HP Washing

While I agree with the sentiment, this post falls within a category of hundreds of other complaints that propose no viable solution to the problem.

Also, I don't typically delve into other servers on the forum, but I felt like your statement concerning the comparison of growth rate between ML and Dr**m warranted some discussion. Of course they're currently growing faster, it's a newly launched server. I personally don't feel like they'll last anywhere near as long as ML has (and hopefully will). Their progression ingame went way too fast and is likely to become dull within months.

Fixing hp washing is something probably everyone here would like, but suggestions with any reasonable hope of succeeding are few and far between.

 

HP washing will never go away and the real reasons its here to stay are not at all about game enjoyment

The first and most obvious reason is sunk cost - this server has been out for a while, has a dedicated long term player base that comprises the majority of day to day players and all these players through survivorship bias, have put in colossal effort to HP wash. Removing it has two inevitable outcomes it splits into: it either a) devalues the work of these players or it b) depending on the implementation, permanently gimps newer players to have less health/tankiness than older players.

The second less obvious reason relates to the fact that MapleLegends prides itself on being a non 'Vote2Win' server - i.e. voting is not only permissible, but encouraged, on multiple accounts. This gives ML a very definitive advantage relative to its contemporaries where this is disallowed on the basis of vote abuse. And like it or not that exposure is tremendously responsible for a very large number of the inflow of new players into the server so that's not something that can just be done away because it's good for players too, not just a selfish server strategy. I mean it is selfish, but it's also kind of good for the community.

 

The last point, if I understood you correctly, about voting bringing in lots of new players as well, I highly doubt. I’ve seen the argument ‘we need GTOP voting to bring in players’ batted around many times but I have in my times on the forum or ingame never seen any evidence of GTOP or TOPG bringing in new players. The twitter campaign however, definitely did. I personally already met 5~10 players KPQing who said they found the server through the twitter campaign.
On top of this, Kimmy has recently been very clear and outspoken against relying on GTOP voting, even temporarily disabling it, which to me suggests it is not that important in bringing in new players. If it were a vital component in maintaining a playerbase, she probably wouldn’t do so.

 

Except Kimmy was also very clear and outspoken about the importance of GTOP to new players. Your point about her temporarily disabling it is literally the biggest pointer to this fact - there was an extremely strong and moral stance against the dependency on GTOP, leading to that change which was touted as final, but yet days later was reverted for rather obvious reasons.

As Kimmy said, google Maplestory private servers and see what comes up first. Unfortunately it's a certain G-something website we begrudgingly depend on for a large proportion of traffic. It sucks but it's how it is.

 

There's always going to be thousands of hours of difference between the elitists and the new players, it's simply the nature of an old server. There is no meaningful way to bridge that gap without throwing the entire server into turmoil, any efforts to do so will be conservative and seem like a pittance at most when dealing with the gap.

This isn't a fast server. While 1-200 has gotten much quicker over time and NX per day has gone up moderately, DPM gain has gotten much slower as the prices have risen, and that last metric is the only one worth looking into past the first year of playing. The only way to succeed nowadays is to either inherit or borrow gear from someone, which is probably worse overall for the health of the game as playing the game is meaningless while being friendly with people over discord leads to the most DPM. The game would benefit most from having ironman characters. At least then you can have a fresh starting line with everyone else, free of all of the nonsense that plagues old servers.

 

I see, well then that point does hold. I just wanted to question it as to me it did not seem obvious.

 

From what I gather the reversion had everything to do with the other option being just as awful for tracking votes, and leading to inconsistencies with people being rewarded for votes. It had nothing to do with traffic. They are still looking into an alternative system to replace votes entirely.

 

HP washing is here to stay that's why I made a second Buccaneer with 30K HB so I still die to zombify+reverse+I don't know where the hell I am in Pink Bean. So yeah is kinda annoying but how do you remove that without messing up the rest of the people that spent years voting for that or without messing up the balance of the game. So yeah is a necessary bad and the most we can do is perhaps to lower a bit the damage that bosses like PB or NT do. Or well we could give Paladin a skill like Combo Barrier (-20% dmg taken to al the party) making guardian an active skill that has the passive effect of if yo have the a shiel you can guard that already has.

 

As a new player to this server HP washing seems very daunting and really kills the overall fun of the game because of the insane importance on it to enjoy bossing at the later levels. Every other newer player in my class I meet comes to me and asks about it and I tell them if they want to have fun to not worry about it and just play the game. Nonetheless its still a worry because we all want to join our friends that can boss and experience more of the game.

I don't mind grinding too much but having to spend hundreds of millions of mesos on gear, working out calculations for washing, and spending even more millions on leeching or having to work at an even harder grind to level is really daunting for a casual player like me and a lot of the other newer players I've talked to.

I understand the concerns with keeping the system as it is but its really a lot of stress and I also think there can be a better way that may upset some older players but not by too much.

 

Most of the time you don't train up your character that fast, and you do collect NX as you play the game every (other) day.

A low amount of hp wash to like 12k after gears which is like around 100 int is really fine, and it adds more depth to the game without really killing your gaming experience totally.
It is those 300int and 30k ranged characters that takes 6m NX that should not be encourage, which makes the whole washing experience daunting as hell to new players.

 

As time passes, the bar to setting your hp washing goal increases. People initially started with merely 6k hp wash by 155 as a goal. As time goes on, people wash to 9k, 12k, 15k, 18k, and so on.

At some point it might end up just having the minimum bar to hp washing ranged character to be 30k because they want to be "the better".

 

are drks gonna be extinct?

 

In terms of end game bosses like pink bean and toad, and even nameless, yes they will disappear

Though they still are strong multi hit attackers even without hb compared to other warriors and shadowers against other bosses like ht, zak arms, and cwkpq .

 

Trying to homogenize all the servers for the sake of survivorship is a terrible idea. Legends has maintained much of its player base because it has certain qualities that other servers do not have. Dream has its upsides as a new server that caters to a specific crowd, but eventually there will be downsides that get discovered as the server ages.

There is always hype around a new server because a new server has unique ego-driven accomplishments that any long-standing servers burn through within the first year or two - to be the first rank/max level, the first expedition to defeat ___, etc. They also have the perks of an emerging economy where everything is determined organically. However, once that phase of being a new server passes, the magic tends to fade away. The only thing left is to dangle unreleased content or change up the meta to keep things fresh.

I don't think eliminating HP washing will really have the effect of drawing in new players without having an adverse effect on the current playerbase, but making the game more playable with HP washing might. Personally, I think changing the damage formula to include base INT as a secondary could alleviate some of the HP washing grievances, but it would have to go along with some changes to current established forms of 'optimized play' like leeching.