State of the community, whats your opinion?

The hosts put more work into the community than anyone else. They are the ones sacrificing their time, mesos, and staking their reputation on these runs.

They are the ones growing the community. They are the ones giving you a space to play. They are the ones putting on these amazing events that you get to go to and play with your friends. The events that you can't attend, but you curl up at home with a stream and share the hype.

Hosts have so much riding on this game being a success, they sincerely want this game to be the biggest success it can be. But as a Host, we are under a completely different set of pressures and it influences how we approach rules discussions.

If hosts try something new, players revolt because it's not what they are used to. If Hosts stick to what works, the community calls them lazy and tells them they are killing the game.

Hosts have to balance player relations, market relations, staff relations, and new player relations. Hosts are the first ones to show up and the last time to leave. And if a run goes poorly, it's the Hosts name on the line. Hosts are the ones that have to deal with the pissed off players and staff.

Hosts have so much on their plates. Stop the hate. Go out and hug your local organizer and tell them you appreciate their hard work. And stop the lazy Host narrative -- it could not be farther from the truth.

Furthermore, Staff are people too. They put on events for the community because they love the community. All this hate puts a lot of pressure on them, and last thing we need are these brilliant, hardworking people being pushed out of the community because of the online toxicity towards them.

 

Goes to show how the title of this thread is working correctly.
This is basically the state of the community, I've see a shift from the pre-2020 and post-2020 era.

Its as if, post-2020 the community became a toxic wasteland trying to just make everything as efficient and as solitaire as possible.

 

Tbh I haven’t received quite the level of hate Ryan has as a host, albeit I don’t host as publicly as he does and rarely find myself in the spotlight of community attention like Ryan often is. The only “hate” I receive are complaints from players that I didn’t invite them, often times facetiously as I absolutely did fucking invite you Cornwall .

Even when things go wrong on my runs, I’ll take responsibility and people are very understanding. I haven’t experienced any if at all toxicity from the runs I’ve hosted, although perhaps this is because they’re alliance-only runs and not public.

That being said, I have experienced similar phenomena as Vystical in that I have been pushed to host things I do not want to host in the past. I already go out of my way to regularly try to host 12 man HT to teach new HT players, especially bishops, which is already usually a 2.5-3 hour affair. I’m happy to do this, but it’s more or less the limit of what I’m comfortable doing and being pushed to do even more is tiring.

It’s understandable to want to have more content, but I wish people would just host it themselves instead of constantly asking nearly over-extended existing hosts to do more.

 

After seeing the struggle hosts gets put through daily you all have my full sympathy and respect!

I think it's just rose tinted glasses, this has always been prevalent on the server. The strategies are just more well known/flaunted for the common mapler nowadays.

 

I disagree.

 

I dont quite understand what is all the trouble. What exactly is meant by community anyways. Maple is probably enjoyed more with a group of friends. If you surround yourself with sweaty friends, youll probably get in sweaty runs. If you enjoy hanging out with more chill friendly people then im guessing youll have friendlier runs.

Why is it a critique that certain people want to do things their own way? If you dont like these conditions then just join another group of friends.

Im trying to translate this to a real life scenario and I simply cannot. How is it valid for me to question why rich kids wanna go to expensive restaurant if they could be more inclusive hanging out with everyone else at the local pub or mcdonalds?

I don't think these are the correct measurements for a good or bad community. I'm sure at every stage of the game youll find a group of like minded people for your own needs. If it seems like there are more and more sweaty people, then thats probably caused by something else (balance changes, economy, stage of the game people are in) than by any lack of community values itself.

Even in the guild im in, we continue to grow simply because some people enjoy progressing in the game, farming extremely unhealthy amount of hours and clearing PB. If someone joined the guild and asked us whether someone would like to do some Pirate PQ surely theyll be found with the loudest silence ever heard, since it is clearly not the interest of the crowd. Likewise, if you find yourself hanging out with sweaty people, dont expect them to want to carry you in runs because that is simply not in their interest to do so.

Tbh im probably not understanding the whole thing being discussed anyways so keep going.

 

I think everyone pinning this on the playstyles or socialness of players themselves is masking one of the actual issues driving disparity in the community:

There's a serious lack of formal organization and communication for most content in game.

1. Horntail, NT, and Pink Bean require formal organization and planning and as a result the content populates.
2. Z-Runs, CWKPQ, and area boss content aren't being planned for and as a result it's hit or miss whether the run populates at all.

Often mid-game content runs are very spur of the moment recruiting through guild word of mouth, run history, smega, and discord leading to a lack of coordination amongst the available or interested population. This ends up diminishing the population that could participate in this content and often leads to a sampling discrepancy between the playstyle of runs. Yes, there are a lot of people running slimmed down content. They're also the people who are not only consistently advertising but have advertised correctly long enough to find their niche and as a result the content fills. There are probably dozens of failed-to-launch Z-Runs and CWK's run by mid-game characters that never populated because the available mid-game playerbase just wasn't aware that the particular run was organizing. People get frustrated when runs don't fill and stop organizing all together. (Hi, I'm in this picture and I don't like it.)

As I see it there are two issues at play here and I will outline them down below.

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The first is if we as a community were to more formally actually commit to...

1. Consistently advertising runs in a single open and accessible format/platform that early and mid-game players know to look for and find
2. Organize content more than a day in advance of running while attempting to keep some semblance of a schedule intact
3. Openly communicate the expectations and goals of the content they're running

... the general health of the game would be better.

Yes, what I am saying is that we as a player base ought to migrate towards posting Z-Runs multiple days in advance with clear expectations just like raid-statics do in other MMOs. Is it silly to want that level of organization for something as small as Zak? Yep. But it's necessary for the long term health of the game. We've become too complacent in communication with running and organizing mid-game content because it's gotten too easy for some of us.
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The second is that the actual media in which we are communicating is often inaccessible or frustrating for many players.

1. Forums are too rigid and lack the ease of use for organizing such runs.
2. Discord is too fleeting and often runs get buried.
3. Word of Mouth and smega are too fleeting and do not give us a proper chronology of an organizer, runners, and their respective history.
4. Guilds are a decent solution but they lack broad accessibility and still fall back to the same issues in points 1,2,3.

As much as I hate to say this MapleLegends is ill-equipped for this right now. I don't think we currently have a way out of this by communication and setting standards alone because the media we communicate in are insufficient from the start.

I'm actually very confident in saying that this is a driving factor in the communication issue and why we're sitting here talking today.

Why are we putting the onus on who is or is not organizing runs when the methods and mediums we're organizing with are simply broken to begin with?

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Our priority ought to be this:

1. Foster or Develop any or multiple platforms/systems that enables easy and accessible information for content.
2. Foster an expectation that content should be scheduled and managed at all levels. We promote everything from struggle HT to 5 Man efficiency. We encourage repeat promotions and scheduling.

If we fail to address the medium in which we are composing these runs: we're doomed. It doesn't matter how well people are communicating if they're getting burnt out or frustrated with the medium in which they're communicating.

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Our best chance of beating this is either to get the community onto the forums (good luck!) or find a new way out of this all together. My bet is the latter. The forums are simply not agile or used enough to remedy this. Sorry.

This new platform (whatever it is) needs to be flexible in adding and removing players from scheduled content, needs to have some level of permanence, needs to be accessible, and needs to be known and used by the community.

I'm not saying we have to find a new communication solution to this but if we are just gonna roll the dice on what we have we're not going to succeed unless the expectation is set and executed at an astonishingly high level amongst the playerbase.

TL;DR

I don't think we have a playstyle problem. I think we have a communication problem. It's not the way people are communicating it's

• how frequently and early they're communicating it
  
• the medium in which they're communicating
• the accessibility of that medium.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

 

I actually agree with this take. Even back when I used to host more "large" content like 6-20 man CWK and even sometimes nowadays with 12 man HT, it can be a struggle to fill the roster, whereas condensing the roster to smaller runs makes it significantly easier to host. On top of monetary/EXP incentives, it's actually just straight up easier to run things like duo/trio Zak once you're at that level, and forcing yourself to try to host larger runs can be a frustrating experience.

 

The barrier of entry for actually hosting content is way too high and needs to be discussed. More to come.

 

Just a random thought about this, when a shad smoke, should the dpm be attributed to the shad for the difference for the team without smoke vs team with smoke. Example: An archer deals on average 5m dpm, but with smoke it increases to 6m dpm. People attribute the dpm to the archer but not to the shad for giving 1m more dpm by smoking. Should the shad dpm be counted as "dpm increase by smoke for whole party" + "own dpm"? If so, would this be the same for nls with SE. Future contents that can make use of all/most class unique skills/capabilities will help to elevate the problem of "inefficient" classes. The stale of the community is shaped not just by time and profit, but also the content. Content has not "change" while player strength has shifted.

I would actually be even more scared if the average party run sizes is not smaller overtime for content that didn't change; if average party size didn't change would mean that players have 0 progression. Ultimately, maple core game is progression, be it the social or bossing aspect.

Personally I have only played this game for estimate 1 year, so I have only participated a few (a few is an understatement), huge community runs by alliance, and personally I liked them. I enter with the intent to have a good time and I believe most people enter those run with that intent too (if not why are you here right?). Personally hosted a few runs and host do indeed gets the pressure when trying to fill big groups. People might even "unsign" from runs when a more efficient group is up. Personally, I will try to just stick to runs I sign up first or not sign and let those that can confirm to sign first if I am not sure whether I can join or not. That makes the host is not have a difficult time finding people last minute. To me, courtesy and kindness still exist greatly in this server (or maybe I am well protected in my own bubble) as I have met countless of them. Do not let the bad experience pull you down (for those that are reading this), hate only breed hate. If you let those people that gave you a bad experience bring you down, you have let those people win.

 

I don't think clever hosts just see numbers only. As I joke sometimes like 'NL = TT mules and dpm rises by SE is actually archers DPM' (Yes I love to bully most pity class in this game, because I love them) and that's why I'm so against for meta-fixed composition. Almost every classes has their own synergy and this can be gamechanger when it's used correctly. I think I gave an example which I really love - Drk + Shad combi cleave in cwkpq.

Issue is this - to maximize such features which isn't easy to see simply with @dpm 45, host player needs deep understanding about this game, and there's alternative way easier (well, maybe hard sometimes if you stick on it) - just bring poggers only, and there's no reason to hesitate to choice easier way. Hosting 'clever' requires such brainpower and runners aren't dumbs who don't know who is good host and who isn't. I also love to quote like, hosts score report comes from 'successful run rate' and 'how frequently it goes on'. Good runners will love to attend good hosts runs, it makes a virtuous cycle, and vice versa. Who would love host blocking most not-meta classes just sticking on R>meta classes with pog gears only when you aren't one of them.

I do LOVE to optimize stuffs in my run (I even mention it like 'squeezing runners out till the limit'), but my principle is, such optimization should be done in 'given situation', shouldn't affect on recruitment. So, my recruiting for my 6man HT (I'll mention only this, because this is what I do in ML almost 80%ish) is just like 1 bsp, 5 dpm, faster grabs slots, regardless of classes. that's all. only 1 guaranteed slots for SE classes only when there's NL signup because of very obvious reason. Did few runs w/o SE when there was no NL, and I see nothing wrong for it, run went well anyway, because 6HT is simple game - 'at least 1 bsp and 5 dpm', that's all. even did many meme run like '2bsp 4dpm' or one of the peaks, '6 heroes 0 bsp run'. Everydays run was my daily homework for 'with given members, how you'll make the goal' because even I didn't know how tomorrows composition will be. I really enjoyed that game. Can you imagine going 6HT as 4 warriors and 1 MM 1 bsp, no SI at all? that wasn't meme at all in my squad because it was 'very commonly happening situation' thanks for 'be fast to grab slots, that's all'.

This was also issue for myself when I was on start-stage of my own hosting. Everything wasn't stable, so I had to prove myself that I'm worthy host for runners to attend my run. As Ryanlights mentioned, hosts bet their reputation on their hosting. Continual successful runs will make them have impression of 'good hosts', and vice versa aswell. Being flexible for unexpected situation aswell. Likewise, dropping out and getting replacement quickly (or replacing with resources host/runners have - yes, muling). It took time and effort to make team solid and I'm so appreciated everydays, for runners attending my run trusting my lead. It's same thing with RL - Leaders, should prove himself/herself he/she's worth to lead others. that's my viewpoint on hosting in this childhood mushroom game. Because we aren't children anymore.

 

Shads are at good place and strong in most bosses I don't understand why players even think that shads are weak in some content.
I run a lot of CWK with shad friend and he does very good job and I never though of not inviting a shad to a party in any content.
Just ask caution how he white many perfect gear NLs on regular basis.

Its okay not to invite certain class/players to content but to say such comments are just disrespectful. better to avoid this type of toxic players

 

You shouldn't feel any guilty for that, if so, it'll be so sad for myself. As you mentioned, all playstyles should be respected and your preference for 'risk and adventure' is also I do agree matters. If I'm nothing but safetyhoe, would I challenged such meme runs for fun? not at all. Please, be free for seeking your tasty fun. That's how we should enjoy this game I think.

 

Ok look, this is not the main topic but if i want to keep my title of being an S tier shad doomer i need to say something. Your statements here are simply NOT true. There's already good enough data when it comes to shad performances be it on actual bosses (DPM compilation) or the akash DPM guide (Which is theoretical data). We can't single out a given case and say shads are "good" because X or Y shadower has whited X or Y NL. There's simply very limited importance that could be given to empirical data when there's a decent amount of data that can be reproduced given fair circumstances. Given the exact same player skill amongst every class, shad by far does the least damage in MOST scenarios.

If anything else wants to be argued then by all means but i think it is wrong to spread misinformation. At the end of the day, the forums is a place where some players take inspiration to pick their classes and it's not uncommon for people to jump into the jack of all trades shad and then see reality down the line and quit.

 

I think alot of these problems can be summed up under the umbrella of the "struggles of playing in a private server" in a general sense. It is never going to be like 2008 GMS, KMS etc. so there will sometimes be less than ideal situations. But as long as you have that mindframe and just enjoy it for what it is you will turn out fine.

I love your attitude of trying to seek out new friendships. You seem like a great guy.

 

I think you missed my main point and focused only on the second part where I mentioned a certain player.
If all you think is DPM sure the avg NL/BM/sair will be stronger to the avg Shad. (if both with same gear attack)
But shads got smoke, higher avoid, can pin certain end game boss like nameless/scar/dunas.
can cleave, got meso guard aka x2 hp easier time with 1/1 etc
there are a lot of benefits for shads that does not exists in NL or other DPM class.
So sure if u look only on DPM then you are right. But as I mentioned some of the pros of shad with the DPM he does i think he is at good place.
Overall from my experience running with shads I don't consider them weak by any means

 

Try to have a forum discussion without it devolving into Shadower discourse challenge (impossible)

 

This is very true though this thread actually did start with some shadower woes.

 

It really took a lot of willpower to not go down that hole again but at the end of the day, i'm a shadower discourse addict. I might need some help.