My humble opinion on Nexon's path.

Well, Maplestory is on Steam. All those games I listed under 5$ are indeed cometition. New players coming from Steam willing to spend 5$ will have to pick, don't you think? As for the new account thing...

We're clearly not going to agree about that so I won't bother responding.

You both seem to forget a pair of things, first, it's not only link skills, even if you want to make a new character, your old link skills can't transfer, and so does your character card deck. That you can't fully fill unless you have at least 6 slots, 9 soon. That's a lot of stats being denied to new players... Unless they dish out 21$ per deck. Yeah, I know who's not coming back. It would be different if they knew they could eventually earn those by playing the new classes, and buy more if they wanted to go ahead. It's almost like setting a level limit that you can only bypass with NX. Because I'm quite sure the deck gives more benefits than leveling past the 200 cap (at the moment at least, this is just an example).

Correction, new players are missing a lot of health. With the only currect exceptions of MM and Kanna(bosses only), none of the cards directly contribute to your damage. The only reasonable damage is from Pirate Set bonus which many classes can max PDR without it. So no, new players aren't missing much.

The other thing is mainly personal. See that flag over my lame avatar? Yeah, that means I'm European. It means I can only play accounts made before the regional lock, and therefore, can't create a new one. So my only chances at this are either: Delete character, or pay 5.5/6.9$ just to be able to try it alone. Not even including link skills or not in my case.

Your situation is unfortunate, but you must realize that this does not apply to the vast majority of players. GMS is not trying to cater to the remaining European players and quite frankly, there are so few of you that any profit gained/lost is a drop in the bucket.

I'm not even trying to justify myself, I'm just letting you know about what I think people would do if they get treated like crap... Because with Unlimited it can VERY easily go like this:

[COLOR="#696969"](DISCLAIMER: Something tells me these changes have something bigger behind, because it'd make sense to make some change to make people not end like this fatalist scenario)[/COLOR]

- First, with the bosses ultra buffed, only the funded can kill them. Therefore, a lot of people knowing they won't reach that level unless they spend copious ammounts of money will leave. Not being able to access all link skills without paying silly ammounts of money won't help either, making the gap even bigger.

-Then, there would only be the ultra funded and the not funded at all, and very few averages. Well, the ultra funded can make nice runs... But there is almost nobody left to sell. Or boast to. Interest declines, most end up leaving, and the biggest income starts going down the drain.

-Without the ultra funded, the game suddenly feels incredibly hard, requiring incredible ammounts of money to start playing. And therefore, new people leave. By this point, population in the game is pretty low.

I don't know, it feels quite like that from my point of view, and the game's main idea is nice by itself, it'd be a shame to see such an original game go down the toilet in such a pityful way.

I'm not going to talk about content that isn't out yet because we have no idea how GMS will choose to implement it. They been branching out from KMS in the last 6 months and there's no point in arguing about something that might not happen at all.