Given recent events... let's talk about this? In my opinion, I don't have a problem with mage farming in general. It's not appealing to me to play that way personally, but I think having diverse methods for making mesos is a good thing. The issue is that it's just TOO GOOD. Setups have been refined to where it now is just so exponentially better than traditional methods like bossing, etc. This is creating a widening gap between those who mage farm and those who don't. It's very demoralizing to those who don't want to play the game that way, but feel like they can't possibly compete otherwise. What we need is for it to be balanced, I think. So let's try to come up with ways we could limit/balance it. Some ideas: 1. Limit farmers to 1 channel. Downside: Needs to be manually enforced by GMs. 2. Drastically reduce NPC sell prices. Downside: Harms regular players/leech sellers. 3. Drop rate for mage ults gets exponentially worse per character the longer you farm for (maybe starting at 1h+, resetting at server reset?). Downside: Probably very complicated to implement? Any other ideas? Thoughts? PS: Please no personal attacks directed at the actual people behind the mage farms. They are just playing by the rules and hustling to get those mesos. Direct your criticism at the rules instead and the game balance that pushes them down that path.
The ~mapowner system could be made to accommodate this (likely going by IP, with a corresponding T&C update to specify that you can't use multiple IPs to hold multiple maps/channels), and for the most part it should work out reasonably well, with enforcement only being required in the case of people ignoring mapowner rules. Ultimately though, instead of banning it outright it's better to offer alternatives/nerf specific mechanics to make it no longer attractive to do. Note that alternatives (for now) should probably give some amount of pure meso if mage farm is killed, with potentially a plan to slowly reduce that meso over time to let the economy adjust. I don't have recommendations for what to add, but something probably in the lv 100-135 range, something in the 135-150 range, and 150-200 range together would likely be good? For low lv/pre-bossing, then early bossing where bosses can't make money, and then an alternative to classic bosses. Another way to nerf mage farm is very simple: make all items dropped by enemies that were killed by ultimates (or rather, probably use the standard 80% rule here too if it's not too much server load) only pet lootable by the person who used the ultimate that killed them.
im not sure on ways to fix mage farming but i agree with the overall sentiment of the post. Mage farming really does feel like the only efficient way to farm mesos and its not sustainable if more and more people decide to do it. I think more diversity is needed to compete with mage farming at the very least.
There is no problem with mage farming in my opinion. The problem is that all the content in the server is being adjusted in response to how OP mage farming is to the point where the average player cannot enjoy the game's events (either by nerfing event drops or nerfing the rewards from them). I also think that it's dumb to have a mechanic in the server which is very abuseable by botting/automation and increasing the workload of staff by testing wether they are rule breakers or not. I think the mechanic should be viable option for players but also the amount of players that a player should be able to control and attack with should be limited (which would also be easier for staff to enforce). I hate the cat and mouse game thats currently is going where people find ways to abuse every single rule to optimize mage farming when it is not the essence of "old school maplestory" which the server was suppose to mimic. The staff should move the goalposts in regards to mage farming and change the rules. The current state of game sucks very much and I think the population decrease reflects that.
I just want to comment on this subject because I've been seeing a lot of misinformation and inaccuracies circulating in different places (not referring to your post). For the record, I do think mage farming became more of a problem in recent years, but in my opinion this is not the most pressing issue and there are much more important subjects to tackle at the moment, and I will do my best to explain why. offlinetvfan's method looks scary to the average player, and it might even seem like it's game breaking or dangerous for the game, but I want to assure you that it's not. He claims to be making 2-3b per hour, which is false. For reference, if you farm 3 channels of IV2 with max efficiency with mages centered and with meso up, you will make 220-230m npc. He farms 9 channels, so even if he was the most efficient farmer and used meso up on all 18 mages, he would make about 660-690m at most. This is clearly not the case, since his mages are cornered and he doesn't use meso up, not to mention the disappearing loot and rotations that take longer than 3 minutes. I estimate his gain is around 300-350m at most, and his pot cost is through the roof, so he would be pretty much making the same meso as your average 6 mage farmer. With that out of the way, I want to talk about mage farming in general: Mage farming got popularized in recent years, and many more players have farming setups ready. However, on the average off event day, farm maps are still not full (in fact, on some days they're even almost empty). It looks scarier from the outside when you see all the new people with mages, but in practice it's very hard to make significant money that way, and there are only a handful of farmers who do that consistently. That said, I do think there are 2 problems with mage farm, and I would ultimately like to see them solved, even though I don't think it's as urgent as class balance or pb: Map diversity: The real issue of mage farming is the raw meso. It's much easier to just gain NPC meso without having to sell anything. There are plenty of known maps that make you significant meso (even more than the meta maps), such as Silver Mane, ToT, Wyverns. People don't farm those much, because a few days in it becomes clear that it's too hard to sell the drops and the market can't really sustain more than 2-3 farmers of the same map. Raw meso is king. I've tested every map with a farmable layout in the game last year (6 mages, 1 looter), including some really cool and promising ones like Moon Ridge and Lab 202 for example. I won't share all my findings publicly, but the results were that only 4 maps in the game gave me 200m or more npc money per hour. Not only the rest didn't exceed 200m, but most didn't even get close to 150m. If this issue is tackled in the future, the npc meso from popular farm maps needs to be brought down to be on par with other maps with farmable layout, so there will be many farm options, with more farming for sellable items and less for raw meso. This is difficult to do and will require a lot of knowledge and experimenting, but it's doable. A change like this is also granted to piss people off, so the specifics need to be discussed with the community beforehand. Events: The majority of farmers on the server are event farmers, almost exclusively. During events, popular farm maps are basically warzones. You need to hold your maps while eating and rush your bathroom breaks if you want any chance at keeping your mapowner. This is where the market issues created by the increasing amount of farmers really takes place. This in itself is not a major issue too, but the problem is that events in this server last way too long. If we look at the 2025 farming events alone (CNY, Anniversary, Halloween, Summer Event, xmas), they lasted 5 and a half months. This is almost half of the year where farmers can generate Att pots, CS/WS, NX, Smegas and other things. It's ok to have long events, but in that case the nerf to event drops from mage ults needs to be more harsh, a lot more harsh even. In addition, Anni event specifically is way too strong. Not only you can get CS/WS from the boxes, but the amount of NX is absolutely absurd. The meso I made during this event could basically almost give me 70% of an Auf Helm, and I didn't even farm the most in the server. Anni event should be reworked, the boxes can't just drop from mage ults like this, and the rewards should not be that strong. So in conclusion, I would not like to see mage farm killed, but diversified. With less NPC meso, more map selection and less event rewards, it should eventually benefit the market as a whole and also make bossing a little more appealing. But again, I don't think this issue is as urgent (with the exception of Anni event) as other things that Staff currently work on.
Okay, but like, compare the avg meso gain from mage farming vs the avg gain from bossing. It simply doesn't add up to anything even remotely resembling equal grounds, even if you use 6 attackers to solo horntail as an example. If the game really was about grinding maps for mesos then yeah it would make sense that mage farming is this good, but as it stands there are very few map options for mage farming, so only a small group of the most dedicated farmers stay on top, and the game is still on the face of it geared for people running bossing instances. So why is mage farming so good that almost any top player would drop bossing all together and just play mage in order to be competitive? Shouldn't killing bosses be a rewarding endeavor as opposed to casting genesis on 6 different accounts while standing in place? I do get it's more nuanced than this, but it really doesn't seem like it's healthy for the game as a whole... not to mention the actual addiction that a lot of mage farmers end up dealing with from the style of gameplay that mage farming encourages.
specific maps can be revamped to disallow running into the wall to sync your chars or get rid of safe spots/deadzones so you need to reposition consistently like parts of ulu1 this would add some complexity and reduce confusion towards what looks like macrobotting a quicker fix might also be repositioning merchant npcs, map teleports, and/or char reset locations
