A thing I notice on any update that gets pushed, is the amount of people who try to log in with their old clients, not knowing that an update came out by the time they were gone. Sometimes this cause their characters to get stuck, or client to get bugged, and they rush to shoutbox or bug thread to ask for a fix before even checking if an update came out or not. Maybe for people like us who frequent the forums, its pretty obvious when an update comes on. but for the many players that just play casually, that are new to the game or just don't care for the forums, tend to miss on when an update comes out. Then I remembered that basically any modern game has patcher setted up in their launcher so that as soon as a player tries to play with an old version of an online game, the server notifies the launcher to update the client before you'll have the chance to start the client up. I don't know what are the limitations that made you guys not make a patcher, but I assume it must be too much of a hassle to code and keep up to date for what it is worth. So, instead of a patcher, maybe it would be possible to make the client send a ping to the server and ask it "hey, I'm version X, is this the currect version of the server?" and if the server responds with a "uhhh, no", the client will open an error message, with a link to the download page of mapleroyals (or just forcefully open it on a browser). It's just a low priority, quality of life addition for those who are less up to date with what's happenening in the forums
