This is a private server of a 15 years old game, the community playing this game is very limited and very "educated" on this game, even if you'll shrink the channels to 10, i doubt it will result in the outcome you were hoping for. The kind of players that played MS in the past knew nothing of the game, everything was a mystery, and there weren't any robust wikis for every question you'd have. And in forums opinions flew left and right, making it hard to make decisions on which map is better. Also, a lot of the players didn't care about it as much. This lead to exploration, and people trying out different areas all the time because they don't know if the next best map is hiding around the corner. Quest led them to new areas, where they kept exploring, maybe returning to some grinding place after a while to get a few lvls, then returned to explore to check the new areas. This caused all maps and channels to have some level of activity in them, and adding the large playerbase meant that you won't go around without bumping into someone else. But all this is but a fading nostalgic dream, that cannot be done in the age of information, where BBB hidden street is accessable to all, and in forums you can easily find guides to everything you can think of. the mystery has been solved for the most part, and most players on this server knows what's good for their time, and what's a waste. With that knowledge in mind, do you think people over here would ever pick the inefficient solution? If you'll half the amount of chs, only a certain selection of maps will start to feel the lack of available training spots. In these ones, people will either consider partying, or move to the second best map, and there this chain ends. You barely caused a handful of new maps to become semi viable only on active hours, and nothing more. I have no easy solution for this, because the avarage playerbase mindset cannot be changed at this point. And any idea that spring to mind doesn't really achieve this idea of spreading out on maps without hurting the values of royals like adhearing to nostalgia. I'm throwing the towel on thinking of a solution, but at least I'm very certain that CH reduction is not the way to go, not against hackers, or against empty maps.
I think throwing in the towel sums up your response and most of what the others have to say about the situation. I'm offering a possible solution and I understand many within the community just want to have fun or don't care enough. That's fine but that doesn't mean something like this isn't worth a try, especially when they decided to make this years anniversary candles untradeable, for reasons you can speculate. However, my experience in old source can relate to some of your points raised. In old source, I recall many maps being practically full. Whether it was skeles, ulu, ghost ship, etc. Now we can barely get full ulu channels at best, and for what purpose is there to have all these areas? I understand your point, but there are reasons to pick the less efficient maps. For example, you can maximize your meso gain in ulu1 using duo mages, correct? However, you can have an easier time go to ulu2 or skeles or ToT instead since they don't require as much work to farm. And I think there can be some changes made to make those areas more enticing because old source had vastly superior spawn rates in all maps compared to what we have now. Some players don't know or some of the data is lost but the fact is it still exists and the concurrent population is about half of what it was back then. Why throw away this suggestion if your main argument is individual player convenience when theres a bigger picture to look at? At this point I won't push this much further because I knew this wasn't a popular suggestion but I don't see many others being made. And the same points will just be reiterated over again.
Personally against. Sure, there are a lot of hackers, but they will keep coming back. If anything delete the maps nobody uses or goes to that hackers freely populate (please don't actually do this). However, we need the channels for: Event bosses (Cake Boss, Love Slime, etc), mini bosses (Lyka, Anego, etc), popular leach maps (ulu1, ulu2, petri, etc).
I would say delete only 1 channel, it will still have a huge impact on every channel. Maplestory was never about constant training, the community made it awesome true talk - player since 2005.
I agree on this. Also i think 20 channels is just too much.. sometimes royals has over 1,000 players online but some days it feels like it has only 100 online, because the world is too huge and people spread into different channels....... Like i once met 10 people at least in CPQ in channel 5 but channel 1 was empty. I think if we reduce channels at least by 1 to 5, people would be more social and there would be more players at empty maps.
This year's halloween event showed that a single channel can host hundreds of players for event boss raid. In the same way, other event bosses should be available through multiple rooms in a single channel. The argument on the necessity of extra channels for the event boss is no longer applicable.
They were mostly used for getting 10 of your charas inside; hitting it 100x each chara, then smegaing ppl to come and help.
