What to do about mage farming

All my homies hate mage farming during anniversary event . It is too op from what I've heard in game. I think the coins should spawn at a way lower rate from mobs or from certain skills mages have.

 

so it was about the mesos

 

At this point I would make the argument that we're in two game loops

New Players & End Gamers

For End Gamers, the Focus on Mage farming is a great part of the economy, the mesos pouring in is a way to quantify the effort to get that very last 1 WA for billions....

New Players though....

I've made my points well known over time, there is nothing new players can do to catch up except Bishop Leech and build up a farming environment of their own. Almost any other activity is 30-40m/hour at best....

To OfflineTVFan's point....why do we play the game.... to have fun. But the game is built on a small group of players fun not everyone.
Royals is odd, it's not like the high end players are whales keeping the lights on.

But we have to face a lot of the facts
- New Content is not coming out at a pace that meets demand. The events are giving the same prizes, the same chairs, the same NX outfits that they're all tanking. Dev resources are at a low.
- Classic is knocking at the door, and many new players are just 'practicing for Classic'
- Mages suck at everything but farming, and we've let that go on for 13 years.
- Closing the door, only leaves new players farther behind
- The only Meso sink in the game right now is extreme scrolling.
- Mage Farming is worth it because it can be anywhere from 3x-7x better than normal farming.


I think that there has to be a middle ground that address both game loops

For the End Game Players, we do need to calm down the fire, and help new players as well

- I think a limit of 6 clients is a reasonable start. A full party for whatever events there might be. 4 Mages + Looter + Whatever
- The power ceiling needs to be raised, not to discount all the work, but to move the economy forward.
- We need incentives to bring more players not try to see how few players it takes to beat a boss.
- We need to buff the mid game Meso loop, APQ giving 50m/hour is a good start, but we need to discourage Mage Farming to being a min/max strat not an everyone strat.
- We need more random prizes they can resell to get some nice mesos from older players (IE Stuff like Red Sock)
- If someone chooses not to mage farm, they should still have a game play loop reasonable enough. Many lower level bosses (Zak, Krex, etc.) Players can barely break even on apples. Having small QOL changes like Bosses dropping Appos, or things could help.
- Introduce some sort of boss token, Just like the token of teamwork prize boxes, imagine some useful prizes from bossing. Regardless of how many players are in the map. This should help mid players the most.
- Encourage new ways to bring more players.

These are just some quick ideas, I'm not saying any of these are the one and done solution. I just want us thinking about how this server can become sustainable. Some of these are probably terrible ideas, but the problem is only going to get worse.

 

That would also kill leech and just regular mage grinding gameplay which would be pretty disastrous for new players

 

Speaking from a newer player perspective - I've been playing about a year and a half. The only way for someone like me to ever realistically catch-up to end-game players is by mage farming.

Mage farming =/= free and ez mesos. People are being baited into this conversation by the straight cap 2-3b an hour claim. Nobody is making anything even remotely close to 2-3b an hour. For a newer player like me to reach end-game by mage-farming, I still have to put in a ton of hours. If scrolling an auf helm is approximately 140b, and if I make what an average mage farmer makes of 240m/hr with 3 ch ulu, that's still nearly 600 hours of farming. SIX HUNDRED HOURS for one piece of gear. There are certainly ways to up the rate, but the main limiting factors are PC power and the # of characters you can physically control at once. Also, if mage-farming so easy and OP, why isn't everyone doing it? How many people are willing to put in the time and effort to create the characters, create a physical set-up, and then put in the hours actually farming?

Do we want to widen the gap between the top and everyone else? Because that's exactly what nerfing mage-farming will do. Many end game players have benefitted greatly from mage-farming, and there's no way to retroactively nerf it. Nerfing it just widens the gap between the top and the rest by eliminating the most efficient path to end game. Instead of nerfing mage-farm, the best solution is to buff other money-making methods, so there are multiple reasonable routes to end-game.

 

The issue is, I'm pretty sure it's most likely impossible to buff other methods to compete without entirely destroying the economy and causing hyperinflation. It's possible to nerf mage farming AND add alternatives at the same time to balance things, but adding alternatives without removing mage farming will either:
- Quickly devalue whatever items they give since people will farm them to market saturation
- Cause hyperinflation because they add pure meso

This is due to mage farming being the main source of pure meso, and also being relatively uncommon compared to other content (very few consistent farmers compared to all the HT parties or whatever). So if we add a pure meso content to compete, it'll be run often enough to significantly increase the amount of pure mesos being added (see RG as an example), causing inflation. If we add valuable items instead of meso, people will run that content until their value drops to below mage farm level, as people tend to prefer non mage farming content (see initial RG and the impact on CS prices as an example, or current rg and the impact on bwg/taru prices)

 

As a player who started in the past year and half, I also think mage farming as it is now...is fine. What I do think is that higher level content that is difficult mechanically, should be rewarded with better money on an hourly basis, however I've yet to see a piece of content in royals that is mechanically difficult to the point where it should be greatly rewarded. By design, I think maple in general won't allow for extremely difficult.

I also don't think there should be any changes to low to mid level ranges. I think in generally, this invites botters and other forms of cheating to have a lower barrier into making good money. I also don't see a need for lower level content to be extremely rewarding. Levels fly by so fast in royals and you barely need any mesos early on and everyone has access to an effective 900m/hr from level 15, it's called voting every day. In general, I think only a few content should be meta by design, it is extremely bad design for all content to be brought close to the most effective tactic available. By definition, there should just 1 meta and right now that is mage farming. In fact, I think the barrier to entry for the meta money maker right now is quite low. There is plenty of time for a new player to play the game organically, get well into 4th job, decide that there is a need to farm something and make those characters to allow themselves to do so with very little ACTIVE game time.

I want to just take a moment to use osrs as a game progression and money making example. The best methods can make a lot of money, but the content is hard enough that only a small amount of the player base can actually achieve those results. Up until then, there are options for a mid range player that makes approximately 15-20% the amount of money the best, most efficient methods make. However, even then there is a relatively high active game time hurdle. You have to spend 10-20 hours just questing (though I would say they are designed much better and are generally more enjoyable), 100+ hours in training skills before you can actually kill the first genuine money making boss. Even then, there are plenty of ways to die. You messed up protection prayers? Dead. Forgot the rotations? Dead. Too inefficient at managing inventory? Dead. All this for 15-20% of the top money maker.

Now let's take a moment to look at royals. This is essentially what a well informed player with 60-120m investment is able to do:
1. 1 hr maple island
2. 1 hr orbis etc/2-3 hrs efficient questing route
3. 1 hr training to lvl 40
4. 1 hr effective game time to complete olaf 1
5. vote for 2 days to get basic pet equips
6. read up a bit on how apq works
7. access to money maker that is ~25% of top money maker by leading apq

oh did I mention you could do a set of 5 characters at the same time? Yeh you could do that, but you'd have to buy the pet equips on the main.
This is extremely low effort compared to 6-8 mage farm and requires far lower hardware and attention requirements.

Now on to offlinetv's claims. I think anyone who is scared of his claims can go and have a look at what a proper farmer like Donn1e is like by looking at them in IV2. Then look at offlinetv's video. The dude farmed for all of 3 mins and was already wall hugging and made mistakes on the looters and he claims to be able to make 2-3b an hr? Give me a break, I was born during the day, but thankfully not yesterday.

If you want to do something nice for the mid game, then pq untradeables like opq, epq is a solid way to go. I think there is value in somewhat eliminating the need of mid market cgs (~25 total range) so you allow players to exchange active game time for gear that will be serviceable until they decide there is a need to farm something.
20 clears of KPQ can reward an alternative version of the slime shoes with some hp, 1 all stat. Scrollable 5 times for 1 atk each, from tokens exchange
20 clears of another PQ give 2 atk cape with some hp, 5 all stat, 1 WA. Scrollable 5 times for 1 atk each, from tokens exchange

TLDR
- Meta is called meta for a reason, mage farming ok to be ave 3-4x better than alternatives. Alternatives barrier of entry isn't that high. Ironically barrier to entry for mage farm is also...not that bad
- D0nn1e's post...based
- Epoc's post...based
- Sylafia...based as always
- Offlinetv, thanks for the appeal to emotions, I almost believed it. Stop the cap and self snitching. GL in your new found desire to farm IRL, hopefully it's not as short lived as your mage farming career

 

It's fine that there's a meta content that earns more, I disagree with the massive wealth spread you seem to want but that's more a matter of opinion.

One of the real issues of mage farming is that it sucks and should not be the content the game encourages, any economy debates aside. Mage farming is tedious (yeah some find it relaxing but overall it's highly repetitive) and solo content that can't even be done by a large amount of players at once.
We should instead encourage people to play fun content with high skill caps, like VL or an actually hard boss

Also, mage farming is relatively low investment and once you get that... what are you farming for again? Making your attacker stronger, which you won't play because you're busy mage farming? Making bossing content good feeds into the loop properly as your meso is now useful and makes you more meso instead of just being a range flex game

 

There's way too many aspects to talk about for this topic, but... the biggest issue is time.

You could argue Royals is more of a catered experience, multiplayer game with post-game content.

Catered experience in the sense of "this is how you should be playing our game to experience OSMS MapleStory / MapleRoyals". Like a single player games story-mode.
- At least from what I think, this is the whole "reach higher levels, unlock more content, do content, get things that will help your own growth"
- Olaf gives slight direction as well with tasks, questing, and giving some rewards.

Post-game in the sense of "these are the things you should grind to power up you character after being able to experience everything the game has to offer".
- RG, LHC, VL, NT

The catered experience aspect feels terrible for most players. Need too many things in general to even really get started playing the game at all. HP washing? Terrible PQ rewards? Leech? Lackluster progression path? This can be mitigated with the help of other players and mesos but, well, mesos are one of the multple, major issues here. Could make a whole separate ordeal out of this aspect but it kind of deviates from the mage farming aspect, won't write it here.
The post-game experience feels terrible for most players.
- Horntail 44 times for no MW20 and make negative mesos or progress.
- Gacha 1.5m nx 3k totems and get 4 lines, sitting there realizing you did dailies for 3 months and basically got nothing.
- Daily NT for 3 hours praying for frag drops.
- VL 6x a week and get 4 meso bags and elixirs per box.
all this time and you basically moved nowhere.

It's all RNG, and RNG has no time to progress ratio. Mage farmers essentially are just shifting by utilizing the current market to directly quantify their time to progress as much as possible.
- 70 WS (on average, this isn't guaranteed either) to perfect a weapon, 35b in white scrolls, X amount of time mage farming mesos to reach there. Makes it easy to gauge.
- Who knows how much a 33 att boot is going to be, so just farm mesos forever to be able to outbid the other guy when it pops up eventually.

And then in the end, what even is meso used for? The game essentially has no meso sink. Mage farmers buy goods with their farmed meso, people hold the meso in hopes it actually can be used for something tangible, rinse, repeat, there's billions of mesos just existing because people perceive it to somehow have value in and of itself. The market is held up by everyone thinking the same way, but really, meso is practically useless. Maybe VL Belt? How many people are even running VLing.

Hot take:
Maybe make it so there's guarantee WS / CS drops from content. Add more ways to get CGS related equips from content. Limit it so it's a set amount per person and not per character so people can't solo? WS / CS is basically the entirety of progression at this point so it'll always be needed.
Mage farmers (outside of events at least) aren't progressing their characters when farming, they are strictly just making mesos. Their progression comes from everyone else's willingness to sell their own luck / progress, so create extra emphasis on progress coming from running content. Give a better, definitive time to progress ratio to content runners, not whatever pure jank RNG we have right now. It doesn't matter if this still somehow allows mage farmers to get to the end faster because it allows most other players to even see the end to begin with. People still need to run content to even get the items to hit CS with, people still need to farm the items to WS with, and people still need to hit a CS and go positive on items. The variance in RNG is still all there, same as ever, keeps people playing to keep rolling. It's been 12 years, why are there only supposedly 3 29 att boots? Where is the oversupply of all the CGS gear after all this time? CGS should be dirt cheap, yet it isn't because good CGS is hindered by the very nature of a CS, so increase the supply of CS. If CSing isn't working, well then at least you have WS to work on your perfect gear.

If the problem ends up being too many players are too strong now, the onus shifts to the devs to create or balance content where players can utilize their progress.
Either that, or maybe people should finally find peace in reaching the end. Do we want a forever moving goalpost? Is the point to literally never be able to reach the end?

 

No no, I definitely don't want a giant spread of wealth, but I think in general the splits on current ladders of money making is fine, although perhaps mage farming would do good with an alternative pegged at a higher level.

I think perhaps it would be good to split the methods into essentially solo and group. Solo content should be high intensity, high reward. Group can be much less demanding, but also would take a maybe 20% cut on the profits.

Mage farming could completely go and be replaced with a high intensity lvl 175+ solo content with similar mesos. For example 200m reward, 1 hr timer, you do a small JQ to get to a solo boss with different mechanics you have to navigate. The content itself could be 2 hrs time limit but a good player could finish within 45 mins to 1 hr. You could also include other parts that are iconic to maplestory to make this a daily quest I guess. The highest money making content should reward a complete player that is good at multiple aspects of the game. Some might be deterred by the thought of JQ, but that's exactly the point, you are rewarded by actually being good at the game, not just the parts of the game you want to be good at.

Then you could perhaps do this in a party, for example if you have 6 tasks to complete, same amount of time, but now the reward is scaled so that instead of 200m, it will be a 1b split between 6 players. Tasks will be split evenly, for example parties of 6 will need each player completing 1 task one after the other. parties of 3 will require each to complete 2 etc. The rewards will be scaled at 200m*no. players*0.8. Obviously in this case, there is some major efficiencies at play because you could feasibly run a second set while you wait for your first party, but the general idea still has merit I think.

Then below this, you could still have other content like APQ making relatively good money and low barrier or entry.

 

As a new player, my only income that I can make right now is event farming on multiple accounts and APQ.

It feels a bit unfair if mage farming has been around for 10+ years and everyone has already farmed their billions of meso and I can’t ever catch up. I was looking forward to find some innovative ways to set up mages in the future and farm since that’s what maplestory has always been at its core to me - a grindy Korean MMO

 

Current split is something like:
- Noobs: 20m/hr
- APQ: 60-80m/hr?, limited, reduced a bit by needing to find parties. I don't really APQ enough to be confident in this though
- Low lv leech: 80m/hr
- Mid leech (uwu2): 130m/hr
- High leech (skele): 180-200m/hr
- Mage farm: 250-300m/hr
- Goby: 300?m/hr? I don't sell so not sure what it is now
- Endgame bossing: like 100m/hr unless you're a quad attack pro LMAO

And as far as I can tell, 300m/hr is about the cap of what staff wants players to earn, meaning things above that get nerfed. It seems pretty reasonable to me, skele isn't that much investment and still makes close to optimal profit. So yeah I'd agree with keeping tiers around the same.

I would personally go with the opposite - solo is lower intensity and lower reward, group is higher intensity and higher reward. This is an MMO after all and we want to encourage people to play together, along with reward the time/effort required to recruit and get a good party comp. We also need to make content reward people for investing in their characters, which bossing does (smaller parties, faster runs), but mage farming does not (I love naked mages) and leech only minorly does (once you're at skele level there's not really any reason to invest more, but you still do need to spend like 10b+ for a low lv skele killer)

And yes we should absolutely reward people for being good at different aspects. Halloween event is a great example of rewarding the JQ pros - witch tower is a lot of fun and (at least used to be, dark tokens have since lost a lot of value so it's worse) good meso. But this means we'll need harder bosses/content for people to actually get challenged by, so it's likely a long term project to fix sadly.

 

Ok I think flipping the group and solo would make sense. I would be 100% on board to kill mage farm if there is a linear progression in terms of meso per hour from 80m from APQ with asterisk to 80-100m no asterisk at 120, eg low lvl leech. All the way up to 300m for intense, group activity that tests all aspects of the game.

I do think there needs to be a way for mesos to come in though, maybe for example if rose garden was 250m an hr (just example purposes) via gach option, but you can sell the totems at 65-75% expected gach for pure meso. Sorta like Apr gach decision making, go for consistency or jump a few hoops. I wasn’t around when rose garden was the shit so I am just going pure theory. What if th current RG can be scaled? Lower lvls can go but obviously they are limited by how strong they are. What if there can be duos? Cap 30 bees but you share 15 each? Would the meta become 1 char pure clear plus a NL FJ to catch bees faster?

 

Agree on pretty much all points, but I don't think there's much purpose with scaling RG, just give us different party content instead. Also, classes with AOE (mages, DK, even pally) can aggro bees to them for ez catch, so no need for NL if that was a thing.

 

mage farm is around 50 mil per hour and that is without the cost of potions why you want to nerf it ? mage cant boss or really do any content so thats all his purpose..
some people just want to log in and chill grind with a mage after work with out being dependent on someone else not not everyone can be online all day seraching for partys
stop trying to make the only meso making way in this server to sell leech

 

I think a lot of players agree with this, as more content + class balance broadly affects more peoples' actual gameplay experience than mage farming does.

All the discussion about mage farming amongst the community is great, but I think it'd be even better if we got some communication from a staff member about it, and what their position is and/or what they'd consider doing about it.

 

When people say mage farm on this server, it means something specific that's not just logging into one mage and grinding. Mage farm specifically is using multiple mages (most often 6) in static places in maps to spam ultimates, and then loot/sell everything on another dedicated looting character, and can reach like 300m/hr. I think dickdann's pure meso record was around 400m/hr? Although most players don't reach his rates

 

oh i see you mean that guy who play maple with his feet

 

Why you need mesos? What do you do with mesos? What do you do with stuff that you aquired with mesos?

Those for me are the question to make.

and then ask those question.

Why you need perfect weapons auf and highest possible cgs? What you gonna do with your range? Are you going to content or Sitting all day in FM?

Whats your goal?


WS and CS. Make those obtained via bossing ( rise the drop chance of it, istead of doing 20+ zak to see 1 CS) or make something like vboss where u hit a treshold to aquired a box and when u open you have chance to get WS CS from it.
About multiclient - make it to be restrict to idk 2-3 only( you can do it via IP i guess) so u can have up to 2-3 max = 1attaker a SE CR or HS.
You get ride of mage farming and making people start to do content instead.


I dont know if it make sense.