I am trying to make sense of this update. Maybe somone can help me see it clearer. Let me go over each point. The only issues I have are with whats stated below, everything else introduced I think is good. New earring which can only have luk. Do other classes not exist? Why don't they get to experience new strong earrings? This is not comparable to Grandpa earrings, one is a dead boss the other is a daily with a max 10 luk. Heroes, pallys, mm and bm want buffs as well not just thieves. New Roa, maybe the craziest thing I can think of, if im not mistaken you guys are off your rocker with this one. A new ring which CLEAN is already like 15% stronger than a perfect roa. Not sure who was smoking crack with this update, you could've easily limited it to 3/3/3/3 or chosen two out of the four stats randomly, but to give it a perfect 7 across all stats is wild. Maybe even upgrade the roa to two slots or use it to craft the new ring. You can literally just camp for a 7 main stat ring and ws 60 it, giving you a 9 main stat ring, 50% better than a perfect roa. If you manage to cs it to 12, its literally two perfect stat roas stacked on top of each other. ROA is dead in the water now its not even meta to use one. We only have 4 ring slots, New ROA, Valentines, Summer, and Krex. Roa is a glorified washing ring. Make it make sense, please, from my perspective no thought went into this change. Finally, this new hp quest change is a nerf, not even debatable. More quests to memorize, more maps to try and stuff into our rocks which don't have the space. More time looking at the forum to try and decipher what monster you just got assigned. You guys spent how much dev time on this? Instead of just giving us hp rewards from PQ's like we've been asking for years? The hp quest was really fine. This just ruined it for all the people who spent months memorizing it, this change was unnecessary, we've been asking for alternatives. Really a big waste of time, and you think you guys got the drop rates fine tuned on the new quests? Doubt it, should've listened to your players.
1. It's a new tradable earring. There is a Shogun earring (STR), all stat EP (which is also good for m.atk) and gold emerald earrings which also drop from The Boss like Shogun, albeit much weaker comparably when considering the DEX stat. I remember reading some suggestions to add accuracy bonus to Shogun earrings, which would be nice for warriors and buccs. It's not like future content can't fill in the still existing gaps. I don't really think this is something to fuss over. Also, it's a max of 11 LUK not 10. An earring which will probably end up being a popular trade-able midgame option for the most popular adventurer class seems fitting to come from a daily piece of content, allowing it to match demand if anything. I don't have a strong argument for why these earrings were implemented as LUK otherwise, but again I don't think it's really something to complain about. What would you suggest for a new earring stat? Presumably a better DEX earring? 2. New Ring - You are completely overlooking the fact that the ring is untrade-able, and thus a permanent investment into a single character. Furthermore, your argument heavily leans on several things lining up; godly-ness and scrolling. Obtaining the ring itself significantly more cumbersome than Krex ring. For an understandable comparison, if you are competent you can easily grind 2 krex rings a day guaranteed, while Ifia's Ring is far from guaranteed for one a day. Factoring in the chances of a halfway decent godly roll and subsequent scrolling (chaos or otherwise), whoever obtains a decent Ifia's ring would have earned it after most likely putting in several hours. Who says ROA must be the 'meta' forever? I'd argue that untrade-ables should outrank trade-ables. ROAs still have the ultimate convenience of transferring between characters and reselling if needed. Also, we can do without the percentages, i.e. Ifia's ring is 'x%' better than ROA. The raw numbers are small and require context, and speaking in this manner blurs that context and can blow things out of proportion. The 12 stat Ifia's ring is the most ideal scenario, and the probabilities are astronomically low. Anything decent in between would, again, be well earned and in all likelihood have cost the player a good amount of resources (time and money.) I like the idea of using a ROA to craft the ring to serve as an item sink, but then it'd probably have to be changed from what it is now to fit that exchange. 3. HP Quest - It's not a nerf, pretty debatable. This update was simply to provide more variety to an existing piece of content to round it out. There are several benefits from this, as players grinding for HP now: visit areas with less traffic, perhaps finding niche equips and items (think mastery books, flame sword, female versions of equips.) grind monster cards... I think it's nice that grinding the HP quest is also a way to fill up your monster book with cards as a multitask. In addition, it adds quite a nice depth to what felt like a shallow and monotonous grind. This may sound a bit crude, but complaining about memorizing new quests is quite... infantile. I've grinded maybe 12k HP total on my character at this point, so I'm speaking from experience. Is a couple of seconds of searching something up, and perhaps building yourself up a notepad document that much trouble? I don't think I ever even used the HP quest guide... I'm baffled this is even a complaint. As to the teleport rock point, from what I recall tp rocks save you... maybe 2 minutes of walking at best? A fast travel pass is a trivial investment and I've never used a teleport rock for any HP quest, and always kept my HP quest times around 15-20 minutes. I don't think content should be designed around how many maps players can fit in their TP rocks... As to your point about time spent/dev time, this was a project which was chipped away at by staff as a group, with one staff member in particular heading the project and doing a majority of the work (they can come forward if they wish.) In my opinion, projects like these are a breath of fresh air and easily approached by any staff member with or without developer experience. We are human beings, and I think it's necessary that in any game, staff members find small passion projects from time to time to keep their sanity and actually enjoy their time contributing to the game. Finding three mobs and implementing new drops is trivial from the technical standpoint. Since we had a group of quests already implemented, as well as experience from the quest being out for so long, rates were fairly easy to determine for each quest. Are they fine tuned? For the most part, probably. But, nothing is perfect, and I'm certain some things can be tweaked. Items were also imported from higher versions, completely cutting out a huge portion of possible dev time (making over 60 new custom item icons.) We always look for ways like this to cut on dev time. So, your implication that dev time could have been spent doing something 'better' is ignorant, and objectively incorrect. It was time well spent. Something like this requires careful thought and much more discussion into revamping the rewards of PQs as a whole. There is much more nuance to HP gain and other rewards from what is assumed to be group content (can be muled) than this solo content. Again, this was meant as an update to provide depth and variety, not address the 'lack of alternatives'. There are alternatives in the pipeline, but it is disingenuous to make it sound so simple. This update took quite a bit of work to push out, between bug fixes and pushing out new content, there's only so much time left to work on other things, especially big projects. If you really want to help in this endeavor, then you should take the time to outline what changes you want to see in the game. Players often comment what they want to see as results, such as 'make x more profitable' or 'make x more convenient' or 'add alternatives for x', but a significant chunk of work can be alleviated from staff discussions if players take the time to outline proposed changes, the reasons behind the changes, what is expected to be the effect of those changes, and so on. Two users that come to mind are @xDarkomantis and @LichWiz , you can view their feedback threads to understand what I'm talking about. As a player you may feel that it takes way too long for any changes to be implemented, and it feels that way for staff members too, but at some point it needs to be accepted that that's the way it is in a game run by volunteers with limited time, energy, and resources. In sum, I wouldn't call this update perfect by any means and it will require some tweaks in the future, but I think even the things you outlined are fine.
I recall you’ve been buying clean RoAs to scroll for like 2-3weeks before this new Rose Ring. I feel for you, but it be like that sometimes.
@Aqwrd ,I'm just still waiting for PinkBean and Empress, maybe there's no rush, everything in due time, do you want to arrive, do you want to not, it's a relatively game to give us nostalgia and cheer us up after a day's work, I assume that more than 80% of the server border 25 years to more! I have always seen each update to the experimental, and what is out of place they correct, but I understand the need to have a luk earring, or is it so difficult to find a team that accompanies you to Showa daily? If so, I can help you! So as Nut says, we all have our advantage and it's only our choice to search, so relax, I want to see you in a good mood. As far as I'm concerned I never saw an earring that stands out for LUK, now they finally have it, you want EP but the statistics are complicated, unless you put 1 30% dex on it and start playing the lottery with the Chaos Scrolls!
Really doesn't look that bad when you put them side by side: Gold Emerald Earrings (lv80) - DEX / INT Shogun Earrings (lv80) - STR Ifia's Earrings (lv110) - LUK
To add on I doubt RoAs drop significantly in price: its hard enough to get a Rose Ring, the odds are quite bad to even get any Rng of godly clean stats that you actually need You then have to chaos it and hope for the stats you actually need Unique Item Undisputed BiS is: Krex Vday ring The last 2 slots are either rose, circlet, or RoA and only one of those are tradeable and the other two have a chance to be better than a 6 single stat ring. TLDR: It’s going to take a long time to get a Rose Ring or even Circlet better than a 6 stat ring. At that point its only extremely seasoned end game players/lucker gods who can even think about going RoA-less
Also, this ring is only for 170+ meaning you can't use for quite a while, while ROAs can be used on low lv characters. Int roas should still hold value for level capped leech sellers and washing.
Honestly Nut summed this up better than myself or anyone else on Staff can really, I don't think I can add anything else but I will touch on this bit he said about the HP Quest and the allocated dev time you are worried about: I spearheaded this project entirely on my own for at least 90-95% of it. I had an idea to add more HP Quests to the rotation because I found myself getting burnt out redoing the same 10 quests over and over again. Every time I kept seeing that stupid Typhon egg one I could feel my blood pressure rising. With the addition of enough quests to make it 30 I now only have to see the stupid quest once a month instead of once every 7-10 days and right away that increased my mood lol and I figured others shared the same feeling considering every time someone got the Typhon egg quest, or really any other quest someone didn't like in the old rotation-- you'd always hear about it in guild/alliance or buddy chat. That was the spark that initiated wanting to add more quests. Keep in mind I got 2 characters (Shad and BM) unwashed through the unlimited HP Quest back when it was still 10/20 HP which basically took them both from 4-5k right up to 9.5k before it switched over to the daily one, and then I still continued to do it here and there for those two characters, while simultaneously working on it for my other characters (Sair, Bucc) and I plan to do it for my soon to be MM and my NL in the near future. My main goal is to show that HP washing is optional and so far I've had zero issues aside from stagnating a bit to doing the quest enough times to reach VL/Toad on my non-mains, (mini-mains? side mains? idk what they're called.) the stagnation was mainly my own fault because there would be a few days or a week where I don't do any daily HP quests and then I fall behind. I also didn't want to add in 1-2 quests every update I wanted to get it over with and add as many as we can to reach 30 quests so that way you have a brand new quest every single day of the month instead of the same ~10 quests that got boring and repetitive. I brought up my idea and got the greenlight from those who participated in the discussion and with that I went to work. What that entailed: -Choosing the mobs. -Deciding on what mobs go where in the quest list. -Making sure the quests flowed similar to the older ones IE: time to complete them is roughly the same, etc. -Creating the etc items on my own via re-coloring or resourcing them from GMS files. -Creating the drop % and trying to balance it to keep it in line with the current HP Quests. -Figuring out a correct/healthy amount of items to gather per quest while balancing it with the drop %. -Naming the items. -Creating the item descriptions. (Granted I believe a couple other Staff members had added around 10-15% of descriptions at the time, and I just hunkered down one night and went to work writing to get it ready for this update.) -Testing it to make sure Reuel goes through all ~30 quests before he starts to give you repeat ones similar to the old 10 quests we had previously. Obviously since I don't know how to write scripts, or have access to alter/update the test server's files to add in these 60 brand new items I had to rely on help from Matt because he's the one who mainly does 90% of the Patch work and he had to add in the quest items and did the quest scripting. All in all this took not a whole lot of time in the grand scheme of things because most of the work was already done by myself for him to add in IE: drop rate %, number of items to gather, he didn't have to break down all of the mobs into 3 per quest, etc. All he had to do was plug in the numbers, import the items into the files, and then update the quest script which I'd imagine doesn't take a whole lot of time. Edit: Apologies I forgot to add this in: I want to reiterate that this is not me going "I did this all by myself" for attention-- I am saying this and breaking it down to show you how there was essentially little to no Dev work involved and anybody else on Staff can do things like this too. Not everything 100% requires Dev work; they are mainly needed for putting the items in/making the changes to the files for us since we do not have access to do that.
I agree with @nut this HP quest change is not nerf,i can even say that is nice buff and so far very wellcome thanks for the work! @royals team I can say from my own expirence after doing it for some time the old limited few quests felt like boring and missing so much of the content area/mobs maplestory has to offer Cards diff nice items some of them are rare and not many know doing prequests or farming items for craft/quest while HP quest I dont think hp quest should be a chore or punishment by being limited to few mobs just because we didnt mule leech and wash Exploring-hunting around maple world and geting rewarded is the way it should be done (i can go as far and say it should be the only way more hp can be done but is to late for that)
Based on my experience with 50+ KPQ shoes (also 1/1/1/1 with godly), I don't expect to get a 7 stat ring (let alone a 7/7 stat ring) in 10 years. And ring is not actually farmable/not guaranteed everyday. I don't think it will hurt ROA prices since that's still good to have, don't forget the circles of ancient _ aren't guaranteed to have good stats too. I agree with a DEX earring for fairness.
+1 on what nut/becca said. A slight buff to shogun earring drop rate would be good though. I have killed the boss about 40+ times and have never seen it. Might be my shit luck, but that's pretty bad.
I still can’t quite believe no one’s talking about the background story as a buff to this game. There’s a whole love story, The lion king ignores a beautiful dead lady after a terrible war. The black mage corrupted the relationships between two realms, there was an alliance attacking the castles you grind totems at and ya’ll talking bout some earrings. What’s into you guys
