New player experience feedback
Posted by Yuki
KuroMS Suggestions discussion with 4 posts about New player experience feedback.
Hey Kuro and Liuyue! Me, soupy and maleficent made new characters in Ironman mode recently to experience the content from scratch for better feedback. Here is what we found up to level 40: Tutorial Difficulty: Easy Complexity: Casual Overall: ⭐ 10/10 Bugs: ❌ Disconnecting when talking to NPCs Saw you fixed this in the recent update. Remarks: ✔️ Smooth onboarding experience. Suggestions: Gacha Tuning: Getting gold gacha in the current state of the system is a bit too much for early players. If they try their luck, they might end up with high-end gear they have to hold onto for a long time. Consider gating or rewarding blue/silver gacha tickets instead. Maple Island Difficulty: Easy Complexity: Casual Overall: ⭐ 10/10 Bugs: None. Remarks: ✔️ Hits the perfect, nostalgic OG Maple Island experience everyone is familiar with. Level 10-20: Job Quests & Demon Hat Difficulty: Easy Complexity: Casual Overall: ⭐ 10/10 Bugs: None. Remarks: ✔️ Job quest is very straightforward. ✔️ Great monster spawn rates and good EXP scaling. ✔️ The first set item gear has a massive "wow" factor for progression. Suggestions: Gear Uniformity: The shoulders that drop early on are for Level 30. It would make more sense to lower them to Level 20 to match the rest of the set and keep progression uniform. Level 20-30: Sleepywood Questline Difficulty: Easy Complexity: Moderate Overall: ⭐ 9/10 Bugs: ❌ The glove for the crit chance scroll (from milestones) disappears upon dropping it without any warning or message. When trying to move it to storage, players just lose it on the spot. Same goes for earrings for crit rate Remarks: ✔️ Easy quest access via the town signs. ✔️ Excellent monster density/spawns for party play. ✔️ Straightforward, satisfying questline flow. ✔️ Doing all quests gets you to level 35. While slightly above expected progress, it doesn't hurt the experience. Suggestions: Scroll Rewards: The 100% scroll rewards feel way too random. It would feel much better to receive fewer total scrolls but have them guaranteed to match your class stats, rather than getting 5 scrolls for other classes. Level 30-40: Mushroom Kingdom Questline Difficulty: Easy Complexity: Moderate Overall: ⭐ 9/10 Bugs: None. Remarks: ✔️ Armor drops are incredibly helpful for progression stats feel good and they aren't too abundant. Suggestions: Remove Pepe Scrolls: Since Pepe weapon scrolls are untradeable, they can't be shared with party members. They just end up clogging scroll storage forever. Recommend removing them entirely. Rework Pepe Weapons: Pepe weapons (from the Yeti class box) are super rare and untradeable, and they are worse than Astaroth or Level 35 Maple weapons. No one will use them in their current state. IMHO, they can be left as is, they are not harming anyone. Inventory Overflow: Players get flooded with stars, bullets, and arrows here, completely overflowing bags. Please tune the drop rates down by at least 50%. Party Bossing: Allow players to enter the Yeti bosses as a party! They are pretty beefy for first characters (takes about 5-6 minutes solo), so party play would be awesome here. Final Verdict Overall, a very nice first impression! We are incredibly happy with the pace and how fun the experience is. We will definitely continue playing and provide more feedback as we hit the later content. We got the gist that PQ is not really a thing early on, and it's totally fine. Party while doing the content is fun enough and doesn't feel repetitive. Maybe we can make PQ as a more high level thing to do? Thank you both very much for all the hard work! ❤️
Replies
Reply by carrots
adding on to what has been said above. lv 1 - 30 has been really fun this time around, good exp and good rewards (weapon, shoulders, shoes, gloves, ring, and of course the hat). with on my first character, completing the job/astaroth questline only took me to 20+, i was then left to wander around victoria island doing random quests to eventually hit level 30. with my second character, i picked up all the little side quests around vic island while progressing with astaroth story which got to me to about level 32-33. lv 30 - 40 was nothing special, just the usual mushking quests. would be cool if we could party up for yeti, but it's not like a game breaking feature that needs to be added. cape reward is good too because with my previous experiences, cape slot was pretty much left empty until about 3rd job (i think?), unless the gacha gods bless me with a pink adventurer cape. overall, a smooth and enjoyable 2-3 hours. hyper rock was bugged but that did not bother us at all, we made do with town scrolls and taxis. double jump is already a great qol for mobility, at a low level i'm trying to zoom through the entire region anyway. we did not feel the need to do KPQ, which is a bit of a pity. maybe a complete pq overhaul to make all PQs attractive at higher levels? it feels forced to try slotting in KPQ between lv 20 - 30 and the current pace already feels good.
Reply by Liuyue
Hi Hate and Carrots, thank you for making Ironman characters to test out the game from a new player experience again. I'll most likely delete Gold Gachapon on launch or will lock it behind a more late game region and rework it. I thought about making the shoulder level 20 but I wanted to make it level 30 as kinda used as bait for players to play a bit longer and something to look forward to. I kinda wanted a bit of early market for those scrolls or players trading among each other earlier for fun community engagement. I would be open to secondary weapons throughout level 10,30,70,120 with no slots if that's something players want. I'd be down to delete all Use items with the word "Pepe" in theme. Weapons in particular, then the items more or less will come from gacha starting level 1 to 127 but unsure if the rates are sastisfying enough. I'm comfortable enough with 15 minutes for the Yetis as somewhat bearable. Stars and consumables probs will run a script across all regions before launch to decrease it by 50% to 80% as you said. Regarding PQs, Kuro did show me a new custom PQ and to make them meaningful would probs be the workload of around 2 regions but I also must be cautious of casual play-time availability. Right now my vision of their average week for a level 150 casual character is like: - 7 daily Quests + 1 Weekly Quest - 6 Balrogs + 6 Papulatus + 6 Zakum + 6 Krexel + 6 Scar/Targ + 6 Horntail - Grinding a bit here and there - Doing some quests/monster book stuff I'm not confident that they'd wanna do more stuff in their schedule like Daily Party quests too but I do realize many players play pre-big bang Maple for them so its a tricky dilema. I think that a rotating Weekly PQ 120 to 150+ featuring Commerci Glasses Level 150+ (Renamed as Golden Flower Glasses and stacks with the Golden Flower set) (Golden Scrolls as +3 to 7 and more rare on launch) rewarding around the value of 5,000 Timeless Blessing or 120 to 150 Pitch Perfect and 38 mil EXP or 190 mil EXP. If players find it fun then perhaps could slowly increase. This would also mean that may have to disable most PQs on launch besides the weekly one. But regardless, thank you guys for the feedback. Waiting for 40+ stuff :>
Reply by Kenpachi
Fixing just 1 pq accessible per week i disagree with. Because it hyperfixates people into efficiency and certain weeks people may just not want to do them at all because, orbis pq. *horror*. Locking a high value eq behind eqs in general is good, for those who really grind away at it, but you don't have to exclude all other possible ways of playing just to push a certain eq. its good that the you are detailed enough planning into expected 'contact time' average casual players will have but i think let it remain as expected. Don't need to customise so deeply just to fit an expected schedule because there will be other things that may take peoples' time away. bell curve ey