Notice Staff Blog: 2025 Recap

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Happy New Year maplers!
Back by popular demand we have another recap of the year to reflect upon for you.

New Features and Content
In our topic titled 'The Future' in the Recap of 2024 we hinted at various pieces of content that we planned for 2025 which started off in January with update #94.

New fully custom Lunar New Year event
We often choose to research and select nostalgic events that were originally held in various years in the past to rerun in MapleRoyals with some tweaks and additions to make it suitable our community. However we wanted to expand on that and challenge ourselves by creating our own event in 2025.
We looked into the origin of the assets for the Red Tiger and Gold Dragon chairs when we were just browsing chairs one day, and decided to create our own storyline with these assets. We got the community to split up and compete against each other while both sides weren't sure who was going to take the win, yet both sides still got regular rewards making nobody feel left out. The friendly competition by representing your side with your friends, the playful banter and the fairly even split during the entire event was more than we could've hoped for. There is room for improvement of course, but we were very happy with how it turned out for its first run!

EXP and Party EXP changes
Update 94 also brought us EXP changes for when you're vastly lower level than the mob that's being killed to combat the innovation of new training methods that were unintended and too powerful. Here's the infographic once more:

Spoiler: Update 94 EXP changes

Spiegelmann Necklace
At some point in the past we nerfed the ability to obtain godly stats on Spiegelmann Necklaces, however some of the godly ones were still in the game. Upon review we decided it would be most fair to allow this item to be obtained in its godly state again.

Ranch Owner's request
Ever since we removed the ability to craft our custom consumable Shiny Onyx Apples from Rose Garden we've been looking for another way to make this item obtainable, even temporarily.
We landed on a new NPC with a particular interest in exchanging them in limited quantities for Onyx Apples during the Valentine Event period.

Balrog Boss and shoulder equipment
As teased in the 2024 Staff Blog we released a new boss with custom features and a first of its kind equip reward, Balrog!
We haven't released level limited content like this before which many players weren't expecting but we really wanted to see what kind of refreshing bossing experience we could bring to characters that are limited to third job skills. We were hoping to see veteran players take this opportunity to start a new character of that job they always wanted to try on their main account to transfer the shoulder equip to their main character, and perhaps help their lower level friends and guildies along the way as they train up together to eventually face this boss. We also made sure that HP washing wasn't a hard requirement for this content.
It seems like a bunch of players did eventually catch on and enjoyed playing on their third job characters to get a shoulder with decent stats.
Later in the year we added more drops to increase the reason to replay this content.

There is still a bug that we want to fix with the stats of the shoulder not counting towards your character being able to equip other equipment (e.g. if you need 100 dex for a weapon, you have a 2 dex shoulder equipped on top of your 98 dex from base stats and other equipment, you won't be able to equip that weapon yet).

Maximum character slots per account increased
To accommodate for new Balrog specific characters on main accounts we increased the amount of characters you can have on an account from 6 to 9. This way everyone has the opportunity to add a new character on any account they already had.

Ninja Storm
We noticed that Night Lords were missing mob, but more specifically boss control in certain scenarios making them less favored in content like LHC. We enabled Ninja Storm to work on bosses giving them a method of grouping up or moving these boss mobs better.

Duct Tape
As many of you know we have a custom reward for some of the Neo Tokyo bosses, White Scroll pieces A, B and C. For the longest time you were only able to have them taped together with a Gachapon reward Duct Tape. Based on feedback we added Duct Tape to the Vergamot drop table so all the required items can be obtained in Neo Tokyo.

The introduction of Duey transfers
Duey was made available. Here are the features once again:

Spoiler: Duey

• Duey can be used to send items and mesos to another player, even if they are currently offline.
• Recipients have 30 days to retrieve their items and mesos from Duey once they have been delivered, after which they are permanently deleted.
• Duey offers two delivery services; Regular, and Quick Delivery.
• Regular service takes 6 hours for delivery - costs 200,000 mesos per parcel.
• Quick Delivery is instant, available from anywhere, and allows you to write a memo - requires 1 Quick Delivery Ticket per parcel.
• You must be level 50 or higher to send a parcel through Duey.
  
• Cash Items cannot be sent through Duey.
• Up to 10 parcels can be stored with Duey at a time.

Item Tag for Equipment
By popular request we reenabled the Item Tag feature which can be bought in the Cash Shop, here are the conditions once more:

Spoiler: Item Tag

• Item Tag can be used to permanently engrave an Equip with your character name.
• Item Tag can only be used on equips that do not already have a name engraved.
• Item Tag cannot be used on Cash equips, or time limited equips.
• It is not possible to change or remove an engraving from an equip.
• Character name changes do not affect engraved equips.

Item Guard for Equipment
We enabled the Item Guard feature with various durations which can be bought in the Cash Shop, here are the conditions once more:

Spoiler: Item Guard

• Item Guard allows you to add a temporary seal to an Equip, restricting it from being dropped, sold, traded or accidentally scrolled.
• Item Guard cannot be used on Cash equips, or time limited equips.
  
• Sealed equips can be scrolled, but are given an additional confirmation prompt.
• Sealed equips cannot have their seal removed early.
• You can extend the seal duration on an equip with an additional Item Guard.

Additional Storage
up to a total of 48 Storage slots are functional and available to purchase in the Cash Shop. You don't have to put all your items on mules anymore as you can keep a lot more items with the Storage NPCs around the world this way.

Quality of Life changes
Cecilia at Gardener's Spot now allows exchanging for multiple items at once.
Slightly adjusted the color of Spouse Chat text to make it more readable.
Fixed some missing hitboxes for Papulatus' AoE Heal skill.
Fixed some missing hitboxes for Castellan Toad's attacks.
Blue Mushmom respawn timer changed from 23 hours to 6 hours.
Black Crow respawn timer changed from 23 hours to 8 hours.
Kacchuu Musha respawn timer changed from 11 hours to 6 hours.

Bug fixes
Cold protection capes no longer override required item for 'protectItem' maps meaning you will die as intended by unequipping Guild PQ earrings if you have cold protection on your cape.
Fixed an issue where fire damage over time would sometimes not expire.
Reverted a change made in Update 82 which made monsters more aggressive, with additional changes intended to prevent bosses from getting stuck in a non-attacking state when multiple players are hitting the monster.
Note: This also fixes issues related to mobs being able to "animation cancel" during mob controller swaps.
In addition to Dispel and Damage Reflect, all other mob skills will now take effect after a delay to match the mob animations more accurately.
Fungus Scroll, Oinker Delight and Zeta Nightmare now work properly.
Snail Pet can now properly equip Transparent Pet Equip.
Pink Yeti Pet can now properly equip Pink Yeti's BFF.
Fixed a issue which caused Carrot Basket Chair to disconnect players.
Fixed a graphical issue with Shiny Ribbon Hair.

Logging improvements
As some keen eyed community members may have noticed in missing item character requests for example, we worked on making it easier for ourselves to locate certain logged activity of characters and items so we can gather our data and provide more accurate answers on player inquiries and ban appeals.

Staff Changes
Game Masters
We'd like to inform you that Intern GM's @Foxy and @Heidi have been promoted to fully fledged GMs!
Working with them has been wonderful ever since they joined the team and I hope they will continue to assist the Staff team and the community for a long time.
With their new role they will also be able to host GM events in-game without the assistance of a senior member so look forward to that!

Game Balancers
The Game Balancer role has proven to be a difficult position as feedback gathering, ideas and suggestions are formed a lot faster than any sort of game implementation can be. In addition to that the people in this role often chose it because they don't have time for a GM position, but they would still like to help making the game better.
Unfortunately our Game Balancers have gotten busy with their lives this year leading to not having spare time continuing this role which brings us to the current situation of vacancy for this role. Fear not though as balance changes are still being discussed and implemented by the rest of the Staff team as part of their regular duties!
We'd like to thank @Rielle and @Tommy for taking on this role when they were active and planting the seeds for certain game changes.

MapleRoyals Statistics
As always we have some fresh statistics for you from 2025:

• 16592 accounts were banned
• 83188 characters were created
• There are over 97000 characters that are lvl 120 or higher, let's shoot for 100k!
• 171 characters created in 2025 made it to lvl 200
• Of the characters created in 2025 that made it to 4th job, most of them chose to become a Bishop (1173), followed by F/P Mage (661) with Buccaneer (546) sweeping up a third place! Corsairs are down to double digits with only 94 people choosing to pursue this job.
• The player with the highest amount of NX on one account has surpassed 38.4 million. Two other collectors are in hot pursuit at 36.4 and 33 million
• 1699 Chaos Scrolls failed in December 2025, at least they didn't get a -5!
  
• This years Chair Gachapon machine has consumed 1.446.350.000.000 mesos at 28927 uses in total
• We hosted 161 GM events during 2025 which is not bad! Maybe the new GM additions can boost those numbers.

The Future
You may have realized that we weren't able to fully complete and implement our goals for 2025, especially regarding Class Skill Balance and Pink Bean. There's a variety of reasons for that of course, but what it ultimately comes down to is that while we have made a lot of progress on these updates, we didn't want to release something rushed, untested and unfinished. In addition to that we're balancing out Pink Bean based on the Skill Changes which means the Skill Changes have to be released prior to Pink Bean.
We do have good news for you though! There will be a Phase 1 and Phase 2 of skill changes with Phase 1 coming to you in a game update very soon.

We have plans, dreams and aspirations for other future content including a shoulder equip from a different source than the current Balrog once we fixed the bug on the shoulder slot, but we'd like to keep most of these plans a secret for now, at least until we're able to deliver on our Skill Changes and Pink Bean updates!

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Lastly we'd like to thank the community for their continued support and interest in the game we've been maintaining for many years now. Here's to a fabulous 2026 with nostalgic and interesting new content!

- The MapleRoyals Staff