs skills at lvl 70+.

 

For me dual blades were the last playable patch but even then the writing was on the wall for where necksons idea of balance was heading. As others have said drastic changes in exp curve and the addition of a plethora of full map attacks (not for me but to each their own) killed the game for me.
The charm of making buds and just goofing around while slowly progressing was now a thing of the past and even worse player attitudes shifted heavily away from casual conversations and way more towards solo grindstory. I can still remember in my last few weeks with the game being scoffed at for suboptimal training areas. Honestly I think this change in player attitude was a large part of my declining interest with maple.

 

For me miracles cubes and pvp arena were released theres were nebulites that gave a bonus line to potential and people would "sell" decent skills as a glitch to have people have a decent skill without having the item that had the potential line, this made the game unbalanced and wasn't fun anymore so i left.

 

Basically big bang patch changed the genre of the game. It went from a slow but social traditional MMO into more of a dungeon crawling boss-hunting ARPG like Diablo (but with side scrolling). You can see these days in GMS that the transformation is complete and the game is totally unrecognizable from the pre-bb version.

I personally stopped playing right after dual blades, because as FatSloth says it really showed what kind of """""balance"""""" Neckson had in mind for their game. Dual bladers could start at level 50, had their 4th job skillbooks locked behind NX (literal cold irrefutably p2w) and their 3rd job skills were like a fusion between flash jump, rush and dragon crusher, annihilating entire platforms of monsters. I looked at the Hero i spent 2 years grinding (grinding back then was just hell) and compared its performance to these new dbs who spent maybe a week. Then said fuck this game, and moved onto dota forever until I realized ML existed in 2017.

 

Just like Runescape 3.

 

I'm pretty sure ST and Boat still existed post-BB patch. IIRC it was much later when they revamped Explorer (think Chaos) that these skills were removed.

Granted, I think post-BB and post-chaos maple still had some party play element to it (i.e it was impossible to solo PB unless you dumped a few thousand dollars into the game, and empress was still a 24/30man expedition between the top players, LHC and Future Ereve). For me, things really took a deep turn to solo/muling content when Hyper Skills came out (and damage cap was raised to 50mil), making most things soloable even if you didn't spend a fortune in the game.

 

They condensed the maps, removed maps which I deem nostalgic, removed some stages in pq to make the pq shorter.
These are my last straw.

 

Big Bang bad reeee