Suggestions to make game more enjoyable (aka copy Maple Story)

[thailehuy]

If you know what Maple Story is, you’ll understand my points.

If you don’t know what it is, MS is a cute platform hack-and-slash game run by the infamous Nexon itself. Think of it as chibi Diablo 2, online of course.

MS is plagued with everything we fear that will happen to TOS: botters, hackers, gold farmers and sellers. It is extremely P2W, players who open wallets can easily be 2 or 3 times stronger than regular people, and better looking too.

And yet MS survived for more than 10 years. Yes people, in this day and age where online games can celebrate their success after 1-2 years of existence, that piece of crap survived 10 years. They must be doing something right after all.

DISCLAIMER: this is entirely my speculation and by no means the best way to do things.

Leveling

• Currently in MS the max level is 250, I would say that it is quite close to the max 280 we currently have in TOS.
• The first 1-200 levels are relatively easy, provided that you know what you are doing of course. But even clueless players can reach level 200 (80% of the game content) within 2-3 weeks, without any effort. Hard core players can reach 200+ in one week.
• This solves a very crucial issue we have with TOS: the boredom of monotony leveling. People feels good when they level up, so let give them more of that. If you level up faster than getting bored at the grinding spot, you won’t be bored.
• “But when they reach max level, wouldn’t they have nothing to do and quit?”. No, not really. From level 200+ the grind becomes so hard that you need to spend months to get to max. And this also encourages people to play multiple characters (aren’t we the same?) because they are addicted to the easy level up process. This lead to the following points

Family bonus

• I made up that name, MS only has linked bonus and character universal bonus.
• Each character you play can contribute a small bonus to another different character, up to 12 different bonuses. When you aggregated them all, those are not small anymore. This is one of the reason people play many characters.
• Each character you play will provide some universal bonus too all characters (something like +3% crit rate, +40 STR etc…) up to 9 different bonuses. Again, people will feel inclined to player more characters.
• We can do the same in TOS, isn’t that the whole reason we share the family name and a lodge? Currently it’s useless.

Quest + exploration vs Grinding

• The life long debate of which is better

http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2015-03/26/19/enhanced/webdr06/enhanced-25942-1427414324-7.jpg

• In MS you have hundreds of maps spread over many continents, mirror worlds, parallel dimensions etc, whatever you can think of. And thousands of quests. You can spend years explore them all, or you can just … grind.
• Most of the time questing gives better exp if you are willing to walk and pick up quest items. Except when there are 2x exp events, then people go nuts on grinding.
• The trick is to minimize the amount of required quests, and allow people to do them when they want to. Optional quests can be done anytime. I think TOS is good on this. Of course we need to add more maps/contents, but the amount of content added in a new game cannot be compared to a 10 year in the making. This is just a direction we need to go.

The joy of the grind

• I think this is the main point keeping people in MS after all those years: they are addicted to the grind
• In MS every map is packed with mobs. If you hack them down, more will spawn. They will be forced spawn if their number in the map falls too low as well, thus there will never be an empty map. That makes grinding fun too, because if you kill faster, mobs will spawn faster and you level up faster. In TOS mobs are respawned on a timer basis, regardless of how fast you kill them, this is bad and need to be changed.
• In MS every class has some good spammable AOE skills so they can mob faster. This makes grinding enjoyable as well because the feeling of hacking your way through the horde of mobs thinking “muahahaha die maggots … die” feels much better than “ok I poke this one down, wait for skills to cd, then poke another one”. It just FEELS GOOD. Note that spammable AOE can be auto attack as well so that does not goes against Tree of Autoattack motto we have over here.
• If you don’t believe the above point, check how popular highlanders/barbarians are comparing to lesser mobbing classes, like archer. (archer damage is great, seriously, just that the mobbing capabilities are too sad)
• Simple solution to solve our boring grinding issue: double or triple the amount of mobs. Scale down the exp a bit if needed, or not (check point #1), give people more AoE, bigger attack range, spammable skills etc. Make the game more interactive than sit and wait.

Bossing

• I heard some people complained that we have too many random boss fights. I’d laugh at them. What we have is nowhere near enough, we need more, we need different types of bosses

• In MS if you kill enough trash mobs in a map, a bigger mob will appear (think elite mob in TOS) that drops some better stuff than trash mobs. If you kill even more, a field boss will appear, this one has quite good attack but not that high HP so you can kill it with some “skills” as people like to call it. Field boss usually drops equipment or crafting materials. The main point is you can encounter bosses literally around every corner of the map. In TOS we have … Cafrisun? We need more of that, seriously. Killing trash mobs is fun and stuff but when I need to show off, bosses are the way to go. This make bossing builds more viable too.

• The bosses in MS are even simpler comparing to TOS as well. They have 1-3 special attacks, and most of the time they just ram their bodies into you and cause contact damage. That is all. But boss fight in MS are much more interesting than TOS, because no boss fight is like another, due to the following debuff bosses can use:

  • Darkness: your field of vision is reduced to minimal. We have something similar in TOS, but I can only see 1 boss use it on King’s plateau or so. I seriously don’t understand why you don’t make more of those instead of boss bullet crap
  • Silence: prevent you using skills, nothing special
  • Weakened: you cannot jump or dash anymore. This will be a lot of fun in TOS
  • Curse: Your accuracy is reduced by 50%. Take that barbs

Builds and Balance

• Who needs balance when every one just need to be able to spam AOE? In fact let just makes everyone OP because it is what is fun. The ultimate point of balance is to make everyone super strong.

http://www.troll.me/images2/syndrome/everyone-can-be-super-and-when-everyones-super-no-one-will-be.jpg

• Because at the end of the day, this

feels much better than this

Thanks for reading.

[darksmurf461425]

no one seems to be commenting on this. except for me

[elfochka]

Give aoe skills to everyone?

Then give heals to everyone, and aoe autoattacks to mages and… Oh wait. What is the point of different classes and builds then?

But having better mob respawns is a good idea.

[thailehuy]

Give aoe skills to everyone?

Then give heals to everyone, and aoe autoattacks to mages and… Oh wait. What is the point of different classes and builds then?

That’s a wrong way of thinking. AoE can come in many shapes and sizes and ranges, making them unique isn’t hard.

In fact we already have them in TOS, check archer’s multishot and barrage, or barbarian, or all mage classes, or krivis. It’s just that those are extremely limited to certain classes.

Now you might have heard how unbalanced the population in kOBT is, how it favors toward highlander and barbarian while neglecting archer and healer classes. This reinforce my points: playing classes with high AoE attack feels good, and others are just meh.

Question is do you want that to be the final situation we are in?

There are some simple solutions to this as well, starting with lifting the restricting AoE Attack Ratio to a higher number on many skills, and give some others better range of effect.

[Indeed]

If you know what Maple Story is, you’ll understand my points.

If you don’t know what it is, MS is a cute platform hack-and-slash game run by the infamous Nexon itself. Think of it as chibi Diablo 2, online of course.

Sounds interesting

MS is plagued with everything we fear that will happen to TOS: botters, hackers, gold farmers and sellers. It is extremely P2W, players who open wallets can easily be 2 or 3 times stronger than regular people, and better looking too.

And yet MS survived for more than 10 years. Yes people, in this day and age where online games can celebrate their success after 1-2 years of existence, that piece of crap survived 10 years. They must be doing something right after all.

DISCLAIMER: this is entirely my speculation and by no means the best way to do things.

Not sure I like this idea of P2W, but I will continue to read

Leveling

Currently in MS the max level is 250, I would say that it is quite close to the max 280 we currently have in TOS.
The first 1-200 levels are relatively easy, provided that you know what you are doing of course. But even clueless players can reach level 200 (80% of the game content) within 2-3 weeks, without any effort. Hard core players can reach 200+ in one week.
This solves a very crucial issue we have with TOS: the boredom of monotony leveling. People feels good when they level up, so let give them more of that. If you level up faster than getting bored at the grinding spot, you won’t be bored.
“But when they reach max level, wouldn’t they have nothing to do and quit?”. No, not really. From level 200+ the grind becomes so hard that you need to spend months to get to max. And this also encourages people to play multiple characters (aren’t we the same?) because they are addicted to the easy level up process. This lead to the following points

I assume you mean when someone is leveling so hard (in terms of hours), they should suddenly get the level benefits in recovering their HP & SP? Angel buff all of a sudden? Every 10,000 exp without changing map (except for channel)?

Family bonus

I made up that name, MS only has linked bonus and character universal bonus.
Each character you play can contribute a small bonus to another different character, up to 12 different bonuses. When you aggregated them all, those are not small anymore. This is one of the reason people play many characters.
Each character you play will provide some universal bonus too all characters (something like +3% crit rate, +40 STR etc…) up to 9 different bonuses. Again, people will feel inclined to player more characters.
We can do the same in TOS, isn’t that the whole reason we share the family name and a lodge? Currently it’s useless.

I think it is good to give bonus, but I think giving % is too much, and it feels people have to buy more characters. Another suggestion is, giving a flat bonus to your pet on your 3rd character. And this base on the highest 3 character level. Eg. One level 50 swordsman give your pet +50 Attack Damage, One level 200 Archer gives your pet +200 Crit Attack, etc. Can this be the alternative?

Quest + exploration vs Grinding

The life long debate of which is better

In MS you have hundreds of maps spread over many continents, mirror worlds, parallel dimensions etc, whatever you can think of. And thousands of quests. You can spend years explore them all, or you can just … grind.
Most of the time questing gives better exp if you are willing to walk and pick up quest items. Except when there are 2x exp events, then people go nuts on grinding.
The trick is to minimize the amount of required quests, and allow people to do them when they want to. Optional quests can be done anytime. I think TOS is good on this. Of course we need to add more maps/contents, but the amount of content added in a new game cannot be compared to a 10 year in the making. This is just a direction we need to go.

This is good to allow players to choose their way of leveling.
I would like to suggest one more thing: Quest + exploration vs Grinding + crafting costumes

When you are grinding, I hope they can drop receipts at a higher rate, but lower the materials rate. Therefore, more than just grinding, you are also doing customized head-gears or other cosmetic items.

The joy of the grind

I think this is the main point keeping people in MS after all those years: they are addicted to the grind
In MS every map is packed with mobs. If you hack them down, more will spawn. They will be forced spawn if their number in the map falls too low as well, thus there will never be an empty map. That makes grinding fun too, because if you kill faster, mobs will spawn faster and you level up faster. In TOS mobs are respawned on a timer basis, regardless of how fast you kill them, this is bad and need to be changed.
In MS every class has some good spammable AOE skills so they can mob faster. This makes grinding enjoyable as well because the feeling of hacking your way through the horde of mobs thinking “muahahaha die maggots … die” feels much better than “ok I poke this one down, wait for skills to cd, then poke another one”. It just FEELS GOOD. Note that spammable AOE can be auto attack as well so that does not goes against Tree of Autoattack motto we have over here.
If you don’t believe the above point, check how popular highlanders/barbarians are comparing to lesser mobbing classes, like archer. (archer damage is great, seriously, just that the mobbing capabilities are too sad)
Simple solution to solve our boring grinding issue: double or triple the amount of mobs. Scale down the exp a bit if needed, or not (check point #1), give people more AoE, bigger attack range, spammable skills etc. Make the game more interactive than sit and wait.

I think the main point of keeping people to the grind is a community. If there is a safe area with people to put up repair and allow them to join up for party (refreshment table), that would be great.

I agree they can scale down the exp, but not necessarily give them bigger range and more AoE, even though, I like that idea, and I feel the range and AoE are rather small. What they need is to have more than Cafrisun choices to give longer range, AoE, elemental attack, and etc.

Bossing

I heard some people complained that we have too many random boss fights. I’d laugh at them. What we have is nowhere near enough, we need more, we need different types of bosses
In MS if you kill enough trash mobs in a map, a bigger mob will appear (think elite mob in TOS) that drops some better stuff than trash mobs. If you kill even more, a field boss will appear, this one has quite good attack but not that high HP so you can kill it with some “skills” as people like to call it. Field boss usually drops equipment or crafting materials. The main point is you can encounter bosses literally around every corner of the map. In TOS we have … Cafrisun? We need more of that, seriously. Killing trash mobs is fun and stuff but when I need to show off, bosses are the way to go. This make bossing builds more viable too.
The bosses in MS are even simpler comparing to TOS as well. They have 1-3 special attacks, and most of the time they just ram their bodies into you and cause contact damage. That is all. But boss fight in MS are much more interesting than TOS, because no boss fight is like another, due to the following debuff bosses can use:
Darkness: your field of vision is reduced to minimal. We have something similar in TOS, but I can only see 1 boss use it on King’s plateau or so. I seriously don’t understand why you don’t make more of those instead of boss bullet crap
Silence: prevent you using skills, nothing special
Weakened: you cannot jump or dash anymore. This will be a lot of fun in TOS
Curse: Your accuracy is reduced by 50%. Take that barbs

This is a good idea, it is slightly stronger, but the HP is within normal monster, so it does not take 10 minutes to kill. If this can help fight Bots, that would be great as well.

Builds and Balance

Who needs balance when every one just need to be able to spam AOE? In fact let just makes everyone OP because it is what is fun. The ultimate point of balance is to make everyone super strong.

Because at the end of the day, this

feels much better than this

Thanks for reading.

Not sure I prefer everyone to be stronger, this sounds like Black Desert Online, where every player is easily stronger than the mob. Besides, this will give too much confidence for people to skip a few levels, which ends up the same.

Perhaps every class should have some auto-attack self-heal skill, this will allow them to recover faster, but the damage and heal is weak with auto-attack, maybe only recover 10 x CON.

[thailehuy]

I assume you mean when someone is leveling so hard (in terms of hours), they should suddenly get the level benefits in recovering their HP & SP? Angel buff all of a sudden? Every 10,000 exp without changing map (except for channel)?

No I mean when you get the flash light that knocks out all mobs around you, it just feels good. We need to show people more of that. Grinding hours after hours for 1 level is just not good.

[quote=“Indeed, post:5, topic:126133”]
Not sure I prefer everyone to be stronger, this sounds like Black Desert Online, where every player is easily stronger than the mob. Besides, this will give too much confidence for people to skip a few levels, which ends up the same.

Perhaps every class should have some auto-attack self-heal skill, this will allow them to recover faster, but the damage and heal is weak with auto-attack, maybe only recover 10 x CON.
[/quote]Having AOE does not necessarily make you stronger than mob. It is just a means to show more numbers on screen, and that make players feel better.

For your last point, life leech skill/buff will solve that easily

[Indeed]

Having AOE does not necessarily make you stronger than mob. It is just a means to show more numbers on screen, and that make players feel better.

The only problem is, I got crashed once in a dungeon, where we are poping too many numbers (due to too many numbers being sent from the network? Too many packets?). Without increasing auto attack speed for many classes, it definitely feels the need of poping more numbers.

And for life leech, perhaps it can be on a Gem as well.

[II_JoJo_II]

About MS before BigBang patch
In MapleStory every class gets strong in PvE after 3rd job and
in PvP they did a great job balancing the classes (nerfing skills, blocking some, changing autoattack animation)
They have 4 modes por PVP (deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture flag, boss mode… a ramdom player turns into a boss and try kill people lol). PvP gives you coins to buy itens and also exp.

In MS you don’t really care about lvl fast, because the grind was so satisfying and fun.
MS was the best game ever before BigBang patch/p2w, everyone that played knows… the game wasn’t just about lvling, the community was nice, everyone was friendly, played together and we made bonds… that is what made Maplestory special, this bonding aspect

I can remember many reasons why ms was great, fun and we never got bored:
-people was addict to grind, was really fun to grind (crowded maps, many monsters types/skills, few spamable skills)
-open and huge world full of possibilities
-repeateble party quests
-the game was challenging sometimes you died just for touching a monster
-the free market concept (map for people selling/buying itens, trade itens, talk, etc)
-stalking pros at dangerous areas (omg he’s so pro! lol)
-bosses were very hard like 1~2hit KO, they were smart and fast
-hanging around with friends or just sit in your chair and talking lol
-you could get professions like herbalist (in a special map to dig and craft itens for your specific profession)
-every monster was unique in desing, skills and they could inflict many negative status (darkness, blind, etc)
-exp death penalty
-you can see all your equipped itens in your characters, like earings
-average exp rate
-EPIC boss fights! hard and long battles, like zakum boss with 10 players fighting for 30min (tos boss are a joke lol)
-online GMs banning people for hacking on global chat
-customization character options, sometimes we get cash prizes at events to custom our characters
-made tons of friends playing party quests and fighting bosses
-monsters drop scrolls to enhance equips (chance to work can be 2%~100% depending on bonus effect)
-npcs everywhere
-fun and balanced pvp
-random potential itens, the makes the itens rare, legendary, etc
-Skillbooks! you can unlock best skills with skillbooks from boss drops (50% chance to work)
-no autoloot
-nostalgic bgm
-rare, epic, unique, legendary itens
-lots of events
-towns and worlds, you had to take the flying ship and travel like 15min to other worlds, and survive the demon balrog attack or hide under deck like I do lol
-many options to equips (earings, rings, capes, hats, medal, belt, pendant, etc) and specific armor itens for your job
-jump and creative quests, quests, guild quests, party quests
-hard job skill quests, you had to be really good to survive and kill the job master
-Mini games! like memory cards
-NX cash only to change character appearance (like sunglasses )
and many more =p

Reference

~~
Now MS is ruined, everything is too easy and goes too fast, maps changed, also turned p2w.
You don’t need make friends or play together… Nexon totally destroyed the game
and I felt the same thing when playing ToS
because everything is too easy in tos, so people will only play alone,
but I hope imc improves the game in many aspects

Sorry for the long post, but people who played before bigbang
will undertand how special this game ^^

[Indeed]

Now MS is ruined, everything is too easy and goes too fast, maps changed, also turned p2w.You don’t need make friends or play together… and I felt the same thing when playing ToS because everything is too easy in tos, so people will only play alone, but I hope imc improves the game in many aspects

This is good, as I also pointed out some of those on another thread.

As for ToS, I am not sure it is easy. You can skip a few levels if you find it easy. But the problem is, there is no place for gathering on a map, and you are harder to find a party (people keep moving for quest). And the quest line destroyed party by not able to do the quest together (Do I wait for my party for 15 mins to kill a boss, and just to see they move on to another map?).

RO is great as people gathered on one place in GH, so they can chat and party together. Mind you, GH has no warp, and you are more likely to start a party with a Priest to get warp to the place. In ToS, you don’t need a party/Priest to begin with.

[II_JoJo_II]

But the problem is, there is no place for gathering on a map, and you are harder to find a party (people keep moving for quest). And the quest line destroyed party by not able to do the quest together (Do I wait for my party for 15 mins to kill a boss, and just to see they move on to another map?).

Yes indeed… people just keep going non stop
I had many problems doing main quest line with others, that was so confusing because you can have 5 members doing the same quest but at different steps!

You must wait or ask them to wait for you if you are behind
or
leave the party/play alone, that what usually happens because ppl don’t want to wait and the game speed is too fast
(I bet most of beta testers didn’t even read the story lines)

And sometimes when you share party quest with your group
and someone goes too far (or he’s already too far in the quest)
killing a boss or collecting itens without you near,
you have to cancel and restart the quest
This was so dam annoying that I just played solo quest due this problem
So… Imc needs put effort in party quests, that’s one of biggest problems in ToS

[Indeed]

leave the party/play alone, that what usually happens because ppl don’t want to wait and the game speed is too fast

lol, and you don’t know if they can kill the boss solo, that is my issue for leaving the party. Do you wait for another 15 mins again just to find out he needs to do this again?

They should have another starting place with NO quest line. Simply take the initial quest to boost your exp for grinding on that map. Once you move to another map, you talk to a NPC to give you bonus on that map. You will be given bonus exp card for killing some number of monsters (can be done as a group, and once a day, reset at mid night). The NPC also allows you to visit a room with a boss, which will have a chance to give you card. You can do this in a party, but only do this once (just like quest line, you can only kill the quest boss once).

Something like that may help instead, and this can distinguish players who wants no part of story quest.

[Sixaxis]

But the problem is, there is no place for gathering on a map, and you are harder to find a party (people keep moving for quest).

Other than the Valkarine statue, the people standing around the same NPC as you are usually doing that same line of Quests it gives. There’s also the Public Party List (Recruit Board), which let’s you put up information on your party (Party name / description / members class/level / Questing (Y/N) / etc), and people can join it through there. Has a Search bar too. That’s more efficient than some designated area for people of different levels/classes to meet in.

And the quest line destroyed party by not able to do the quest together (Do I wait for my party for 15 mins to kill a boss, and just to see they move on to another map?).

Almost all Quests, both Main and Side, can be shared so that the whole party within the area can complete them together. I duo’d an entire map from start to finish with someone who only spoke Korean (While I said nothing at all) thanks to the kills and objectives being shared.

[Indeed]

Other than the Valkarine statue, the people standing around the same NPC as you are usually doing that same line of Quests it gives. There’s also the Public Party List (Recruit Board), which let’s you put up information on your party (Party name / description / members class/level / Questing (Y/N) / etc), and people can join it through there. Has a Search bar too. That’s more efficient than some designated area for people of different levels/classes to meet in.

I do not find the Search useful, perhaps you have better experience. I often join a party, but don’t know where they are. The nearby party bar on the left side does not allow me to request for party, which is sad. And worse, there was the party bug, which you cannot even create a party. Maybe things change, you want to share your experience?

[quote=“Sixaxis, post:12, topic:126133”]Almost all Quests, both Main and Side, can be shared so that the whole party within the area can complete them together. I duo’d an entire map from start to finish with someone who only spoke Korean (While I said nothing at all) thanks to the kills and objectives being shared.
[/quote]

Is this from the new patch? The time we where playing, quest line boss instance cannot be warp if you have not completed the previous story quest.

I level without doing any story quest, and every time my party member has the quest, I cannot enter. However, if I completed the quest before, I can get into the boss instance. Therefore, our previous experience is, you cannot share quest that you have not fulfill the quest requirement.

[Sixaxis]

I do not find the Search useful, perhaps you have better experience. I often join a party, but don’t know where they are. The nearby party bar on the left side does not allow me to request for party, which is sad. And worse, there was the party bug, which you cannot even create a party. Maybe things change, you want to share your experience?

It’s not really useful for me on that server (Since pretty much all the parties are Koreans, along with the party names/descriptions). The map indicator/positioning was fixed though so you can see their map locations now along with which channel they’re on, and the party creation bug did exist at the start but supposedly they fixed it too.

Is this from the new patch? The time we where playing, quest line boss instance cannot be warp if you have not completed the previous story quest.

Yeah the Main (Orange) Quests where you didn’t finish the prerequisite one can’t be completed for the person who skipped them, and the same goes with Side (Blue) Quests that are outside of the level-range of picking them up (Which is 10~15 levels below the map level), but the person with the Quest can still be assisted in most cases (Not in cases where use of a Quest Item/action to affect the mobs/environment is needed, and the others don’t have it).

It’s toggled On/Off through the Quest UI:

[thailehuy]

The only problem is, I got crashed once in a dungeon, where we are poping too many numbers (due to too many numbers being sent from the network? Too many packets?). Without increasing auto attack speed for many classes, it definitely feels the need of poping more numbers.

They might have planned to remove party numbers on screen, I’m not sure soon. Most of the issues are due to latency, for example, attack speed never worked for us but works on kOBT.[quote=“II_JoJo_II, post:8, topic:126133”]
Sorry for the long post, but people who played before bigbang will undertand how special this game ^^
[/quote]Yes that was special, and it was hell killing Zakum the first time as well xD

[Charon]

Family Team bonus
-||-

YES.
They’ve been going on about how we aren’t playing separate characters, but that the characters are different parts of our single personalities, hence the whole “Team” and Lodge-concepts in the first place. Yet…there has been no connection there so far besides staying in same party when switching (actually it even lacks the obvious shared storage that most of us simply assumed was already a thing until we tried to make a second character just to find the storage empty LOL).

So some kind of bonuses that pile up for the whole Team as you level different characters sound like a fun idea IMO. But it has to be thought through and not too fancy (otherwise I can already hear some ppl cry “p2w!” since you can buy more character slots lol…). I’m thinking of a minor EXP-boost for your other characters everytime you reach some point with one (not serious example: character2 reaches lv170, all your other characters higher than this one get 5% bonus-EXP)…

In MS you have hundreds of maps spread over many continents, mirror worlds, parallel dimensions etc, whatever you can think of. And thousands of quests. You can spend years explore them all, or you can just … grind.

Grind needs to become a perfectly legit option to the point where one might easily decide to go a pure grind route…rather than grind not even being a shitty alternative to doing quests LOL (and the solution isn’t nerfing quests, it’s buffing mob exp and scaling thereof, along with more interesting respawn and mob numbers of course)

And oh yes, grind needs to feel fun, instead of an unbearable chore.

In MS if you kill enough trash mobs in a map, a bigger mob will appear (think elite mob in TOS) that drops some better stuff than trash mobs

I like the example of stuff happening eveytime you kill enough mobs. Like if every 100 mobs of the same type you kill, spawned one with 50x as much hp and 100x as much exp, and some other number for one with higher rare drop chance etc… bonuses for grinding and things that make it feel more rewarding, there is lots of ways…

In MS every class has some good spammable AOE skills so they can mob faster.

Sure, but it should manifest in different ways so it’s really not all classes being like highlander/barbarians (not a full solution for archers, but a maybe too complicated unnecesary, yet interesting twist would be if their shots would deal 50% damage on everything on the sides of the path towards the mnster thats being shot at). The devs expressed many times they imagined TOS as an auto-attack-focused game…but they haven’t given us enough ways to make auto-attacking interesting, while giving us tons of skills instead, which are quite superior most of the time to the point where you’d rather simply wait for sp regen and cooldown to finish instead of auto-attacking meanwhile.

(also, with that “this is gonna be an auto-attack-focused game”-goal, I would have made most current damaging skills be buffs… say Ice bolt being a buff that changes your next 10 auto-attacks to be boosted and ice elemental etc… which would also be interesting if you could use it on partymembers etc…)

Interesting points.

Oh and I just remembered one idea… what if exploring maps would also give EXP? ;O
(and then have some hard to explore place that gives more explroation-exp, like a big dangerous maze or whatever)

EDIT:
Also, I don’t know maplestory, but the pics you posted remind me of that short-lived Ragnarok-Battle-Offline game that was a sidescrolling hack and slash game and it was fun as heck xD

[Tomazelli]

I’m really trying my best to read this topic, seriously haha, but it seems to never end xD

Anyway, what i read seems reasonable, i want to finish it sometime, i hope some staff reads this post

(I think they just throw a dice and decide wich topics to read based on the results, seriously, it’s completely random)

[Indeed]

if their shots would deal 50% damage on everything on the sides of the path towards the mnster thats being shot at

I know this is just an example, but I guess due to the nature (or slowness) of the game, this maybe difficult. This is a good idea though. Another alternative is to have elemental damage, which is also discussed on the other thread you created:

The current Element Table in TOS - too simple and unimportant?

I love me some element tables! Always like figuring out what element beats other elements and what it's beaten by etc. Ever since I've first seen the element table for TOS: [image] It felt underwhelming.... actually, merely the fact that Poison does not even have a weakness at all, made me convinced that this was just a prototype, a work in progress.. But as far as I'm aware, we're through several betas and in korean OBT right now, with the same element table. Of course I'd be happy if the d…

May need more refinement, but regardless, I find the game reduced a lot of scope as compare to Ragnarok. I enjoy Archer capable of having different elemental arrows for making adjustment.

[II_JoJo_II]

The devs expressed many times they imagined TOS as an auto-attack-focused game…but they haven’t given us enough ways to make auto-attacking interesting, while giving us tons of skills instead, which are quite superior most of the time to the point where you’d rather simply wait for sp regen and cooldown to finish instead of auto-attacking meanwhile.

Yes, auto attacking is not interesting at all, and odd for classes like wizard/cleric imo… players get bored, doing the same thing over and over, no fancy animations, bonus, combos or anything
Maybe you can think that giving good spammable skills is a bad idea for balance or something like this, but the main point is to make grinding fun (you can make more balanced changing other aspects as exp rate, rework AA/skills for pvp, etc)

With some spammable skills, crowded maps/fast respawn and reducing cooldown on potions (or mana comsuption), make the monsters harder (especially the dumb bosses), players will enjoy more this game when grinding
as op said

It just FEELS GOOD.

[thailehuy]

So some kind of bonuses that pile up for the whole Team as you level different characters sound like a fun idea IMO. But it has to be thought through and not too fancy (otherwise I can already hear some ppl cry “p2w!” since you can buy more character slots lol…).

No worry, you can just limit the amount of bonuses on a team, for example you can play 10 characters, but can only choose 5 of them to give the team bonuses. You can play more than 5 to get different kind of bonuses, but you have to choose what suit your ultimate main character best.

[quote=“Charon, post:16, topic:126133”]
The devs expressed many times they imagined TOS as an auto-attack-focused game…but they haven’t given us enough ways to make auto-attacking interesting, while giving us tons of skills instead, which are quite superior most of the time to the point where you’d rather simply wait for sp regen and cooldown to finish instead of auto-attacking meanwhile.

[/quote]You know what is nice about MS? Auto attack is a good form of AOE for some classes too lol.

You can swing your 2h weapon (sword, spear, poleaxe etc) for goodd AOE attack (like our barbarian) and they have passives/skills that can reinforce that type of attack, such as:

• Final attack: on every attack you have 70% chance to inflict an additional attack on target
• Shadow clone: summon a shadow on your side, every time you attack the shadow attack as well, dealing 70% of your damage (we already have this before I think, on barbarian aggressor or something that got removed)
• Combo attack: every third consecutive attack performs a special move, dealing 120% damage

Plain attack is dull and boring