Some of us were quite surprised when Reboot World was announced for GMS.
They were sure that, like the Auction House, Meso Market, and permanent NX clothing in Cash Shop, this "money gives no advantage" server was something our branch of Donxon will never let us have.
But we did get it. Maplers and ex-Maplers came flocking to experience the wonder for themselves. Success?
Unfortunately, some puzzling decisions by NexonNA make the experience not as good as it could be.
- Hardware
Seems Nexon grossly underestimated the enthusiasm for this new world.
Even on normal days it's choked and laggy and difficult to even log in to, much less stay connected. On 2x it becomes impossible.
While it's to be expected that enthusiasm will wane and the population will drop, failing to allocate sufficient resources from the start means that people are not enjoying Reboot as much as they could, and may well leave because of that, and not because the world itself can't hold their interest. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.
They did add a bit of hardware a few days after release, but that hardly made a difference. They keep having maintenances for "back end modifications to the servers" to address their stability, but those don't help at all.
And then, when you manage to get on and stay on, every boss map and every good training map is full, ks'ing and tracking and all manner of harassment, just like in the good old days...
- Cash Shop contents
This server is supposed to support itself through cosmetics alone.
You'd expect it to have the most extensive selection of equipment covers, effects, cosmetic coupons, and so on, to encourage people to part with their NX.
And yet it doesn't. No VIP or REG hair/face coupons, pitiful selection of pets and equipment covers, everything expires, it's just sad.
So unless their devious plan is to make people buy barely-decent clothes first, and then release better ones and have people spend NX all over again, they're just shooting themselves in the foot here.
- Pay to Win, aka "advantage to paying players."
As soon as we saw the promo video, we asked about pets.
In KMS, pets and their skills can be purchased with Mileage (Reward Points), but here they can't. A looting pet is, if not essential, then a huge advantage, especially in a server where all you have is what you're able to loot. Making pets, as well as their skills and water of life, only available through NX (except for the 5-hour snail and the rare Hilla drop Blackheart), is a definite advantage to paying customers. Reboot doesn't even have Tot's, for a free 7-day pet that would help one get strong enough to defeat Hilla.
It's true that this advantage can be had at a fixed low cost of about $10 for the initial outlay and then another $10 a year for water of life, unlike Cubes that can run into tens of thousands in open-ended gambling, it still runs against the principle of "no advantage to paying players" and it turns a lot of people away from the server. People don't like being forced to pay, even just $5, on a nominally "free" server.
And then there was the Meso Sack fiasco.
They tried putting those in at release, but the public outcry made them realize people will just flat-out refuse to play the server. So they withdrew them, but with a notice that definitely leaves them the option of re-adding them at a later date. That doesn't sound good.
The whole Meso Sack mess did serve to draw fire away from the pet issue, though. People are now all, "Aren't you ever satisfied? They took away the Meso Sacks, now you want pets for free too? You expect the server to run on air? Nexon deserves at least some money. If you can't afford $5 go mow your neighbor's lawn or shovel snow from their driveway or something." And Artasi finally responded to the pet issue, saying essentially, "Pets are only cosmetic."
- Bugs and changes
There was the stupid Cash Shop overflow issue that gave people unlimited cubes and meso.
I hear rumours of other exploits that have yet to be patched.
And of course the same botting, hacking, and vaccing tools that work in the regular servers still work in Reboot.
Some of the gear being smega'ed in Reboot certainly looks like it took way more cubes than anyone could have legitimately collected in the time the server was open. Some people could get lucky, of course. But the same person getting lucky on a dozen pieces of gear, and coincidentally being an NX-user with plenty of money for smegas? That does make one wonder.
Nexon changed the drop tables in the entire game, apparently copying them from KMS. The purpose is not entirely clear, although it might have been to prevent low-level gear from dropping from high-level mobs. Why this was necessary is unclear. It just makes it much harder to use the transfer hammer to get decent gear in Reboot.
Unintended(?) side-effects of this change, that make life unnecessarily hard in Reboot: (Recall that Reboot isn't supposed to be a "hardcore" server. It's the same as the normal servers, just without trading or pay2win)
- Familiars and Codex cards don't drop. Some classes guzzle MP potions. Everybody loses out on Leafre set Ignore DEF.
- Purple Senior equipment doesn't drop in MPE. The guaranteed Epic potential on those, along with the transfer hammer, would have made it much easier to get decent gear in Reboot.
- Equipment drop rate is much lower everywhere. This, especially with the Sizzling Santa event making people level 3x as fast, makes it so you're unlikely to get a full set of gear before you outlevel the mobs that drop it. And of course it means a lot less meso by NPC'ing gear.
- Reboot Coin Shop
First, they neglected to put Epic potential scrolls and potential stamps from this shop's Reboot World version. No reason given. Just to make things harder on Rebooters.
But ok, the shop still has some really good things, like cheap inventory expansions and nice rings.
Then they sharply nerfed the coin rate from Shining Santa Boxes, not just instating a cap of 90 coins a day, but actually replacing multi-coin options with Rudolph Noses, the single worst item in the box. Besides being a sadistic quality-of-life punishment (because of how the noses fill your inventory and are hard to discard), it makes it nearly impossible to get any of the good things in the shop. People who were happy to farm the boxes and participate in the event for various goodies before, are now royally pissed off.
This change affects all servers. But it's worse in Reboot, because everybody is new there, and needs all the items in the shop. In the established servers, many people just wanted inventory expansions for mules, or chairs and damage skins for fun. Not being able to get those isn't nearly as infuriating as being unable to get decent rings, or inventory expansions for one's main.
So the mood on the new server has definitely shifted from unbridled joy to frustration and resentment. The server is still full, possibly because there's nothing much to do on the regular servers (since the coin event was nerfed just as bad there). But will everyone abandon Reboot to create their Kinesis on their normal server, next week?
Now, back to the title of this thread.
As you can see by my sig, I generally tend to believe Nexon is incompetent, rather than evil.
However, all these seemingly unrelated issues that add up to a less-than-happy experience with Reboot, are they truly accidental? Or did NexonNA only give us Reboot because Korea made them do it, and they are subtly (or not so subtly) trying to make it fail so they can be justified in closing it?
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