This is why people are quitting, and how the GMs can fix it.

Hello all. I made a new account for this because I'm going to give out a few personal details about myself that I don't want associated with my normal account.

I am a business strategy consulting senior working at one of the largest and most prestigious consulting firms in the country. I specialize in strategic marketing and social media, and brand reputation, and I've worked with many organizations, from startups to large, for-profit, government, military, and non-profit with 7 years of experience under my belt. I didn't say this to brag, I just want you to get a better idea of why I personally believe that my analysis on MapleRoyals can be trusted.

MapleRoyals is a good private server, managed mostly by very capable young adults. And many young adults often suffer from groupthink and fear of disrupting a working system. What this means, is basically many of the GMs tend to follow the ideas of 1-3 people (usually they have a "leader" personality type), and most GMs are too scared to put the effort or risk into approaching things from a new perspective. We saw a good example of "disrupting" through New Source, but that's a more technical approach rather than conceptual.

So why is MapleRoyals slowly but surely losing traction? A few things come to mind.

• Lack of high-involvement and high-reward community involvement
• Excess of constraints, restrictions, and rules
• Lack of willingness to create solutions for existing problems
• Overreliance on majority rule and negligence on minority request

So I'll expand into each of these four points and provide a solution for each one. Keep in mind that I fully acknowledge that MapleRoyals is a not a company, and there are a lot of constraints such as able hands and expense issues. But none of these solutions are impossible with the constraints considered.

Lack of high-involvement and high-reward community involvement
In a nutshell, this means events that people want to log on for. Events need to be engaging to everyone. Summoning a special monster in a specific map isn't too engaging. Sure, a decent number will show up, but prizes aren't enough and people aren't able to participate if they're already doing something else.

People want to feel as though they achieved something, and they want to compete with others for it. That's why the recent questionnaire player-held events were successful to a certain extent, because people are actively competing. Events don't need to be complicated or structured. They can be simple scheduled events, such as "first person to pick up a dropped item on the top of a jump quest wins." They want to be able to see the GMs as a friend.

And they want prizes for it. Special chairs. Have a special version of NX (maple points) that can be used to buy special hairstyles or donor points. Make it hard so people will still pay for donor points. There are a lot of possibilities here. 2X EXP events are also fantastic. 2X EXP events for self-training only - this would be excellent to engage training rather than leeching.

Point is, you need to get people involved and active. Make people do something and make people want to do it. The playerbase in Royals most likely ranges from 18 to 26. Go from there and think. What do people want. Get into the game and be a part of the userbase so that the GMs can see what players truly want.

Excess of constraints, restrictions, and rules
MapleRoyals has a purpose: to provide a nostalgic MapleStory experience. But it has an extremely important secondary function - freedom and customization. That's the beauty of private servers. It's like the Android of phones. People don't just want to be spoon-fed the rules, they want to break and be able to control their own approach.

I'm going to talk about "disrupting" again. A GM, at some point, made it extremely crucial to have a strong set of rules to follow. But that's the thing, people don't want rules. Rules are beneficial and rules are important, but they're not what people need in something like MapleRoyals. MapleRoyals is a community, not an organization. And a community with too many rules is an avoided community. We are all peers, we are all around the same age. GMs have the authority, but we don't want to see and feel that so frequently.

People are scared. I hear at least once or twice a week about how people need to be careful with chat logs and trade logs. Certain rules are unnecessary. It's good to have restrictions, but you need to do a cost-benefit analysis on whether a rule is worth keeping.

The question is: Is it better to prevent people from benefiting unfairly and restrict them, or is it better to give people the freedom?

A prime example is multiclienting. This is a rule that gives unfair advantages in comparison to legacy MapleStory, but the GMs decided it was worth letting people break the rules and have some freedom.

So what rules am I talking about? Account Sharing is the biggest one that comes into mind. I understand that account sharing gives people an unfair boost, but it also restricts a lot of freedom and turns away a decent number of people. It makes people scared to help friends, family, significant others. While this isn't always a major issue, it serves to chip away at peoples' tolerances. That's the main issue.

Lack of willingness to create solutions to existing problems and Overreliance on majority rule and negligence on minority request
I put these together because they go hand-in-hand. I noticed that a common approach to developing new data is to ask the community what they want. This is sensible, but not always the best approach.

In MapleRoyals' case, a decrease in playerbase can snowball. This means that although the majority of players want something A, if it can take the same amount of time to implement B, C, D, and E, it can have an incredibly beneficial impact. Right now I believe that GMs are focused too much on making most people happy, but not enough on making some people happy.

A lot of companies do this very nicely, and it makes them stand out. Santa Monica Studios personally pushed out a on-screen text scaling option to address the few people who felt that was a problem, and they did it very quickly. Blizzard edited the design of a small sign in the Junkertown map to better reflect Australian terminology. Small steps create large rewards.

MapleRoyals is a community. Communities strong but fragile. Losing a key member of the community can cause the remainder to waver. For example, if a group of friends play, and one person quits, the rest might quit. Then, if the group quits, some of the people surrounding that group may quit as well. If this group was vital in the bossing community, it could make it a lot harder to find viable bossing teams, which indirectly makes a lot more people less inclined to boss. That can cause even more people to quit. Finally, people go on the website and see that before, there was an average of 1000 people, and now there's an average of 700 people. That makes people think the server is dying which makes even more people jump ship.

These trends are important, because even though it's rare that this can happen, it's not impossible. And it certainly happens throughout MapleRoyals in small doses. 100 active people quitting over 1 year can mean 300 average players. People flock to the most populated private server and if MapleRoyals loses its #1 place then it can quickly downfall into an inescapable pit.

That's why minority voice is so important. HP Washing was only addressed when a large portion of the community expressed disdain towards it. But think about the minority. How many people quit because of HP washing? Addressing HP washing would not make people quit. But NOT addressing it WILL make people quit.

Same goes for other minority issues. Paladins, Buccaneers, and Marksmen being weak. Axes being completely useless. People who hate leeching. People who want CPQ. Addressing ANY of these issues will not make anyone quit. No one is gonna say "omg, Buccaneers are decent now, fuck this game." But if you leave it alone for too long, you chip away at a person's tolerance for this game.

Long story short, address the small issues if they're easy enough to address. I'm not a developer, but I have a decent background in IT. Changing damage outputs and rebalancing is easy. This is a private server, it doesn't have to be perfect. The pressure of fair rebalancing is extremely high in a game like Overwatch, but even they make test runs and throw out rebalancing options that are completely ridiculous.

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So TLDR Summary:

1. Make more events that involve people.
2. Be more lenient about certain rules and make people fear the GMs less.
3. Address the minority and take community ideas, even if only one person suggests it, into serious consideration.

 

After having read through all of this, I agree with everything for the most part.

You mentioned that the lack of change regarding HP washing is the reasons that some players have quit. I am most definitely part of this group, and am only around once more (albeit on a new account) because of the recent news they've given. This is a huge step in the right direction for the server, as it makes creating their dream class, something that should be done on a private server with relative ease, not a "troll move" if you're not someone who is crazy rich. Not to mention you have to have a bishop to leech yourself if mass HP washing. Thanks to this change, squishier classes will be able to survive another hit in most content, and this makes a world of difference.

This is not the only thing that needs to be addressed. There are other things in the server that people have quit over that the staff (more-so the lead admins) have not taken a stance on. Plenty of people quit because mages are just leech mules at this point. Why on earth would someone bring an IL mage to a boss over any non-magician?

Events, while generally enjoyable, give rewards that make no impact on a player. A ring with minimal stats, for example, is not going to be felt. It's pretty much placebo rewards to make the players feel good while not making any impact on the game itself. These items are also sometimes difficult to obtain and require lots of playing during the event, leading to a high amount of input for a weak reward. At first you are happy you finished grinding out something, but then you realize it made no difference.

I truthfully don't have a huge list of things on the top of my mind, but even then every little thing counts.

 

Yeah those giveaway events that have been happening over the last few days where people get 25M~100M~1B and cool chairs and stuff - people flock towards those things. I bet if those were official GM events people would log on just for it.

 

Hi

Just jumping in, feedback is good, we love it, but multiple forum accounts is against the rules, so please don't do it.

Carry on.

 

nice idea

 

Excess of rules is simply too true. People are afraid of what to type on daily basis in fear of getting banned for it. Let's be honest we are all adults here, should we really limit peoples socializing by making certain words off limits?
I genuinely want to know who is even bothered by the usage of these words? I understand that certain words have history and can be used offensively, but there is a shitton of other words that have history and almost every word can be used offensively... What differentiates n-word from pointy eyes, towelhead or white trash? By the current logic of the rules, these words should be banned also and we should have zero tolerance for them.

I have never understood why people hold these words in such a high esteem and therefore give the word the power you so desperately want it not to have. When people actually use these words casually and when they are not held above other "offensive" words, the words WILL lose their power.
Instead of having zero tolerance for certain words that are being held above other "offensive" words why not just focus on the people that actually use them offensively to abuse someone?

No one, I mean no one should be offended by a word that wasn't even directed at them but they saw someone type it.

Get some sense to the rules you fricking bubbles.

 

Putting my own feelings about any number of words being reference, I wanted to offer some insight...

Quite a few people (sometimes the same person, but usually not) come forward with reports for a whole slew of personal and moral objections to these words. So there is a part of the community who don't want the words around in all chat/smega/etc. Also, to respond to the highlighted part ( I personally don't see the connection with white trash but), the others if they ever happened (do they? I don't think I've seen reports for them), and they get reported, I have a feeling the consensus among staff would be treat it like other big words. I won't speak for the other staff of course, but I've yet to see those words or phrases get reported, so it's not that they're "differerent", it just doesn't happen afaik. It's not really our place to tell people what they should and shouldn't be offended by.

Now as a general rule, I believe the rules are in place because Matt wanted certain words more or less absent from the public chat of his game. The server is also PG13, and anyone 13 years of older may play, so technically, no not everyone here is adults. Even though most of us are lol.

Just to shed some light on why and how.

 

100% agree with this. In my opinion, the rules against account sharing does more harm than good to this server.

Are account sharing bans really essential for fair gameplay?

Royals make a really big deal out of account sharing, arguing that account sharers gain unfair advantage over others, such as:

• Taking turns to grind on 1 character to level faster and accumulate more wealth.
• Borrowing a friend's bishop to HS / leech oneself.
• Paying others mesos to grind (power-leveling services) or quest (doing Zak JQ) on one's character.

However, is it really so important to prevent those things from happening, even at the cost of banning & turning away many players? I don't think so. There is another popular private server that doesn't prohibit account sharing, and it's running just fine. Players there aren't constantly complaining about the "unfair advantages" gained by account sharers. In fact, they couldn't care less about it. Nobody even suggested or mentioned making account sharing bannable on that server's forum and discord.

The next question is, why don't they care? I cannot speak for others, so I will explain why I don't care about those "unfair advantages".

1. For the case of 2 people taking turns to train on 1 character. Although the character in question may level faster than other ones, its ownership is also split between 2 players. Therefore, after that character becomes high-leveled, the 2 owners will need to split play time, boss runs, and other experiences of that character. That seems totally fair to me.

2. For the case of 2 people taking turns to make mesos on 1 character. This is even less a problem because it's possible to do similar things in Royals right now. There is no rule that prevents player 1 from grinding on account 1 and giving all his money to player 2 on account 2. This already happens between some couples in Royals. In this case, I think player 2 is incredibly lucky, but it is not unfair, because all mesos were earned legitimately.

3. For the case of borrowing a friend's bishop to HS / leech oneself. This seems to be unfair, because it's a large advantage that comes from being friends with a Bishop player. However, pre-BB MapleStory was centered around the social aspect, and there is nothing wrong with benefiting from friendship. Even in Royals right now, people who are very social can enjoy much larger gains than leeching oneself, such as borrowing expensive gears, finding boss parties easily, and free FM spots. I am totally fine with those advantages gained from friendship, so why should I care about someone borrowing a Bishop to leech himself / herself?

4. For the case of paying other people mesos (not real-world money) to grind levels / do quests on ones' character, it's just like leech, where you spend money to save time. I don't have a problem with it.

In conclusion, although account sharers can gain some advantages over others, many similar scenarios are already prevalent in Royals, and I don't find any of them game-breaking.

Are the rules against account sharing harmful to Royals?

Definitely. When a group of close friends (or boyfriend & girlfriend) in real-life start together, account sharing is a convenience that really improves their gaming experience. I know several groups of people like that. Most of them have switched to the private server that allows account sharing now. When I asked them what difference it makes, all of them said it's really nice to be able to share accounts with trusted ones.

Here is one such example: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/bans-ban-appeals-lets-taco-bout-it.117194/

In this case, @anniedearr tried to log in from a University that has a banned IP, and got a ban message. She got anxious and asked her friend to try logging in at home (to check whether it's an IP ban or account ban). Her account was not banned before that, but she was banned 30 days for minor account sharing. She tried to ask for a change in Feedback, but nothing was done.

What happened next? She switched to another server, along with 5 of her friends who wanted to accompany her. They were the core members of a small but tightly-knit guild, which fell apart after that incident. Other members of that guild either switched server too after a while, or became less active after most of their social circles quit. As far as I know, only 1 member out of 10+ people in that guild managed to form another social circle and still remains active. I was good friends with them, so I made an account in that server too. Currently my playing time is 50/50 between the 2 servers, but this may change if more of my friends / guild members quit Royals.

Other examples I know don't have such significant cascading effect, but the gist is similar. Therefore, if account sharing isn't bannable, I think Royals will definitely be more active than right now.

Is it too late to revert account sharing bans?

Another argument that I frequently hear is "it has been like this for 5 years, so there is no way back".

I don't see a technical problem with reverting the account sharing bans. I don't know what database Royals uses, but I remember Tim saying that queries can be done to find players banned for a specific reason.

There may be repercussions following the reverse. People might be angry that they were banned for a reason that is no longer bannable now. Compensations proportional to the banned time (such as NX or mesos) can be given to lessen the effect.

If the administration really don't want to revert previous account-sharing bans, they can keep the previous bans but stop banning account sharers from now on. In this case, it would be similar to modifying laws to make something not a crime in real life. People who committed the crime before the modification date remain jailed, but people who does so after the modification remain innocent. The administration can argue that previous account sharers deserve punishment because they knowingly violated a rule, and the changes in rules don't affect that. This will not undo the harms that has already been done, but it will prevent new harms from happening.

 

I think I really want to highlight two specific points in the original post. People like freedom, and the GMs are suffering from groupthink. It's not the GMs' fault, because it happens to everyone. But they're scared to change the system too much. It's easy to say "this has been working since the beginning so why change it now?" But that's never a good thought process, no company succeeds by just doing the same thing and never trying to improve by taking risks.

I think the GMs are comfortable with where they are now, but it's HARD to implement these changes and approach this problem. But if you take too long, you WILL slowly lose people to other servers.

This server is kept alive by its community, not its GMs. I understand why the GMs may feel responsible for keeping up a strict system, but you are not going to have any benefits by making rules that really don't matter in the end. It's worse to lose ONE valuable member of this community than it is to prevent 100 people from getting an unfair advantage.

Speaking of unfair advantages - they are not unfair if everyone has them. People are upset about account sharing unfair advantages but most of us are adults, most of us have friends, and most of us can trust our friends with our info. We run the risk of losing our stuff - that should be our responsibility alone.

Companies like Nexon are forced to create due diligence and enforce a safe and responsible community because they're legally bound to it. They HAVE to output a fair and well-controlled game because people pay for it. Just because people aren't FORCED to pay doesn't mean they don't owe their customers the due diligence. It's literally business law - they don't have a choice.

The GMs - you have a choice. You're managing a community with donations to help server and dev expenses. Not running a company. You aren't for-profit. You need to act for the benefit of the community, and you can't have a community without a wide variety of people. It doesn't matter if you like them or not - if they are not doing anything illegal and if they are not hacking the game, then it should be allowed. Again - unfair advantages only exist if people actually have unfair advantages - if everyone has the option, then it's not an unfair advantage.

 

I personally think banning words is fine, but I think it should come in the form of filtering, similar to how GMS would have filters that prevent you from typing a word. If GMS could do this, why can't Royals? Royals doesn't have to be MORE strict about this than an actual company like Wizet and Nexon. That's going against the freedom aspect. The word "fuck" was banned in GMS but people still found ways around it by saying f!k or fck or fk or phuk or FUU or whatever. No one I know got banned for it. I know as a teenager I said those words almost daily, out loud, even in smegas, so...

 

Thank you for bringing an honest opinion about this server.
I agree with you and I indeed think is the best server and has the potential to be even better.

There's something urgently that needs to be addressed and it's the HP wash wagon making new comers run away from the server (Like me). I am interested in playing, but I am honestly not wasting my time making a bishop to leech, and spending months of NX Cash savings to get HP, that's just lame, and scares out the people. It's the most stupid thing to be implemented in a Private Server, people come to PS to have fun and enjoy classes, in this case we are here to enjoy a classic old MapleStory, but you are doing it exactly like the original MS.

You can do better than the greedy Nexon guys! You got the power to be the best of the best MapleStory Private Server, you got the potential to have 3k or more players online. You guys have the potential to make a game even better than the current MapleStory! Go for your dreams, go for your players dreams, remove HP Wash (or fix it somehow) and make a happy community have a great time and make new friends. I said.

 

What about people buying and selling accounts, since there is no way of differentiating them from actual account sharers.

 

This is just my opinion, but I agree with the OP - so what? This is a private server - people want freedom. If GMs can find proof of RWT or buying and selling accounts, then they can go with the ban. But that cost benefit analysis mentioned in the OP makes sense - how much do you want to sacrifice in order to prevent a small few from gaining an advantage? And for what? If there are 100 people level 180+ who bought their accounts, what will be lost? Who will suffer for this? People will find things unfair, yes, but in exchange you're preventing a lot of positive gameplay with a much larger sub-group of people. Couples who live apart but play together - my girlfriend and I are in an LDR but we visit each other pretty often and play Maple side by side.

 

Yeah, if people buy accounts with real-world money, that falls under the RWT ban.

But if people buy accounts with mesos, what's the real harm? People who earned enough mesos to buy an account probably have high-level accounts themselves, so they don't get much new experience by leveling up all over again. It's similar to buying leech on your 2nd char after your 1st char reaches high-level, but potentially paying more mesos for untradeables like zhelm / krex rings.

 

Agreed. It's really hard to prove RWT ban versus just plain generosity. But if it's that big of a problem, just open an investigation into it.

The big question I have is why is MapleRoyals more strict than Nexon?

 

because one of the primary problems the server owner had with gms was how lax nexon was regarding things they thought gave players out of game advantages over others.

 

I am saying there is no way to investigate that. If i sold an account for real money, i can just say i have given this account to my friend for sharing. That's a pretty huge loophole.

Cause Nexon's maplestory was filled with rwt and hackers :/

 

Ok, fair enough. If that's the creator's huge problem against normal GMS then I understand banning account sharing to avoid RWT situations at least to a certain extent. I don't want this post to detract from OP's other points though, the listen-to-minority and better events were spot on.

 

Yeah that's definitely a problem. When GMs are working hard to deal with RWT of WS/CS/Equips, we probably shouldn't add RWT of accounts to their plates too.

But if we manage to significantly reduce the amount of RWT one day, maybe that's the time to consider making account sharing legal here.

 

I can't think of a single game where account sharing is legal. The reason why it's not legal is simple; we don't want some players to gain unfair advantage over others (e.g. sharing accounts with siblings, and thus being able to progress in the game much faster than those who play solo, or rather, do not have anyone else to share the account with).