Hp washing is never mandatory, and it should be endowed to be unfair because you are trying to achieve something you are not supposed to do naturally. But APR is something that matters a lot in this server, It hinders people from fully unlocking the game experiences. Becuase the player base is not large enough so that we could have a complete spectrum of gaming experiences which means you can join either a noob party for just chilling around or group up with a pro team to hunt down bosses. With a shrinking player base, I'm sorry if you get rejected as one of the party members in a boss run because unfortunately, that's how things work on this server. Also, not everyone having an endgame mindset doesn't justify that endgame mindset is supposed to be beyond our reach. This is a private server to retrospect something we did 10 years ago or even experience something we never got the chance to do back in old maple. It's ok if you don't bother doing hp washing and you can forget about everything that I said, but it doesn't change the fact that inflation is truly affecting the gameplay for those who have an endgame mindset and that I'm not sure how long this server can still exist if the market is going wrong given a shrinking player base. As for those guides, or let's just say community culture, these are the treasures of the community which is probably the most valuable fortune of all time. But still, the prosperity was in the past, I'm pretty sure without any positive changes, this server will finally become an exclusively luxurious club for those "pro-players" only. But it's a game anyway, who cares about your perfect weapon if you are like one of the last ten players on a server. There's no such game server that lasts forever. What we are trying to do is to slow down the process.
LOL Let's see. No one is gonna buy your leech unless you lower your price in a foreseeable future cuz the leech service is forced to be oversupplied and demand is shrinking. There will be no equilibrium. So the ending story of inflation would be deflation cuz no one would even play this game anymore. Also, simple math, if the APR is set at 8mil at store and 800nx at cash shop. A newcomer can buy 10 APR per day and sell them 7m ea. that's 70m> 3 APR (rounded) now each day = 51m
Reading all the complaints makes my eyes tired. You all know why AP reset price was much lower in the past. Simply due to hundreds of vote abusers who never got caught. As Shiyui once mentioned, there were thousands of AP resets flowing into the game out of nowhere from the abused votes. Somewhere in the new source the price drastically went up all of a sudden BUT do you all remember, on the same week or month few pages of ban appeal was filled with "You have been permanently banned for major vote abuse"? (I remember this is when Staff developed a new way to catch vote abusers and some high ranked players were caught for years of vote abusing as well. I remember a high ranked NL IGN: EMC2, who got caught for vote abusing for year+ ) NX market is separate from the current Meso market and the NX currency didn't just go up only due to market inflation but because there are less NX flowing into the server from vote abusers. What I'd request is to reduce the price of AP reset in nx (e.g From 3100 nx to 2000 nx) to balance the demand. There seems to be a big argument about leeching as well. I came to this server in 2016 August, started off with an I/L mage and never sold a single minute of mage leech until now. Almost every mage I met was selling leech. 2016 Players would remember how popular skele leeching was back then and how people fought for map-ownership or ended up buying maps. I only grinded, often gave free leech to priests and farmed equips and NPCed them to make a living. Only difference I had compared to newbies nowdays is that I had a humble mind of a newbie. OFC I saw bunch of blue texts saying "~~~slayed horntail~~ you are true heroes of leafre~~" ever so often but that didn't force me into thinking "Oh, I wanna reach that horntail-slaying endgame straight away. But I only get 35m~40m / hour from grinding at ulu1 and 2, how am I gonna get there in 3months? this server is unfair". NO I assumed those who manage to kill Horntail are the respected veterans who must have poured months and years into this game. I never regarded it unfair just because older players could do something I as newbie couldn't do. When all of you guys abandoned royals in the beginning of new source, I stayed here with less than 10 people online at a time, and grinded the hell out of ulu2 for few months, making 10b+ pure mesos just from npcing equips and saving bunch of godly clean equips. This is where I surpassed a lot of old players and stepped up from a newbie. LEECHING ISN'T THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE INCOME. You can grind as mage or none mage characters with no injury. It will just take longer than those who are selling leech but they are sacrificing/wasting hours of their lives, without freedom to visit bathroom before getting screamed by the buyers, to go ahead of you. I don't know what expectations newbies have when they join royals nowadays but their demand doesn't seem legit because they want to achieve the same amount of work I have achieved in 1.5years merely in few months. They are basically saying "I don't have the same amount of time to spend as the veterans but I still wanna get to end game (perfect gears, 30K hp washing) quickly because that's what maplestory is all about. If it's hard to do that, this server is unfair. Make it easier for us now so we can reach the end game with only a fraction of input" I am not defending Staff. Some of you will call me white knights for writing this but I have my disagreements with staff as well. For the inflation of market, I have mentioned countless of times that it's caused by high drop rate of equips in New Source but staff hasn't fixed that for past 15months. In old source, Bishop meta was DA BEST. Along with SI buff mules, Bishops were roaming everywhere and archmages were facing dark days. Tables turned around in New Source. Archmages received their damage buff and major bishop grinding maps got nerfed in spawn rates (Gobies, Skele). Ulu1~2 maps are now even better than old source because mobs respawn faster. Lets see what happened in Newsource then. A lot of people quit in the beginning (although many eventually came back) and a big fraction of player population mained Bishop. A lot of bishop that stayed behind were already high lvled with mw20 or gen30 and could 1hit popular grinding maps. There was a large replacement of mage generation but most people inclined toward archmages when it came to decisions since they had a buff in newsource. Start a new character as archmage and reach lvl 130. Sell equips/etc you gathered till 130 and buy a wand 5 or 7 and mastery book 20. There goes easy 1hit ulu1 or ulu2. There is no doubt most meso influx to the server is from ulu maps (ulu1, ulu2, petri). Other maps definitely contribute to the whole but ulu maps are like CHINA (heart of factories in the world) in quantitative sense. No matter how abundant supplies of expensive items (WS/CS/gears) are, high drop rates of equips in these maps are causing massive influx of mesos compared to old source where drop rate was no where as high. As more new players kick in, more rich gold farmers are produced who can simply afford more expensive items. If our ultimate goal is to revert to Old source economy, these drop rates needs to get fixed first. If the higher drop rates were an intended feature, there is nothing wrong with current inflation because that's Economy. (And I don't see how this is unfair to newbies as well. Drop rates of equips are higher all over the maple world. Newbies would make money faster from selling MORE low lvl equips as well IF they grind consistently. Or, are they expecting to make same income / time as the high lvled characters&mages?) A personal example from myself. I'm currently saving 30b for a shoe upgrade but I'm doing this only from grinding at ulu maps + stopper farming with 2 mages. It's been about 2~3 weeks and I have saved 12b so far without selling any leech. There could be people making 30b / month with no-life leech selling but that's not my concern and there is no need for me to compete with them just because they are ahead of me. I'm not willing to make equal sacrifices. I'll add one of my quotes from another thread.
In response to your comments about various ways to make money, and how much harder it is to get funded now compared to before: Leeching: many people (including myself) has stated that petri leech and low-level leech income kept pace with WS/CS/APR inflation. So if you are selling petri or low-level leech, it is as easy for you to get funded now compared to before. I do want to point out the some other leech (Skeles in particular) has not kept pace with WS/CS/APR inflation. Skeles split was 45M when CS/WS was 300M, but only rose to 50-55M when CS/WS price rose to 500M. So if you are a high-level Bishop selling skeles leech, it is harder to get funded now compared to before. Profits from Zak: As far as I know, these profits definitely didn't keep pace with WS/CS/APR inflation. Regular Zhelm remains 50M, SB remains 20M, and gen20 remains fluctuating between 700M - 1.2B even tho CS/WS price steadily inflated from 300M to 500M. Moreover, in old source, players were probably more tolerant about attackers using energizers / ciders. Nowadays, if you don't use stoppers, you will get flamed most of the time. This adds 10M extra cost to each Zak run. In short I think we can agree that it is a lot harder to get funded from Zak now, compared to before. Grinding other mob drops (silver mane ETC, scrolls, godly equips, NPC equips, and so on). As far as I know, silver mane ETC, most farmable scrolls, and most godly equips didn't keep pace with WS/CS/APR inflation. To my best knowledge, the only farmable godly equip that kept pace with WS/CS/APR inflation is 12/56 Red Craven (which is too rare to be a stable source of funding). Even the price of 11/56 Red Craven didn't rise much. In old source, you can farm gobies for 80M / hour NPCed equips (1-hit mage + SI). Now goby farming doesn't work, and the best map for NPCed equips is ULU1 with 60M / H. So if your primary source of funding is grinding drops from mobs, it is harder to get funding now compared to before. Profits from NX: selling AP resets and gaching. It is true that AP resets kept pace with inflation. So if your primary source of funding is selling AP resets, it is not more difficult to get funded now. However, voting NX is limited to 5 AP resets every 2 days, which is extremely slow compared to the 40+B mesos bar for many bossing parties. Gaching rewards kept pace with inflation. However, it is not stable. In many cases, it yields even less return than selling AP resets. You can overcome the 8K-NX-per-day limit by hunting area bosses. However, this is a chicken-and-egg situation, since you need to get funded in order to kill area bosses efficiently. Unfunded boss hunting for NX is even slower than grinding alone for mob drops. In conclusion, this funding source kept pace with inflation, but it is too slow. If you want to put in extra effort to accelerate this process (following the no-work-no-gain logic of many veterans above), you need to resort to other measures. Merching: I don't know much about it, since I never managed to make huge profits using the buy-low-sell-high approach. There are certainly people who managed to do so, but it seems to be a rare gift. Majority of the players cannot use merching as their PRIMARY source of funding. Scrolling: This approach is unstable. You may make large amount of money in the short run, but it is much less likely to happen for the long run. Summon Farming: Not everyone has a computer that is powerful enough to run many clients simultaneously. My computer gets really laggy when I open 3. Feel free to enlighten me if I omitted any other source of income for unfunded players (obviously HT isn't one). My conclusion is that unless you are willing to sell leech, it is harder to get funded now compared to before, due to the unbalanced inflation. This is what I meant when I said the inflated economy is telling people "sell leech or go home", which is definitely not healthy. As OP suggested, controlling the inflation of WS/CS and AP resets in some way (e.g. letting NPCs sell them at a lower price) would alleviate this problem. In response to your comment "Just because you see players like me looking for top bossers doesn't mean it is harder to find bosses with players who also started out": I had a lot of difficulties joining random Zak/Krex parties as a low-range NL. When I was 135-140, just PMing my level to the Zak / Krex organizers usually led to a rejection. Things got better after I leeched my self to 140+. But even then, if the organizer asked about my range and I said 3.8K (which is the normal range for not-so-funded NLs at LV14X), I still got no response most of the time. It only became easy for me to join random Zak / Krex parties after I sold hundreds of hours of leech and upgraded my NL to 5K+ range. Even if unfunded players manage to squeeze into random parties, the discrimination doesn't stop there. I won't go into much nasty details here. Suffice to say there are people who think they are better than others simply because they do higher damage, and are really explicit about that feeling. Of course, I might experienced those difficulties because I was not social enough. I sincerely hope players that are more social than me had better experiences bossing with friends when they started out. I believe veterans had an easier time during this phase, because people didn't have such a competitive mindset back then. From what I see, this factor is discouraging the remaining few starters who survived the shock of HP washing and lack of party play / PQ. If we insist making the new players grind just as much as old players (maybe even more if they don't want to sell leech), many of them will be driven to other servers. From what I see, many of them (even the not-so-new ones who started in mid-2017) are already driven to other servers. I don't think this is a good direction to head towards. Like @FireHeart , I believe there is a middle ground between valuing veteran players' existing efforts, and giving new players more motivation to catch up. If most players here don't agree with me, it's fine. I admit that I could be totally wrong about what veteran players went through (since I started in 2017), and that my bossing experience may not be what other starters had (since I am not very social). I don't have a problem if nothing changes, since I enjoy selling leech. It's just sad to see people around me quit. Disclaimer: underlined portions were added in an edit that came after some quotes of my reply.
Warriors use ap reset for -4 mp and 50+hp while other classes use ap reset for 12-15mp for 20-hp (except Bucc) why not change other classes to benefit Ap reset more closely to Bucc, not too much like War But could be -10 mp but + 30-35 hp. Something like that. We still need to HP wash but the process won't be too much difficult like atm. I'm just making a suggestion, again I say.
There's a point to make about ancient players like me who had to deal with the server changing drastically continuously as they play. I feel like yall are very 'old players just want it easier for themselves / old players had it easier back then' but like... I made my NL before HT was even out, so of course it had 4k HP at level 140! I then started washing it just a little to get to 5.2k which was the amount of HP you needed at level 155 to enter HT back then. And then when I was lv 160 it was changed again to need 7k HP, again, had to wash a bit more, until it changed to 9k or whatever it is now and I just have to take HB with me when I go. Feel like that is just as bad as the 'when you level to 70 and only then find out about HP washing' situation, if not even more frustrating because there was literally no way to avoid it. I don't really know what my point is. Right now, I play a lv 197 NL with 7k HP, it's hella annoying to have to have HB in every run, I often delay runs as we try to look for one or someone has to bring a mule, it definitely takes away my motivation when I feel like I worked on this character for so long and it feels like people have to cater for me to bring me on runs, but sure, it's possible (if you have nice enough friends).
The royals market is stabilised at an equilibrium between AP resets, WS/CS and major leech prices. Leech sellers/buyers are price takers. They don't set the price of the leech. You might think this is really counter intuitive but the invisible hand of the market is much more powerful than the individual seller/buyer. When prices of APr/WS/CS increases, demand for leech is increased as newcomers have greater buying power and at the same time expectation of the seller is increased as well since their goal is not meso per se but the APr, scrolls and weapons. Price of leech will not fall unless price of APr/WS/CS falls. If price of leech falls without an equivalent fall of APr/WS/CS, leech sellers would simply quit leeching, steadying the supply of leech. This trend has been around for a long time and as a seasonal leech seller, I can attest to it. At the end of the day, like many posters above have already pointed out, prices of all things have increased, but time spent to achieve end-game weapons have not differed much. And, you did not mention that you wanted to reduce the cost of AP resets in the CS in your original post. In that case, it doesn't matter whether there is an artificially set APr price or not, the new comer will definitely be able to earn more, in fact much more than the case you are illustrating (ie. APr at 16m ea and not 7m).
Your' opinion's don't mean shit to these people Just suffer like the rest of us and keep forking out money for nothing
@Evan @Muff @Kai any reason why a forum mod comparing people who have taken the time to break down their take on the royals economy as "kids wanting icecream for breakfast" is accepted but someone calling this mod out is forum banned?!?!? Also why is a mere forum mod and not anything more than that speaking on behalf of the admins and gms? Also making that level of comparison, how out of touch with your own community are you?? Agree with them or not thats not the point. Theres a huge issue here that many players have with how things are currently. Once again there has been zero communication from the actual people who make the decisions around here about these players concerns. Even if you dont believe these issuea are actual issues, just acknowledge them with an official response so people stop thinking you are gonna listen. Just pretending these players concerns will just go away if theyre ignored is the worst possible way of handling an issue. Sorry if this seems out of sorts, im typing it from my cellphone while around my family. I was this pissed off about the responses here, i had fo say something
Evan's post was on topic, replying to Jae about his post on this thread. Jae's response was totally 100% off topic and I saw fit to deem it as flaming, the warning points for that infraction looked to have banned Jae TEMPORARILY. Evan's response, my postings, and Kai's are all AS PLAYERS ONLY. I suggest you go back and read Kai's post again. This is the exact reason the other staff don't want to add in their opinions on feedback threads. Everyone latches onto it as an official response, when none of them, and certainly not me, are responsible for decision making around here. And it doesn't matter if there's a hat next to someone's name, they damn sure have a right to respond to any feedback threads with their opinions without being assaulted by everyone else. That goes for myself, Evan, Kai, or any staff member that add their two cents into a Feedback thread.
Theres nothing wrong with you guys giving your own feedback. But when the king never comes down from his castle to speak to the common rabble and your responses are the only thing the community has to go off, whether you like it or not you guys are speaking on behalf of matt and the admins
No, we are not. And you can not force your opinion of what we are doing on us or anyone else to become truth. And I'd very much like it if you'd avoid calling me a liar. When I respond in any feedback threads, it's the same manner I have been responding with the same mindset for the last 2 years. As a player. And I feel, as a player, there is nothing wrong with the cost of AP Resets.
Im not calling you a liar. Im glad you can respond as a player and not gm. The issue is you evan kai are not admins. Evans a forum mod so he has even less to do with the behind the scenes stuff. If he is involved in the behind the scenes discussions, then he needs to be made an admin so when he responds to stuff he has something behind what hes saying. When you are the only faces who happen to actualy take the time to discuss inside a feedback thread. And because neither matt or andreas have taken the time to stop into these threads to join the discussion, you guys become the face of the server whether you like it or not. What you say becomes the stance of the servers admins.
As much as I think the discussion you two are having about how different parts of staff communicates with the server is very important, this isn't what the thread is about and I'd appreciate it if you didn't derail this feedback thread. @Enticing @Muff
Do the people in charge only pick people for staff who share the same opinions as them about the state of this game, it's always the same lot with you guys saying hp washing isn't a problem or necessary, when it definitely is and creates barriers.
Speaking as somebody who has been chosen for staff, no. Healthy discussion is taking place in this thread as well as in staff chat, so once again we'd like to ask that you do not go off topic. A server that is almost 5 years old is bound to experience barrier problems and so we're weighing the options and might need to tweak things again just as we've done in the past. Back on topic.