Hi Everyone,

As Jungsoo mentioned earlier this week, we’ll be putting more focus into communicating with you a lot more frequently and clearly about some of the changes going on, and addressing the concerns you have. So with that, let’s jump into the biggest topic in the community right now, the future of Kishin.

I’ll get this out of the way now; we will not be making any changes to Kishin in the immediate future. However we do intend to do an overall revamp to Kanna at some point, in order to emphasize the strengths and unique features of the class, while addressing some of the overall issues that both our team and our players have identified.

Now, it’s true that we have been discussing Kishin more frequently and we did have plans to make a change to Kishin for our upcoming v200 patch. This is why Aru mentioned that there may be news about it soon. But at that time, we were still in the middle of planning that change and had not finalized a course of action. Since then, we have decided to step back a little from this plan while we discuss more options. The first of many apologies we will be making is that we did not address this topic and communicate to you all sooner about this.

Let me explain why we were considering changing the skill in v200. As some of you may know, lately there has been an increase in the amount of latency and lag players have been experiencing, specifically in more populated worlds such as Bera and Reboot. Now, we know this server lag is not a new issue, and we have continuously made changes to help alleviate these issues. Some of these changes are visible to you and some of them may not be. We can dive deeper into the most recent changes in a future memo. The reason I bring this up is because we’ve come to the conclusion that a major contributor to this server lag is specifically the Kishin skill and how it functions. Because the Kishin skill allows maps to have more monsters and increases the rate at which they reappear after being defeated, and because of the sheer amount of players in the game using this skill at the same time, this causes a lot of technical issues that are difficult to solve. As I mentioned, we have done a lot to try to mitigate the lag, but we ultimately came to the conclusion that Kishin’s ability to increase monster spawn rate needed to be reduced to provide a smoother experience for all players.

We started to accelerate these discussions so that we could make changes before our upcoming Black Mage update patches. Our proposals included ways to reduce Kishin’s ability while providing bonuses to things like drop rate and EXP, so that we could ensure these changes didn’t impact the skill’s overall purpose and effectiveness. Our intent was actually to make these changes as a temporary measure, while we continue to plan for an overall revamp to Kanna next year. As we continued these conversations, it became clear to us that temporary changes to this very important skill to alleviate lag was not the best solution for our players.

To add more context to the above situation, we do understand that a large number of the Kanna characters in the game may be hackers and botters. As we have mentioned in the past, we are constantly evaluating and improving our anti-botter efforts to constantly address this problem. In the past 2 weeks alone we’ve taken action on over 30,000 accounts, a majority of which are permanent bans to botters we find. Moving forward, we will continue to put a heavy focus on removing these illicit accounts from the game as much as possible. These efforts can also be a topic we elaborate further in a future memo.

Now what about the future of Kishin? As I mentioned above, we are planning to revamp Kanna at some point, but at this time have no specific details on what those changes will look like. We do understand the importance of this skill to players, but we also understand the overall concerns about Kishin and how players feel that it is necessary to have a Kanna mule or a secondary PC just to be able to progress at a reasonable rate in the game. We mentioned above that we understand a large number of the Kannas may be botters or hackers, but we also saw in our data that 18.55% of the unique non-banned characters who have logged into the game since June 1st, 2018 were Kanna classes. We agree that this creates an unhealthy game environment for our players, so we will be taking a hard look at these concerns and gathering as much data as we can and we will use this information as we decide how to move forward with Kanna. All of the feedback you have provided on this topic is invaluable to us to help understand your concerns and guide our conversations. As we start to solidify our direction and have more details, we will be sure to share with you all as soon as we can.

I hope this memo provides you some more insight into the recent situation. If there is one thing I want you to take away from this memo, it’s that we do ultimately want to do what is best for our players and for the game. So I encourage you all to continue to provide us your feedback as we move this game forward together.

Thank you,

Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo
Producer - MapleStory