The Achilles Heel of Multiclient Farming

Earning $ to pay leech price is also a type of effort. I see buying/selling leech as 'exchanging time with mesos'. If you value your time higher than mesos, you'll buy it. If you value mesos higher than time, you'll sell leech. That's how leech market economy goes on.

Wrote as who spent 1.2b on buying leech last month.

 

GMS shortly before big bang came out

 

I played GMS since beta (quit around bigbang but fucked around on it every now and then), and have played on private servers since OdinMS days. Leeching has always been a thing, even back on GMS, just not to some of the extremes we see here on legends. We still had multi-clienting back in the day, it just normally required 3rd party tools or VM's to open multiple clients at once. There have been servers that actively combat the progress of leeching, like limiting XP gain to only active attackers, but at this point, it's so ingrained as part of the economy and culture of the server, I don't think trying to limit or remove leeching as being a good thing, at least without a server wipe, which is also my stance on multi-boxing as well.

We're playing a 20 year old game, the game is stale for many long time players. It's just a way to try and keep things fresh while also being monetarily efficient.

 

correlation is not causation; saying the success of ML is due to multiclienting, leeching, and (relatively) unbalanced classes seems to be quite extreme. Player count by itself is a big part of why ML continues to be successful--as you said other servers dont even break a few hundred. And there are tons of other reasons why ML is nice besides multiclient, leeching, and class balance.

And to throw back your question back at you, if multiclienting, leeching, and class imbalance is what makes a server successful, then why are other servers with those aspects not successful and have died out?

 

I dont see any relevance in my post to what you are writing here sorry. I dont mean its no effort to pay for leech or acquiring the meso to pay for it, but its just no effort to level characters fast once you have meso. I can also play my NL earning mesos at the same time someone else leeches 5characters for me, which is actually more profitable than even leeching them myself.
This will undoubtedly age the server faster. No matter how this server was balanced we would end up in the same place eventually, but do we want everyone to have perfect gear and be done with everything in 1year or in 10years. And I would assume most people play ML with its 2x exp,1x meso rates because they preferred the rate of progression in oldschool maple compared to todays GMS.
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I also think my choice of words in my first post was not every well thought out with the "Leeching has ruined the server", and "leeching is the devil" and thats where ppl disagree with me. Let me defend myself a little and clarify.

I am not against leeching at all currently in ML. I just think it ruined the real "oldschool" vibe of Maplestory where leeching was not a thing, and it has messed up the rate of progression for people who want it to stay close to that. The server seems very divided about if leeching and multi-clienting should be allowed.

But overall I think leeching has done more good than bad, I use it myself plenty. My NL is 198 without any leech what so ever. But I wanted to make a pally and was I gonna grind 1>135 again? Fuck that. I dont have time for that, I wanna play at 135+ so I bought leech the whole way. I would have quit the server 100% otherwise.

It provides some cool strats where people can take this 20year old game and make it new and refreshing figuring out new ways to play and ramp up the difficulty.

These new multiclient strats. Farming 10k gach tickets with roarmules? Cool af lemme watch. Soloing HT with 4NLs/8clients? Super fucking impressive, 100% deserve every bit of exp/meso and creed for going there.

My one and only problem is with some things.

Why complain and constantly nerf all new strats and multimagers/mutliattackers if we gonna keep allowing leech, or if you are for either one dont complain about the other one. Either ban it completely or allow it completely. The cherry picking on what should be allowed or not is very wierd sometimes.

In the same way I dont understand why account sharing is a bannable offense. But we are allowed to leech each other, and share gear... hello??? Other than security reasons I thought the whole reason about account sharing being bannable is to not have someone else help your progression and give you an unfair advantage over others.

Well I remember EMS having an event or something of sorts right before big bang that introduced 10% scrolls with 100% succesrate. I dont think they made many good decisions post 2008 tbh.

I agree on everything youre saying and somewhere it must have been lost that I also have these beliefs. Because I dunno why im defending myself about this lol.

 

in legends the "op" leechs are still disabled, going back to GMs there was the PG Leech which was very broken,

I know a lot of new players who get the tip to sell low level leech to make money, and I know a lot of people who gear their first character this way, I don't see any reason to take that away from them.

I believe that any form of balance has to think about new players, since the most experienced ones will always find a way to farm more, better, faster, and this is also part of the game.

 

This is interesting compared with experience I had from pre-BB KMS even from beta. Leeching was always a thing even from beta when we had only 2nd job, multiclienting with multiple device to mule buffs was always a thing from 3rd job update even before zakum, some sweaty adults did multiattack aswell on bossing too. Of course, it may not similar with 'old school vibe' which you experienced and hope to see happens here again, but I hope you remind again that we were kids when we played OSMS, and we aren't anymore now.

Always there were few sweaties lead the culture, and most casual players. I see same happening in ML aswell. just sweaties spread their voice louder so it seems like this server is full of sweaties and 0 casuals, but actual game I'm experiencing doesn't seem so.

Defining 1 playstyle as something 'right and correct' and judging all the other playstyle as 'bad, evil, unhealthy', and forcing one style to whole servers player wouldn't make this server stayed alive till nowadays. Of course, I lowkey joke think that history of ML balance patch was 'Spear vs Shield' but even such rashing nerf patches bonking sweaties heads didn't went too much like your opinion.

To feel 'true nostalgiac experience' we need irl timeleap aswell to bring our minds back to the past, when we had no knowledge, no modern PC environment, no money, backsmashing parents for me playing game too much, sadly we don't have.

 

I think what's lost is that your comment read like this is new to just ML because you only experienced it here on ML. I experienced it on GMS during the "OSMS" era. I participated in it. We had multi-person multimaging back then, as well as some multi-client single person multimagers on GMS and private servers. I personally don't agree that leeching is inherently bad, but I understand the sentiment because imo it's just a symptom of (for lack of a better term) larger issues, but not the root cause.

 

Saying there wasn't much leech in old maple is very revisionist. It was everywhere.

People were buying PG bigfoot leech until 75 and then harp leech since like 07-08.

 

I remember leeching once LHC came out but not before. That’s probably because I only hit level 65 on an F/P doing LMPQ and used the game as a chat room before I quit to play Halo 3 and MW2. I also remember players post big bang when I came back to check out the exp/map updates but before the skill overhauls of maybe unleashed(?) running multi PC set ups specifically for HS. I’m sure there were players legitimately playing multiple characters at once in those days but it was more likely to see hackers/botters doing their thing. I specifically remember a guy in LMPQ with no attack delay on an archer or something saying he just changed the value of some nonsense file and he attacked faster than hurricane on every attack. Even in LHC if I remember right most of the leech sellers were abusing some kind of something (something to due with battle mages but I can’t recall what). Multiclienting to the extent we see today in ML is gold farmer style play that gets the passes it does because they’re physically playing the characters themselves. I did a comparison of it in the balance thread but I’ll quote it below:

TL;DR: MLs obsession with multi farming strats is strange and inauthentic/inorganic to the game most people remember. I personally remember 2 clients at most, but was far from a pro back when I played as a child. People can use them if they like, but it isn’t normal even by the standards of modern gameplay metrics unless you sell MMO currency for a living.

 

Ye thats true, I never experienced it as I quit when Big Bang came out and before that there might have been at most a handful players using it in EMS. But in ML its more the norm to leech than not.

But what got a bit misunderstood really is that I dont think leeching in itself is bad, especially not since we as Hui said all are adults with limited time nowdays.

I just believe leeching is the root cause of other problems, and instead of fixing problem after problem it causes it would have been easier to terminate the source. But again, that is WAAAYYY to late now in ML, it would have had to been banned from the get go.

And in reality it would have been no difference in how the ML population is divided between the rich and poor, we would have just been further away from the "end". In the timeline leeching was banned in ML the casuals would have had 1attacker+1hs mule maybe at this point, and the sweeties 2attackers,hs mule + 4mages. Meanwhile in our current timeline the casuals have the latter and the sweaties 20+ chars.

And to be fair, when we reach 20clients roarmules I dont even think its debatable, its not even the same game as we played back in the day.

Im very confused on the timeline of this tho. 4th Job wasnt even out pre 2008. And before that all I ever saw was ppl using 2laptops to HS mule. Thats very different from selling lvl 10>135leech imo.

 

Speaking about GMs, if you stop to analyze leech and wash, they are old mechanics. There is a record of washes being made before the release of the 3rd jobs, for example. With Leech it is no different. Few people used it on gms cause it was pay to win..

 

u One thing to always keep in mind is that the stronger the character you have, the easier it will be to level up the second one, this about "strong character" and money, even if it's not leech itself, have other many options to get more exp in the second char onwards,

In GMS, there has always been all of this, but before the launch of the market trade system, few people invested heavily in the game.

 

a (perhaps) unpopular opinion, RPGs have to have a certain imbalance, of course, there are things that need to be reviewed (such as drk and the risk reward in DPM)but, if all jobs do exactly the same thing, there is no diversity, and in the end it ends up being like the Big Bang where everyone is the same mobility, teleport, fj, full screen skill, survival, good boss damage, its too bad

 

Oh god the nostalgia

Costco has a sale on tylenol+advil for all us old pricks

 

Ye I mean everyone did to some degree benefit from playing more, having multiple laptops, rich dad etc back in the day. But people here try to make it sound like it was the norm to leech pre big bang, which it was def not. And even if it was leech to some small degree back in the day it was nothing compared to leeching 10chars to 120 within a week, not even close.

Anyone who thinks leeching chars to 120 within a week is even comparable to what was going on back in oldschool maple is very delulu. And yes this rapidly ages the server, denying that is also delulu. But that way of playing ML seem to be way more popular than being a 1client turd so I dont think its a negative we have leeching/multiclienting in our ecosystem.

The people in charge of ML seem to draw the line somewhere between 4NLs multiattacking with footpedals and 20roarmules before its too much tho. And that's completely their choice, they must be doing something right since ML is a popular server, no questioning that. And the 1client turds cant deny leeching is a good thing for the server, as much as the leechers cant deny this is not in par with the oldschool maple norm.

 

oh yes, but I mean GMS being p2w in the sense of apr, 2x exp coupon, rock, etc., in the golden days of Orkut I met some Brazilian guys who farmed/bought leech, almost as much as here,obviously, due to the proportions, I understand your point too, bro

 

I don't think I said multiclienting, leeching, and (relatively) unbalanced classes are the reasons for ML's success, I said servers that have what you want aren't successful