I’m having a hard time remembering the last time an MMO developer deleted an entire class from an MMO. The NGE, maybe? Regardless, it’s what Nexon’s doing in MapleStory right now: Late last night, the studio announced that it’s removing the character Jett from the game – in fact, if you haven’t already rolled one, you’re probably outta luck as the character was made un-rollable with today’s maintenance.
“[W]e have decided to disable Jett’s character creation after today’s maintenance, and remove Jett as a playable character around February 2024,” the team writes. The rationale is that she’s a character who exists only in the English-language aka global version of the game, which means that when Nexon Korean ships a homebase build, Jett is constantly being borked. That might make you wonder why Nexon doesn’t just add Jett to the Korean build so it’s shared across all builds, but that isn’t what the studio has decided to do.
“Jett is unique in that it’s a class that is available in Global MapleStory. This creates development challenges when we create future content suitable for all MapleStory regions. As new content needs to work for all of MapleStory’s 50+ classes, it adds complications when focusing on one region-specific class. Current Jett players may have noticed that new content sometimes contains bugs that only affect the Jett class, and these bugs can be difficult to resolve. Going forward we want to focus our development efforts on high quality content that can be enjoyed by all players, such as new content and features that will be released in the future. We’ll be sure to provide more details about these exciting updates through our continued roadmaps and Maple Memos. Making the decision to remove Jett from Global MapleStory was not easy, but we believe this course of action will allow us to provide a better service to you Maplers. We understand this news may not come easily to our passionate fans and existing Jett players, and we understand the concerns this may cause. While additional details are to come, we would like to provide an overview on expected changes.”
To compensate players, the team will be running a long event later this year – starting in the summer and pushing well though the winter updates – that allows players to transfer to a new class. It’ll also hand out several other perks to former Jetts, including buffs, coupons, and name changes. “We do have plans to transfer equipment, but further details on this process will be shared at a later time,” Nexon notes. “Additionally, any Jett characters that have not transferred to a new class by the time the winter update ends (tentatively scheduled for early 2024), will be changed to Beginners.”
As you can imagine, people who main Jett are… not happy about this move. The phrase “slap in the face” was deployed. Jett has apparently been around 11 years, having been added back in 2012, so folks are pretty attached to her. There are also complaints that the Korean version still has classes the global version doesn’t; that the compensation is poor; that the change options are lacking gender changes; and that Nexon is continuing to undercut and neglect the Global playerbase. And of course, it’s left even non-Jett players uncertain about the future of their own characters – and the game itself.
