Yeah, MPQ. It’s pretty obscure; you’ve probably never heard of it…

I’m revisiting this thread to share what some of my thoughts are, some three and a half months later.

I still maintain my belief that party quests (PQs), like MPQ, are an extremely integral part of MapleStory. It’s true that so-called “SoloStory” has always been a bulk of the MapleStory experience, and many people will avoid PQs entirely or almost entirely (especially if they are completely restricted from PQs, like ironman characters). But PQs offer one of the most social possible experiences that MapleStory has to offer, which I think is important for anything that would call itself an “MMO”: not only is socialisation necessary, but PQs incorporate well the game’s combat system, as well as group problem-solving that is not necessarily combat-oriented.

I believe that 71~100 is the most logic level range for MPQ at this point in time.

The requirement for at least one mage in MPQ is still somewhat of a puzzle to me. In order to lift this requirement, some redesigning of the relevant stage is necessary. Some have argued (and I’m somewhat sympathetic to this point of view) that lifting the requirement is too invasive, and that the design of the double-JQ stage is very intentional, in the spirit of encouraging class diversity (by making certain classes important for the PQ itself, rather than as simply “useful for killing stuff”). However, as true as this may be, there are some serious issues with how MPQ implements this design:

• The mage JQ is simply a Teleport check; there is absolutely nothing interesting about the JQ, and it requires no skill other than “having max Teleport”. A mage with max Teleport simply teleports to each box and hits it, until the clipboard falls out. While this technically does something to make mages feel needed, it is quite seriously the bare, absolute minimum.
• It is still abundantly possible to make mages extra useful in this stage, without making them completely necessary, by using any one of the techniques (and/or any other yet-unvoiced technique(s)) that I briefly sketched in my original post.
• This stage, I think, is intended to retread the same ground as LPQ and OPQ, by making mages (who have Teleport) and rogues (who have Dark Sight and Haste) the favourite children of PQs. Thankfully, Haste is in no way necessary for the left-hand-side JQ (often colloquially referred to as the “thief portal”, “thief room”, or “thief JQ”). Haste (and even better, Flash Jump) simply makes it easier for the MPQing party. But do we really need to rehash this trope for yet another PQ? There are 3 classes (4 if you include permabeginners), and 7 subclasses (8 if you include permabeginners) that are neither rogues nor mages, and they remain relatively less popular, even today. Warriors are, in my mind, notorious for being useless in PQs; they never get anything special in any of the PQs (unless you count HP warriors’ ability to do the “thief portal” in LPQ). On the other hand, mages are already extremely popular and extremely useful in PQs (and outside of PQs), and rogues have been popular since MapleStory’s earliest days, for their consistently extremely high DPS from level 10 to level 200 (I have claw-users in mind here, in particular; sorry, dagger-users!).
• Even an extremely popular (relatively speaking) PQ like LPQ can suffer from this class-favouritism (difficult to form a functional party, depending on where in the world you live, and therefore your timezone); and LPQ supports party sizes up to 6 (but at least 5)! MPQ requiring a party size of exactly 4 (and this point still applies even if the party size requirement were loosened to 3~4 or 2~4) means that fitting in a mage becomes that much more difficult. If we lived in an ideal world where MPQ members were selected from the 5 main classes (warrior, mage, archer, rogue, pirate) to maximise diversity (every class having as close to equal representation as possible), one class would be left out every time, so we’d expect only 80% of MPQ parties to be functional…
• Making mages feel needed only really makes sense for priests, and for some odd-jobbed mages. INT-based I/L and F/P mages have no problem making themselves useful throughout every combat of the PQ, including the boss fight. Even priests are still quite useful, simply due to their use of Heal, Holy Symbol, Dispel (for the boss fight), Bless, etc. Plus, several of the mobs in the PQ use physical attack cancelation, anyways.
• Mages hit a power spike around early third job w.r.t. training, so this makes MPQ less appealing for mages in general.

These issues can, however, be somewhat patched up (albeit clumsily) by:

• MPQ mules (read: permanently level 85 mage). I’m honestly seriously considering making one myself, although I already have some half-dozen characters or so, so it’s already hard enough as it is for me to keep track of them all…
• A generally larger population of MPQers. This is wishful thinking (and indeed, the main motivation for my original post), but would also help the above point.
• A more creative version of this stage. I’m not going to go into speculation here, other than to say that it would be nice to see other classes represented in PQ mechanics.

I think that the rest of my points still stand:

• The restriction on party size should be loosened to at least 3~4, if not 2~4 (or even, with a lot more work put in, allowing sizes in excess of 4).
• Having two PQ lobbies is unnecessarily harmful (and damages some of the supposed plot behind the PQ, by inserting a plot hole).
• The Rocks of Wisdom need to be slightly more attainable (ideally through PQ completions, and not by random end-rewards; the end-rewards should be nice things that people expect, like scrolls), and more reliable (read: 100% success rate).
• The Horus’ Eye probably should have different stats than what it has right now.
• Fixing the main bugs (crashes, beakers failing to register liquids, the Teleport bug) is important as well.

And I might add that people, of course, expect EXP. I did not mention this in the original post, because I find that MPQ is suitable EXP for my tastes (at least, to get to level 86 and graduate). But, MapleLegends is more of a mid-rate server (with things like Taipei 101, widespread leeching, etc.), so it probably warrants buffing MPQ’s EXP a bit.

Ultimately, I worry that I’m the only one (or at least, one of a very small handful) who actually cares this deeply about PQs. MPQ definitely needs a “buff” (more EXP, better rewards, yadda yadda), but I fear (perhaps without warrant; after all, LPQ is pretty bumpin’ most of the time) that people may ultimately simply not enjoy MPQ. If that’s the case (and I hope it isn’t, and that the reason MPQ sees so little activity is its design failures and bugs), I still think that it should be “buffed”, but it’s ultimately out of the hands of MapleLegends to fix the problem of people “just not liking” it (if there is, in reality, such a problem). The PQ is mostly preserved as it was in GMS, so for such a problem, we could only really blame Nekksyn.

I think (correct me if I’m wrong here) there was some new year’s resolution given by MapleLegends’s owners about improving and “giving love to” PQs. I hope that that’s seriously the case, and that we see satisfying improvements to MPQ and/or (hopefully “and” ^^) alternatives.