Making HP Washing Truly Optional - a Solution

Making HP Washing Truly Optional - a Solution
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: The Fatal Flaws of MapleLegends
2. WWWW? (What's Wrong With Washing?)
3. Timmy's Dilemma
4. What Should a Solution Look Like?
5. My Proposed Solution
6. Potential Benefits
7. Daily Questing vs Traditional Washing
8. Potential Problems

1. Introduction: The Fatal Flaws of MapleLegends
Everyone who's played on MapleLegends for more than a few months knows that the server, being pre-BB MapleStory, has a few serious gameplay flaws that have been around since the very beginning. These flaws are:

• HP Washing
• Leeching
• Mage Ultimate Balance

With this topic I'd like to focus on the first in that list: the infamous HP Washing. If you don't know what HP washing is, go read some guides because I'm not going to bother explaining it for the 1,000th time. I'm here to propose a potential solution to finally make HP washing OPTIONAL on MapleLegends.



2. WWWW? (What's Wrong With Washing?)

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Meet Little Timmy. He's a new player here on MapleLegends!

After about a week of playing, Timmy hits Lv35 on his Bowman and joins up with an LPQ party. While PQing, he converses with his party, and eventually they bring up the topic of HP washing.

"What's HP washing?" asks Timmy. In response to his question, he hears this narrative:

>You can't/shouldn't play the character you want, because they won't have enough HP to participate in all endgame content.

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>If your Hunter/Crossbowman/Assassin/Gunslinger doesn't look like THIS, then you're doing something wrong.



3. Timmy's Dilemma
Timmy looks up some guides and finds out his party-mates weren't just bullshitting him -- this HP washing thing is for real. He considers his options as this point, which are basically these three:

1. Give up and quit because the game feels inaccessible to the point where the effort involved doesn't justify the enjoyment obtained.
   
2. Try to correct his already-crippled character by adding a painful amount of INT to his base stats -- OR -- remake his character and start off pathetically weak, having to be carried in every PQ and grinding party.
3. Create another character or multiple characters to help boost up his weakling INTbaby so that he can have the chance of enjoying all the content the game has to offer. This new character will inevitably be a Mage, most likely a Bishop. They have no need to HP wash, are strong without gear, and are pathetically easy to level up in the early and mid-game, compared to the alternatives.

But Timmy should be more realistic about his goals, shouldn't he?
Whether or not Timmy will ever reach the endgame content that would require him to HP wash is not important, because simply knowing that his character, who he was having fun playing on, will not be able to engage in late-game content is enough to sully his enjoyment from now onward. If he continues in willful ignorance, he'll know every second that the clock is ticking on his character's impending obsoletion.

It's often the case that, from the perspective of a new player who just wants to have fun on his Hunter, HP washing is an insurmountable barrier to the prospect of having fun playing the game.



4. What Should a Solution Look Like?
HP washing on MapleLegends is a big problem, but you can't just throw around ideas willy-nilly. You have to be realistic about what is and isn't possible. Ideally, a solution should achieve these goals:

1. Make HP washing truly optional. Allow any player to play whatever class they want, without having to invest in a crippling amount of INT. A new player should be able to play their character from Lv1 to Lv200 with the guarantee that they'll never be locked out of any content, no matter what.
2. Leave HP washing in the game as-is. It's not going anywhere. "Removing washing" or nerfing it would be unfair to new and old players alike.
3. 100% prevent any character from being permanently screwed. This is one of the worst aspects of old school Maple: there are an obscene amount of ways in which you can ruin the potential of your character. A bad skill build, incorrect AP distribution, not getting the right skills early enough -- and HP washing (or lack thereof) is the biggest and most insidious there is.
4. Maintain the GTOP voting incentive for MapleLegends. For any player who gets far in the game, over 80% of their Vote Cash probably goes to AP resets. Many of these players even vote on multiple accounts daily. We want a solution that will preserve current vote counts to ensure maximum publicity for MapleLegends.

5. My Proposed Solution
ALL NUMERIC VALUES ARE SUBJECT TO BALANCE

A shitty concept edit I made for the consumable - imagine a Mana Elixir, but the carbonated version.

A daily quest available Level 130+ 70+ that involves hunting random monsters and/or collecting random ETC items from all over the Maple world. The quest may also have a small meso fee attached per completion (1-2m?).

• The quest rewards an Untradeable, One-of-a-Kind Use item that increases your maximum MP (yes, MP) by a set amount depending on your character class.
  • Example: a Night Lord would consume the item and receive an additional 18 Maximum MP - an effective gain of 24 HP via stale washing (with AP resets).
• You can only receive this quest if your Maximum Potential HP falls below a certain threshold.
  • This threshold represents one of two things:
    • EITHER: The amount of base HP required to effectively engage in all endgame content on MapleLegends, EX: ~9.5k for Thieves
    • OR: An appropriate amount of excess HP based on class, EX: ~25k for Warriors, ~15k for Brawlers. This is to ensure that ranged classes aren't the only ones who benefit from such a system.
  • The point of all this is to guarantee that any player can get as much HP as they will ever need, but that the system will not be abused to gain excessive amounts of HP easily compared to vanilla washing.

Maximum Potential HP Explained
Imagine you have a Level 140 Night Lord with 3,523 base HP and 4,000 base MP. You could wash all your excess MP to gain ~2844 HP, for a total of 6,367 Max HP. This value - 6,367 - represents your Maximum Potential HP - the amount of HP that you could have if you washed all your MP into HP.

TLDR
The daily quest rewards additional Max MP, which can easily be converted into Max HP with AP resets. You can't wash to 30k through this method, however you can gain as much HP as you will ever need to be effectual in ALL MapleLegends content. Washing becomes optional.



6. Potential Benefits

• Little Timmy gets to play on his Hunter and rest assured knowing that, if he so wishes, he will be able to participate in all MapleLegends content. He may not ever reach that content, but he has the peace of mind of knowing that he could do it if he ever wanted to.
• You will need NX, but you won't need to wait for months or years to "finish" your character in order to play them. They won't need to have any INT, so they'll be perfectly effective in any content that they've got enough HP for.
• The relevance of the current HP washing system is maintained for those who want a little more, or for perfectionists who wish to achieve high goals like 20k+ NL, or 30k/3k warriors. Believe me, even if a system like this gets added to the game, we'll still see loads of INTlords and INTmasters. Sweaties gonna sweat no matter what.
• Get more players to start playing the classes they really enjoy! Far less reliance on leech for leveling up Assassins, Hunters, Crossbowmen, Gunslingers, and Brawlers.
• Give lots of players a reason to log in and play daily instead of AFK vote farming!
• Not as many INTlords in LPQ.

7. Daily Questing vs Traditional Washing



Note that, of course, there's nothing stopping any player from mixing and matching these methods as they see fit.



8. Potential Problems

• There may be ways to cheese the daily quest system that would result in much cheaper HP washing than usual. I'm not huge on washing math, so I'm counting on you guys to point some of these out for me.
  • One of these I can immediately foresee is that a player, ex: a Night Lord, would get to 130 and halt all leveling progress on that character while they completed the quest daily for several hundred days to hit the quest's potential HP cap. After that, they'd have a relatively easy time washing up to ~15k or beyond using traditional methods. Whether or not this is more cost effective than traditional washing the whole way, I'm not sure. An easy way to prevent this would be to separate the single daily quest into several identical quests for different level ranges, ex: one for 130-139, one for 140-149, etc. These higher level versions could have progressively higher caps for potential HP, which would make cheesing the system for free gains almost impossible.
• A lingering mentality of "If I had to suffer so much to wash, so should everyone else!" This is pretty toxic and non-helpful to the server long-term, but I can imagine a lot of experienced players disliking the concept on these very grounds.
• Balance of time/effort vs reward, especially when compared to traditional washing. The new system needs to be good enough to consider utilizing, but not too effective to the point where it totally usurps traditional methods.
• Less INTlords to make fun of.

Spoiler: Q&A #1

Hey guys! Thanks for the feedback so far. I'd like to address some of the points I've heard. First, though, I want to re-stress the main point of this suggestion:

• The primary intent of this quest is to make HP washing effectively 100% optional on MapleLegends.
  • No existing character, old or new, will ever be permanently ruined.
  • We'll finally be able to rock the "HP Washing Optional" tag without it being a blatant untruth.
  • You'll be able to honestly tell new players in KPQ & LPQ that they'll be fine and can just enjoy the game and have fun.

Also, please recall that ALL NUMERIC VALUES ARE SUBJECT TO BALANCE.

Points of Contention
1. This quest will discourage continued voting because players' goals will be easier to achieve.

I truly don't see this being the case. For one, the quest rewards a Max MP boost which will still require NX to be converted into HP. For another, simply voting and accruing NX will still be far more time efficient than spamming the daily on every single character. Voting is free and you can do it on as many accounts as you have the patience for. Personally, I vote on over 20 accounts daily.

Plus, how many times have you been playing ML and thought to yourself, "Damn, [Insert Class] is really sick. I gotta get me one of those." I think voting will be fine.
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2. Speeding up the washing process is bad for the server because long-term players won't be retained.

If MapleLegends is lacking anything, it's certainly NOT goals. Having a fair amount of HP on a character is one thing, but what about their gear? And their level? And their card sets! And heck, what about that other new character you just made on an impulse?!

Upcoming players won't suddenly become apathetic once they complete their sixth month of dailies and find out they hit the HP cap. If anything, they'll be more motivated to actively play the game since they can enjoy their character without long AFK voting breaks.
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3. There's nothing stopping players from washing AND enjoying the game.

This is absolutely true. I've often recommended this very course of action to many new players who come asking on Discord:

>"Don't worry too much about washing at first. Pick whatever job you like and play it. Make an extra account and start voting on it. You'll thank yourself later."
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In a perfect MapleLegends, every player would be this cool-headed and realistic, and we'd never have anybody complain about HP washing. HOWEVER... this is not a perfect MapleLegends.


Hear me out, because it may be hard to see from this perspective if you've been around for months or years on the server:

You're a newb on MapleLegends. You're bored/sick/on vacation, so you google "maplestory private server" and choose ML because it looks to be the highest quality. You join up and start leveling your Slinger. You're having a good time with some dudes you met in KPQ, until one of them mentions something called "HP washing." You're curious, so here's what you find out via your party/forums/Discord:

>There's this weird ass mechanic in the game called HP washing. It's a way to get more HP. You can convert any extra MP you've got into HP, and you get that extra MP by leveling up with INT.
>The reason you need more HP is because if you don't have enough, late-game bosses are gonna one shot you.
>The guides recommend leveling up with INT gear/base INT as a way to get extra MP.
>They also mention some crazy shit called "MP washing" that you don't really understand yet.
>Some of the forum threads say you should remake your character. But you were having fun on the current one and just got a really sweet haircut from the Amoria quest.
>The gist seems to be that you're gonna need to add a bunch of points into INT, otherwise you won't get to fight bosses when you're high leveled.
>All this while you're still trying to decide what skills to add, how much STR you need, and whether you're gonna want a green or blue Bamboo Hat.
>This is all too much of a headache, it's not fun anymore. You uninstall the game and go play League instead.
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With regard to your point about buying leech, leeching from 1-120 is rather prohibitively expensive for a player starting with a single unfunded character. Even if you grind your unwashed char to 140+, there's a good chance it would still break the bank. This is why so many players just make a Bishop and plan to self-leech/sell leech instead. From their point of view, it's the easier and more efficient path to "having fun," since they can't main their first character.​

4. New players think they're entitled to immediate returns/New players are too lazy to figure out washing.

New players usually just want to have fun. The way the game is set up, it places the huge and unfair burden of a steep knowledge curve at the very beginning of the game, when many players are just learning/remembering how to play in the first place. You're putting this huge responsibility of "following the most optimized route" on a player who probably just got his head around what HP washing even is. This is often way too confusing for a lot of newbies to even bother with. Why continue when, after you've just gotten on your feet and feel like you're doing pretty good, you're presented with Do Your Taxes: The Game? In this way, the current MapleLegends is unnecessarily player-hostile.

Plus, we play games to have fun. We should set up the game in such a way that it encourages having fun. It's not a good thing if the game starts to feel like a chore within the first few hours.

New players are the acorns that grow into mighty trees. Without them, our forest will eventually dwindle. We want to encourage them to stick around for as long as possible.
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5. Only very high level players/Level 200s should be able to complete a quest like this.

Imagine grinding all the way to Level 180 on an unwashed character, and then, and ONLY THEN being able to begin doing a quest that will take several hundred completions over months to achieve what it's intended to. Total nonsense, nobody would bother -- they'd just wash the normal way from the start.

This would really only be good for Lv200s that didn't wash enough because they literally had no way of knowing they'd need more HP.
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6. No one would actually take advantage of the daily quest/Players will get lazier and complain about the MP quest being too grindy.

This is part of the balancing process. The goal is to make the quest a viable method for boosting a character's HP, with its own upsides and downsides compared to traditional washing.
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7. A reasonable amount of washing is already easily achievable, even for a new player.

This is a very legitimate point, but again the burden is being placed on new players who are just taking their first steps in the game.

Leveling with 60-100 base INT is certainly doable. Out of anyone on MapleLegends, I probably have the most experience in leveling unfunded characters with high amounts of base INT (150+). That said, it's certainly not a pleasurable way to play (in any non-masochistic sense). You're giving up 10-20 levels worth of AP. You'll need to be carried in your PQ parties. You'll be a weak grinding partner. You won't be able to play your Bowman/Sin/Slinger at full power for over a hundred levels, whereas the INT-based Mages gets a free pass for maximum power 1-120 (sans MP washing).

Also, you can still ruin your character. We don't get to say that HP washing is effectively 100% optional to experience all content on ML, because it just isn't true.
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Point(s) of Agreement
OK, there's actually only one worth noting right now.

Some of you suggested that the quest should be available from Level 70, and I wholeheartedly agree, as long as the proper checks and balances are set in place to prevent overgain/cheese.

Let me know what you think, maplers! Agree, disagree, love it, hate it, don't care? Let's get some discussion going!

 

The ones who all quit when they learned about washing.