Hi everyone,

Before I jump into the topics we’d like to discuss this week, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that it was great to hear all the questions you guys had during our stream last week. Although we couldn’t provide a lot of definitive answers, it helps our team greatly to know what recurring questions and concerns the community has. While there is a long list of things we want to look into, being able to hear the current community concerns helps us know if things need to be re-prioritized. We hope to have more of these types of streams in the future, and I personally hope that by the next time, we’ll have more concrete resolutions on some of these topics. Having said that, I do want to address a few issues we’ve discussed in previous memos, as well as provide insight into some other subjects.

This week, players may have noticed that we did not have a scheduled maintenance as we have normally done in the past. There were a few reasons for this. While our goal has always been to address issues in the game as soon as possible, we are also always concerned about minimizing disruption to our players' valuable playtime as well. It’s a balancing act that ultimately we will look into on a weekly basis to determine if the amount of issues we’d like to address would compel us to schedule a maintenance for that week. This will also give our teams more time to prepare and test these changes so we can ensure that they are stable.

Last week, we disabled the Marvel Machine page to prevent unintended use of 2x EXP Cash items by characters Lv. 256 and higher. We’re planning to make changes to these coupons to limit them to characters between Levels 1-249 as previously intended, and we'll apply these changes in the next scheduled maintenance (tentatively planned for next week). Once those changes are implemented, we plan to reopen the Marvel Machine page so players can access their coupons again and use any unused spins.

The next topic I’d like to discuss is the “Both” tab in the rankings when viewing rankings for both Reboot and Non-Reboot worlds. I’d again like to say that it was helpful for us to hear all opinions on this topic to determine a course of action. After reviewing the feedback from many different sources, we are internally planning to adjust the view of the rankings so that the server type selection is not defaulted to any single view. We understand that some players feel the “Both” view is unnecessary to begin with due to the how different the rates are between both types of servers; however internally, we do see value in comparing the data, and we’ve seen that some players have also expressed this desire to view the “Both” selection as well. For this reason we believe that the view does have value. However, to address some of the feedback we received from players regarding this view, we are planning to present an option for the player to opt-in to choosing which view they feel is more important to them.

We also know there are a few critical issues still occurring such as players disconnecting during bosses, as well as various quests that can't be completed. Our teams are looking into these issues and we’ll provide updates when we have them.

Starting next week, you’ll start to see more details about our forthcoming update, and we may be able to start sharing more news about other exciting things happening for MapleStory. Stay tuned!

Thank you,

Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo
Producer – MapleStory