Accepted [Community Discussion] Merchant Item Bundles

When it comes to scamming, MapleLegends have always been quite strict. For example, we've added additional warnings when obtaining a legendary item for the first time to first do your research before accepting offers. This was added in the hope for newer users to not get baited from low sales on their valuable items. This is technically not scamming, but it's still something I personally discourage, which is why we try to prevent it from happening as much as possible.

When it comes to merchant types of scams, we've quickly put a halt to what is called "Bundle Scamming" a few years ago. This is done by putting multiple of the same item, but sneakily between one item put a different type or bundle amount. This was infamously done in another populated server as well, and before it started to get heat here was immediately stopped and became a punishable act. Now it appears once or twice a year and will be stopped immediately once spotted

Recently, a new feedback thread has popped up. This topic came to light because we've received a few reports about users that again tried baiting users who were not paying attention to pay way more mesos than they actually wanted to by using the bundle item feature.

Unlike bundle scamming, where the action is to put "sneakily" one item so the person not paying attention falls for the wrong one, this is an act where consistent bundles get used for users not paying attention.

When this started to happen, the staff was looking for an opinion on what should be done, where I personally said that this can't be made punishable because all the items are exactly the same in the merchant, and we can't judge "scams" based on prices alone, because that would mean that 1) We give official prices which we have never done and 2) It becomes a major can of worms what is considered a "overprice" and what is not.

The community however understandably wasn't fully pleased with this result, since it gives room for users to intentionally bait users, thus the feedback thread was put up.

We've re-discussed the problem behind the scenes and discussed together if there's any point of having "item bundles" existing at all since that's where the major problem here right now comes from.

Removing item bundles would resolve the problem, and also solves the problem of us unable to give "official" prices. However, the issue is that we don't know 100% if item bundles can be missed or if they are used for other useful purposes.

Some people already bought this up on the feedback link, but I want a more official discussion about this possibility, in case there are things they missed, or we missed.

Official proposal: Would there be a serious problem if the item bundle option will be completely removed from MapleLegends to prevent or lessen the act of malicious users sneakily putting overpriced items in order to punish users that were not paying much attention, or are item bundles having other purposes that should remain intact with this feature?

Please do not expect action regarding this to be taken by this patch, but we wanted an official discussion before even considering looking into this feature or problem.

Thank you!