Important Boss Equips: Removing 'One-of-a-kind' (Feedback Thread)

I like the change. Is good if your want to upgrade, altho Im not sure how this will change the boss meso earning at least we can now get some por mesos back (depending on the job and boss). A random idea o.o what if we make useles items like the zakum diamond and tghe NT etc give you some NPC mesos? Specially on NT, where ppl go for fun cos I dont think ppl get much profit out of it

 

One of a kind items should stay as it is. This way of attempting to "stimulate" the economy is short lived and would cause many repercussions e.g: game made less challenging and would reduce interest to stay in the game as voiced out by many.

**Solution to stimulating the ML economy:
Among the GMs, occasionally task each GM to scroll some godly eqps (just like how players without perfect eqps would). The eqp and scroll has to be purchased from the FM by the GM (perhaps the name of GM can be masked or some sort so players are unaware that a GM bought our stuff instead of a regular player). This way, keeps the market alive and injects mesos into the system organically (though not completely but what choice do we have since we lack new users) without altering the game. The scrolled items created at the end would then be destroyed by the GM (npc it) and not be introduced into the system.

It's similar to the concept of US Fed purchasing shares so to prevent stock market from collapsing. GM can be the fed of ML though it's more work

These scrolling exercise need not be announced to the players. Everything can just be within the communications of the GMs and admins so the game and its economy is kept alive without players feeling the tweaks are artificial (yes, changing boss eqps to no longer be 1 of a kind is artificial, and is a short lived solution).

 

The thing is, for all the bosses which this change would apply to, none of them need a minimum reimbursement boost. Zakum and HT already drop several pieces of NPCable gears consistently (and enough people out there are using scar/targa that they can still pick up one helm to NPC), CWK will also consistently give out at least some scrolls or equips or whatever plus some NX (which for a lot of player is also a valuable reward) unless you're going on some kind of 12 man run, and there is rarely a reason to fight scarga for anything other than helms which will drop most of the time (not all, but most). These are different from NT bosses, where 50%+ of the time you get something worthless like a sigma or wisdom crystal or just plain post-apocalypse air, and thus benefits more from an increased minimum reward.

 

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So these three are the primary goals this was changed around?
Just a disclaimer, I'm more of a former player than an active one right now by all means, and so I am slightly out of the loop when it comes to the concurrent status of the market. But from what I'm reading, it appears it's more or less the same as from when I left the game. That said, I wanted to address my thoughts on the goals that were mentioned in the OP.

I find points one and two to have essentially the same goal: more money in attacker/bossers' pockets. While I can't necessarily argue against the fact that yes, that will come into effect, just having that much more raw money in the economy with the amount that people boss I'd find would just lead to more inflation. I'm thinking primarily in the context of end-gamers/ mid-gamers who are farming Zak and Scar for buyers or for the rarities, but from my understanding, a lot of players would just forego the money overall and instantly put it back into the market in the initial presenting of a feature like this. It's even more so the case for groups that clear much faster.

This makes potentially 3-man Zaks an extremely quick method of farming exp and potentially getting a quick pay off if a handful of NLs decide to just apple run Zak and they manage to get a Gene20 as well. Now all of a sudden, their exp run isn't costly whatsoever, because the Item-change would essentially compensate for the costs.

In the overall mid-long run of the change, yes, the demand for scrolls would increase to meet the needs for the people wanting to perfect their equipment. The problem with scroll prices is that they have a higher volatility rate by quite a margin. No, I don't have exact numbers, but this is just off of my experience from being the asshole to meta-raise CFA 60, CFA 30s, etc. It literally takes a single person to shift demand and I personally don't think this should be seen as a positive effect to the economy with all things considered.


Maybe I'm a little juxtaposed to my own experiences, but aside from quick extra cash for some people and an allowance to more easily-accessed near-perfect gear (from the lessened risk ratio of trying to even try for it), a generalized-more "wealthy" sub community within the game leads to more problems in my opinion. There needs to be more coverage to a potential hard dip considering how feast-famine the game-style is.

 

implement a bonus stage after boss

 

I'm against the idea, the point of perfectly scrolling a boss equip is to be hard and the risk of dropping old equip to scroll new one is a thing made for preventing players to get easy perfect boss equips and being so strong easily.

it'll be much easier to gain perfect boss equips if everyone can just keep scrolling until get one and this is the point of one of a kind item.

I'm against the idea, if someone want to make a perfect boss gear he should take a risk and drop his previous one which makes it hard to have perfect boss items.

I rather to stick to the old maplestory and not changing things please. the old maplestory ruined because these "small steps every some time" We should find other ways to bring mesos into the community, maybe an event or something but please don't change it.

 

The majority of new players have to break 1m to really become potion solevent / keep playing etc. Easiest way for that to happen is for an existing player to help them, but that doesn't always happen. One way to boost meso generation for new players who mostly tend to make money from equip drops, would be to somewhat improve the npc price on items worth less than 10k (obviously not more than any purchase price), and to increase the potion drop rate on the lower leveled mobs (or all mobs in general now that mannies is no longer the PE farm it used to be). GMS actually made it to the point where you could rely exclusively on mob drops for pots (e.g., lvl 10 mob dropping a stack of 5-10 blue pots), though I don't think this is the solution. This might actually annoy card hunters since their invs might fill with pots faster but I think that's somewhat inconsequential.

As for something for existing players, getting an npcable etc from zak on exit (after completion) for 500k-1m would ensure it's distributed evenly / controlled. You can only do 2 runs per day so that's a max of 1-2m per day per person, this would also help buyers recoup their costs a bit, especially on runs where they don't get a helm. Grinding somewhere relatively high leveled but with a high kill speed is always going to be better for raw meso generation just due to being able to npc weapons which frequently hit near 500k. 5 of those drops in 30 mins could easily out value running a boss, as well as cost significantly less in pots, and generate gach. Meanwhile running the zak relies on a buyer for a decent price (or lucky drops) to be even break even.

 

IMO, the reason the economy is suffering is because all modes of production in the game point toward amassing wealth towards the wealthy who do not spend in return. The best means for artificially injecting wealth to new players was through the generation of white scrolls and chaos scrolls through gach, which were nerfed at the beginning of the population boom in order to set a flat number and control the total supply. In theory, this should have shorted the supply and, in turn, increased the cost of the scrolls pertaining to a growing demand and scarcity. However, end-game items like white scrolls and chaos scrolls have a dual purpose of serving as a set standard form of trade while also inherently holding a functional purpose. This led to a trend of a fairly inelastic market for white scrolls with the price being almost entirely controlled by buyers. While there are many more players with amassed wealth looking for white scrolls to finish their end-game items, the trend has become to not over pay for each individual scroll, even by the smallest margins. This leads to a very stagnant market with a scaled-down transfer of wealth during a time of population growth, further adding to the feedback loop of amassing wealth towards the top.

In theory, during a population boom, there should have been a larger concern for inflation. Mesos can be created out of thin air by time-investment. However, with the current trends of heavily washing for new players, the only classes that seem to survive the pitfall of poverty are mages because they're the only ones actually spending time out in grind maps generating raw mesos.

 

I just thought of an idea to distribute and equalize the wealth and reduce feast-or-famine. The current flow of meso is that the meso gained from mage/bossing is spent on high end gears except on few occasions (Overall int 10% given to new players in KPQ). What these means is that new players do not have much to sell to high end players (mules/leeching) which results in stagnant economy since no money is really spent other than blowing up goods and low to zero motivation for high end players to spend other than making the perfect gears. In order to reduce the wealth gap high end players must be given incentives to buy goods from new players such as valuable scrolls which can be abused through muling. What I suggest is introduce cosmetic items that involve acquiring ETC or obscure items that is dropped from low level monsters/zones that are easily available for new players but considered tedious for the old players to buy to stimulate the transfer of wealth. Since the items will be cosmetic it will not be influenced in balance patch at all. Bossing for chairs is a great incentive for new and old players to compete together and I'd suggest a collection of cosmetic items that will take a long time for ppl to complete by themselves so it would encourage buying and selling.

 

or high level players just kill 1000 slimes in 5 minutes using 15-mobs-hitting skills and go back to FM AFKing while noobs try to farm 1000 slimes in 1 hour 30 minutes with lucky seven

 

down with the bourgeoisie the proletariat shall suffer no more

 

Nothing's easier to kill for low levels than higher levels, except mabye killing pq bosses. In fact most of the balancing seems to be around higher level players which results in lower leveled players getting bigger than intended nerfs. Mannies good for training? Someone else is making money there, and we occasionally have to dc people who afk there, nerf it. Now leveling from 60-125 is leech only for the majority of users, whereas pre mannies nerf you could easily train to 100 before it became less effective than grinding at unbalanced higher leveled mobs. There've been a couple efforts to fix this but nothing that really filled any serious gaps, especially since half of the locations require 3-5 players to control the spawn rate and actually get a good eph without spending 90% of your time on a rope.

Making some kind of daily quest that is random or tailored to the users level and provides a set reward would improve the situation for lower leveled users, while not rewarding enough for higher leveled players to gain a significant advantage off of compared to grinding normally. E.g., a single daily quest that rewards a set amount of exp based on your level with a cap, and 250-750k. That is if all you care about is raw meso generation for users other than bossers.

I think blaming higher leveled characters hoarding money for every problem in the economy isn't really accurate or solving anything. Sure it probably happens to some extent, but many of these players are also the ones injecting into the economy by buying things. If they weren't willing to put out 80m for a clean sky ski from gach, or 90m for a chaos, or 140m for a ws, new players would have no way to break 100m past just grinding and scrolling items to sell, or merching.

New people had less and less money as helm buyers due to a huge influx of players, and as a result runners desparate for money, or wanting to help people, kept letting the price drop lower and lower. Now we're at this point where we're considering making helms easier to npc because running for a buyer is so unprofitable that it's easier to just run at a loss. Not everyone "needs" a helm, helms cost money for runners to produce (pots etc.), a few months ago you'd pretty regularly see casual level 50-80 players without helms, or players putting off buying a helm till 90 just to get a scar instead, or not getting a helm till after they hit a ws, etc.. Now some people in my experience are acting like they're entitled to a free helm / acting like we're lucky they're willing to give us 5m for a helm. And mabye this is just a few bad apples, because I've also had good experiences too, but it's a really negative experience when you get someone acting like that.

 

Can someone please reword the poll for me?

 

1: remove one-of-a-kind
2: keep one-of-a-kind

 

This is where creativity comes in. Either make the PQ quest more rewarding for new players or create questlines that would entice new players to complete. It would take significant time and effort to reduce the wealth gap in general but from my experience skin/chairs are the one of the few rewards that will not hurt the economy while redistributing the wealth. Currently the only "intended" way to escape poverty via proper reward system is completing the Jane Doe quest which guarantees one 30% overall Int scroll which do not even come close. Balance the opportunity cost of the reward on new players able to finding ways to gain mesos vs. old players making mules. The balance lies in incentivizing new players to initiate/complete the rewards vs. discouraging established players to make mules to compete with the new players.

I still maintain my position to keep one-of-a kind attribute to keep Maplestory as it is.

 

If mesos from quests is a concern its not just Jane Doe quest only, theres more here


Farming some ETCs for trade-ins can also get you good items to sell.


But even with this here I would still like One-of-a-Kind to be removed due to new players not being able to farm these because they're level 60 and hit pretty hard, meaning newer players won't have the meso for potions to farm for mesos.

 

Maybe I'm having a misunderstanding on your point here, but sounds like you are suggesting level 60s would be able to farm zak helms for the NPC price? Sounds impossible to me because level 60s aren't going on zak runs as attackers, and high level attackers are not gonna bring level 60s along for free helms when they obviously want the zhelm NPC money for themselves. Same goes for MoN, Scar, Targa and HTP.