Hi Everyone,

We understand there are a lot of frustrations in the community regarding an issue we resolved in yesterday’s maintenance in which the Kishin skill and Fury Totem effects were permanently applied to maps. When we announced last year that we were planning to make changes to Kishin, one of the reasons we decided on this change was to alleviate latency issues and server instability that we identified at the time as being partly caused by the increased monster spawning capabilities of Kishin. This was one of the primary factors for the changes we made in the v205 Pathfinder update to reduce the effectiveness of Kishin's monster spawning capabilities. Please keep in mind that this change alone wasn’t meant to resolve all server instability and lag, but our intent was to mitigate one of the factors that was contributing to it.

As everyone who has played the game in the last few weeks can see, with the v205 update there have been a wide variety of issues introduced that have been causing increased crashes, disconnection when using certain skills, players not being able to log back in, and many more. Our teams have been working hard to try to address these issues as swiftly as we can in order to improve overall stability for all of our players.

The Kishin and Fury Totem skill issue that began after the June 20 maintenance was one of these issues that we observed was contributing to overall server instability. Since this issue was an unintended change to the way these skills were designed to function, there was also a large risk that there could be many other issues introduced that we could not immediately identify. For these reasons, we decided to resolve this issue in yesterday’s maintenance.

The next topic I’d like to discuss is the recent World Merge name poll. First, I’d like to share the results of the poll after examining all eligibility requirements and tabulating the percentages of voters for each name. Please see below:

New World #1: Broa, Khaini, Galicia, Renegades, Arcania, Zenith, El Nido & Demethos

Names Votes Totals Aurora 504 64.20% Arcane 361 45.99% Eryl 97 12.36% Elysium 435 55.41% Capella 86 10.96% Elviana 112 14.27% Scarlet 262 33.38%

New World #2: Windia, Mardia, Yellonde, Bellocan, Chaos, Kradia & Nova

Names Votes Totals Aurora 695 65.38% Arcane 481 45.25% Eryl 152 14.30% Elysium 550 51.74% Capella 108 10.16% Elviana 149 14.02% Scarlet 400 37.63%

When we announced the voting details, we had indicated that in the event that the top choice for each poll was the same name, the merged world with the larger percentage of players voting for that name will receive it. Each voter was able to choose up to 3 names in each poll, so the sum of percentages in the tables above exceed 100%.

So in this case, for New World #1, 64.20% of eligible voters chose Aurora, while for New World #2, this number was 65.38%. Therefore, New World #2 will be named Aurora, and New World #1 will be named Elysium since that name generated the second highest percentage of eligible voters in that poll.

We always welcome our players to provide us feedback on any of the topics we discuss, and we will try to reply to as many inquiries as we can.

Thanks,

Dennis "SavageAce" Bernardo

Producer - MapleStory