Notice About GTOP and Vote Cash

Hello all,

Time goes really quick, but two years ago we've made major GTOP changes which can be viewed by clicking on this text.

During these 2 years, unfortunately not much has improved when it comes to GTOP. Heck, it only became worse, and voting is getting more frustrating each day. Users get false 'Already voted' alerts, sometimes nothing at all, or have to multiple times turn off their connection and back on again due to GTOP's aggressive browser agent checks.

I believe it's old news by now, but I absolutely dislike GTOP.

Unfortunately, when MapleLegends started up in 2014, voting sites were dominant, and now 6 years later this has not changed at all. It became a norm that users complain to server owners that do not put their site on GTOP, claiming said server will fail if this is not done, or that it's a 'red flag'.

The truth with GTOP is that they have an extremely powerful SEO, which gets them to the top of search results when you search for 'MapleStory Private Server' and sometimes even more vague terms.

This in return creates a fact that a lot of people googling for unofficial servers quickly get to GTOP, which then gets them to the top list of servers, which then gets them to our server since we are high on the rankings.

This creates the monopoly of bigger servers being seen first, makes servers encourage users to vote more, which also gets GTOP more traffic. It's a nasty, but genius way on GTOP's part on having a monopoly and insane user traffic, which they embrace by having numerous ads on the site when you vote and visit it.

An annoying feature for the user, but at the same time 'effortless' rewarding

While most of the things listed are great for us; GTOP exposes our server more, creating more users/traffic, the voting progress by itself is not nice for users.

Users are daily frustrated by GTOP not working, or in general voting day after day account after account, just to get some free cash. The benefits are that you do not have to be in-game to get any cash, but the negative side effect is that it's heavily time-gated.

We feel we reached as far we could with GTOP

MapleLegends is proudly on position #2 by very far on GTOP. We accomplished this with no real vote2win for a good while now. It's thanks to YOUR daily struggle that we are as high ranked as we are, and we can't thank you enough. There's 1 position left. We feel with our current rewards and no way for voters to directly receive mesos, this position is unrealistic to reach unless we introduced vote2win content again, which we absolutely do not want to do.

Focusing away from GTOP and voting as a whole

Now before you panic already with both hands on your face. No, we have no plans to completely remove GTOP rewards, since obviously that would... well, remove that #2 rank after 1 month. We absolutely understand still gaining progress while taking breaks and such is a nice thing to have.

However, each time there's 2x Vote events and such things we notice voting gets more and more frustrating. For some it works, for some, it doesn't. More vote cash is nice and all, but giving users a worse experience to gain said vote cash is not... a nice thing.

There are thousands of loyal users currently playing our server. These users are the ones keeping the server alive, keeping it active, and participate with the community.

If you don't count events there's currently no way for active users to make their progress faster in any way, when it comes to voting rewards or vote cash in general.

Fewer vote events, more in-game 'vote' cash rewards

We've considered bumping down vote rewards, and introduce new ways to gain 'vote' cash in-game. One thing that was actually on my 'list of things' when MapleLegends was still in development in 2014 was an achievement system, which I believe I was inspired at the time by MapleDestiny. There, you gained 'Vote Cash' by doing different kind of tasks, or reaching specific milestones. We have a little brainstormed internally, but not so much yet, since we already have so many other things still on the plate as well for the upcoming patch.

Conclusions and summary

The message we try to deliver in short is the following

• Voting is getting increasingly more frustrating
• We feel we reached 'as far' on GTOP we can
• With an exception to events, there's no way to gain vote cash, which gives a feeling of being 'time-gated'
• We are currently brainstorming on ideas for (temp) additions to gain Vote Cash while actually playing the game!

If you've personally got any ideas or thoughts on how gaining Vote Cash could be more enjoyable for you, besides voting day after day, feel free to let us know!

~MapleLegends Administration & Staff