Just to make it clear when we say afk farming we don't literally mean afk farming, you're still at your computer monitoring everything that's going on. You still need to manually attack every few minutes to keep map ownership and move your character left and right when it gets knocked to the edge of the map if you want to be efficient (which actually means this isn't afk farming at all but that's not the point). Do you also consider bringing mules to bosses like krex unfair as well then? There might be a combined playtime of 10 seconds between your mules out of the hour you're fighting the boss yet you reap whatever benefits your mules bring, whether that be SE, SI or HS. What about pets that heal and loot for you, they're technically relieving player input so should those be in the game as well? I see all of these the same as stopper farming. There are mobile games that are built on idle farming and are hugely successful. Games like FF Brave Exvius, Summoners War, War of Crown, Brave Frontier just to name a few are 10% "actual playing" and 90% auto combat, do you not consider those games to be games then? So long as you're playing the game within the rules of the server you should be able to do whatever you want. Maplestory has never been a game about balance, it's always been a community based game and as such should be treated as one. The biggest appeal to this game is the community, you take that aspect away and it becomes a subpar 2D mmorpg like the hundreds of other titles you've never heard of. It's the cutesy characters, emoticons and character interactions that attracted so many people to play this game. I think everyone here can agree that the current state of our game is the furthest thing from being balanced yet we're able to look past that and enjoy the game for how it is and that's what's important, having fun. Would removing afk farming make the game more fair to people without a 4th job mage that can't do it? Sure, maybe, but at the cost of what, taking the fun away from those that can?
Yes I am clear on how the process works: you teleport twice to the center of the map, press heal, and press summon. This takes at most 3 seconds to do. Most people arent monitoring their hs farming the whole time. If a player was going to pay attention the whole time I dont understand why they would be sitting there making 25m/ hour when they can go just about anywhere and make 50m+ just manual farming instead. While I dont like the fact of players being able to make multiple accounts in general, I dont have nearly as much of a problem with it. As I have stated, the biggest problem for me about hs farming is that a person can do it even when they are not playing the game. I can work out and hs farm between sets, I can read a book, I can watch a movie, I can clean the house, I can do work on the computer. All of these things you can do while hs farming, but you cant benefit from buff mules while doing these things. To benefit from buff mules you must be actively attacking mobs/bosses or else it is completely pointless. Thus it is completely different compared to hs farming since with hs farming all you have to do is get back for 2-3 seconds every 2min 40secs. Same thing with pets, whats the point of their benefits if your not actively playing the game the whole time? the fact that they use pots for you to keep you alive when your afk? you can just get on a rope and its the same thing. While Maplestory isnt about balance, Mapleroyals on the other hand is. If the community was bad in this game would people stay? yea alot of them would. But what if we throw balance out just like nexon did with the original GMS and introduce Pay2W, Cubes, 30 more OP classes, and 30m damage cap? 99% of the current players would quit instantly. Most people are here for nostalgia, and Many aspects of nostalgia is about balance. If we had the things above that I mentioned which break balances, this server would no longer be nostalgic. When you compare Maplestory and Mapleroyals I believe it's hard to consider the current state of our game being the furthest thing from being balanced. Lastly I agree that community is very very important, I never mentioned it and especially did not argue against that fact in any regard previously. I can name like 50 instances in this server where a change was made to create balance even when it would take fun away from players. Let me name just 3 since I dont want to write up an entire book: 1. Gobies were nerfed because the money from their lootings were ridiculous. - Who benefited from nerfing gobies? no one, it just took fun away from the mages who made alot of money there. 2. During last year's anniversary event, a player could get into maple hill- log out- and when he/she logs back in they would be at maple hill again. This allowed players to take up to 6 characters from a single account and get them into the tree beforehand to be able to loot up to 6 golden leaves per account, per round. However this year if you log off in maple hill you will log into a seperate map where you cannot loot golden leaves. - Who benefited from not being able to take in 6 characters per account? no one, It just took the fun away from the people with 3 accounts and 18 characters. 3. People used to be able to park their buff mules in fm and have access to them whenever via the FM button. However the FM button has been removed and as a result players cannot have super easy access to their buff mules from everywhere. - Who benefited from not being to use buff mules in such a convenient way? no one, It just took the fun away from people who had a bunch of buff mules. I think its pretty apparent that Balance is a huge concern of the Mapleroyals staff and that they prioritize (as they should) balance over how much "fun" it is for players to have something that is out of balance.
My opinion is that if something is not too op it doesn't have to be changed. An hour's farming = an hour's usage of stopper seems really op to me
FWIW gobies were never nerfed @Nineskies. And the maple hill change you mentioned was because being able to log out and get another one is considered a glitch, the intention is for someone to get 1 per time it explodes not more than that. Very different than balancing the game.
Alrighty I stand corrected although I am wondering why you guys didnt fix the maple hill glitch for the entire 2 months of last year if that was the case o.o. Well either way, let me replace it with another 2 cases of balance decisions then: 1. Every decision made for the sake of meso/nx sink is for the sake of balance: higher taxes, the decision to make nx items expire going foreward, no longer being able to purchase VIP hair coupons for 1m mesos, etc - Taxes dont help anyone and neither does expiring nx and having to spend 5k+ nx on hair coupons now. Maybe some of these decisions are partly due to wanting to get closer to the original game, but wanting to get closer to the original in many aspects has to do with balance as well 2.Removal of certain items: about 2 years ago we had black crystal blade which is a lvl 100 1h sword and it was removed from the game because it was deemed too "op." I disagree with the fact that the sword is op at all however the fact is that an item that had already existed in the game was removed for the sake of balance - No one benefited from the removal of the coolest looking sword in all of Maple. Im sure alot of 1h sword heroes at the time had to cringe at the fact that the awesome sword inbued in blue flames had become just a dream. As a staff member I believe you would agree with me that balance is a very important aspect in the goal of this server
Some things get balanced but others do not. Note how paladins are still low tier classes and no one makes a shadower for long. Same for marksman. Some people make them yes but others don't because they're below average attackers and don't have much to make up for it. Some things don't get changed for balance but they get changed for fairness or other reasons. If a glitch doesn't get changed (like being able to log out in maple Hill just to go reloot another leaf) it's either because no one thought to report it to us, or because it isn't fixable without file changes. Regardless i was discussing this topic from a players point of view, personally. Also last year's event was 1 month long.. The server 2 years ago is different than it is today. 2 yrs ago what would have been deemed op isn't the same as it is today. Taxes were because they never existed solely out of a glitch and it helped to curb inflation which people had been complaining about for years.. I just don't understand your point with this. Is it because you want to get rid of stopper farming? You'd have to get rid of summons entirely because people summon farm anything. Zombie teeth, leprechauns, elder wraiths, etc. And honestly who cares if someone decides to use their mage or bowmans summon to farm with.. I do it when I'm too busy with something else to grind / farm. I could choose to grind at ulu and get 50m/hour without selling leech and also get exp for my mage and bucc or i can choose to summon farm and get like 10m/hour (assuming that the stoppers even sell! Just because you have a stock of items doesn't mean you have the money, not until they sell.)
One last thing I'd like to add, summons aren't the sole reason why afk farming is possible, pets play a much bigger role in it. Without automated healing and looting there'd be no such thing as afk farming. When you think about it afk farming is a byproduct of many things coming together. Obviously there's classes with summons, then there's pets, the map being small and single platformed and low hp easy to kill mobs. You can't change something about stopper farming without affecting lower level players and I don't think it's good to change something just because a small group of classes with summons are "ruining" it.
Yes some things get balanced out and others do not, however once something crosses a certain boundary of balance then usually a topic is brought up and it is addressed one way or another. This is of course assuming there is a general consensus of the problem. Either way balance is a huge aspect of those reasons. Are you nitpicking about these things just for our information or is because you actually believe that balance is not a super vital part of this server? I dont believe that is actually your argument but if that is actually the case then I would like to ask about 3 other balancing decisions which I would need an explanation for: - Why dont mobs such as drum bunnies drop chaos scrolls? Isn't it because this would break the end game gear balance that we have now? - Why is there even a discussion about Mark of Naricain getting nerfed because "it doesn't make sense that an easier boss drops a better pendant than horntail" if balance isnt a vital aspect of the server? - Why did Matt deliberately make balanced fury recipes 100x more expensive from 150k to 150m when it was always originally 150k and even the npc (before Matt deleted that part) says herself that she charges 150k for all her crafting services? He did this of course because if balanced furies recipe was actually 150k then it would only cost a fraction of what it costs to make cilbis, therefore making end game stars super easy to obtain and also obliterate the value of cilbis Unless you actually believe that balance is Not an ultra crucial aspect of this server, you don't have to go out of your way to explain the things I just mentioned. I honestly believe that my point here is very simple and clear: I think the current way hs farming works is a problem and I want a discussion to delve deeper into the topic and see if we can come to a consensus about it being a problem. Just to be clear, I'm not sure what the best solution to it is. However when it comes to solving a problem the first step is always to acknowledge the problem. If you dont agree with me on the acknowledgement of this being a problem then there is no point in discussing any kind of solution since even if I came up with a perfect solution, you at the end of it all would just tell me that you don't think this topic is a problem in the first place. Again, my objective here is try to just take the first step of pointing out what I believe is a problem. If we can agree that it is a problem then we can put our heads together and see if we can find a solution, but until we can agree on the base premise, discussing a solution will get us nowhere. This is kind of telling me that my opinion is worthless without any facts to back it up, so im going to disregard this part
Your right about that. I honestly didnt really think about it too much from that perspective. However as I mentioned just a minute earlier in my response to Sila, my point in this whole thread is to delve deeper into the topic and see if we can come to a consensus about the topic. I haven't thought too much about the solution and the one solution that I did suggest earlier had some fatal flaws to it. But again, I am just trying to take the first step here which is to see if we can agree that this is a problem in the first place, because no matter how perfect the solution, there is no point in it if we cannot agree on the base premise. If there is a general consesus, we can open up something in the feedback section instead of the general discussion section to brainstorm some ideas
The thing is, I'm pointing out that you seem to be a very small minority who think stopper farming is a problem or that it's unfair. It's been a part of the server for the past 3+ years at this point, and no one has had an issue with it. The drop rate may be higher than it was in old source but that is the same for places like Ulu 2 or Skeles which are also higher than average drop rate. Which, still, benefits mages who can grind there much more efficiently. If the discussion is about the drop rate alone, well, drop rates aren't finalized for anything currently. We aren't using the proper drop tables so rates of everything are skewed. It's something that will be worked on but it takes time since the original source code is missing a lot of places we have (like ulu, ToT, etc). I personally don't see it a problem, so maybe that's why I'm confused at your point to this discussion other than simply discussing it. There's a motive somewhere and that's what I'm trying to figure out. Is the motive to try and nerf stopper farming? Nerf the rate? To shift people's interests elsewhere?
How long something has been a part of the server I believe is not very relevant seeing how there are many examples of things having been changed in this server even though they had been around for 2+ years. And your probably right that its a small minority, but isn't the whole point of a discussion to present info that people may not be aware of/thought of to possibly shift people's opinions? Yes I am trying to simply discuss it, that is my motive, I thought I made that very clear in my earlier reply to you. Even before that, if you look at the the very last thing I say in the OP, and the fact that I posted this in the general discussion instead of feedback, I would say my objective is quite obvious. As I mentioned above "the whole point of a discussion is to present info or perspective that people may not be aware of/thought of to possibly shift people's opinions." In simpler terms, I am trying to have a discussion so either I or others may shift opinions to possibly come to a consensus on whether or not hs farming is op or not. I can say something like I want to nerf heartstopper rates down to the ground (not that im saying thats the solution), but that discussion would be pointless for those that believe making 20m/hour (much more than this during this event thanks to candles and sunshines) by playing 3 seconds out 2mins/40secs is perfectly ok. So again, there's no point in discussing a solution if you don't agree with my base opinion If we ever get to the solution stage we can make a new post in the feedback section with a link to this thread. Until then I'm not looking to discuss what form my base opinion would take
Alright then I think I've made my opinions clear enough and if you truly don't want to actually change anything you just want to discuss it, then I'm going to back out of the discussion because we're going in circles anyway. There's not really much left to discuss anyway, everything's been covered in the past 3 pages, but Im going to unwatch the thread and back away.
Well I did say I'm trying to change other people's and/or my opinions in my earlier post to you, so actually I am trying to change something. In any case: I'll be making a thread with a poll sometime about hs farming with a summary of the things discussed here. From there if the poll indicates that the majority thinks hs farming is a problem then I will go on to making a feedback thread about possible solutions. If not then that's that. In the meantime if anyone has anything they want to add to this discussion that hasn't already been discussed please do post your thoughts
I train at voodoos regularly on multiple characters for the sake of exp and not HS. Here are my thoughts: AFK farmers dominate the channels, but there if often at least a few open. In that vein, I do not care about the farmers because they aren't affecting me. I understand that farming is part of the economy, and higher leveled individuals are set in their ways about how the server should be played, thus trying to REMOVE the farming aspect of HS is a moot point. The problem for me lies in the potential of every channel being full of farmers, not allowing individuals to train there. This is similar in many ways to leeching, but that is for another thread. So, let's say you want to train at voodoos, but they're all full of farmers or other people training: 1. KS'ing the farmers isn't an option because, well, KS'ing isn't an option. 2. Limit, in some manner, summon effectiveness/usage on that map. I'm not sure this is within the means of the programming, but, in any case, that would be "removing" the farming aspect. A no-no. 3. Level cap the room. Again, a programming dilemma? But make the level 120 or 125. It would give third job summons plenty of time and fourth job summons some room, but it surely eliminates plenty of fourth job farmers. 4. In some manner nerf HS themselves. Whether by drop rate or effectiveness, make the HS less valuable to the farmers. 5. Instance the map. This 100% solves the farmer/trainer dilemma, but the potential quantities of HS that would come out of this would be stupendous, practically making them the default training potion for the server because the value is so low. And I don't want that. 6. My personal favorite. Make it so, starting at level 120, untradeable versions of HS may be purchasable from an NPC for 500-700k each. Give the farmers another means, if less attractive, to obtain the HS. I promise there are better ways to MAKE money than to farm HS with the intent of selling them. Combine this with option 3, and the game favors the little guy a bit, but I am the little guy. I leave the floor open to further thoughts.
I am just curious, is NINENINE one of your characters? I received very low-ball offers (80M for 16TMA 3-slots single earring, for example) multiple times from this character. Hopefully it is not one of your characters. If it is not, then I apologize for raising the suspicion, and have a nice day. If it is your character, then I just wanna say, it seems that some parts of the good income from "merching and scrolling" comes from ripping off other players. Of course, merchants buy low and sell high to get profit, but I think the offers I got from NINENINE have crossed the line, and became attempts to deceive and rip off people. I don't like that approach at all, no matter how much money it gives. To me, it is worse than AFK farming. At least AFK farmers provide solid stuff for buyers.
Thanks, then I do apologize for raising the suspicion. Just wanna remind everyone to be careful to NINENINE's offers. Let lowballers get what they deserve ~
The lowballer has characters "NINENINE" and "NINENINENINE", and when I saw her name starts with Nine, and she also talks about making lots money from meching & scrolling, it just struck me as a possibility. For some people, especially people who know her, this may sound ridiculous, and I know it's baseless. That's why I used the "if" sentences. But since there aren't many people on this server, name similarities do not occur that much. In fact, if you read the ban appeals, many reasonings by GMs are also based on similar start / end of names.
Please stay on topic and keep the discussion about farming heartstoppers per the original post ^^ Thank you! ♡
