Level together or self leech later?

To be fair, there isn't anything stopping anyone from finding like-minded players to party up and level as a team. I think its much more fun myself, but I only have one friend who plays with me at the moment.
To play devil's advocate though, I remember playing GMS and having the Monster Carnival parties just trading wins, as it was more efficient than actually trying to beat your opponents.
I understand why they do not have that here as a system, but I find it strange more people are about multi-clienting, than choosing to find others to level with. I suppose it comes down to greed maybe, as playing on your own you can keep all the drops for instance.

But myself and my friend level and at the end of our session, we split profits 50/50. Something we self impose, as if something good drops and sells, we all benefit.

 

The problem with finding a party, is that a lot of "players" are away-from-keyboard bots and multiclient mules. The current setup of this server strongly encourages solo play until the end game. It's a shame really.

There is so much untouched potential in Maple that is ignored. A few simple changes would bring the community together. Imagine more party quests, more rewards for parties, bonus loot for parties, more bonus exp for parties, no safe zones on maps and bosses to eliminate AFK chair leechers. No mutliclienting, at least on the same device.

Playing with friends or even strangers beats playing alone.

I like a challenge, but mule washing is just plain boring. It's about as much fun as washing a mule in real life. But people here do it for a whole year. Or 2. I understand people like different things, but Mule Story isn't my cup of tea. In fact, it's not most people's cup of tea. Mule Story is for a select few diehards that Maple Legends caters to. As soon as the mods realize that muling and multiclienting are driving people away, the server will become much more popular.

There are lots of people who miss the old Maple days. Those days are gone. Even servers that try to replicate and improve on that experience, miss the main point. We don't have nostalgic memories of washing mules while we grind 150 levels solo, watching movies on the side as we hold a button. We have nostalgic memories of exploring the Maple world with our party, finding new and exciting things, beating bosses by the skin of our teeth, and sometimes getting wiped out and hurrying to rejoin the chaos in a dungeon. That's what we want.

As for sharing drops and such, I made a suggestion about not being allowed to pick up other people's loot. This would apply to pets too. Ideally, a toggle would be best. If you want to share, share. If not, to each their own.

But what does my opinion matter? I'm just one penguin with a snorkle that can't reach my beak.

 

I agree with this sentiment, allowing multiclient is simultaneously the biggest QoL change and the biggest problem this server has. I am an early 4th job player and I use multiclienting so that I can solo Ravana and Papulatus using my bishop for MW20 and Holy Symbol. For Ravana I also tab into my Bishop to clear the spawns with Genesis. If multiclienting were removed it would force me to party up to get buffs, or at least force me to play my bishop on my steam deck. Multiclienting was added because policing the use of multiple devices is very difficult, and allowing it without allowing multiclienting isn't fair to those who don't have multiple devices.

If multiclienting was removed, and using multiple devices was banned, I would worry about how that effects storage and shop mules. All the items I am holding onto would be forever lost, or lost until a friend could help me move them. That's annoying though. Calling on a friend every time I need to take a scroll out of storage. That would be grounds for a lot of players to quit I'd imagine. I'd probably still hang around, though I'd definitely be online less. Not like I play much anyways.

I start new characters a lot. I think my favorite part of this game is 1st job until 3rd job. 3rd job is fun for me until you are too high level to do MPQ, but after that it's a slog until 135. In my time with new characters I ran into a surprising amount of people willing to party. And a surprising amount of people who've asked me to party. I had to turn people down on my New Leaf character in the Ant Tunnels because they weren't part of the challenge. I'm not saying there isn't a problem, I just happen to have lower expectations I suppose since I was too young before big bang to remember what it was like. I think if you do some training on your own in one of the meta locations (Teddies, Platoons, MP3/Ghost Ship, CD's, etc.) or you smega, you might run into someone or you might not. But you miss every chance you don't take. I find myself in a loop where I will want to do Zakum but not want to do anything else. This causes me to not play, which causes me to not see when someone smegas for Zakum, meaning there are cakes, but I'm not there to eat them. There are definitely more people running Zakum than training so it's not a perfect analogy, but by doing things on your own I'm sure you'll find some party content eventually. It's up to you to determine if that's worth it for you.

I'm not a very social person, and I have trouble confronting people and asking for things. If I was more confident I think I would ask people to run certain things with, but I have a mental barrier that stops me from doing so. The best recommendation I can give if you wish to do social content is to join a guild with people around your level in it, and to ask frequently if people want to run something. It's not something I could do right now, so I understand it's not for everybody, but if you have the confidence I think it could be worth a shot.

 

I agree! One thought I had about multiclient being unfair to people who don't have multiple devices, is that currently multi client is unfair to people who have a slower laptop. For example, I honestly can't run two clients on my MacBook, because it gets so laggy and the screen will freeze every so often. I also have to run the resolution super low to use two clients, so the backgrounds are super ugly. I would really just prefer multiclienting to be disabled though.

 

I agree.
There are a lot of really fun moments i think they could implement, im no developer but i have played a lot of mmo's that would do things like timed map challenges etc.
One of the things i remember from a beta test of an mmo long ago, was to help alleviate the grinding, there was a challenge npc in grinding maps and the PT leader would select a challenge like "kill 50 monsters while under 50% hp" or something, and you had 15 mins to complete it. If you did, youd get experience and a token. There was a whole token shop and stuff but here i could see how that could take a lot of work code wise.
Although you could delve into the same code that is able to determine whether you are active or not, as there is currently code in place that gives you 10% boost if your active and half that if you arent.
Little things like that might be able to drive active parties potentially it would just have to be something that gets tested heavily.
P.s. penguins are awesome