Update New Source Update #11 27/01/17

Yeah...so theres this new portal at Skele which hasnt been enabled on Royals yet, but will be eventuall, called "The restoring memory" and its a mini dungeon map of skele which an unlimited amount of players can enter into and party each get their own skele map. This version of Maple Nexon added mini dungeons in a few of the really popular maps in leafre to help give more places for players to train without actually adding more content.

 

I remember Matt saying these dungeons can only hold 10~20 parties per channel in our version.

But seeing our declining population, I think that's more than enough LUL

 

and population will continue to decline with all this delay... more than 1 month

 

Since you're talking about my message specifically in there, I'll address it. That message was in shoutbox, and the following message I put in immediately after that stated not to go around telling everyone it's coming that day because even I didn't know for sure it was. All I knew was exactly what I said. As a matter of fact here is the exact message I put in Shoutbox:

By the way, little sneak preview for those in shoutbox... when I woke up this morning, Kevin had pushed trades overnight to our test server.
Sila, Matty, and Saleh were testing different scenarios to try and create dupes/break the trading and were able to find some issues that Kevin will fix once he gets up today.
Perhaps today is the day new source gets trading implemented? Tune in today!
NOTE: Do not go around telling everyone it is definitely coming out today as I don't even know if it will myself. However, I did want to pass some good news along before I head out for the day!

This is what we have been talking about. Some people get upset when we say something like this and nothing happens because they feel we are providing false hope and being "seriously annoying". However, if we don't say anything, we're accused of "hiding something" or not being communicative.

I told you exactly what I knew so that you the players would know. If it would rather be that we don't give little updates like that and only post the patch notes and mention what is being worked on for the next patch, that can be arranged too.

I'm not trying to sound snarky, rude, stand offish, or anything negative. I genuinely do not know what you want the staff to do. We are trying. We all want the source working and this bug fixed and that skill working just as much as everyone else. But there is nothing else we personally can do except help Kevin test and try to bring things to his attention.

 

You know the game called maplestory, not chat story.

 

There, FTFY. Sila been doing just that. Just the crucial info, no extra info whether it will be today, tomorrow, or soon. She just laid out the info on what's being worked on. No hype baiting stuff.

 

The reason why people keep get upset over and over in general is because 'New Source' was way too overhyped and marketed as 'one of the biggest updates in any MapleStory Private Server' Not only that, but continuously over the past 2 years new source was marketed non-stop by other staff members as 'the source that will destroy all the competition' and non-stop ego over and over. Server crashed? NEW SOURCE HYPE.

People are disappointed, even I am disappointed because I was actually looking forward to seeing a well developed 'v83' server with 'Never before seen features on any Private Server' and whatever other claims were made. This is perfectly comparable to No Man's Sky to be honest.

Now the communication.

People want daily updates. When you say 'Trades will become available today' people want you to update them when that isn't happening. Not first 20 people complaining why there's still no update and than a 'ohh yeah... we were testing in the test server because new bugs appeared.' Update your users immediately what you are doing, not after they asked 5 times when the ETA is already countless hours over

Take it how you want. You can just reply to me, call me out for 'bla bla competition yada yada' or you can actually take my suggestions to improve your communication, or your server as a whole, and see my tip as something you should take by heart, and not meant to bash you away.

I don't even know why this whole mess of what is in my opinion one of the bigger disappointments in the MapleStory Private Server scene is bothering me so much, but please stop with the ego already. The ego is what is especially bothering me, and so is a lot of other people, trust me.

Maybe I should just request a permanent ban of this forum since I just can't handle it anymore. If you hate this post, please ban me.

 

Let me preface this by saying I'm in the same boat as all of you. I now have a level 124 hero that can't put ANY points into 4th job skills. Want disappointment? Get 4th job and not be able to do anything new.

That being said, you can't attack John from both sides. As he said, they are getting yelled at for either not saying enough, or too much (the stuff he apparently said in the chat box about trades). I'll tell you this much: if you want to make someone go on the defensive, you're doing a great job. Complaining will get you no where with John.

The server is broken. We know that. They aren't reverting it to the old source. We JUST HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT now. Yeah, it took longer than anticipated. They probably should have known how many problems were going to come up. But the fact is that this is where we are now. Karven is working on it, and he has fixed a lot of things. The game is now playable. And he continues to work on things.

He's fixed some MAJOR issues:

• Number of channels (20! THATS SO MUCH BETTER THAN BEFORE)
• Bosses spawn! This means people can train better!
  
• He has fixed TONS of skills!
  
• Buddy lists work again! You can chat with people while you play. In fact, you can make friends with some of the people who are playing throughout the new source! Let me tell you, if you want to meet nice and optimistic people, this is your chance. Most of the people online right now are freakin awesome
• Etc. Etc.

This new update, imho, is taking longer than usual because trading is such a particular subject. Things can go very wrong. Duplicates of items can be made if things are wrong. People can force someone else to trade without their consent if things are wrong. Items could disappear. Mesos could disappear. They have to make sure that its perfect before it goes through.

 

Amen

 

TLDR:
The fact's are the community(players) is not one person, and we all can't be pleased. You shouldn't stress yourself out to try and please all of us. Do what is the least stressful for you and best for you and the staff.

the long version:
There's a lot of salt in this topic. The situation that we are in right now is terrible, its a miracle that maple royals staff haven't just given up on the entire project(community) and closed the doors. the community(player) are acting like they are owed something, but the fact is your not owed anything.

to John the emotion that I understood from your words, quote"I told you exactly what I knew so that you the players would know. If it would rather be that we don't give little updates like that and only post the patch notes and mention what is being worked on for the next patch, that can be arranged too."

I would like to suggest that you change your approach and not speak to the community(players) on status of when something is pushed to the test server's or if bug just got found. I propose that all updates with the community(players) is done though the update forum posts that you make whenever a change is made to the live server.

I propose this solution because the community(players) have grown to believe that they are owed something and entitled to something. Half of the community(players) believe your small updates are great but the other half of the community(players) believe that your just trying to string them on and add hype. The fact's are the community(players) is not one person, and we all cant be pleased, and you shouldn't stress yourself out to try and please all of us. do what is the least stressful for you and best for you and the staff.

Edit:
I know that the staff has only the best intentions in mind for the community.

 

See the thing is, John..

I have always been fine with sitting here and waiting for source. Many people have been from since before I joined server and around the same time and after, and I know you have, too.

I'm not disputing the fact that you guys are doing something about it, but yes it's true people get annoyed when days go by and they hear nothing. If people who regularly or even religiously do something suddenly have to stop for an extended period of time for no reason of their own, no doubt they will feel some type of way about it.

However, it seems like people are asking for transparency, not promises. The reasonable bunch here would understand that what happened happened and everyone has gotta deal with it. Nothing you can do about what already happened, it's in the past. So I really don't think there's any incentive there to bait anyone into any type of forward thinking about when things will be running again.

See MoriForest's quote.

I've always said we can sit here as long as we need to, and I AM being reasonable in saying that regular updates (or should I say, regular reports so your player base can know what dafuq is going on) would go a long way. You are humans we know but so are we so remember that while you want everyone to be patient with you, as with everything human, there is a limit.

I speak for myself when I say I can sit here, but as you've already seen, many people don't give a flying monkeys in being truthfully vocal about how they feel towards it. This is why I keep asking for regular updates.

 

@John
Bruh if you order something from abroad, you can track it's location generally and the steps it's taking towards your destination. It gives you facts, not assumptions. Just so we know where it's at. And it won't say 'It may reach you by x or y day so stay tuned' and if it goes over 24 hours in one particular phase it will notify saying it's still in the same destination etc etc.

I hope you don't see it as me asking for spoon-feeding in regards to what you're doing, that's just an example. Just so we know where you are at some transparency would go a long way. And believe me when I say this, if still people are discontent with the information on the work you guys are rolling out, then it's on them.

 

All I want to say is that we're doing our best to relay the information we're given by Kevin. When he says "I'm finishing up some issues with trades and hope to have them out soon", that's what we tell you guys. If we're made to look like it will be out soon, then that's what we tell you - we can't control if something takes longer to code, or bug test, or if something comes up irl. I try to update people in shoutbox when I know something different, until then it's just repeating everything because what else can I do?

We asked him today to try and post more often on the forums to tell people what's going on, so hopefully you'll get to hear from him. I've personally requested that the last remaining core skills get fixed asap - corsair's battleship + mounts, darksight for assassinate, meso explosion, stance and power guard. It's literally all I can do at this point.

You don't need to tell us we fucked up, because it's already known. Matt already explained his best. As someone who isn't coding, all that John and I can tell you is what we see. We tell you all the minor updates when we see them. We don't know how long something will take, or why something is taking longer than expected. If we're told "I'll fix these issues and trades should be pushed live in the morning" then we try to tell you the same, but if something comes up and makes that not happen what are we supposed to do except to tell you something came up and it's taking longer?

We could either not tell you updates at all until things are completely done and uploaded to the live server for all to see, or we can continue to do our best and tell people what we know. I think most people want the latter, judging by the constant questions in shoutbox.

As to why we're only just now having these issues instead of fixing them in beta?

 

I am not at all concerned with the dwindling player population during the current coding and bug-squashing period.

Once the game is finally stabilized, people will return given their previous investment in this game.

 

Here's an excerpt from Valve's Community and Communication in Games-As-Services where Robin Walker explains why they don't communicate with their community and I can't help but relate it to what's going on in our server. I'd give a TLDR version of it but honestly you should give the full thing a read. Take it how you will but keep in mind that this isn't meant to be taken literally, it's to give perspective. I didn't write this, full credits to /u/birkir for transcribing it.

Spoiler: Warning: A wall of text ahead

[34:05]: External communication is a lot more riskier than product communication. A typical scenario involving external communication might look something like this: You see a customer report a bug in a forum somewhere, and so you as a member of the dev team you post a reply and say 'Hey, yeah, that's a bug, I'll fix it', and then you go and fix it. That would be great.

Unfortunately as you get into it you find it didn't quite work out like that. Maybe you get in there you find out that bug is a lot more harder to fix than you thought, actually. It's not something you're gonna get out the next update, maybe you won't get it out for months, that's a really significant bug.

Or maybe it involves trade-offs, say, you can fix it, and that customer will be happy, but now a bunch of other customers are going to be less happy. So what do I do there?

Or maybe you find out that you can't fix it. Like the trade-off is so great that you can't fix it, like 'Yeah, we could fix it, and we have to drop support for Windows 7, and that's not something we can do', whatever, right, you can't fix it.

Or maybe even if you could fix it you shouldn't fix it. Maybe as you get in to fixing it you realize 'This bug is entwined in our balance of our game, and if we change this suddenly now our entire competitive game-balance is off and it's all kind of screwed so we can't fix it'.

The problem is by posting in that forum and saying 'Yeah I'm gonna fix that' a piece of external communication has now made it harder for us, it's made our life harder. It's done two things that are worth noting:

One is that it changed the community conversation around the bug. And so, this is most easily thought of, imagine this wasn't a bug, it was a piece of balance suggestion or something like that. Well, now you've interjected an official voice about what we as a dev team think is right into that community conversation. And the problem there is that the best feedback that we get from our customers is the things they say to each other when they think we are not there.

We don't want to cover their opinion of the product with what we are trying to do or what we think is right or anything. We want customers to have that conversation, and we just want to sit there and listen to it as much as we can. So if we sat coloring that conversation, telling a bunch of customers that 'Oh, the official voice is that that bunch of customers is right and this bunch of customers is wrong', then we've permanently altered that conversation in a way that will cause us to get less valuable community feedback around that entire topic, potentially forever.

We've also added friction here with that choice. And it's specifically friction about our ability to make the choices that are right for the customer. If any of the four examples we have for why you can't fix the bug turn out to be true, what you're essentially saying is even though we said that we would fix the bug, the right thing for our customers as a whole to do is to not fix the bug. So say we want to change our mind. And that piece of external communication has now made it harder for us to change our mind.

And it's really, really critical that we can change our mind, today or maybe at any point in the future. That piece of external communication is on the internet, and it will be there forever, and if in five years from now we realize 'We've done five years of learning about what's right about our product, our customers have learned a ton, we've evolved the product, the right thing to do is to actually implement something different', that piece of external communication is still out there. So even if it all works out perfectly, like, we say we're gonna fix the bug, we fix the bug, everyone's happy, it may still come back to bite us later.

And even if we've made that particular customer happy, he's at risk at being made unhappy in the future by the fact that we've gone back on our words. And it's important to realize that this concept of we need to be able to change our mind is the whole point of game service. The whole point of running products that you publicly iterate is to change your mind in response to customer's impact in the product. If we weren't going to let customers interactions with the product change our mind then we should have just kept the [product] inside, and worked on it for five years, and then unveiled it and walked away, right? But the whole point of doing public iteration is that we want them to change our minds, so we need to be able to do that.

But unfortunately, bad communication is worse than none. And if we define bad communication as communication that turns out not to be true, something we said to our customers that they know isn't true, now or unfortunately at any time in the future, or any communication that just makes our customers far more confused or less sure of what we're doing or their trust in us, then that form of communication costs us more than if we hadn't said anything in the first place.

...

It destroys customers trust in our decision making process. It destroys their trust in our communication. If we communicate ten things, and five of them turn out to be false, then their ability to trust the next ten things we say is going to start decreasing with time. So if you think back to that bug-fix example, the core value that we provided in that scenario is fixing the bug. That's the bit that mattered. The external communication piece simply increased the risk for us. It may have made that particular customer happier than if we just fixed the bug and not told him we would fix it, but we certainly put that person in greater risk of being far less happy if we said we were going to fix but and then in the future changed our minds.

So in the end, ultimately, the best form of communication around the product, is simply to improve the product itself. It doesn't do a bunch of the things we've talked about external communication doing. It doesn't reduce our future options, we can always change our products, the product just is at any particular point, and we haven't produced a record of a justification for its state that turn out to be invalid in the future. The product inherently reaches all our customers. Both today, and all of our future customers. That bug fix is something that adds value to all our customers today, that bug fix will make our customers lives better in the future as well. As opposed to that piece of external communications, which best case,... you know, there's no way it will reach all of our customers. Because improvements to the product actually solve issues. They don't placate customers, they don't make them happier in the short term, they literally just solve their issues. And improving the product generates clean feedback, as we've talked about. It doesn't change the community's conversation, like, we haven't injected our opinion onto the conversation they have, so all they can do is react to the actual state of the product and we get clean feedback which means we can make better decisions in the long run.

Now I don't necessarily agree with everything he's said, especially the part about transparency where they stay completely silent, that simply doesn't work in our modern day and definitely wouldn't work in a close-knit community like ours. But like Robin said, bad communication is worse than no communication and that's exactly what's happening here.

When you gms interact with us players, whether that's through the shoutbox or on forum posts, we're going to take what you say as fact and when a certain thing you say turns out to be different from what you said there's going to be outrage. Remember when Matt promised we expect it may take around 7-14 days for all functionality to be fully in place? Guess how well that went. Even the update Karven wrote recently regarding trade was unnecessary. All he's done is relay a piece of information we already knew was going to happen (that being fixing everything in the game by the end) and brought us false hope by 1) not giving us a date on when the update was going to be and 2) tricked us into thinking it was happening soon. That post was made 4 days ago and it's still yet to come live. You could argue that Matt never "promised" the server to be up and running in 7-14 days and Karven didn't "trick" us into believing trade will be up soon but really, you did. While daily updates are nice and people do want them, if you can't follow them up with any tangible progress then don't bother.

When you communicate to us, what's important is how we take it, not how you want us to take it and that's not something you can control. And when you know everyone is this impatient you shouldn't go around taunting people with false hopes like that even if they're done in good spirit. It's already broken a lot of people's trust and I'm sure a lot more people will lose your trust. I get why you're doing it, you want to satisfy the outraged vocal people but you're actually doing more harm than good in the long run by making empty statements without any immediate follow-up.

My suggestion: keep communication to a bare minimum to exclusively update threads. Don't go about trying to please everyone on the shoutbox or reply to every post on the forums. We all know you guys are working on it, there's no need to feed us the same generic "we're working on it" response and give us your agenda if none of it is going to come anytime soon. People are and will take everything you say at gunpoint and arguing back with them isn't going to do anything about fixing the problem, which is getting the server back up and running to how it was.

To quote Robin Walker, "So in the end, ultimately, the best form of communication around the product, is simply to improve the product itself."

 

I couldnt agree with this more. I've been happy the Admins have been as transparent as they have been. I honestly havent minded the problems and bugs they've run into, i get whats going on, what potential issues they probably ran into. Where I work my job consists of doing roughly the same thing that many of the GM's are here doing. We provide tech support to a whole heck of a lot of people, and we're always told to keep the conversation with our customers as simple and to the point as possible. To be vague, but not too vague. Give them just enough that they dont ask questions. Dont promise anything, and the people wont wind up holding you to those promises which would inevitably be broken. Being transparent and open is admirable. But it only opens you up to further criticism when you inevitably run into problems.

 

Is there any way for admin/gm/coder to estimate that how many days/weeks/month would the game become normal like all skills are fix, trading, scrolling, cash shop and those able to work in old source be fix ?? Just asking hehe not complaining or anything I just wanna know when because I play this royal 3 month ago for awhile and quit then came back everything bug due to new source so if able I would like to know when so I can be able create a new character and start afresh hehe, to all gm/admin I have no intent on rushing you all because I know people have other things to do and so am I but I just wanna know

 

the server is gonna die if this keeps up, too long for a 2 year+ project to be at the very least playable with trades/cash shop

 

No.
Way.
Look at the flame posts on top when they released some possibility of an updates, but failed to push it out on time due to unforeseen bugs that surfaced last minutes that may wreck the game.

So, Quoted this for truth:
The best form of communication around a product is to simply improve the product.

 

The vote is decreasing