Backtracking changes

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well.

I am here out of personal curiosity, and not in any official capacity. I am writing this thread as a user, and not representative of Staff, nor in collaboration with any other Staff member or commissioned to conduct an official survey. Okay, I hope that's enough clarification.

Recent events (and less recent ones, too) have sparked a curiosity in me, about how people would feel about the idea of MapleRoyals backtracking through some custom changes, to return to a state closer to vanilla MapleStory in terms of core gameplay and class identity, but with tweaks pertaining solely to the %-damage numbers on various skills. If it is not clear what I mean by this, allow me to list two examples of custom changes which I argue are fundamentally different:

A) Buffing the range on Paladin's Blast and increasing its damage output from 550% to 580%.
B) Adding Total Crash to White Knights, giving them the unique ability to remove monsters' Weapon & Magic Cancel.

Example A tweaks the numbers of a skill inherent to the original class, allowing it to be more flexible and dish out a bit more damage. Example B introduces new functionality to the class. Now let me list two further examples, similar but slightly different:

C) Buffing Sniper's Strafe to deal 125% damage instead of 100%.
D) Removing the cooldown on Buccaneer's Transformation.

These two examples are perhaps more subtle, since example D, removing the cooldown on Buccaneer's Transformation, did not strictly introduce new functionality to the class, but it did change a core part of the class' identity, and it did change the way the class was played.

Now when I speak of "returning to a state closer to vanilla", I am referring to a hypothetical version of the game which retains tweaks to skills such as example A and example C, as they did not shift the class away from the way that it was played in vanilla MapleStory. It however also means a version of the game without changes such as example B and example D. Do note that, to compensate for the "removal" of custom changes such as example B and example D, other tweaks, more similar to the nature of example A and example C, should reasonably be introduced.

It may not always be a simple distinction to make, as can be demonstrated by

E) Increasing the damage of Marksman's Snipe to 199k from 99k, and reducing its cooldown from 15 seconds to 5 seconds (4 in reality).

Compare example D and example E. Technically neither introduced new functionality to the class, yet I would argue that example D strays further from vanilla MapleStory than example E does. Anyway, my point is not to get stuck in technical details here, but rather to invite others to share how they feel about such an idea. Again I must stress that I am not here in any official manner whatsoever, and this thread does not signify what the Staff plans to do.

The arguments I see for entertaining this idea are both related to the advertisement of MapleRoyals, which focuses on "nostalgia" and the "oldschool"-factor, the difficulty of predicting the outcome and effect of heavily customised changes, such as examples B and D, and the predictability aspect for players, who before investing in a long-term project such as a new character will want to know roughly what the class arrangement in terms of features and functionality will be months, or even years down the line. The arguments I see against it are rather self-explanatory: it diverges from a meta that has evolved as a result of custom changes made in the past, and people have adapted and made mules to suit this current state of the game.

Thanks for reading my thread. Perhaps it will garner little interest, or perhaps it's an irrelevant question that would have been posted long ago were it of any interest to anyone; but I wanted to share nonetheless. As usual I am glad to see the level of engagement and passion the people of this community have for the game. Have a good day now.

Spoiler: P.S.

I preemptively apologise for any errors I might have made in this thread, I have written it in a hurry. I also hope no long-winded theories will be drafted about how the ideas laid out in this thread may underpin my psychology and affect or explain how I operate as a member of Staff. Thanks, lol.

 

I think such ideas bring positive vibes to the server.

Many custom changes were made in the past to bring out the best balance staff and community could formulate together, within the technical limiations. A good example you mentioned is D.

Before the tri-balance patch, it was a norm for buccaneers to alternate between the naked form and the transformed state. Allowing infinite transformation buffed buccaneer's DPS to a remarkable, somewhat balanced level among other classes but many at the time mentioned how the identity of the class has been taken away. Now that we think about it, there were other ways to yield the same result without introducing such drastic change, not saying it was a bad one.

Those reasonable compensations could be simple damage % buffs to skills that are commonly used in the un-transformed state to match the current firepower of buccs. This also solves one of the issues that was recently brought to the surface. Permanent transformation covers all the pretty NX/RP wears on the character but buccs don't really have an option to stay out of the transformation during bossing/PQing because they'd be making a serious dps loss. If we can revisit some of the custom changes and modify them to bring back the "nostalgic" identities of certain classes, while offering necessary compensations, it may solve multiple problems at the same time.

 

From the day i joined, i knew i wouldn't be able to "re-live" the gms of olden days, and when joining here, i expected to at least feel familiarity with the game.
To that end, royals didn't fail me. Visually, it looks like maplestory. Functionally, it felt like playing gms in terms of classes, skills, and combat. Community was different, as its a smaller and far more well informed than back in GMS, but i was prepared for that as well.
Idk about you, but nostalgia for me doesn't exist in the small details, but rather, in the whole experience, which is why i feel like core changes to a class that still retain its general image is perfectly reasonable.
Royals is not oldschool gms, it evolved from it by the design needs of its community, and its limitations as a slightly higher rate, smaller population sized server. Its a seperate beast.
So no, im against doing a mass revert for the sake of this ethereal concept of "nostalgia". I'm not nostalgic for the damage classes did, or the specifics of how each skill behaved. As long as the coherency of maplestory is there, im down to balance changes.

 

We talked a bit about this internally and I think we share a similar... philosophy(?) on the nature of this topic, so I'll do my piece on adding to the public conversation as well! Now as we all know, I know absolutely nothing about this game and as a result rarely participate in such conversations. But this is less about my ideas on what specifically needs to be changed for optimal gameplay, and more about my ideas on how generally we can go about making such changes for optimal gameplay. I have actually made similar comments on various feedback posts in the past (before I was Staff), and I think there is a bit of a habit in our community of requesting and implementing changes that are unnecessarily complex and unintuitive. For me, I'm less concerned about wanting to preserve nostalgic class identity and more concerned about wanting to introduce changes in ways that affect the core mechanics of the game as little as possible.

For example (forewarning: this is a bad example), instead of adding a custom crash mechanic to Paladins what if we just buffed their Blast from 550% to 650%? This is probably my lack of experience talking, but is there really a need to create such niche identities for certain classes when we can just make them all equally viable for what is essentially repeatedly whacking the boss? Changes such as this are easy to implement, easy to adjust, and most importantly, they don't surprise players. If a certain class had their damage buffed, the most that would happen is that there is greater interest in playing the class. I think much of the frustration with many custom changes is that they force (although force is a bit of a strong word) players to completely adjust their playstyle, in which the time and money they had invested can often feel like a complete waste. They also often lead to unintended and unforeseen consequences, such as the Buccaneer example above. Essentially, I just think custom changes that severely overhaul the core mechanics of the game are ambitious undertakings whose ultimate goals can be implemented in easier ways.

At the end of the day, they are simple solutions--and simple solutions are elegant solutions.

And to reiterate your point Joel: I hope the fact that Staff members are bringing unofficial discussions in such capacity to the forums won't be interpreted as warning signs of internal discord or dissent, and I hope it instead shows that our views on the game are constantly changing and open to new ideas and perspectives.

 

You have summarised well.
Personally I don't particularly care about the nostalgia factor because it's subjective and probably means something different to everyone. To me there are enough things about MapleRoyals that make it an old-school versioned private server and that in itself is nostalgic enough for me - I get to invest in and play all the classes I never did 12 years ago in a familiar environment, with new friends that I'd made along the way. I will mention however that all the examples you have mentioned are positive balancing changes which serve to give class(es) a competitive niche in the current metagame. On the whole, these changes add more diversity into the player base and make these classes an attractive option to invest and play in.

This is fundamentally different from nerfing, which are negative balancing changes because they harm a proportion of the existing (and probably future) playerbase. These changes essentially make certain classes less attractive, in the hopes that it would achieve 'balance' - at a cost of a group of players' suffering.

To that end I would support a backtracking of the negative changes that have occurred. Whilst no doubt many of these probably started off as an idea with a certain goal in mind - be it reducing macrobotting, encouraging party play and so on - I feel like due consideration should be given towards the negative impact these changes will have, particularly on the players that have put in the effort to protect their style of gameplay.

 

Of the big changes that have been done to classes over the years, which would you label as negative, and how?
And are you looking at the overall gameplay or just the affect on the specific class which has been changed?
For example, would a nerf to one class not be an indirect buff to others? If you make one option less attractive, it should logically open up the other options to being chosen more.
I would assume the most recent change to Thieves avoidability is one you would label as negative but when the number of people who choose that class is so very imbalanced compared to others is a nerf that bad for the overall gameplay of the server?

I think one of the biggest issues that causes the need for these balances is HP Washing. When you give ranged classes the ability to reach 30k HP and tank hits just as melee classes can, you start to muddle the identities of what the different classes should be. Personally I don't think ranged classes should be able to HP Wash as much as they're able to.

 

This is something I've always wished for, so thank you for bringing this up. The feedback section is usually overwhelmed with proposals for "creative" custom changes, and not so much "this is not nostalgic" objections (except when it comes to nerfs (especially to NLs )), so I always thought endeavors as such are unpopular and hopeless.

I believe that class balancing is 100% necessary, but should be done in the direction of:

"keeping the original skills and utilities of each class constant, how I can set the numbers to make this class as desirable as other (similar) classes, while maintaining as much of the class identity as possible?"

Take paladins for example. I think the most natural solution is probably to raise the damage cap to 250k, which makes their class identity shine more (blast + heaven's hammer), instead of introducing an completely new gimmick like total crash.

To me, some of the biggest deviations from original maplestory mechanics are (in rough order):
1) paladin total crash
2) buccaneer 100% super transformation up-time
3) shadower assassinate dark sight charge
4) hyperbody being a marginal skill, when it is supposed to be life-changing (probably unfixable at this point)

(Apologies if I'm missing some obvious ones for classes I'm less familiar with.)

That said, I think the server has already done a good job on maintaining the nostalgic identity given how short my personal list is, and I hope it can continue to do so in the future!

 

I think the difference is that a nerf to one's class feels significantly worse than a buff to another class. For example, when dark knights got a 5% damage buff from zerking, NLs could probably care less about it, and heros probably felt a little sad. However, if brandish got a 5% damage nerf, heros will probably feel a lot worse, as if their efforts have been devalued for no reason, even though it may be logically equivalent in the case of hero vs drk competing for a melee spot in HT.

I'm personally not in favor of "only buff never nerf" either, but that might be the least disruptive/backlash-inducing way to skill balancing unfortunately.

 

While the thread is still young I would like to clarify some points:

1. The primary reason for entertaining this idea (for me) was not meant to be "nostalgia" (which is far too fleeting of a concept for me to base a thread around), but rather just that I see it as a very pragmatic approach to balance the game, given that the original developer laid the ground work, and few tweaks here and there are seemingly all that is needed to more or less make classes equal. An indirect consequence of this could be that it is easier to market as "nostalgic" or "oldschool", however.
2. I recognise that it may be difficult to draw a line between positive and negative changes, even with the mindset I tried to lay out in the original post. It is also hard to construct a completely consistent rule for what is a deviation from a class' original identity, and what is not. For example, I argue that reducing the cooldown on Snipe is less of a deviation than removing the cooldown on Buccaneer's transformation is, though they are both just alterations of skill cooldowns. I would further argue that reducing the delay between skill casts, in cases where these are significant, is not deviating much from the "identity" of a class. (Note how this concept is vague.)
   
   I hope it can be understood that the point I tried to make is that there are changes that enhance the original (vanilla) gameplay of classes, via tweaking %-damage numbers, slightly tweaking cooldowns, and reducing delays between skill casts; and there are changes that alter the gameplay of classes, and turn the class into something that it "wasn't" in vanilla MapleStory. Again, think of this as a pragmatic approach, and not an attempt to swing the word "nostalgia" around.

 

You're saying that as if hp washing to 30k hp for a ranged class is an easy and common feat. The ones that have done it are the extremely few minority and are usually the older players with a lot of time invested in this game, some new players can't afford washing and choose not to. The recent thief avoid nerf just punishes new players even harder, now they gotta have low hp and low avoid before they unlock shifter skill, spending more mesos on buying potions, not to mention recharge stars cost . You see the impact of nerfing?

 

For what it's worth, as a bucc main from even before the new source, I've always hated change D

With that being said, aside from 2 changes I think almost all changes done to the server fall in line with my philosophy of prioritizing game health while minimizing player dissatisfaction, the only notable examples that deviate from this (for me) are D(personal bias) and increasing the price for recharging throwing stars. Also I'm known for how much I hate the nostalgia argument, just because something is old does not mean it's good, and at this point, most long-term players would be more nostalgic to Royals itself as opposed to Maplestory.

 

I believe you disregarded shadowers, they are also thieves and they are melee, and personally 30k hp is more a perfectionist thing, you don't actually need 30k hp, most people don't wash till 30k for thieves

 

People say 30k, but that isn't the important part. Because of how potions work, you get functionally the same effect from 9k+ hp on almost all content. That's both a much more common figure for these jobs to push for, and achieves the same negative effects that people are referring to when they say 30k.

 

In my opinion, game feel cannot be fixed by tweaking numbers alone.
I can attest to that in your changes to bucc's transformation, and to the removal of charge time on assasinate on shads. While you could always adjust a class to DO as much damage as other classes, stuff like clunkiness cannot be fixed by changing % damage.
Also, due to certain classes overlapping in their roles, if you don't slightly differentiate between them, but just try to balance their damage, you'll keep playing cat and mouse to try and keep the two in the same place, only for the balance to tip to one of the sides.
Lets take MM vs BM for example. MM has in its core a skill that deals a flat damage, that means that in a graph of their DPS, they have an initial +dps that doesn't change, no matter the range, and dps that scales with their strafe attack. In comparison, BM only has hurricane which scales with damage.
The result from this setup, given both classes calculate their damage with the same linear formulas, is that it would be impossible to make them deal the same amount of damage given the same range. The only way to balance them would be to either strip MM's idenity, and make it a BM clone class, or go to the other end and give them a different class personality which would justify the damage difference. And both of these solutions require more than a simple % damage change.
Certain design situations require different tools for fixing, I don't think you should limit your toolset as long as you can use it responsibly.

 

I don’t agree with this. No one is asking for BM and MM to do the same amount of damage at every level.

I believe the popular opinion is that MM falls off too quickly in the end game, and to me it wouldn’t be crazy at all that a well-tested increase in their skill % or damage cap would fix this issue and make everyone happy.

Granted they may do a lot more damage than BM in early 4th job, but they also require SI to perform optimally and don’t have the luxury of the hurricane game play.

 

I don't have much to say on this topic currently but seeing the passion that other people have for the game/server is often what makes it so fun to me and feel still alive. I always like insightful and thoughtful posts like this.

 

Ah, yes. To @lxlx and @Geazy I should not have specified 30k. That is a far reach for even very rich players.
However, HP Washing in this server is far easier than it was in GMS, and because of that I feel the identity of the tankier classes took a hit years ago and never fully recovered.
I see what you're saying about how a nerf to your favorite class feels worse than a buff to classes you don't play, but with the numbers pulled by the admins there was an overwhelmingly majority playing as Night Lord compared to other classes like Paladin and Marksman.
I guess what I'd like to see is the classes shining in what they're meant to do.

 

Again, how does nerfing NL avoids make people more excited to play Paladin and MM? Your comment here is exactly what the community is saying is completely wrong in terms of the staff’s approach to balance.

It’s fine to want to push toward more class diversity but the mentality here is completely flawed. Breaking down popular classes does not work as a balance. Fix Paladin and MM instead by looking at the numerous suggestions in the class balancing thread.

 

I don't think nerfing thieves' avoid was done directly to push players to other classes, I shouldnt have phrased it to sound like the nerf was done to lessen the popularity of the class, but more to make it less mindless.
And that's why we're here at this point to figure out the best ways to make the classes what they're supposed to be and hopefully avoid one or two completely and totally outshining all others.
I mean I main a Hero and as useless as they are to most boss runners I still enjoy it, and I get that if Brandish was nerfed it might upset me a bit.
I'm not against the custom skill changes but I think they should fit in with the classes style.
Like Night Lords, I don't think they should have more avoidance than Shadowers because they also have stellar mobility.