Hi everyone,

We hope you are all enjoying the new Lunar New Year events that started this past week in addition to the new content released in v202.

One of the long standing issues that players have expressed is a change to Elite monster drops since our v200 patch on November 14th, 2018. As Aru originally mentioned in a Reddit post on December 4th, these changes were not intended and we have been looking into the issue. We apologize that we could not provide any further information, though we have been actively looking into the issue since then. During this time, we have experienced several inconsistencies with the reports from players as well as our own investigation and internal tests. In addition to identifying the issue, we've also had to look into ways to address the core issue of why this unintended change was implemented. We believe we have a fix for this drop issue, and are now testing it internally. Unfortunately, we could not include it in this week’s maintenance, but we plan to include the fix in the next scheduled maintenance.

The next issue I’d like to address is the topic of players leveling up to 275, and the rankings discussion being held on the forums. As our CM Ghiblee mentioned in the forum thread, we wanted to hear all opinions on this topic as we value feedback from all of our players. We absolutely understand that there are fundamental differences between Reboot and Non-Reboot servers, and that players in one server may progress faster than another. However, we hoped to initiate a constructive discussion regarding the “Both” tab specifically, since we noticed it becoming a topic among our players. Whatever the outcome of the discussions turn out to be, we hope our players understand that all opinions on this matter are valid.

Additionally, we know players are concerned about illicit activity from players trying to each level 275. While we are actively monitoring the situation, I wanted to discuss two incidents that occurred in the past week. Players noticed that two characters seemed to have either progressed very quickly, or have gear that should have been unobtainable. These two characters (“NewRecruit1” and “ChromiumXE”) were internal test accounts that should not have been visible to our community. We apologize for the confusion these characters caused.

Lastly, I want to briefly touch on the topic of Ark character bans that players have been mentioning. Some of these bans may have been made in error. As I mentioned in a previous post, a lot of these ban appeals are being reviewed and processed as quickly as possible. In addition, many of the past criteria that we’ve removed for triggering some unintended bans ended up affecting a small number of Ark players. These Ark players who would have been caught in the criteria should no longer get banned, and should be able to play normally.

I hope this sheds some light onto some of the more pressing topics the community has been discussing. We also know there are several other discussions happening, including some new topics that arose this week. As always, we’ll share more information soon and bring you more news as we have it.

Thank you,

Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo

Producer - MapleStory