The State of Maplelegends Economy 0

I remember past Maplestory private servers like LocalMS from back in 2008, years ago had an NPC that literally sold you every single item in the game via it's menu options.

As Kimmy says:

https://forum.maplelegends.com/index.php?threads/the-past-and-future-of-maplelegends.38287/



Having the game as hard as it used to be is the authentic experience, yes there is many QoL for the better but it is still the same v62 as many remember. So if it means you need to spend time to farm an item (IE: Piece of Time from Temple of Time) then you need to do it, if you don't then that is your choice. You will have to put time and effort in regardless of your decision to play this game and in life as a whole. Nothing is free.

Do I think having an NPC that sells everything at a fixed price fun or correct? No.

The market will decide itself on what the best thing to do, no one can control it, not even Staff (or RyanLights lol).

https://www.peterleeson.com/Does_the_Market_Self_Correct.pdf

 

Time to add expiry date to everything scrolls (actually this was suggested for ws/cs back then). no more hoarding. end of story.

 

I would like to rescue the entirety of what our dear BT xiaoyaoz said in the original thread which unfortunately was closed shortly after he tried to communicate with the playerbase. His enthusiasm for dialogue is an example and it's really what's needed and expected:

 

Personally I feel like the problem in hand is that Staff does not present balancing with a clear goal in mind. How can we deem if the economic situation is good if we dont have a reference we should strive for? It would be much easier to have some sort of KPI like target amount of hours per WS or similar, to be able to suggest different methods for proposing changes. I proposed this already back in the Shivering ULU1 days, see spoiler:

Spoiler

With the lack of communication from staff, does staff even consider the economic situation problematic? It seems like silencing the issue is preferred to trying to resolve it together (playerbase together with staff). At my post in 2021 I proposed a staff developed roadmap for the balancing of the game, however it was shutdown even before consideration. I don't consider the current economic situation as problematic as I see the lack of staff to userbase communication.

I am however really appreciative of xiaoyaoz trying to listen and engage in the conversation and I hope more BT and Moderators will follow suite. How would you consider an ideal economic situation for ML?

 

For those of you who say staff is silent on matters of the economy, in every recent patch update post, Nise posts a section specifically regarding the economy called "state of the economy". Seeing the amount of work BT puts into these threads, it takes them a while to write rough drafts, create graphs and crunch numbers.

I'll link them below if you'd like to read them:

Feb
https://forum.maplelegends.com/index.php?threads/february-2023-balance-changes-explained.48858/

Oct
https://forum.maplelegends.com/index.php?threads/october-2022-balance-changes-explained.47418/

Summer
https://forum.maplelegends.com/inde...r-event-2022-balance-changes-explained.46741/

 

the amount of information handed to the public has been decreasing over time from those posts

 

I just wanted to post it for those who may not know about it. Even if there isn't as much data as you'd like, staff IS monitoring the health of the economy actively, which is shown by the posts above. The economy not something we're ignoring, which is what I wanted to show.

I'm sorry that the amount of information isn't enough to make you happy. I'll bring that feedback back to the team.

 

I think Siganture raises some good points honestly. To be honest, I don't think there is necessarily a "correct" answer for what an ideal economic situation looks like, but I do think it would be a good exercise for staff to try to define it. Setting goalposts to use as standards is at least a starting point to determining the direction we should be moving in. Currently how "healthy" the economy is and how quickly someone progresses is entirely subjective. If I'm able to finish a perfect weapon on average in 10 months, is that considered fast? Slow? Depends who's asking.

At peak average efficiency, it currently takes around 5-6 hours to farm 1 White Scroll. Is that high or low, in staff's PoV? What would a good upper bound for that number to look like? How accessible should such strategies be? What is the average time/mesos commitment to gaining access to such methods? How many different ways of farming are competitive with this number? What about at the mid-range, what would average farming gains look like?

There's too much of a skewed perspective at the top and low end for these players to agree with each other, and it makes sense I think to start with setting some kind of "average" to compare to.

 

Thank you both for answering Just realized beegoratto wrote a v good response, but I'll try to answer the questions myself aswell.

At a first glance I think there should be KPI's regarding both server age aswell as the economy of the server.

KPI regarding server health could be for example: Farmed NX/apr per hour, Time to wash attacker (base time of voting together with farmed NX and APR), EXP per hour per level (what exp should peak leech speed yield at what level), Meso per level in leech (how much should it cost to level level X to X), etc. When HP challenges gets added, more needs to be added.

KPI:s regarding economy: Max amount earned as an "afk" ulting character (define how much a single char should be able to earn by standing still and using FMA). Amount of scrolls in circulation in FM (if too few add to bossing table?) , EV of bossing, Coin price, etc.

These are KPI:s I thought of just now, but I'll give it some more thought when I'm off my work week.

Wtf you can't just return the question?? (jk) I don't have an ideal economic situation in ML and I wouldn't want to enforce "my ideal economic situation", as seen by the previous thread there are lots of different opinions on this. However if you did a survey regarding quitting players, we should get a rough estimate on what is deemed most important to the quitting population. I'll try to think of a better answer here aswell

Yes I have read through every patch, however the numbers presented I believe contribute very little to the actual problem at hand. Lets take for example meso generated, a bigger player base will generate more meso, is this inherently bad? Does this factor in amount of hours played? What does banned meso have to do with anything? Does banned meso lead to lower coin prices? The problem with statistics is that its very easy to generate metrics, without efficient KPI:s and targets, metrics will only be numbers.

 

I agree wholeheartedly. The numbers presented with Balances Changes are just trivia facts, nothing more.

 

i thought some of those numbers would have been helpful explanations in a time series sort of way, but not much can be done when they decide against publishing

 

I think all of these complaints about the economy don't have anything to do with the economy at all. I think they have to do with the fact that the things that are generally economically profitable in terms of producing a large volume of goods also happens to be particularly unengaging and boring gameplay that when scaled up becomes exhausting as well. People want to be able to acquire items to sell at scale, but don't want multi-client AoE mob farming nonsense to be the way to do it (mage or otherwise).

So I guess the question is, is there a way for staff to make a means to acquire gach tickets at about as frequently a rate of a multimage farming setup that's actually fun? I think that's all that anyone wants, really.

 

that would crash prices, but what'll probably happen is deflation will act as a buff to multimage farming

 

Consistent event cycles could benefit the server economy. Events generate a lot of server activities (good and bad ones). Here are few examples I've noticed in the past that could be discussion points. Please share some of your perspectives.

• Most obvious one is increased player population which is definitely inflated by multi-clients. But there are noticeable returning and new players.

1. It is temporary and I'm not sure if these players are staying post event. Is there a way to fix new player retention?

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• Exchange of goods and services. I think it has been decreasing compared to the past events and should be reviewed again.

1. 65% scrolls. I think these were deemed too broken by the community back then. Overall INT 65% scrolls were plentiful I believe staff later included more 65% scrolls to decrease the chance of getting them. Regardless of your stance on these scrolls, it definitely generated meso circulation whether it was selling services, scrolling items, or buying/selling clean items.
   Are there situations to bring them back or something similar?
2. Event att/m.att potions. Easy way for low level players and bossers to buy and sell from each other. Recent example is 'MFF glow sticks' 100 w.att /200 m.att buffs. I remember a lot of smegas for them. However, most event pots are untradeable and/or relatively rare to acquire them. It could be beneficial for all event pots to be tradeable with expiration dates. Iirc when staff placed an expiration date on 'Witch's Special Stew' it forced the hoarders to sell. This could be another way for mesos to circulate and encourage bossing.
3. Event points. There was one event where killing mobs via party was the best to acquire points and it caused a lot of gacha tix to be generated. Back then, 'Brown Work Gloves' were down to ~27-35m. Player feedback was they were burnt out because they had to farm on mules too. Not sure where I'm going with this one, but it was an interesting observation.

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• Return of gamblers
  1. I always see gamblers during events. Whether they affect the economy significantly I am not sure. Generally, they roll their raffle winnings or leech money. Once in a while, a random whale starts rolling creates a big audience, inspires others to roll and vanishes after the event (probably banned).

Long event droughts discourage player activities. Consider separating balance patch and event patch dates. Probably more work for staff and less efficient coding wise? I do not know. Perhaps 2 big events and 2 small/medium ones is a nice balance. (4 per year consistently).

I think the best way to tackle the server economy is approaching it with several angles. ML events are one of the cornerstones of this server and it has always affected the server economy. Let's use it to our advantage.

tl;dr events boost the economy.

 

There’s something to be said about the advantages gained by being willing to do something others aren’t.

In general, if everyone is doing the same thing, you’re incentivized to do something else. Part of what makes multimaging and multi leech successful (among other things) is the fact that most people don’t want to do it. Unfun strategies will always have some level of intrinsic value because it’s a guarantee that few people will be competing with you. If bossing were to become as profitable as multimage, multiattacker solo bossing would likely become incredibly profitable and those who are willing to do it would have an enormous advantage over those who are unwilling to do so.

 

Agreed with what you said! It wasn't meant as "oh once x person recieves more than x million mesos an hour, we have to nerf asap", more of a guideline when new strategies are found out which are deemed healthy for the gamestate and which are not. I'm sure many are rushing to get some farming DK's as of fartsy s post but they will (hopefully) get nerfed soon, there should therefore be a KPI to why they are nerfed (lets say due to hyper scalability) so it's easier for the average joe to know where to spend their hard earner meso before the nerf hammer gets brought out. A similar example can be why Duku leech, SI with Mage ult, Sweeper etc. was nerfed. It must have clashed with an internal KPI, hence why it was nerfed, but it would be great to have some clarity before just announcing an abrupt nerf next patch. Communication is key!

We don't have to monitor everything all the time, there are plenty of veteran elite players that according to the reacts and the engagement here in these threads would love to help out with current strats and their yields (some even gift them for free in journals ). From those numbers together with the players knowledge behind the strats I think it could be easier to really understand the difference between a high and a low end player, and how to balance around that. Also as I suggested before, I would love a Staff ran thread in the middle of a patch where they gather the community thoughts on the current gamestate. By having them semi-recurring it would take off all this taboo-factor to minimize players venting posts disguised as discussion threads.

I realize that this might be an issue too, but as I said earlier communication is key, its much easier to understand different design and balancing implementations when discussing it with the player base before the launch. An excellent example of this is the HP-challenges which has engaged a large part of the community and I hope that you have recieved some valueable feedback from this aswell!

Yes, I'm def not hating on the fact that we are receiving data, I think that's great. However just putting out a number isn't the be all end all, since I would rather hear your reasoning behind the number rather than just the number. But as you explained I think we share our opinions here!

 

The primary flaw with your approach is in attempting to define what "fun" is for all players. This changes constantly.
What was once considered fun can quickly become a chore.