Many of the other top private servers have 3/4 to 4/5 of the playerbase that royals has. However, they have far less votes than royals. What can make up this discrepancy? 1) Vote abuse 2) Inactive players - waiting to accumulate nx so they can gach/buy cool items Royals' #1 spot on Gtop is not representative of actually "active players". Thus, the biggest thing that can be done to legitimately grow this server is to get back as many "inactive" players as possible. This involves many previous royals players that have moved to other servers (you would be surprised to see how many "famous" veterans are in other top servers). How do we get back these inactive players? 1) Many basic fixes to this game as discussed here: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/this-is-why-people-are-quitting-and-how-the-gms-can-fix-it.119901/ 2) New content * This one is super important because if there is another released PQ (CWPQ/CPQ/Dojo/GPQ) that is not functioning and has to be disabled again, oh boy its just over then. Make sure it is 110% tested, fully completed unlike the other changes that were implemented, but "not ready" (a.k.a. horntail, GFX, class balance changes, and it goes on and on). 3) More accurate representation of player population for transparency - Yes this can make royals look worse than it actually is, and many people only play the #1 populated server just cuz. But, this offers transparency and helps people choose more wisely for themselves in picking a private server to play on.
Actually I've been thinking, is multiple voting actually bad? While voting on like 50 characters is mostly for RWT and is bad I don't see how voting on 2 characters harms anyone. You can't say it's unfair cause everyone can make 2 accounts and it will only benefit the server by greatly reducing WS/CS/AP reset prices which have grown crazy in price. The only problem I can see is that GTOP might disagree with this thing so you'd have to ask them
For me when I was still voting I found it a pain that the reset is 24 hours, which meant that if I voted every night before bed, I'd have to sleep later progressively, or just vote every other day. Reducing the cooldown time to 23.5hours even would have been a great move personally. Gtop policy is something every server has to abide by.
I think whatever has 24 hours cool down time isn't intended for you to do everyday.The quest "A Piece of Crack" had 24 hours cool down time,but has been changed to be reset at 00:00 servertime.The change allows everyone does Papulatus run everyday without progressive delay,which is same as other bigger bosses such as Krexel/Zakum/Horntail/Toad.If anything is considered to be done daily afterward,it's better to make a regular time it resets instead of reducing cool down time.
I think the limiting factor is actually on gtop's side since they only accept votes 24 hours apart. So both our ideas won't work
I started on this server recently and after a week or so I couldn't stop wondering how/why it was at the top of gtop. Especially so last night when I started checking other "old school" servers and noticed how they had way more WORKING features. The "active"/online player count is also a joke. I'm willing to bet anything that half or more are botting/afk leeching (because what else is there to do in this server... HP washing and bossing when it's off cd?). I still don't get how I've kept playing this server for so long when you can't even delete characters. I feel even more dumb when I noticed that one server has pretty much all the features I talked about in another Feedback thread... This server needs more than CWKPQ to be worth playing in it.
How do you know other servers aren't dishonest/altering the player count? There may be botters out there, but they don't last long, and... you don't think other servers don't AFK farm? Pretty hard to stop without really gimping certain skills (making them worthless). There's also plenty to do without washing, which you don't even need to do, contrary to popular belief. Yes it's a lot of work to maximize certain DPS classes like that, but that isn't a bad thing. They're damage are heads above everyone else, they should be just as easy to play as other classes who give up DPS for that ease. IMO, at least... lol As for CWKPQ, there's a lot more coming through the pipelne. Kevin is handling it from scratch so it can be released not only working, but without any potential bugs/exploits that can be found in other content from OdinSource (CPQ for example). This update coming up is also a big wall, and once we pass it, a good chunk more of stuff will be a lot quicker to release.
... Really? How do I know this one isn't either? I suppose you mean AFK leeching, and no I don't think some of the servers that have antileech mechanics have that many players afk leeching compared to this one. Don't downplay it, if leeching is "a part of the game", embrace it and tell me the positive side of it or something... instead of pointing out how other servers might have the same flaw. You don't have to gimp skills, you just have to change/balance exp sharing... Even then, I couldn't imagine poor marksmen shadowers paladins mages having subpar skills compared to the popular ones. Then why bother with the hp changes in the next update if it's not necessary? I don't even understand why you bring up those points... Idc if it's good or bad and never said so, just mentioned how all I see in this server is leeching, bossing and washing. What is this "plenty to do" you mention? Is there content that rewards you with exp/meso/items that isn't leeching/bossing/playing around AP resets? Cool. I'll keep an eye out and check every now and then, see if there's anything new that catches me eye.
You wanna know what one can do in this server other than leeching/bossing/playing around with ap resets? There are bunch of people who play ironman characters who are not allowed to leech, party or even make trade with others. They play without single leech and they ENJOY IT. How are they gonna HP wash on a character like that? Barely ever. Seldomly few of them are seen in bossing scenes. There are islanders who somehow overcome boredom in that tiny island. I still dunno how. There are dedicated people who goes through 800 quests for quest specialist medal. God knows how much time they invested for it but there are quite a lot of them. There are typical grinders who solo/party grind from 10 to whateva lvl maybe 200 without single leech. (this was me on my 1st mage character). - Some of these peoole never sell mage leech but just grind for the fun and in order to farm good items for sales or self upgrade purpose. There are PQ fans who stick to PQs from lvl 21 including KPQ, LPQ, APQ, LMPQ, OPQ (there's even a guild named OPQlovers) and PPQ. Their objectives are to set new time records in PQ (lucky those who won 6b for it). There are apple farmers who make dozens of married characters and run an apple farm in APQ all day. Ask Perfectsin if he found it "fun". There are people with business mindset who merch day and night in FM: they owl, surf entire FM time to time to resell expensive items. They scan forum merch threads for new info every day. They also fight for fm1 spot after every server reset. There are gamblers who use their precious savings entirely on scrolling items. Whether they hit a jackpot or go home (rip Sawngo), they still enjoy it. The source of income doesn't necessarily come from leeching or bossing. A lot of gamblers just save up NX until they have enough to throw their dice. There are henehoes who simply enjoy the chilled atmosphere in maplestory where they can socialize with their friends in Henesys, FM or lounge. Omok fans are one of them and they login to have fun with friends. I hardly ever see them bossing or leeching. You either haven't even tried the options above or you are ignoring them because you don't like them. Face the harsh reality and welcome to royals where there are plenty of things that others like but YOU don't. You are only staring at trend of veteran players who went through tiring process of endless grinding sessions to reach a stage where they are rich or experienced (possessing many characters) enough to go for extreme bossing objectives with Aka super high HP washing and baby-sit leeching pure int NLs. No newbie had 1000 AP resets to begin with heavy HP washing unless they RWTed (quite a bit out there...). I don't understand why you try to fit yourself among them and generalize it as a common objective in this server. No one told you that you need to have high hp washed attackers nor sell mage leech to make absurd amount of income before you can enjoy the game. A lot of casual players don't go heavy washing. If they wish to experience bossing as well, they simply use few int gears and HP wash later to a minimum threshold to survive against certain bosses. For e.g 6200 hp at lvl 155 to survive HT with HB. Yet a lot of people complained and raised their voice regarding HP washing hence staff decided to give extra HP so new players who were not informed of HP handicap may fight end game bosses at late stage as well. Why did they implement it although they regarded it unnecessary? People go berserk when their suggestions don't get accepted: "feedback is the most useless thing in new source, staff don't ever listen to us" (additional HP update probably has more meaning than just that but that's the actual reaction).
It was a snowball effect by even having hp washing from the beginning. It's clear by the state of the game that having 15+k hp on any class is too good of a deal for most people to pass so it's no wonder so much content gets excluded to achieve that goal. With the ease of gaining hp now there should be more people contributing to content that isn't leech, boss and wash, however it'll create an even bigger imbalance between the classes.
>Feedback thread >Giving feedback >"JuST plaY a diFFerenT serVEr tHEN" Also, if you notice the last sentence implies just that.
@sparky95 Those options you've listed to "enjoy this server" does not mean we should not improve upon the game. Whether you approve or not, there are many aspects of this game that can be improved to satisfy the majority and retain current players/draw in new players. And the discrepancy between leeching and PQs (OPQ/PPQ/no other pq that's good after 70), as well as the class unbalances between bossing/non-bossing classes exist. These are aspects of this game that can be improved to help this server. Just because some people find henehoing, islanders, or ironmans fun does not mean we should not improve the server on its clear weaknesses (leeching/class unbalances). Heck, what do you think will happen if this server goes only towards satisfying those "henehoes, islanders, ironmans, chaos scroll gamblers", etc? This would not be a very functional server would it.
Not sure I understand the third suggestion. We have a character online count on the website just like most other servers (though ours is cool and updates automatically). All servers that I know of that use an online count to simply count however many characters are logged into the game, exactly the same thing we do, so not sure why we would need to be different there. I presume you are wanting something that actually breaks down how many characters online are mules, or only count unique IP addresses, something like that? I understand how transparency is a good thing, but I can only imagine this having a negative impact on the server rather than a positive one. If it was commonplace to list only unique players then that would be different, but as it is, it just makes the most sense that we follow what is the traditional method of counting online players.
@Matt You're right, I realize I worded my #3 point very, very unclearly. To clarify, I am urging for transparency between actually active players v.s. inactive players & vote abusers to clearly distinguish between them. According to the Gtop website, there are on average, 4000+ votes per day for mapleroyals. Do we have 4000 players? Not even f*** close. This either means one of two options: 1) Crazy amount of Vote abuse - Very probable, as there are on average 1000 active players (on the high side), and not everyone has 3+ vote whitelists. 2) A shit ton of inactive players - Unlikely, but if there are thousands of inactive players voting everyday to save up NX, we better change features ASAP to attract them before they leave for good. This would mean that there is a possibility to scale this server up tremendously and you, as this server's owner, should capitalize on this golden opportunity.
Thanks for clarifying. Of course there will be both vote abusers and people who don't actively play who are adding to the vote count, however you cannot really expect for the daily vote count to be very close to the number of players playing at any one time. Once you to take into account the fact that not everybody is online for 24 hours a day and that the ~1000 online players consist of some different players throughout the day, then the daily active player count is likely 3000+. Edit: Just did a query for unique IP's logged into accounts in the past 24 hours and got a result of 3767.
In my opinion, the administration and all existing players collectively made this server so competitive and revolves so much around leeching / bossing / washing, so new players shouldn't be blamed for just fitting in. When PQs give terrible EXP compared to leeching and terrible mesos compared to training, of course nobody goes there. No matter how much a newcomer wants to PQ, he cannot do it himself. I don't know why you are listing PQ as an option here when they are practically empty and something clearly needs to be changed by administration. When it takes 4 hours to grind from 90 to 94 for even the strong 3rd job classes (much longer for weak classes like outlaw), but ULU2 split leech gives you those levels within 1 hour at the cost of 40M, people will stop party training, and new players cannot find training partners even if they want to. Let's face it, majority of the people find solo grinding boring AF, and the server should cater to the majority, instead of the minority who enjoys solo grinding for whatever reason. Maybe the new players can be blamed for not having enough patience to use the same skills and do the same rotation ALONE for a hundred hours, but I think more responsibility falls onto the administration for fixing that imbalance (either by buffing party training or nerfing leech). When veterans set HP as a hard requirement in their recruiting messages, when veterans boast about their high HP in forum and look down upon those with lower HP, when they flame unwashed characters for dying in Zak / Krex due to lag in autopot, is it really THAT unreasonable for new players to either get upset or want high HP as well? When veteran players optimize their bossing efficiency to the extreme, forming regular bossing squads with only NLs and BMs, making Dark Knights feel unneeded and quit, thus making it much harder for starters to form parties with HB, should new players really take all the blame for not willing to wait for hours for a Dark Knight to show up? Now let's talk about the focus on damage. I have seen a top-rank BM laughing at an NL for "only having 6K range" in an HT party. I was told by some of my buddies that a "decent range" for LV140 NL is 4.6K when in fact it's 3.6K without tens of billions of gears. There was a hero who bragged about whiting a new corsair player in all chat during Krex, making that corsair feel terrible. There was an NL who starts Zak at bottom arms so his 45K+ lines are not mixed with other NLs and are visible to everyone. OK dude, now we know you can do 45K lines, can you please attack the top right arms with us and maximize efficiency for the entire team? The phenomenons above may not be frequent, but they are definitely there and they ruin the mood of new players over long term. Sure, new players shouldn't compare themselves to veterans in terms of HP and damage. But it's made harder by the veterans who want to feel good about their virtual assets and constantly bring up that difference, isn't it? Take a step back and reflect what all existing players have done, and what imbalances in the game itself hasn't been fixed that collectively contributed to this environment. New players have very little control over the environment of this game. It's the administration's policies that set the big picture, and the veteran players' behaviors that fill in the details. So new players should not take all of the blames.
@Matt Ty for the clarification - I severely underestimated the population of this server. The 3767 unique IP's logged in the last day are the kind of statistics that have not been available to players but change the scope of things with regards to how much vote abuse is going on. With regards to the major problems of the server as noted in the other posts, is staff at least considering to do something with leeching (overshadowing PQ, any party training, or even solo grinding) & class imbalances? Feasible solutions have been proposed by many, including in the form of party-training such as LHC. Are these problems in the server considered to be dealt with in the near future? Or is it something brushed to the side as "leeching and class imbalances" have always been part of the server? May I know what your opinion is on this matter?
We are looking into all those things, and we do have ideas of ways to attempt to tackle the issues thanks to player suggestions and ideas of our own. The reason nothing has been done recently is due to where we are in the development cycle right now, and that we are unable to push any updates until we have fully completed the login server revamp. There's also the fact that any changes for these sorts of things need to be done very carefully due to the sensitivity of what we may attempt to adjust, so we don't want to just rush a change in without making sure we have covered all angles.
