Oct 9, 20187 min read

PRODUCER BLOG - CURRENT STATUS, OUR HEARTBEAT

Dear Maplers,

It has been an amazing week since we launched Head Start on October 1st and October 4th on Steam. Thank you for joining the MapleStory 2 community and being part of the journey! We are very delighted to see players having a great time and sharing happy moments on all of our social platforms. We are seeing our player numbers growing at very fast pace even before the Official Launch and preparing ourselves for a massive number of players to join the community on October 10th.

While the numbers have been going up, we have faced a few unforeseen issues and the team here has been working day and night to resolve them. First of all we sincerely apologize for any of the issues launching the game or during gameplay. We are prioritizing all the critical blocker issues to get them resolved as early as possible, but some of the issues are taking a longer time to fix. We feel sincerely sorry and will try our best to get those issues resolved. Meanwhile we will prepare meaningful compensation for those players who couldn't play the game due to technical issues.

Today, I would like to take some time and share what we have seen from the game for the past seven days, and want to provide transparency on what we are working on and how we

are trying to improve the game in general.

State of the Game

In general, the servers have been very stable and we didn't experience any critical issues. Due to unforeseen last minute issues, we delayed server open time for 30 minutes, and to fix an issue with some players not receiving founder's packs, we had a short maintenance on the second day of the service.

We are really focused on preparing the Official Launch which comes with a level cap expansion, new class Runeblade, new area Karkar Island and more! We're going through intensive testing to create a bug free game play environment for all the players. Also, we are adding more servers to ensure we don't have any stability issue due to too many players coming into the game at once.

Currently, we have a much bigger community on Nexon Launcher, and Steam has started to catch up in a fast pace. Thankfully, we are seeing our concurrent player count going higher everyday thanks to all the players constantly coming back to the game. Again, thank you everyone for having fun with the game, and we are going to continue to be transparent and communicate with all of you.

Top Priority Issues

After Head Start, we have found many small to big issues. Would like to share what we have found and how we are prioritizing them to fix these issues.

Meso Bots/Farmer Issues

We are seeing lots of Meso Sellers creating bot accounts, and spamming world chat, channel chat or even sending out random mail or whispers.

We are preparing a few solutions and would like to share what we have been working on. We won't be sharing detailed numbers to avoid giving out too much information to Meso sellers, but will share general systems we are working on.

But first of all, PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE IN ANY TYPE OF BUSINESS WITH MESO SELLERS. It is against the terms of use, and once we track the logs, you will be also banned from the game if you make any purchase from illegal Meso Sellers.

Now let's discuss the solution we are working on.

Mailbox Improvements

We temporarily disabled mailbox feature to stop Meso Sellers from spamming mails. To stop mail spams, we have disabled the feature temporarily. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Currently, we are working on putting limitations to use the mailbox. Once it is done, you will be required to reach a certain level to use the function, also there will be a limitation on how much mail you can send out per day.

Trade Requirements

To prevent Meso Sellers from easily creating an account and making Meso trades, we are going to increase our limits to level 50 for Meso trades. Meaning you won't be able to trade anything that involves Meso until one of your characters within your account reaches level 50.

We will adjust this accordingly to control the situation.

World Chat/Channel Chat

We are going to put more restriction on World Chat. This is the main means for Meso Sellers to promote their sites, and also they are making charge backs after using all the world chats. We are going to put a restriction on levels, and how many you can use.

You will need one of your characters within your account reach level 50 to use the World Chat. Also, we will be removing the free World Chat at earlier levels to combat Meso Sellers making spam.

Automated Ban System

Also, we are upgrading our ban system to detect spam more effectively and ban those accounts from the game automatically.

Known Game Blocker Issues

After Steam Launch we have seen few critical issues which prevent small group of players from playing the game. The following issues have been identified, and would like to update how we are working to resolve those issues.

Account Blocked: (STEAM ONLY)

Current player flow is not intuitive for players who come back to Nexon games on Steam in a long time. You might be getting a message saying your account is blocked and in most of those cases you are incorrectly getting the message because you have been inactive for long time. If you are getting this message, please contact customer support.

We are working on easier fix for this, and hopefully we can get these fixed by tomorrow afternoon. Please stay tuned for more updates.

Error 10053

We have narrowed down the issue on this disconnection issue. The main cause of the issue is an unstable internet connection or connection issue with your ISP to our servers.

We are looking into a solution where we can gracefully handle the short disconnections which can occur while you are playing the game. No ETA on the solution yet, but we will try to update as soon as we have the date for the fix.

Meanwhile, we're working on a mega post with all potential solutions and we'll share this shortly.

Client Not Loading

We currently have identified three different issues when starting the game client. When you are stuck at the NEXON logo screen: please try to change your audio to monitor or other defaults. Sometimes game client conflicts with your audio which causes this issue.

When you are stuck at the MapleStory 2 logo (on Steam) and the client closes without even showing the Nexon logo: we are still looking into the issue, but didn't find a resolution yet. Please try to play the game on Nexon Launcher if you are facing this issue. If you use your linked email account, you will have no issue playing the game on Nexon Launcher.

Players seeing the "Oops, Something Went Terribly Wrong" message on Steam: we found a potential fix for this issue and have deployed the fix, so please let us know if you are still experiencing the issue.

Hot Topics

I would also like to take the time to discuss few of the hot topics which came up during Head Start.

South America, Mushking Royale Reward Issue

We wanted to provide this update earlier, but it took bit of time to finalize our communication on the topic. We understand there were players logging in with virtual machines and faking the rankings. For these we are still investigating the logs to ensure the lists of players we have are accurate.

Once we have the final list, we will be taking action towards those accounts. This includes banning those accounts from the game. We are sorry we couldn't take action earlier, but our top priority was preparing Head Start.

We assure you we will take time to investigate and take action against those players based

on our ToS.

Trade Block

During first few days of the service, we found out a few items which shouldn't be able to traded were being traded in black market. We found the issue and blocked the trade as a temporary solution.

We will be making a proper change with the official launch to ensure those items are not tradable and we will be switching currently obtained gear to become untradeable as well.

Hair Style Rates

We saw your feedback that Paulie's Random Hairstyle rates did not seem right. We would like to share what kind of rates we currently have for Paulie's Random Hair Styles.

Hair Styles with NEW Mark : 5% each
Hair Styles without NEW Mark: 11.25% each

Our philosophy is to be transparent with all the cash shop items with random aspect. We will try to be more upfront communicating these types of rates.

Dungeon Cap/Drops

We are getting lots of feedback regarding our dungeon limit system. We are taking this feedback and discussing this matter with the Development Studio. Although we agree with certain parts of the feedback, we want to ensure we balance our views on the system by understanding the intention of the lead game designer at the Development Studio.

We are still discussing the matter, and will get back to you with the conclusion on the system.

Meanwhile, I would like to also share the note that, compared to Closed Betas, Korean, and Chinese Service, we have changed the overall drop rates of different tiers of weapons from the dungeons. This was based on the new balance Development Studio wants to pursue with the new enchanting system (which we worked on with the team to remove items breaking after 10+ enchants). We will discuss more details about this on a separate thread.

Design Shop

We are seeing great creations coming into the Design Shop and are surprised with high quality designs. But at the same time, we are seeing a few players stealing other players' templates or stealing other designs from other services.

We have dedicated agents reviewing the stolen designs and based on the reports, will be removing those items during your 10 day of review period before you get revenue share from the shop. Also, on top of that you can get banned from the game based on the Terms of Service.

Please refrain from stealing other players' designs which can be easily reviewed and punished. For those players who are seeing stolen designs, please report them in the store, so that we can take action on the designs.

Social and Communication

We are levelling up our communication with the community. We will be adding more transparency via Videos, Team Blogs and Social.

Please follow our channels:

Also, we have an official partner program called the Joddy Squad! You can find the Joddy Squad on social with #JoddySquad. We will be providing more updates on our partners with the upcoming launch!

Thank you so much for joining the MapleStory 2 community, and we hope to see more feedback and thoughts from you all on how we can do better. Also, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience you might have had with small to big issues throughout the gameplay. I can assure you, the team here is working day and night to prioritize issues and trying to fix any critical ones as early as possible.

We hope you all enjoy the game, and continue to grow the awesome MapleStory 2 community!

Sincerely, Jungsoo Lee