New player experience feedback Part 2 - lvl 35 -80
Posted by Hate
KuroMS Suggestions discussion with 4 posts about New player experience feedback Part 2 - lvl 35 -80.
Hey Kuro and Liuyue! Second part of our new player journey: Level 35-40: Kerning Square QL Difficulty: Moderate Complexity: Moderate Overall: ⭐ 7/10 Bugs: None. Remarks: ✔️ Vanilla maplestory QL experience. ✔️ One of the less "fun" questline to do but still okay'ish and help the progress of the medal. ❌ No monster card drops meaning no progress for the ring. ❌ No real gear progression on this part except from the earring at the end. Suggestions: Not much to do here, I don't really know if you can implement card drop, this part can be skipped easily but there are no better alternatives to do besides griding or doing random quest to progress ring + medal. Including it in the player guide is okay for now, but it will be much better to provide some alternative route. Not urgent at all. Level 40-60: Forgotten Hollow Difficulty: easy Complexity: Casual Overall: ⭐ 2/10 Remarks: ✔️ Interesting zone that vanilla maplestory didn't have yet, make it very appealing as most of the players never did it before. ✔️ Zone gives: Ring, Top Bottom/Overall with decent stats that helps progress ✔️ Trophies are a fun way to get Silver gacha while griding/questing ❌ No monster card drops meaning no progress for the ring. ❌ Questline is 3 parts long with 5 levels different between them: 40, 45, 50. quest doesn't give much exp and 0 rewards aside from the last questt. Very stale questline which leaves you with nothing to do until you reach the next part 5 levels later. ❌ Mobs have large gap between levels on the same map (level 42 next to level 59 on the same platform) makes griding feels weird. ❌ Gets boring really fast as you get no medal and no ring progress. Trophies lose their appeal once you grind there for some time ❌ Not clear that you can exchange trophies for silver gacha tickets. ❌The option of Vicious' Hammer exchange for trophies doesn't seem worth at all. ❌ Even if you do stay there with a griding party to level up, when you hit level 50 it starts to get really slow. ❌ You mostly get useless scrolls from silver gacha and once in a while you get a weapon that, if you're lucky, is for your class. ❌ The amount of drops is way too many, and they also sell for small amount of mesos. I didn't feel the need to try and scroll them at all. Just grab the best stats and kept it. Also why should we put on overall if top+bottom gives more stats? ❌ Randomized reward scroll from milestone reward feels unnecessary. 10% chance with 100% destroy on fail will stay in the storage forever or be wasted on item for the lolz. Suggestions: Remove the saying on @guide that states this is a content for 40-60. this will just get them frustrated after 5 levels. We tried really hard to stay there and eventually went to do other questlines and once we hit 51, we just did LMPQ for exp and PP points. This content needs a MAJOR rework or just not be included as a "progressive zone". Level 60-80: Deep Sleepywood Difficulty: ? Complexity: ? Overall: ⭐?/10 Remarks: ✔️ Balrog boss I guess? ❌ No questline ❌ No item progression ❌ Not clear what should the player do in this content Suggestions:: Umm.. I have no idea what to suggest here. Balrog boss is nice, although it was really hard to solo it at level 60~. Some of us even ran out of time during the fight, meaning Ironman is going to have some trouble there until later on. I tried delving to the further parts of sleepywood dungeon, found nothing special. We each went to our own different way to do quest, grind mindlessly or just switched to our other char out of boredom. Final Verdict Overall, not the best experience. From level 45 the fallback to this content is to just do whatever you want in order to level up and progress. if you don't have some friends or the mentality to do questing, it could get boring and burn you out. Then again, this is what we had before forgotten hollow and balrog boss so it is what it is. People will either go Ghost Ship, Jesters, Ulu until they can start the el nath/Deep Ludi content at level 80+. You can really feel the unbalance between the classes even early on. Hope you will get to it soon as right now Shad feels like a really bad choice for 1st character (Sorry, Malefunction). We will power through those levels to provide more feedback as we hit the later content. Once again, thank you both very much for all the hard work! ❤️
Replies
Reply by carrots
to add on, i get the idea of making FH quests available at levels 40/45/50 but i'd prefer it all to be level 40. this would allow me to just get FH questlines over and done with so i can move on to the next thing, be it quest medal & monster ring progression, farming/grinding, or PQ-ing. trying to get to level 50 from 46 was really boring. we tried farming at FH, farming at gs2, and doing quests. farming at FH was the fastest but really boring and only gets us etc to trade for silver gacha. farming at gs2/jester/magatia is a little slower but gives more meso and possibly other useful drops. questing might be the slowest but good for the long run. deep sleepy being mentioned in the player guide is a little confusing or misleading because we were expecting a custom questline or etc/trade system (like with deep elnath, ludi, leafre). guide might be better off just mentioning balrog expedition unlock at level 60. other players have asked me (before this personal experience) and i really didn't have a straight answer for them. overall, i think the in-game @guide and discord player guide (by liuyue) has been helpful but needs to be updated (especially for launch). some mentioned rewards such as vega 60% are no longer available. this of course applies to bossing guide too, we have to make sure that what is mentioned in official guides is accurate to what is happening in-game. no need to worry about mentioning alternative routes to levelling/farming/questing because i'm sure that player guides will pop up overtime. thank you for the hard work so far, we really do appreciate it. please don't take our points as a critique, we are only sharing our personal experience in hopes of giving the kuro team more information to better balance out every aspect of the game (:
Reply by Liuyue
Hi Hate, first off again thank you for taking the time and trying out the early regions more up to level 80. So we most likely won't do more questlines as it will be quite time consuming for reference another server took 2 years to even have it somewhat work functional and fun or even questboards. It also becomes extremely dangerous if a player has to solo questlines as we reach higher levels due to if missing a launch wave then they are kinda stuck too. The same logic also applies to PQs, while they were fun in the original Maple to level up with friends, as the server progresses, it becomes extremely hard for new players to find PQs also. Hence most likely disabling them on launch until a major rework. It's also kinda a given that even in typical Vanilla routes i.e Scarecrow, Ghost Ship 2, Jesters and Galloperas also have 0 monster book card drops. Forgotten Hollow was imported from Maple Classic so its a bit wonky for sure especially with the scrolls which players can just boom the spare early game items for fun and are not intended as end-game scrolling methods. It may seem useless scrolls or items, but its intended for players to buy/sell/trade equipment and scrolls among each other on launch. All NPCs in forgotten Hollow still need to moved to Forgotten Hollow main town and probably just x10 the Quest EXP amount. Regarding the Deep Sleepywood region, its intended for players to work on their Balrog Shoes and Shoulder and Weapon where possible through trading the ETC for scrolls there. I am also unsure if mobs in @guide especially below Deep Sleepywood has been made to be HP and EXP ratio of 15 yet which will most likely beat other grinding spots. Its intended for Thief Classes to be weak in the early game due to their stronger perks late game. Also right now, trying to decide the final EXP rates for launch too. It can not be lower than 2x EXP as Maple Story was balanced as if 100% uptime 2x coupons back then so wonder how long you guys want 2nd/3rd Job to last also.
Reply by carrots
hi liuyue, i get that you have ideas for PQ rework. but at this moment since they are not really causing any problems for players, could we just leave them be until the rework is done (post launch)? pqs are good for those who would like to take the extra time to farm for exp and pp, was that not the intention? and why remove pq if kuro has done all the work to make pq workable for solo ironman and scaled for higher levels. i just don't understand this part. i get that boss rush pq was disabled in the meanwhile to make way for a fresher custom pq. but i think players should be given the option to do vanilla pqs and can even give their suggestions on how it could be improved. removing features that work fine to make way for reworks just make no sense to me when we could just leave them be and upgrade them eventually without the removing or disabling them.