Information MapleLegends 2022 Development Roadmap

Welcome to MapleLegends 2022 Development Roadmap!

This post aims to give the community a general understanding of what we're working on, what our main concerns and efforts are focused on, and what our realistic plans for the upcoming patches are.

Please be aware that the topics discussed here are in no particular order: what's written first is not necessarily what will reach live first, or all in the same patch. However, it's full confirmation we are working actively behind the scene on it.

Also, the content of this post is nowhere near an exhaustive list of all our current development queues. For example, the progress of our client updates will not be discussed here.


Anniversary and Summer patch

As with a few events in past, we've decided to merge the Anniversary and Summer Events into one.

Being able to focus on the amount of content and fixes while working on one big event, means that we won't have to risk investing into two suboptimal events and, at the same time, having to cut on bug/playtesting sessions due to time constraints.

The last patch releases have been mostly reliable, with only a handful of hotfixes required despite the massive system changes, which proved to us that this can be a solid approach.


First Pass of Class QoL/Balance Changes

We've been observing live gameplay and the various class suggestions on the forum while discussing internally various potential changes across the board.

We will soon be pushing out our first set of experimental changes, some of which may follow suggestions coming from the community, while some others are a result of us wanting to explore new possibilities that don't rely on a pure damage buff.

Not all classes or situations will be handled in one go, so please do not consider this as a one-time pass: extra changes, be it further work on the already touched classes, or some attention to ones we did not alter yet, will come as well.

Your suggestions are always welcomed. Even the ones that don't get implemented have a high chance of sparking internal debates on what we should change about that particular aspect of the game.

You can contribute with your suggestion here!


MapleLegends Economy

The extensive feedback and the observed behavior of the Prestigious Coins system indicate that its current iteration is not hitting the mark as we expected; because of this, we're actively working on changes that will enhance the bossing-oriented aspect of the system, while not destroying its market value.

Prestigious Coins are not the only front we plan to address our concerns for the economy: we've been analyzing the general inflation issues in our server, and are working on multiple sets of changes that will aim to slow it down and keep the economy in check.

In addition, we're planning to add more previously gachapon-exclusive scrolls into various drop tables, to make them more available overall and have their quantity less dictated by pure farming luck.

We are also still actively combatting against Real World Traders as much as possible. Numerous community members, regardless of how long they have been playing, how much they have donated, or how popular they are, have been banned for engaging in RWT.

We would like to remind players that RWT is an inexcusable offense.


Upcoming Content

While our previous few patches have been aimed exclusively at bug fixes and game tweaks, we are now working on new content for MapleLegends.

Those among you who follow our Reddit may already be aware that our coming content is Neo Tokyo part 2, which, at the time of this post, is already in its coding and testing phase.

Neo Tokyo 2 release will come with all bosses from that area, Auf Haven included, which will bring a new challenging expedition to our server.

More content is being planned, some of which have already been teased in the past, but we won't be releasing further details about them just yet.


PQ Revamp

One of MapleStory's main aspects is Party Quests.

Party Quests have sort of been neglected by us over the years and haven't received too many adjustments. This has caused them to feel lagging behind, in terms of viability and quality, compared to other elements of our server.

To put it simply, it's often not worth the time and organization required by a PQ over much easier (albeit less interactive) methods of training and farming at all the stages of the game.

We are planning a revamp of the existing Party Quests, making them more attractive and popular either experience or rewards-wise and potentially introducing some new ones that would give alternatives at levels that otherwise have too few options.


Survivability: HP Washing, Defense Rework

It is without a doubt that MapleLegends currently has one of the worst reputations when it comes to the HP washing mechanic and the related bossing capabilities. This extremely technical "feature" mostly discourages new users, who come to try our server just to find out that there is this big wall of information they supposedly need to master before they're even able to plan which class to pick.

While we do consider, at least part of this obstacle to be a perception issue, rather than an actual one, there is no doubt that the system as a whole needs to be changed.

A few key elements are the fact that users should not feel locked out of a class until a certain (mesos / vote points / ap resets) threshold has been reached on their account, and that one should not find out that their character will not be able to participate in specific content simply because they hadn't planned their route many levels in advance.

We've been brainstorming for solutions for a very long time, including system changes such as the defense formula rework we hinted at previously. The aim of this rework would be to bring back warriors as the prime party tank while making sure that glass cannon classes can still survive while dishing out damage, all while re-introducing a sense of danger that hyper washing has removed from said classes.

We'd like to mention that, while some users speculate that our lack of current HP washing changes is due to our wish to remain high in the GTop rankings, which is simply not the case.

Besides the obvious flaw coming from the fact that our GTop score will always suffer from the repulsive nature of HP washing mechanics, our long-planned changes are aimed at not completely invalidating the efforts and dedication put by our community into tailoring their characters for our content, while also taking the chance to revisit the strange situation that washing puts the game balance in, at all stages of the game.


Conclusions

Thank you for your interest in our ongoing projects. As we said in our End of the Year thread, the way is still long and there are a lot of changes we would like to bring to the game, some more ambitious than others.

Despite our highs and downs, we're always here and working to improve MapleLegends in all its aspects, and learning as we go.

It's a journey for us as much as it is for all of you!