Hi Maplers,

As you get closer and closer to defeating the Black Mage, we hope you’re enjoying the new Labyrinth of Suffering content and new 5th Job skills that we have just recently added. We’ve been monitoring your feedback and I’d like to briefly discuss some of the issues players are seeing and some of the issues we have tried to address.

Shining Santa Boxes

During our internal testing in yesterday’s maintenance, we initially discovered an issue with limits not being applied to the Alliance Medals being earned from the box. While we know players enjoy this box for the buffs that the box provides, it takes a considerable amount of work to ensure the event is updated every year. This year we also ran into an issue where the Gift Filled Christmas Stocking was still giving out Nova Coins instead of Alliance Medals. We have since resolved these two issues and updated our event posts to explain the limits applied for the Alliance Medals. In addition to these issues, we also know some players feel the Rudolph items in these boxes take up too much space in their inventory. Unfortunately, we could not address that concern for this year’s run of the event, but we will keep that feedback in mind when planning future events similar to these.

December 2x EXP & Drop Events

We also see a lot of discussion and confusion about our new daily 2x EXP & Drop events. While the schedule for these 2x EXP & Drop events have shifted from our normal schedule, we wanted to extend these events to every day in December to give more players chances to participate. These will be run in addition to the 24-hour 2x EXP events we will run when each goddess statue is filled with Determination. As always, we will monitor your feedback for this event to help us plan future events like these.

A New Power Quest

We’re aware that this quest is not appearing for some characters who reached level 200 after our v200 game update. We’ve identified that the cause of this issue was due to a misconfiguration for some players that is causing the quest to not appear. We have identified a fix for this issue and plan to resolve the issue in an upcoming maintenance.

Jett 5th Job Skill Causing Crashes

We’ve also looked into reports of the new Jett 5th Job skill, Allied Fury, causing some players to crash. We’ve identified that this issue is occurring due to repeated activations of the skill causing some players to be disconnected. We’re preparing a fix for this issue and plan to address it in an upcoming maintenance.

Sweetwater Weapon Drop Rates

Some players have reported that the drop rate for Sweetwater weapons seems to be higher than normal. We’ve looked into this issue and we’ve confirmed that the drop rates have not changed after the v201 update. It’s possible some players may feel the drop rate is higher due to the change we made in Reboot worlds to drop equipment appropriate to the player’s class. However, we will continue to look into this issue.

Servers and Channel Instability

Although improving server and client stability is very high on our priority list, we apologize that this continues to be an issue. We are doing our best to look into this so that we can improve your experience. Recently, we’ve been continuing to update our server structure and game code to help alleviate issues that may causes certain channels to crash. We are also planning to apply some more of these changes as well as additional logging in an upcoming maintenance to help us investigate more closely.

Botters

Again, as we’ve mentioned in the past, we’re always improving our methods to remove illicit players from the game. Currently we’ve seen an increase in the amount of Ark class botters, so our teams are putting a heavier focus on looking into these and updating our methods to remove them from the game. While we can’t go into specific details about our methods, we’re doing our best to ensure we are targeting illicit players only.

Maple Mission Alliance Ranks

We’ve also seen some confusion regarding some of our Maple Missions that require you to reach a certain Alliance Rank. Players seem to be wondering if they need to rank up on the same character of if they can use multiple characters to rank up. The Alliance rank-ups can be done on any combination of characters, it does not all need to be done on one single character. We apologize that this was confusing and we’ve edited our Maple Missions page to make it a little bit clearer.

Rankings Snapshot

As many of you may already be aware, after the main Black Mage update is completed, in addition to making those areas and bosses repeatable, the level cap for characters will be increased from 250 to 275. In preparation for this, some players have been wondering if we would save a snapshot of our current Legendary rankings similar to how the Classic rankings were saved. We are actively looking into this and do plan to add a separate snapshot of the rankings when we raise the level cap to 275.

Marvel Machine MVP Credit

Since Marvel Machine ended this past Sunday, we’re working to collect the data to apply the credit to player’s MVP statuses. Normally we would have planned to apply this in the maintenance immediately following the end of Marvel Machine. However, this week we wanted to focus our attention on the v201 game update and launching that as smooth as possible. We plan to award this Marvel Machine MVP credit in next week’s maintenance.

We’ll continue to monitor and address issues as well as any feedback you may have. While we may not always comment or resolve everything you may bring up, we’ll continue to do our best to continue improving your experience with our game.

Thank you,

Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo

Producer – MapleStory