Update [Beta Test] Challenges System - HP Wash Alternative

I held off giving feedback until I completed the challenges first, which I did the day before maintenance.

I'm a semi-casual player who loved Maplelegends but quit after a few months due to being overwhelmed by the amount of time washing was going to take. I spent over 1m nx on APRs and added a lot of INT to my character, but the prospect of not being able to play it for another 6-12 months after having invested so much time into it already burnt me out from the game. The moment I saw the HP challenges were going to be added I rejoined and have been enjoying it ever since. Safe to say I'm VERY excited for these challenges and absolutely love them.

As for the challenges itself during this beta test, I have the following feedback:

- 10,000 monsters in Deep Ludibrium is slightly too much work for the starting challenge at level 100. While I'm not opposed to grinding and it helped me complete all the deep ludi monstercard sets, it also took me a very solid amount of hours and was just slightly too much in my opinion, especially given the challenge was the opening challenge at level 100. I'd want to cut the amount of monsters down. The challenge itself is great though as it helps diversify the training areas and helps progress you towards t10 ring.
- 100 teleports used was too quick and didn't give any benefits. I really like the idea of travelling related challenges, but the return scroll challenge took me about 5 minutes to do in Ludibrium by leaving the main map and returnscrolling.
- 1m damage with Lucky Seven was a great challenge and didn't take too much time. This was well-balanced imo.

In general, I really like that you went with the option of bossing vs mob grinding as not everyone is skilled enough to do certain bosses or has the time to dedicate to killing bosses in a party. I'd like to see more diverse grinding challenges to diversify the training areas and support progress towards monster book ring. I think quest related challenges could also be something to consider.

Overall very positive and hope this comes out soon so I can finally wash out my int and play the game how I like it.

 

How about landing 5 10% scrolls - that would make Defense scrolls worth a little more than they already are.

 

Can a GM or Admin who knows answer this? I'd like to do the challenge quests just for the sake of doing quests, but not if I then lose my hp obviously.

 

Yes and no.

With the final challenge system as proposed, you can MP wash beforehand but not after.

Current beta will be reset entirely and have zero affect on your character.

 

It's not very clearly worded but the alpha thread mentions that you will always be able to mp wash on mages.

 

oops ya forgot that part

 

Feedback: I don't like this prospective change because it's encouraging me to play more.

 

As a casual player I just want to toss in my two cents. I think this is a really good idea. Honestly the thought of having to grind up NX for months on end to wash is massively intimidating and puts a pretty heavy damper on the experience for me. While I think the challenges themselves could use some work (maybe try introducing some challenges that revitalize nearly-dead areas/content), I think overall it's an excellent addition. I assume that washing will still have you coming ahead in the long run with a higher HP pool, but that's honestly fine. I just want the chance to actually do some endgame stuff without being one-shot by every boss.

 

This one event already start ?

 

Actual suggestion in red. My reasoning outside of it.

I last played ML in 2015 but regularly looked at the emails I received for years after I stopped playing, waiting for something to draw me back. Earlier in the thread Kim mentioned that the priorities of current, active players are above those of those who are quitting (and by extension myself, who quit long ago) but I think I should put in my 2 cents anyway. I joined this server because it was well run and looked to promise that v42 experience I remember as close as any server was doing in 2015, and what pushed me away was also this. There has, for as long as I can remember, been a disconnect between two types of design for nostalgic games such as this.

1) Keep everything exactly as is, change no balance, accept that people will go into the game with 20 years of knowledge.
2) Change is required to keep the 'feel' of the period in time attempting to be replicated, fix bugs, exploits, unintended design features etc.

What kept me away was that the #1 design decision seemed to win out, it wasn't so much as about preserving the feeling of playing the old game as it was about creating a museum piece to display it as best we could. Arguments over balance would just default to "well this is the way it was, so we will keep it this way".
What I see with these changes and some of the class balance that has happened since I left is a shift towards the #2 design; that it is in fact impossible to have people play the game as if its 2008 on 2008 balance, with 2023 knowledge.

Back when I quit official ms in 2008, I knew that washing existed, but it was so outside the realm of possibility for me or anyone I played with that it was just some novelty that existed on some forums back then, being theory crafted by the best and brightest. Seven years later playing ML it had become well known, and no longer out of reach. We were no longer talking about thousands of dollars and months of our lives, it was just months of our lives and years of voting!

I can see the perspective that people will have, it was 7 years between me playing official MS>ML. and my perspective was that this whole washing thing was alien, clearly to me a design oversight that because of its extreme requirements affected only a tiny portion of players; but if you started playing ML in 2015, and we are now in 2023, 7 years later, I can understand why HP washing is as core to the game as it is alien to me.

If it was up to me HP washing should have been removed on ML's launch; it is a completely unintended exploit that was simply overlooked on official because of its obscurity; and I am glad something is being done to address it. I must admit though that I have always been of the opinion that the 'standard' way should simply be removed totally in favour of some other system. This system described here is a start for sure, but imo the games strongest factors are its approach-ability and its social aspects - and hp washing has absolutely no place in that.

With all this being said, I should do my duty and make a suggestion lol. After reading through the 5 pages so far the most compelling idea to me as a potential returning player was having the new 'washing' tied to quests - however I am not sure that these needs to be a separate system from existing quests, is it not possible to add item rewards for the current quests with a character-bound usable which gives permanent hp? I could see basically every quest line from 10-200 having a bit of HP given out as a reward, with the end result being whatever the desired 'bonus' is once all quests are complete. Questing in MS has always been totally pointless in terms of rewards, so I see little reason that these rewards couldn't be tied to this system, start at a lower level, and be a continuous process that a player goes through throughout their entire leveling. It would feel much more natural to older players than a totally new system, reward players for going through old or under seen content & could be made to scale much more naturally over time as the rewards could be tied to the level req's of the quest, meaning HP would be added piecemeal rather than in big batches.

However this whole thing makes me think of a question, adding hp to fix the issue of certain mobs one-shotting players is one side of the coin, the other is fixing the mobs which one shot. So my question to the devs would be why is adding hp for all players which makes the game easier in many aspects outside of the issue mobs, a better solution than simply nerfing / changing the issue mobs to deal damage in a range which makes HP washing no longer a requirement?

To me this makes the most sense, it does not punish players who have already washed, does not add anything additional players have to do, and seems to me the simplest fix for the issue.

I hope that I can keep reading about changes like these from time to time so that one day there will be a server that actually captures how the game was played back in the day rather than just recreating the environment. I have very fond memories of playing this server back in the day, and I hope other new players will have as much fun as I did. Breaking down barriers to entry like this is a great start.

Now I'm off to put in my application for the staff balance position lol, but actually, see everyone in another 7 years!

 

Cannot gain any hp ? Both challenge must complete ?

 

I can get onboard with this approach. I'm still wondering, however, why we don't have W. Def & M. Def have greater effectiveness. If these stats were more meaningful, players could choose to go toward a glass-cannon approach and need to HP wash, or players could sacrifice some DPS for the ability to survive with their Def stats increased through the natural progression of better armor. Yes, I know this could derail the current LUKless mage route as well as possibly make the Work Gloves less usable by all, but it would make more sense to find BIS equips for all players not end at Level 10 gear.

 

I need complete which one challenge can gain hp ?

 

So when I complete what reward I get it

 

Travis can't read

 

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I agree, and for reference,
If you were to perfectly scroll equips with HP/DEF:

HP 30% / 10%
Pet 7/7 = 350
Cape 5/5 = 250
Shield 7/7 = 210
Gloves 5/5 = 150
Bottom 7/7 = 210
Top 7/7 = 210
Earring 5/5 = 150
Helmet 7/7 = 210

Total Possible HP = 1740

DEF 30% / 10%
Cape wDEF 5/5 = wDef 25 mDef 15 HP 50
Cape mDEF 5/5 =wDef 15 mDef 25 HP 50
Shield 7/7 = wDef 35 mDef 15 HP 70
Bottom 7/7 = wDef 35 mDef 15 HP 70
Top 7/7 = wDef 35 mDef 15 HP 70
Overall 10/10 = wDef 50 mDef 50 HP 100
Earring 5/5 = wDef 15 mDef 15 Acc 5
Helmet 7/7 = wDef 35 mDef 21 Acc 7

Total Possible HP = 410
Total Possible Def = 185 [+10 depending on which cape]

HP 60% are about 1/3rd a 10%.
10x buff for these scrolls might not even be enough to make them

It is also worth mentioning that most / all classes have "required" passive skills to which HP bonuses could apply, and many classes have spells which are buffing things which the class already has little issue with. These spells are generally skipped over because of this, so they could be buffed / reworked to help with the HP/DEF issues, some early game examples:
Blessing of the Amazon: 1 ACC > 2% HP (32% HP)
Nimble Body: 1 ACC, 1 AVOID > 1% HP, 1 AVOID (20% HP, 20 AVOID)
Archer Focus & Bullet Time: 1 ACC, 1 AVOID> 10 wDef, 10 mDef (200 Def)
Disorder: -1 Enemy wATK, -1 Enemy wDEF > -2% Enemy wATK, 10 Personal DEF (-40% Enemy wATK, +200 Personal Def)
Magic Armor: +2 wDEF > +5 wDef, +1% HP (100wDef, +20% HP)


Tbh though, as I have been thinking about all this I've realized none of it actually matters unless washing is disabled and the server wipes / starts a new world. If players were willing to sacrifice some damage for survivability they could already do so through stats (though clearly not through gear / scrolling / skills); but players know that its possible to min/max this and so it has become expected. If its possible right now to attain the needed stats without washing, and people don't do it, why would we expect it to become standard just by giving a new method? The reality is, none of these changes change the fact that a washed character will still perform better.
No matter what changes are made, washing will always be an expectation, and while the culture could shift so that non-washing is acceptable, it will never remove the requirement for it to 'perfect' a character, which I think is quite sad.

 

This only addresses HP changes, what about mages that need more MP?

If we disallow mages to add AP to MP, they can get locked with low MP thanks to this.
Additionally, what prevents me from MP washing out all my HP before completing the challenge? This would cause my HP to rise back to the threshold, giving me a lot of "free" MP?

I'm not saying this is bad, I think it's fantastic, but those are questions that I think need addressing.