KMS planning to phase out Reboot

[Pikamemnon]

Good night sweet prince.
Reboot, RIP

[Eos]

Source?

[Pikamemnon]

https://orangemushroom.net/2024/08/0...ws/#more-66718

Not an instant removal of the systems but a gradual end to the idea of Reboot, I guess?

[SaptaZapta]

TL;DR: GMS Reboot is not going to suffer the same fate.

Long explanation:

KMS Reboot started not very popular. KMS regular servers were actually decently friendly to f2p play, because of the meso market (in-game ability to sell meso for NX) and the fact that all cash items, such as cubes and pets, could be sold in the Auction House for meso. So if you didn't want to pay, you could just grind and merch and obtain cash items that way. Also the culture in Korea is apparently quite tolerant and even approving of paying for progress in games. In fact, I'm not entirely sure why KMS even introduced Reboot. Might have needed a world where the f2p players aren't competing with p2w, but rather everyone is on the same ground. Reboot was pretty hard-mode, with monsters having 5x the HP (and giving double the exp) and with no trading so one has to personally do all the content (crafting, bossing, questing) for the gear or potions they want.

Meanwhile, GMS regular servers were very hard for non-paying players to progress in, due to no meso market or cash item trade, and the Western culture tends to dislike p2w. On the other hand, GMS Reboot was easy mode, because we had Kishin for spawn enhancement, non-KMS monsters with low HP and high meso drops, and also a blind eye to hacking... GMS Reboot took off very fast and became the most popular world, even after GMS regular worlds got meso market, and Kishin and non-KMS areas were nerfed repeatedly. Any new or returning player asking where to play was told "Reboot, unless you want to sign over your paycheck to Nexon for cubes". The free cubes were irresistible, especially for those people who had quit around Unleashed when the game went hardcore p2w.

The years passed, and KMS Reboot players complained about how hard things were for them. They especially did so after the big flame-rigging scandal, when Nexon started "communicating" with players. Nexon didn't really care what goes on in the unpopular free server, so they buffed them. Higher level mobs didn't have 5x HP anymore, only about 1.5x (but still 2.3x exp...). Some rare drops were put in NPC shops "because we can't buy them from each other". The passive damage buff chars there got for not having scrolling or bonus potential, got massively buffed to keep up with power creep. And so on and so forth.

Until one day a popular KMS whale streamer decided to do a Reboot progression series. He had help from friends and a lot of luck, and reached "endgame" really quickly and easily. And the other whales were shocked. How does one progress so fast for free while they pay and pay and are still stuck?
People started rushing to Reboot. The culture might approve of p2w, but nobody in their right mind wants to pay for no advantage.
Nexon panicked and closed Reboot to new character creation, except for accounts that already had chars there.
People got even madder. Locked out of paradise, they directed their rage at the "freeloaders" in Reboot, living the easy life while reg players paid through the nose and suffered.
Nexon, listening to their whales, started nerfing Reboot. They made a variety of changes, over a couple of years, trying to make life in Reboot harder. But the reg whales were not satisfied and demanded even more hardships for the so-called "hard mode" server that turned out to be too easy.

And then, the KFTC published their report about the cube rigging in KMS. Nexon was forced to stop selling cubes for real-world money, in all worlds. At this point, Reboot no longer had any advantage over non-Reboot. There was no reason for anyone to want to play there, unless already heavily invested. So Nexon doing this conversion of their Reboot to a regular world is really the only logical course of action. Although the whales are still jealous of people who got their gear for free, and so there are absurd restrictions placed on Reboot players during the conversion.


Meanwhile, as I said, in GMS, Reboot had always been very popular. We got all the buffs to Reboot during its good days, which made it even more appealing. We did lose Kishin and other spawn enhancers, and the non-KMS farming areas, but that hardly stopped the growth momentum.

When the Reboot nerfs started, we got them, and people complained but kept playing.

However, when Nexon realized that they would have to remove cash cubes in the Korean service, and consequently "normalize" Reboot, they started planning how to avoid that for overseas. The KFTC can't tell them to stop scamming foreigners, so they're still selling cash cubes in all services outside of Korea. So they don't have that excuse to get rid of GMS Reboot. They also don't really want to, since that is where most of the GMS players are, including whales. So they decided to keep Reboot (and rebrand it "Heroic") and just monetize it harder. They sent us Hanbyeol Oh, aka Inkwell, to be our director and put together a dev team that can support such a significant deviation from the Korean base game. If the name sounds familiar, it's because he was the KMS director who came up with cubes. Aggressive monetization seems right up his alley. And if he's in California then the Korean FTC can't get their hands on him, too.

The first thing Inkwell did, in the Dreamer patch that was renamed "Go West!", was to block the last and worst wave of Reboot nerfs, before this final conversion to reg. We get to keep unlimited and high meso drops, which make progress in Heroic possible. From this point on, Heroic is a GMS exclusive.

So, GMS is keeping its Heroic worlds: Kronos, Hyperion, and Solis (EU). How they will evolve and keep up with Interactive (normal, trading) worlds as KMS releases more and more content that does not take "Reboot" into account, remains to be seen.

[Eos]

More drama than a telenovela.