Information Clarifying different things and concerns

Hello everyone,

As I mentioned a bit back on Discord I was going write a topic to clarify a few things, why the maintenance took as long it did, and re-clarify what the term 'GMS-like' means, which seems to be much different now compared to years ago for some.

First of all, I want to thank everyone for yet another wild MapleLegends maintenance. Unfortunately, MapleLegends slowly got its signature of having the longest event maintenances ever in any server. Not the proudest thing, but it happens.

Why does maintenance take as long as they do in MapleLegends

When it comes to event maintenance in MapleLegends, people initially speculated that we do not have any kind of test server or Tespia, which means we code everything and then test it all on the main servers. While this used to be true years ago, MapleLegends do have test servers now, which has been used for early code or experiments.

Now with you knowing now that we have test servers your next question likely would be: Would you not be able to just copy-paste the Tespia code to the main server then?

I actually see this speculation often and the answer is actually no.

When it comes to MapleLegends development, we are working on many things at the same time, as well as experiments, major projects, and so on. For example, shot was working on weddings, complete re-coding of mob movements, changes to the aggro system, and more.

On top of that, Pasta was working on a lot of internal refactoring, as well as the event and client edits.

While not directly involved with server code, yeehaw works hard on the client-side of things as well.

This by itself is an insane amount of changes, which needed a lot and a lot of testing, which is why things did take as long as it did for those things alone.

Why some maps broke after this update

So another question I got after this maintenance often is why some maps like Shaolin 'changed'. Unfortunately, when we made mob movements more authentic, maps that were edited using 'Hacreator' which is a public MapleStory map editor, broke. This is because there's a bug in this program that causes the footholds to change incorrectly.

While it's fortunate I used a different map editor for most of my map edits that do not have this bug, some were edited by hacreator, which has this bug and problem. I've now been looking into all maps I can think of that I probably edited with hacreator, in order to fix the issue, for a revision 2 patch.

We thank you for your patience regarding this.

What does GMS-like mean

So this is one term that I don't like much anymore. Personally, I never use it anymore, because it's a really vague term. It was however used in Nise latest balance topic. I was completely fine with that. However, it seems people were confused by this term.

The confusion: People thought GMS-like means we are trying to replicate a function or behaviour from CURRENT GMS.
The meaning: GMS-like is a term used to make something function exactly how it did in GMS AT THE TIME (in our case v0.62).

Why though?

Since the beginning of MapleLegends, which is 2014, we've used a server emulator with a good share of problems. This would be crashes, things behaving differently (because they are coded wrong), or bugs.

As MapleLegends progressed, we've coded and refactored a good chunk of code, and we usually had the goal to make it behave GMS-like.
Kim note: I will now say authentic instead of GMS-like going forward

You can go back to the 2015 update notices and you will see a lot of changes and behaviour changes that were done usually to make the game feel more authentic like the original game.

So with the latest balance changes, they were more 'bug fixes' than they were balance changes. For example, SI working on mages was NOT a feature, but a bug because the server emulator inaccurately made SI act like 'booster' and booster is known to make skills faster too.

We are also interested in fixing other bugs still, which will certainly affect the meta. I've made these warnings in the past, but I am not a fan of a few other bugs still left. This includes the infamous Shadow Stars bug. Since I made this warning in the past, I don't think it's a huge problem that I do it again. Do note however that while I want those fixed, there's sometimes a will and can, and sometimes it's cannot. This is also the reason why some things still are the way they are.

So if this was known why did it took 5 years to be fixed

This usually gets asked too. When it comes to MapleLegends or MapleStory as a whole, it's just a very huge game. Sometimes I was told by former or current staff 'I could leave and the game will keep going with no development need' but to this day I still disagree with that.

Each time I think MapleLegends is more polished, there's just so much more left to make it even better. This was around 2015-2016. If MapleLegends was kept idle from thereon I can pretty much guarantee it wouldn't have been where it's standing now.

Sometimes some refactoring is also extremely difficult because it requires a complete overhaul of the current code, which is connected to 500 other things, so the difficulty than just gets very high, especially to do it smoothly without problems.

Another example would be Marriage. Right now 'we' have completely re-coded that. However, because pretty much everything has been changed internally, we had to migrate all the old data to the new formats.

Another option is to un-marry everyone and tell them to do it all over again, but is anyone looking forward to that?

Why are event rates always been changed during the event? Why can't they just do it RIGHT the first day?

Back to another question we get criticism for often: Event rates.

Honestly, if you think this one through, it's quite easy to understand why we can't get it right on the very first day. However, it comes to these things generally:

- Each event we have a different population (which means less / more users)
- We've always tried to not rehash events in MapleLegends, which means they are new. Testing new rates with less than 10 people is unrealistic. It may sound realistic to you, but it's really not.
- The meta/economy has changed between the years and we try to balance around it

After an event release, we heavily observe the event and quickly act if something is broken. For example, we've seen that heal was clearly broken, and after some debugging this was proven. We acted on it and fixed it.

The economy is more important than some realize. Countless of servers that went by our face closed down because of a broken economy. Whenever it's due to something being too rare, or because a meta changing item became too common. We've seen everything.

Our economy is not perfect, but I still would say we are proud of what we've reached with a 5 years old server. As one of the most populated server that's not easy, especially since we've gone through many population changes.

Halloween Event

We are currently extremely exhausted from events. When one event ends, the other start, and when that one ends, the next one starts. It really has become an endless cycle, and together with us always wanting to be rehash free, you can hopefully start noticing the obvious problem of us becoming more and more off-schedule.

Especially after this event, we became extremely exhausted, and as players also suggested already we should take a break or have a rehashed event for once.

We believe it's for the better we take this suggestion, so please do not expect anything great for Halloween. Hopefully, during this break, we can focus on actual permanent gameplay additions and other fixes we still have in our to-do list (which may I add is extremely long trrrust me there!)

We really want the best for the server

As MapleLegends goes in and out year by year, providing a way for users to still play Old School MapleStory that the original developers are no longer willing to, we hope you understand we are just people fan of the game, just like you.

We do this in our free time, as a hobby. There's stress, frustration, and heated moments. However, we are still staying, because our love for the game is just that much.

While there are bits and pieces of bad things, there's also a lot of good things. People being happy playing, making friends, and enjoying the server. A server we've built together as a team. Every bit of staff member has been important, and there's really no such thing as 'x is better than y'. It does not matter how big of a puzzle piece may be missing, because an incomplete puzzle remains incomplete, even if it's just by a little.

Together we've been trying for the past 5 years making the best out of the server, and we are as human as you are right now reading this lengthy post of mine.

If you've read all of it, I want to thank you for taking the time to read another series of my lovely long posts. Hopefully, at least something of it was informative

See you next time.

Remember you are all Legends!

~ MapleLegends Team ~