Low Population Measures

[Lilianne]

I don't believe MapleStory was intended to be played with 100 online players. A lot of items do not go on the market due to low population and some players (cough archers) end up skipping weapon tiers because nobody is selling them.

Some solutions I thought about:

Upgrade stones
Lv50 Weapon Upgrade Stone
Upgrades a Lv40 weapon to a Lv50 weapon with random stats. (might be easier to just make an exchange NPC for this though) Drops from all lv50-59 mobs at a low chance comparable to scrolls. Tradeable. These tokens will go up to lv70.

Secret merchants
Every hour, there will be a small chance that a player shop will appear in FM with a few lv50-lv70 weapons for an affordable price (could spice this up with some random scrolls and minigame materials too!). Location is random so people actually have to search the FM maps.

 

[Rex]

I disagree because lvl 60-70 are your end game weapons in this kind of server. Their suppose to be difficult to obtain because you spend a lot of time at these level. You can go farm them yourselves. Adding something that sells 50-70 weapons would kill the market for people farming those weapons and devalue lvl 80 weapons as well which are like the true end game stuff. Same goes for scrolls, we already having boosted drop rate any more will make scrolls far too worthless. Not to mention you can craft 50 weapons and the 50 weapons aren't difficult to farm by any means(I do agree some 60 ones are total ass).

The whole secret merchant literally punish player for playing the game and reward people for afk camping fm. Someone could be outside grinding for 8 hours to get a nice scroll or someone who just afking in fm casually browse fm like for few mins every hour get same scroll is just terrible.

 

[Knivingdude]

I don't know how hard it is to code something along the lines of this but if the secret merchant was only found on random maps that no one really goes to and dissapears after being talked to or if someone leaves the map - that would encourage exploration at the least.

You'd have to be loaded with money in the first place, and waste training time for potentially good upgrades that might not even be yours to take...

 

[Rex]

But whats point of exploration other than wasting time? Like this isn't 2005 when maple was new and its a game of unknown. Its 15 years old and most people playing this knows the game inside and out. Everyone knows what the good grind maps are, everyone knows where to farm for what drops. Unless it just happened to spawn between travel no one going to be actively looking for them or actively exploring an already explored game. I honestly just don't see any point for it, game is rng enough with how low drop rate are and then there rng on scrolls. Don't need more rng to randomly push people ahead of other for doing nothing but being lucky.

 

[Knivingdude]

Don't need more rng to randomly push people ahead of other for doing nothing but being lucky.

I was just thinking of ways to make it balanced.

I just was also thinking along the lines of finding a purpose to all the maps people don't really go to by exploration. Spending your time by looking around isn't really doing nothing for potentially something you could use or sell. It could be another way to look for something valuable and is another grind in of itself (finding routes of scanning maps and looking around with a mage or thief etc.).

"The game is no longer a big unknown, so let's give some parts of game some purpose after we discover them" is the vibe I get from this idea. I wouldn't recommend to do it this way for this server but it's something to think about. I agree that the RNG is already fairly high on the base game.

 

[Mentula]

Upgrade stones
Lv50 Weapon Upgrade Stone
Upgrades a Lv40 weapon to a Lv50 weapon with random stats. (might be easier to just make an exchange NPC for this though) Drops from all lv50-59 mobs at a low chance comparable to scrolls. Tradeable. These tokens will go up to lv70.

How about revamping the crafting system to include higher level items and making items you craft yourself better than the ones dropping from a monster.
i think a crafting revamp that focuses more on monster drops than it does on Ore could be interesting. Maybe marked as a "quest item" so you cant just buy the drop from others easily

 

[Flash]

I don't think that weapons are really a problem. As long as the server isn't completely dead.

Scrolls are a much bigger problem with a low populated server.

Still, that's something for the future to think about. Maybe higher drop rates for scrolls. Or making some quests repeatable once a week/month or something.