New Player Retention & Early–Mid Game Experience in MapleRoyals

Hey everyone,

I want to start by saying that I’m relatively new to MapleRoyals and have been playing for around 3 months now. I’m enjoying the server overall, but as a newer player, I’ve noticed some issues that make it very difficult for new players to stay long enough to reach what veterans often describe as the “fun content.”

From my perspective, the current progression path for most players looks something like this:

• Create a Bishop first
  
• Farm mesos and leech
  
• Save for HP washing
  
• Create your main character
  
• HP wash until around level 135
  
• Finally start enjoying bossing and group content

While there are other things to do, the reality is that a large portion of the player base is focused on bossing. As a new player, you are often left out of that experience for a very long time.

My Early Game Experience
When I first started:

• I made an account and leveled to around 21
  
• Did Kerning PQ
  
• Moved to CPQ
  
• Reached the point where CPQ2 or Orbis PQ should be the next step

At that stage, I realized those PQs are essentially dead. My options became:

• Hardcore grinding
  
• Buying leech

Grinding can be fine, but if we look at the server’s ideal player profile, it is mostly people who played MapleStory when they were younger and are now 26+ years old, often with jobs, families, and other responsibilities. The amount of grinding required just to reach enjoyable group content is not very sustainable for that demographic.

I personally saw several players I started with quit fairly quickly for this reason.

Suggestions for Improving New Player Retention

1. Keep 2x EXP for Party Quests
During the Christmas event, when Team PQs had 2x EXP, the game felt alive.

PQs were populated, people interacted and played together, and PQing felt worthwhile compared to solo grinding.

This is what MapleStory was originally about, teamwork and social interaction.

I strongly believe that permanent 2x EXP for PQs would greatly help retain new players and encourage cooperative gameplay instead of solo grinding or leeching.

2. Improve Access to HP Without Excessive Washing
While HP washing is technically “not required,” the current state still heavily pushes players toward it.

The current repeatable HP quest being limited to once per day feels too restrictive. I believe it should be available 3 to 4 times per day after a certain level instead of just once.

This would allow players to choose quests over meso heavy HP washing, help new players who are not wealthy, and reduce the community pressure to make a Bishop first.

Requiring players to leech on a Bishop just to fund HP washing on another character is not a healthy or welcoming retention model.

3. Monthly Battle Pass or Login Incentives
A monthly battle pass style system could work very well.

For example:

• Over a 30 day period
  
• Complete simple daily quests similar to the Christmas event
  
• Completing around 20 days grants rewards like 1.5x EXP, cosmetics, or utility items

This encourages daily logins, consistent player engagement, and a sense of progression even for casual players.

Each month could rotate different rewards to keep things fresh.

Closing Thoughts
These are just my experiences and ideas as a newer player, but I truly believe MapleRoyals has the potential to reach and sustain a 3,000+ player base by making the early and mid game more welcoming and less punishing.

Creating smoother progression paths and encouraging social gameplay would go a long way toward helping new players feel like they belong in the MapleRoyals community.

Thanks for reading, and I would love to hear other perspectives, especially from long time players and staff.

P.S. My English is not so great so I used the help of AI to help my structure the content abit

 

Create your main characters

 

Personally I hate this push of 'make a bishop first' that has been the norm for a long time. You do not NEED to wash, people wash so they don't have to worry about HP or because they can buy their way out of doing HP quest and grinding HP equips.

I agree with the improved EXP at party quests, game feels less dead since people at appropriate levels are pqing and people farming tokens of teamwork are actively recruiting eachother daily.

I do not agree with your hp quest feedback. In its current form, the quest switches to daily once you reach 12.5k at 175 (without any hp equips). Unless you are looking to get into Toad, Auf or VL immediately after hitting 175, 12.5k base HP is plenty for every single boss I didn't mention. Zancks has a great guide on where to get some HP equips from without compromising your damage https://royals.ms/forum/threads/zan...-guide-is-hp-washing-optional-in-2024.227532/

 

Edit: got sniped while typing but the Zancks' guide is good enough to read twice

There has been a lot of other sources of hp, check out this handy guide by Zancks: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/zancks‘-how-to-play-unwashed-guide-is-hp-washing-optional-in-2024.227532/

I would be against permanently doubling PQ xp, purely because all guides already say only to do cpq from 30-70. Partying is already needed for lots of content (many bosses require at least 3, pqs require party ofcourse, lhc) so making solo grinding feel even more bad in comparison would not be ideal imo. Also finding a party if you play short stints of under an hour is very hard.

If new content gets added though I would love for it to disincentivize muling and leeching, and be viable both in party and solo. But it's not that easy to make something like that I guess.

 

I agree especially the double XP for PQ's good post

 

If you choose a more beginner friendly class youy dont really need to hp wash (especially warrior but bucc is viable too).
Also, the current HP quest system is good enough (though more varity would be nice), and I'm saying it as someone who didn't wash all of my first charecters (NL, bm and bucc), all have enough HP to do every content in the game.
The make bishop sell leech META is the just the most effective and efficient way for a player to start out.
You dont have to play in the most efficient way, you can play in your slower way.

2x exp could be nice but it would probably get "abused" by people starting selling pq leech if it becomes perma.
and for perma 1.5x exp copun, I dont think it really make sense, the server is already really easy to level up in.

 

I didn't say you get perma 1.5x exp. if you check the example of the current Christmas event if you achieve 20 days you get 2 weeks of 1.5x coupon. Now that's just one possible rewards out of 100s that you can provide. The important idea here is to create a monthly battle pass that proved to be success across many games which can be replicated toward this server to retain new players or even old players

 

if you always get a 1.5x copun from the "battle pass" you get a perma 1.5x copun, you just have to work a little bit for it

 

But you not gonna get always the same reward on battle pass, because its gonna rotate. Each month can be different reward.

 

Hello Alexa, glad to see you sharing your thoughts through the grind and reach your current stage

After reads your thread, I have some thoughts and some feedbacks to your suggestions too. Let's start with my thoughts.

Yes, currently there exist a problem that new players unable to sustain their motivation, here's a story that makes me strongly against the idea of suggesting a new player on buying leech on their first character if they ask about how to progress, they're unlikely a hp-washing character that cannot grind properly.

It was sad that I met a new player in Henesys who said hi and chat to me ended up quitting before he could reach 135, simply because "he can't find the fun". There was a sign of him losing the motivation when he was at 90+ and starts to consider buying leech, as it's a meta in this server that even guides will recommend it. He did it, ended up having a Lv120 DK but no idea what to do furthur. He's detached from his own character at this point.

So I think the problem here isn't the server itself, but the consequences of players who decided to choose the playstyle that they didn't enjoy at all, or just simply because they found out the game time consuming after 3rd job.

Now with my feedbacks to your suggestions:

1. PQ quest EXP buff
I do like the idea of encouraging people to do PQ by simply buff its exp and more rewarding, but I don't think it's just the 2x exp buff that brings back the player, but also the multiple factors of christmas event itself attracted people to come back / join and play so I don't know if this will work without event.

2.HP related stuff
Well, alot of the response above already mentioned what I want to say. I don't think it need to be changed at all. Server did give a solution for the consequence of you not doing the hp-wash. It's just you chose the way to slowly grow your hp on quest instead of spending billions of meso on APR to make it faster.

3.Battle Pass
Ew, battle pass, strongly against it.
It's rewarding for active player but you're punishing the casual players for not getting reward by not logging in for just one or two days. I know alot of people who went on a long break from game and will come back eventually, don't do stupid decisions to push them away.

 

long term PQ with EXP buff might prolly open up another avenue to sell leech services

 

On The HP Issue:
I completely agree that HP washing/questing is still problematic in this server. I don't think you're the only one that feels that way. I think we'll see some survivorship bias with the people responding in this thread (not saying their opinions are invalid, but they may be overrepresented). There's probably been a lot of new players that come to this server, learn how HP works here and just straight up leave to play a different server which does it better. We'll never hear from them, so I feel I need to try to say something on their behalf too.

I think Zanck's guide is being used to imply the HP washing issue is resolved, but not being mentioned is the fact that the guide is asking you to do Legendary Collector (which the average player won't ever do, it's a massive amount of effort), almost all of Olaf (which you can't do the later ones right away because ironically you don't have enough HP), wear non-optimal HP equips, wash out all your base MP (which is an unintuitive hacky mechanic), and do HP quests 30 times until they become daily. And even then, a thief/archer will still have TWO MORE MONTHS of daily hp quests to go to cover the difference, even after all of that. If you don't play daily, it might take you years to do all of this, if ever. The amount of time and effort is being very understated here. Many players will quit rather than deal with this. They won't get to the best content in the game which might be the hook to keep them playing.

Is gatekeeping players like this the goal? Should getting HP be a chore? Is it "part of the grind"? If that's the intention, then it's broken because players are either bypassing that by HP washing, by just choosing classes that don't need to wash (which is killing our class diversity), or just flat-out quitting the server. Players are seriously considering making an entire bishop, selling leech, buying aprs and restarting their characters, rather than do these hp quests. That's how badly people want to avoid them. I don't think you can say everything's fine and blame it on players being lazy. They're already picking between two very time and effort-intensive processes and they're still not picking the one you intended. That just shows you the one you intended has something wrong with it. That is my thinking at least

I think we should continue adjusting it (remove/raise daily caps, increase how much is given per completion, double/triple RG pot amounts, add more HP sources) until players universally start seeing it as a more appealing option to HP washing. OR we should get rid of the option of HP washing and make classes more uniform in how much effort it takes to get the HP they need. Rip off the bandaid and see how many of the seasoned players really start to complain when it's their only option, rather than just something the poor/new players have to agonize over

(for full disclosure: I've never HP washed my characters, out of pure stubbornness. I've gotten 2 marksmans up to 18k+ hp through hp questing. On my second MM, I thought it was fun for the first month or so, but by month 3 I was seriously regretting my choice not to just make a shad instead or something)