Gameplay Diversification and Leveling Strategy: Quest Improvements

Hi Everyone,


I'm a long-time maple legends player, playing on and off since 2016. I have seen a lot of MapleLegends' development over the years and I am happy to see how much it has grown. When I began playing the server had usually around 60 players online at any given time, and now we're seeing numbers of nearly 1500! We’ve come a long way, but with this new influx of people there are new challenges being faced.


In this suggestion I am addressing one of the largest issues that comes with a high server population, which is that there simply are not enough channels for everyone to be able to grind on the best maps. This is leading to fierce arguments (and noise smegas) about map ownership and what’s fair. However, I am not going to suggest that we increase the number of channels, I believe, like Kimmy, that this will solve nothing, and only make the server feel sparse and empty. One solution to this problem is to just tell players to grind on maps which are sub-optimal. This is somewhat fair, as there is now a very very strong incentive to get a monster book ring for every class. However, I’m definitely the kind of person who would rather choose not to play and to do something IRL instead of spending my time doing something I don't want to do (i.e collecting monster book cards and training slower when my goal is to train quickly), and I imagine many others are as well. So I don’t think this choice works for everybody.


One of the greatest assets that players have in maple legends as new players, and as old players making new characters, is the 3x quest exp. It’s perfect. In 2016 I began on this server with effectively nothing and brought up my bishop and dark knight to level 40 very quickly just by doing quests. It was easy, required virtually no money (I actually made money on quests), and it was a fun time. Questing remains an extremely effective way to get to level 35 in the game, however once people reach this level, party questing and grinding tend to become much more popular options. Why? Sure, these are effective ways of leveling, but why is it that questing, which is definitively the fastest way to level 35, suddenly become obsolete? It is because the amount of exp awarded on higher-level quests becomes less and less of a fraction of the exp needed to level. Moreover, higher level quests often take more effort to complete, meaning you do more work, for less return. High-level questing offers effectively no return relative to grinding and party-questing. There’s no shiny rings, there’s few good items (the best of which are almost all one-time random rewards) to be gotten, and there’s no exp in it. Quests are useless after level 40! (most of them, at least)


While quests are not a viable source of exp, they could be an extremely efficient solution to the problem of having too many people fighting for high-exp maps. Quests encourage players to train in a well-distributed variety of maps and offer additional incentives on top of the exp obtained in gathering quest materials. They also encourage engagement with the game beyond just the mindless leveling. This is exactly the solution we want to this problem, and it actually gives a little more. By encouraging questing we encourage players to engage more with the game, and probably, more with the community. This could also offer new ways for those who are HP washing to level, without leech, in a somewhat efficient way, which could be a real game-changer on the front of the HP washing debates.


I am not going to address random rewards in this post, but I think they need to be seriously trimmed, as they are often difficult, and otherwise unrewarding (i.e either you make bank or you throw away hours of time).


I am proposing a revamp of quest experience on under-rewarding quests (which includes and is not limited to most quests above level 40). This is not a request to increase the exp multiplier on all quests, the 3x rate is very good for dealing with most low-level quests. This is a suggestion to modify individual quest exp rewards for a large number of quests. This approach could also be implemented gradually: quest changes could be made bit by bit and I don’t think we need to get it all done in one go. For example, quests from 40-50 might be revamped, and then later 50-60 could be rolled out, and so on… These quest revamps should consider how long it might take to complete a quest, how much material it needs, how hard it is to obtain those materials, and above all, how much exp is required to level at the quest’s given level.

For example, at level 40 the LEGENDARY quest The Antidote becomes available. For collecting 100 Mateon tentacles you get, after multiplying by 3, 13.5k exp and 50 holy waters (according to bbb.hidden-street.net). At level 40 you require about 300,000 exp to level, which means you get approximately 4.5% as a reward. However, it takes a very long time for any level 40 player to acquire these items, and moreover, the quest has several parts, each part asking for more tentacles, i.e the second part asks for 200 more tentacles and only offers 5k exp. That’s nothing! This progression only gets worse, and questing (in general) quickly becomes a less-viable source of exp as levels increase, especially as quests become more sparse at higher levels.


By making gradual changes to individual quest rewards we can ensure that MapleLegends maintains a healthy community with plenty of opportunities for everybody and continues to offer a unique MapleStory experience.

 

Almost all item-giving quests will need to be buffed. They universally give bad exp, and most of them give you pretty useless items. This is often combined with the quests being very long, so there's really no reason that they shouldn't award both good exp and an item. So this revamp is certainly a big-project, and this is why I suggested doing it gradually.