What to do about mage farming

Given recent events... let's talk about this?

In my opinion, I don't have a problem with mage farming in general. It's not appealing to me to play that way personally, but I think having diverse methods for making mesos is a good thing.

The issue is that it's just TOO GOOD. Setups have been refined to where it now is just so exponentially better than traditional methods like bossing, etc. This is creating a widening gap between those who mage farm and those who don't. It's very demoralizing to those who don't want to play the game that way, but feel like they can't possibly compete otherwise.

What we need is for it to be balanced, I think. So let's try to come up with ways we could limit/balance it. Some ideas:

1. Limit farmers to 1 channel. Downside: Needs to be manually enforced by GMs.
2. Drastically reduce NPC sell prices. Downside: Harms regular players/leech sellers.
3. Drop rate for mage ults gets exponentially worse per character the longer you farm for (maybe starting at 1h+, resetting at server reset?). Downside: Probably very complicated to implement?

Any other ideas? Thoughts?

PS: Please no personal attacks directed at the actual people behind the mage farms. They are just playing by the rules and hustling to get those mesos. Direct your criticism at the rules instead and the game balance that pushes them down that path.

 

The ~mapowner system could be made to accommodate this (likely going by IP, with a corresponding T&C update to specify that you can't use multiple IPs to hold multiple maps/channels), and for the most part it should work out reasonably well, with enforcement only being required in the case of people ignoring mapowner rules.

Ultimately though, instead of banning it outright it's better to offer alternatives/nerf specific mechanics to make it no longer attractive to do. Note that alternatives (for now) should probably give some amount of pure meso if mage farm is killed, with potentially a plan to slowly reduce that meso over time to let the economy adjust. I don't have recommendations for what to add, but something probably in the lv 100-135 range, something in the 135-150 range, and 150-200 range together would likely be good? For low lv/pre-bossing, then early bossing where bosses can't make money, and then an alternative to classic bosses.

Another way to nerf mage farm is very simple: make all items dropped by enemies that were killed by ultimates (or rather, probably use the standard 80% rule here too if it's not too much server load) only pet lootable by the person who used the ultimate that killed them.

 

im not sure on ways to fix mage farming but i agree with the overall sentiment of the post.

Mage farming really does feel like the only efficient way to farm mesos and its not sustainable if more and more people decide to do it. I think more diversity is needed to compete with mage farming at the very least.

 

There is no problem with mage farming in my opinion. The problem is that all the content in the server is being adjusted in response to how OP mage farming is to the point where the average player cannot enjoy the game's events (either by nerfing event drops or nerfing the rewards from them).

I also think that it's dumb to have a mechanic in the server which is very abuseable by botting/automation and increasing the workload of staff by testing wether they are rule breakers or not.

I think the mechanic should be viable option for players but also the amount of players that a player should be able to control and attack with should be limited (which would also be easier for staff to enforce). I hate the cat and mouse game thats currently is going where people find ways to abuse every single rule to optimize mage farming when it is not the essence of "old school maplestory" which the server was suppose to mimic. The staff should move the goalposts in regards to mage farming and change the rules. The current state of game sucks very much and I think the population decrease reflects that.

 

I just want to comment on this subject because I've been seeing a lot of misinformation and inaccuracies circulating in different places (not referring to your post).
For the record, I do think mage farming became more of a problem in recent years, but in my opinion this is not the most pressing issue and there are much more important subjects to tackle at the moment, and I will do my best to explain why.

offlinetvfan's method looks scary to the average player, and it might even seem like it's game breaking or dangerous for the game, but I want to assure you that it's not.
He claims to be making 2-3b per hour, which is false. For reference, if you farm 3 channels of IV2 with max efficiency with mages centered and with meso up, you will make 220-230m npc.
He farms 9 channels, so even if he was the most efficient farmer and used meso up on all 18 mages, he would make about 660-690m at most.
This is clearly not the case, since his mages are cornered and he doesn't use meso up, not to mention the disappearing loot and rotations that take longer than 3 minutes.
I estimate his gain is around 300-350m at most, and his pot cost is through the roof, so he would be pretty much making the same meso as your average 6 mage farmer.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about mage farming in general:
Mage farming got popularized in recent years, and many more players have farming setups ready.
However, on the average off event day, farm maps are still not full (in fact, on some days they're even almost empty).
It looks scarier from the outside when you see all the new people with mages, but in practice it's very hard to make significant money that way, and there are only a handful of farmers who do that consistently.

That said, I do think there are 2 problems with mage farm, and I would ultimately like to see them solved, even though I don't think it's as urgent as class balance or pb:

Map diversity:
The real issue of mage farming is the raw meso. It's much easier to just gain NPC meso without having to sell anything.
There are plenty of known maps that make you significant meso (even more than the meta maps), such as Silver Mane, ToT, Wyverns.
People don't farm those much, because a few days in it becomes clear that it's too hard to sell the drops and the market can't really sustain more than 2-3 farmers of the same map. Raw meso is king.

I've tested every map with a farmable layout in the game last year (6 mages, 1 looter), including some really cool and promising ones like Moon Ridge and Lab 202 for example.
I won't share all my findings publicly, but the results were that only 4 maps in the game gave me 200m or more npc money per hour.
Not only the rest didn't exceed 200m, but most didn't even get close to 150m.

If this issue is tackled in the future, the npc meso from popular farm maps needs to be brought down to be on par with other maps with farmable layout, so there will be many farm options, with more farming for sellable items and less for raw meso.
This is difficult to do and will require a lot of knowledge and experimenting, but it's doable.
A change like this is also granted to piss people off, so the specifics need to be discussed with the community beforehand.

Events:
The majority of farmers on the server are event farmers, almost exclusively.
During events, popular farm maps are basically warzones. You need to hold your maps while eating and rush your bathroom breaks if you want any chance at keeping your mapowner.
This is where the market issues created by the increasing amount of farmers really takes place.

This in itself is not a major issue too, but the problem is that events in this server last way too long.
If we look at the 2025 farming events alone (CNY, Anniversary, Halloween, Summer Event, xmas), they lasted 5 and a half months.
This is almost half of the year where farmers can generate Att pots, CS/WS, NX, Smegas and other things.
It's ok to have long events, but in that case the nerf to event drops from mage ults needs to be more harsh, a lot more harsh even.

In addition, Anni event specifically is way too strong.
Not only you can get CS/WS from the boxes, but the amount of NX is absolutely absurd.
The meso I made during this event could basically almost give me 70% of an Auf Helm, and I didn't even farm the most in the server.
Anni event should be reworked, the boxes can't just drop from mage ults like this, and the rewards should not be that strong.

So in conclusion, I would not like to see mage farm killed, but diversified.
With less NPC meso, more map selection and less event rewards, it should eventually benefit the market as a whole and also make bossing a little more appealing.
But again, I don't think this issue is as urgent (with the exception of Anni event) as other things that Staff currently work on.

 

Okay, but like, compare the avg meso gain from mage farming vs the avg gain from bossing. It simply doesn't add up to anything even remotely resembling equal grounds, even if you use 6 attackers to solo horntail as an example. If the game really was about grinding maps for mesos then yeah it would make sense that mage farming is this good, but as it stands there are very few map options for mage farming, so only a small group of the most dedicated farmers stay on top, and the game is still on the face of it geared for people running bossing instances. So why is mage farming so good that almost any top player would drop bossing all together and just play mage in order to be competitive? Shouldn't killing bosses be a rewarding endeavor as opposed to casting genesis on 6 different accounts while standing in place?

I do get it's more nuanced than this, but it really doesn't seem like it's healthy for the game as a whole... not to mention the actual addiction that a lot of mage farmers end up dealing with from the style of gameplay that mage farming encourages.

 

specific maps can be revamped to disallow running into the wall to sync your chars
or get rid of safe spots/deadzones so you need to reposition consistently like parts of ulu1
this would add some complexity and reduce confusion towards what looks like macrobotting

a quicker fix might also be repositioning merchant npcs, map teleports, and/or char reset locations

 

farming everyday, Urine bottle in the corner, ordering mcdonalds from ubereats while tipping 0$, leather peeling from gaming chair, holding mapowner for 10 hrs at ulu1, making 16th mage farmer while making 4th petlooter,reminiscing the duku times, posting nerf shad on royals forum. The maple life

 

Nerf mage farming into the ground

 

If Corsair's seagull ult needs to have a cooldown then so should mage ults. It's only fair.

 

what else can a mage do besides farming on this server?
buff mages in boss
or just delete

 

Mage farmers POV

 

My close friends and I had plans to do a 20 channel 20 hour mage farm marathon where I put one mule in each channel with chalkboards spelling

NERFMAGEFARMPLEASETY

I was so close yet so far

 

I'll admit, that's why I rushed to create this thread. I saw the 2-3b per hour claim and it downright terrified me. If true, I think it's pretty urgent to address it before it gets out of control (though I also still want class balance first!).

But it's fair to question that claim like you did. So we'll see I guess? I guess the truth will be revealed one way or the other as the ban appeal progresses.

On the other hand...

I think even if you assume the lower 220-230m estimate for most mage farmers, I would say that's still really high comparatively. It's around double or triple what I make through normal bossing. When you factor in apple costs and all the other overhead (eg: collecting keys for apq, waiting for the party to form, doing scroll party, transferring cgs and walking chars around, finding last second fills for VL, etc etc), I feel like most other content realistically maxes out at only around ~80m/h. I know from my records scrolling my auf helm over the course of a full year, I was making around ~7b per month (plus ~1b from voting) playing maybe 3h per day? If I were mage farming that whole time I guess it would have been closer to 20b/month? So it's pretty substantial difference. And as someone who is maybe naïve about how much effort goes into mage farming vs what we have to do to get boss runs together, I kinda question whether it's justified to be making that much more mesos

 

Slightly nerf mage farming drops. Make drops/NX better on bosses

 

I think this is honestly the best breakdown and take on the subject period. Could not agree more with this!

Mage farmers, for better or worse, actively stimulate the economy. That raw mesos goes towards buying the majority of white scrolls/chaos scrolls, and enables people to actively create new items by gambling while moving the market. Nerfing them completely would be detrimental in the long run in my opinion.

There are definitely only a handful of people (that I know of) that spent an excessive amount of hours outside of events and that the recent discussion is mostly alarm bells due to the potential scale that it *could* reach.

I also think in light of the recent methods the Staff are likely having some deep discussions about what is and is not going to be allowed moving forward. Drawing lines in the sand to prevent people from taking things too far to the detriment of others is 100% necessary. One person monopolizing over a 3rd of the channels for a map can't be healthy.

 

so was it about the mesos or the protest run? because your ban appeal says one thing and this post says another

 

Let's be honest. This server isn't going to last many more years.
The demographic for this server is players who played Maplestory between 2005-2010.
It's 2026 guys. This server's been around for 13 years now. We're old as fuck.
In the coming years, the people who play or would play a server like this will be moving on to starting families. We're going to be too busy to play and sure as hell too busy to care about "magefarming."
To get to the main point.
The backbone of this server is casual and new players. We have what? 1000 daily players? Mage farmers probably make up less than 5% of those players. Just buff the fuck out of normal content like APQ, Bosses, and PQs in general. This will help new and casual player retention. Let's make the most of these final years. Cheers

also,

 

Lots of reasons. I'll write this from the heart and speak freely, though some reasons, as you know andy, I prefer not to share

I invite everyone to take a moment and think about why you play this game. Maybe it's as pure, as simple as wanting to spend time with friends in a relaxed atmosphere. Maybe you want to try running a guild and bringing people together, maybe you want to compete and see how much you can accomplish.

For me, I had an absolute blast playing GMS when I was a kid. Remember those simpler times when all you really wanted to do was go home after school to play this mushroom game? I think a lot of us cherish those memories and find comfort reliving that on Royals.

This might seem counterintuitive, like you pointed out Andy, since I chose to do the thing that is arguably the furthest from those comfy vibes with my SIX CONSOLES TEN COMPUTERS BUNCH A FUCKING WIRES, but I wasn't alone while doing all this mage farm. I had plenty of help and interesting social interactions throughout all this, including this message to you. For some of you, we even became IRL friends!

I also realized I love that sense of adventure and experimentation. The process of figuring out new ways to farm nobody's done before really satisfied my curious mind, especially in a world where everything is solved by AI. There's so much more to experiment with and i continue to keep things private because I want you all to have the option to adventure how I did. Hopefully you all are having as much fun as I am with all this.

As I was mage farming, I also couldn't help but see so many connection it had to running a business, which is what I do in real life. It sounds crazy but mage farming taught me a lot of lessons about business in a low stakes environment since the worst thing that would happen to me is I'd get banned, whereas the real life consequences are serious.

At some point, like I said in the ban appeal, I felt I was ready to do this experimentation IRL instead of on royals, so I'm booking a flight to Malaysia to live in SEA and see what it has to offer.

I didn't intend for this to blow up the way it did. I kept pushing for the GMs to do this privately because I felt my strategy if leaked, would fundamentally change how you all enjoy playing this game. They handle balance changes behind closed doors and we all understand why.

It would be disingenuous to say this was the only reason though. Of course I wanted to keep it secret so I would have a competitive edge and make my trillion. When I was a kid, my family owned a restaurant and to make ends meet I helped them wash dishes and they'd pay me $10 a day. Id run to the nearby 7/11 and buy nx cards. When you see your mom and dad work 7 days a week 16 hours a day it sticks in a way that I don't have the words to explain to you.

Ultimately I think despite all the joy I found in mage farming, I think the most people would have most fun if mage farm was nerfed, so I pushed for it.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk