January always seems to be a time of regrouping for MMO communities and studios, and Nexon is joining the trend with MapleStory 2. Producer Jungsoo Lee this week outlined a three-month plan for working with the game’s fanbase to collect feedback on “the major pain points of the game”; specifically, he says, the team will share its proposed solutions, solicit feedback, act on that feedback, and then share the final solution. This seems pretty basic, admittedly, but given that some studios just spring “solutions” on their playerbases on patch day, maybe this sort of coherent, spelled-out plan is necessary.
[AL:MS2]So what are those pain points? Lee says the team is considering improvements to enchanting, gemstone upgrades, sockets, epic pets, gemstone-related gathering, and the Meso economy (sinks, markets, and gear trading). Expect all the topics to be handled in turn by summer, “coinciding with the release of a new major expansion,” and expect developer blogs focused on these specific topics rather than weekly.
“We are cautious about sharing some of these early plans as we know that players have many different ideas about how to address each topic,” Lee writes. “We ask the community to respect the development studio and let the studio lead the discussion for each topic, and we hope that this allows us to reach the best resolution for the game. We are aware that one of the major topics of player concern regards the addition of more guaranteed methods to obtain bonus stats. However we want to make clear that with the above changes we will be discussing with the community, we strongly believe that the random aspects of bonus stats should stay in the game as part of gear progression. This won’t be discussed or changed in the future.”
