Where did Pre Big Bang go wrong?

[KhainiWest]

[SaptaZapta]

[Pikamemnon]

There have been signs that Nexon at least considered the suggestion, so "doomed from the start" might not be a good fit but I'm not sure that I would advise anybody to wait for Nexon either, unless the person really wants to.

I remember hearing about talk trying to decide on a pay model and rumors about Nexon possibly getting interested if a Pre Big bang server had a enough popular support. (not very realistic but it was better than nothing)

Maybe something went wrong internally or they could not get enough resources to continue development? Could it have been some other form of road block? I can only guess.

[Foxino]

It would be in a different thread where I got into the nitty gritty of the rest of the post but you do realize that Maplestory is still a grind right? The only difference is that in today's game the gravy on top is better. (assuming a person cares about the gravy)

Yes of course current maplestory is still a grind, it's a bloody mmorpg. But old maplestory had less content, with all of the easy content geared towards lower players and the fun, challenging content (horntail and pink bean) geared towards the high level community with a massive gap of grinding and gearing up until you could reach that point. Now think about an alternative universe where nexon releases a legacy server for pre big bang, are new players really going to play a downgraded version of maplestory? and are nostalgia driven veterans really going to play it seriously? Most of us are at the age where we would be either in college/university or working?

Do you honestly think a pre-big bang server would be successful? Maybe for a month or two but what about later on when players have been playing the same patch for a year?

But there you go, your question answered. When should we stop asking for a pre-big bang server? We never had the right to anyway...

[cronnoponno]

Nostalgia was never the point. No one is saying the old Maple was perfect, and a server that purely ported over old Maple and did nothing to change any of its problems would definitely be a huge waste of time.


What made pre-BB Maple better than current Maple was the design philosophy they had. Making every class be able to flash jump everywhere and traverse the map in miliseconds hitting 50 billion lines of damage(each hitting like a hundred quadrillion billion damage) as a support class standing on the center of the map and just nuking the screen(when Big Bang went through great efforts to actually stop mages from doing this, because this crap was a problem pre-bb). Making a majority of the maps have little to no difference between each other and be straight-lines that are just designed to increase grinding efficiency. Changing every class to have roughly the same types and mechanics of skills with very slight deviations to circumvent balancing issues at the cost of making every class feel samey with small differences in animations. Making completely random lore buttpulls from nowhere instead of keeping it how it used to be....a world enricher for those who actively sought it out but was never forced down anyone's throat through mindless tutorial quests that are just a formality for explaining why your level 200 preset character is going back to level 1(which they will then become level 10 within the first quest where you talk to an NPC and then talk to another a couple of steps to the left). Need I really go on here?


No one is saying old Maple was perfect and had no problems, but tearing down EVERYTHING, throwing every map in to be the same, just giving classes a bunch of Dragonball-Z world-destroying power with slight deviances in animations were not the way to fix that. Naturally they would need to improve the balancing of classes(without making them the embodiment of cthulhu), give players realistic goals to look forward to. Increase the content between the low-level and high-level gap, and actually put an effort into map design and all that. That is a given.

Just...something other than the massive potential-samey-class-no-map-design-black-mage-story we have now. Big Bang wasn't even that bad, it was actually a very good step in the right direction(other than removing the relevance of statless builds and increasingly making second stats irrelevant to the point that there is no difference in builds now). Old-School runescape is basically exactly what we're talking about, they took the game as it was in 2007 and are continuing to update and support the game with the same design-philosophy they had back in 2007 and the game is thriving, is responsible for half of the entire population on the game and is VERY community driven. If Maple was just ported back to V62 pre-BB and NEVER changed ever again after that, yeah that would never work and no one would ever want that. But if they ported the game back to just after Big Bang or the last patch towards Big Bang and continued to support the game the way they used to, I think it would certainly go a long way towards improving the game and making it worth playing again.

[Pikamemnon]

Yes of course current maplestory is still a grind, it's a bloody mmorpg. But old maplestory had less content, with all of the easy content geared towards lower players and the fun, challenging content (horntail and pink bean) geared towards the high level community with a massive gap of grinding and gearing up until you could reach that point. Now think about an alternative universe where nexon releases a legacy server for pre big bang, are new players really going to play a downgraded version of maplestory? and are nostalgia driven veterans really going to play it seriously? Most of us are at the age where we would be either in college/university or working?

Do you honestly think a pre-big bang server would be successful? Maybe for a month or two but what about later on when players have been playing the same patch for a year?

But there you go, your question answered. When should we stop asking for a pre-big bang server? We never had the right to anyway...

Everyone is entitled to an opinion but this post is almost entirely based on preference.
-The total amount of content does not matter that much, what really counts is play time and quality of that spent time.
-By no means does easy always equal bad. (CPQ says hi)
-I would make the case that if someone was not having fun until they got to fight HT or PB then they are playing the game wrong.
-A gap differentiating pros from noobs, I consider to be a positive. A lightly competitive atmosphere can be seen as being something important.
-Mentioning school and work is not relevant. Players of all ages were always a part of Maplestory so demographics has no bearing on PreBB. (no more so then it would on the current Maple)

I don't know if you are aware but on the Nexon forum there is a section called Suggestions & Feedback. I wouldn't consider it a "right" to make suggestions but for reference, Nexon did ask for them.

There are a lot of claims in the post but almost none of them have evidence to support what is being said. Meanwhile there are several examples of internet games successfully operating old and new versions in tandem. As a result, the games are able to maintain a larger population of new and returning players then what might otherwise be possible.

Players could try asking Nexon about it and we will see what happens.

[cronnoponno]

The gap in Maplestory pre BB was way too big to be positive and is done in the most nonsensical way possible.

From level 60-70, it's a grueling and soul-crushing experience for most players. You've pretty much maxed out all your useful skills and are just filling in the random crap you didn't bother to add points into, stat points barely did anything. The gear you got was overall useless and the PQ's at the time were more for potion gains than EXP. Then when you hit level 70 a random threshhold is hit where the game sorta became fun again, and then when you get to level 76+ depending on your glass you go through an insane leveling spike until you get about to level 90.

For most classes you hit a huge wall right here, the biggest wall the game had at the time, where you don't -really- need the rest of the skills for many classes and leveling up does very little to change the pace and nature of the game, and even LESS content is directed towards this area. If you can literally claw and bite your way to level 120, the game once again hits a fun threshhold and you can enjoy the game for a bit longer, until you reach the point to where you max most of your ''important'' skills...but 4th job did it worse by requiring many classes to fight endgame bosses for a chance at getting their skill books which required disgusting levels of high-gear, connections with a good guild, and required them to take you on good faith knowing you were at a skill-level disadvantage and that you were taking loot that they themselves sought after due to it being so rare.


That was a huge problem pre-bb and you cannot deny that Pika. You can say you prefer a poorly thought system if you like but that doesn't mean it wasn't a poorly thought progression.

[Pikamemnon]

The gap in Maplestory pre BB was way too big to be positive and is done in the most nonsensical way possible.

From level 60-70, it's a grueling and soul-crushing experience for most players. You've pretty much maxed out all your useful skills and are just filling in the random crap you didn't bother to add points into, stat points barely did anything. The gear you got was overall useless and the PQ's at the time were more for potion gains than EXP. Then when you hit level 70 a random threshhold is hit where the game sorta became fun again, and then when you get to level 76+ depending on your glass you go through an insane leveling spike until you get about to level 90.

For most classes you hit a huge wall right here, the biggest wall the game had at the time, where you don't -really- need the rest of the skills for many classes and leveling up does very little to change the pace and nature of the game, and even LESS content is directed towards this area. If you can literally claw and bite your way to level 120, the game once again hits a fun threshhold and you can enjoy the game for a bit longer, until you reach the point to where you max most of your ''important'' skills...but 4th job did it worse by requiring many classes to fight endgame bosses for a chance at getting their skill books which required disgusting levels of high-gear, connections with a good guild, and required them to take you on good faith knowing you were at a skill-level disadvantage and that you were taking loot that they themselves sought after due to it being so rare.


That was a huge problem pre-bb and you cannot deny that Pika. You can say you prefer a poorly thought system if you like but that doesn't mean it wasn't a poorly thought progression.

I agree with a lot of that, (Actually I would estimate that the soul crushing could start as early as the 50's) but those difficulty spikes are also one important aspect of Maplestory. In PreBB, it was extremely unlikely that someone who was not invested in a character would be willing to endure the struggles and make it to a high level. Just by glancing at a 4th job player, you knew that real time and effort went into the character. Today this quality is completely absent and a max level player is more likely to be accused of hacking then having any skill. If a player just wanted to enjoy the game and burn off some free time then they had no need to engage in the heavy grinding.

One could say that another important part is a touch of the sometimes sadistic game design. (I think that is the right word) Like how for some players, Jump quests are fun but for others they are a nightmare. I don't believe its necessary to roll back the whole game to achieve this but it feels very unwise to not have the more grueling version of Maplestory available when that is where the core audience came from.

If the day ever arrived where an official Pre Big bang server were launched then it would be a whole new ball game. I would want to be right there with you on wanting to tweak some end game features and propose minor quality of life adjustments. (such as making 4th job skills that need a boss kill become easier to acquire)

But such a possibility seems very far away and customer feedback does not appear to be a priority. You need only to ask a Nexon representative about PreBB to see for yourself.

There is still 5th job to look out for but going forward, I would not expect player input to be worth much.