Hello everyone! I hope you have been surviving this outbreak. What better time to sit inside and watch youtube videos? I hope you guys enjoy this video on Maplestory 2 as much as I enjoyed it (Tom knocked it out of the park right?) Sources in the description. Thanks for the support, everything (including views and likes) is helpful. We will get through all of this together :).
Thanks for the video NerdSlayer! I loved MapleStory 2, the first month was glorious, everyone was having fun and not caring too much about the endgame. People fishing, dancing, playing instruments, creating awesome houses... Too bad it was a grindy RNG mess afterwards. Also, the first big update (that gave more dungeons), needed a prior huge grind to get a great combat level for your character to even attempt it, leaving casuals way behind. Since casuals were leaving, the dungeons were filled with bots only, and the grinders were already at the top, everything pretty much fell apart. I had already moved on when New Leaf came out, and so did many of us.
Another great video. I am honestly sad MS2 didn't work out as I really enjoyed the game in the beginning, until that horrible grind and having to watch the playerbase drop off. Recommendations for future videos as always. Exteel - NCSOFT A mecha MMO shooter game that had a dedicated community and strong mech customization. Ghost X - GameKiss A sci-fi MMO with a streetpunk unique style and a rather unique gameplay model for the time.
Good video overall, and I agree with many of your points, but I have a few problems with some. I don't blame you for this, as it is probably pretty hard to keep up with all the information as an outsider, but I hope I can provide some transparency. 1. "Nexon focuses on the Asian market" You didn't really go into detail on what "Project New Leaf" was - it was an update catered to the Western market addressing almost all of the pain points of progression. Most of these updates were GMS-exclusive, however they ended up making their way to other regions in the future, due to their positive reception. While I agree that this update was too late, and the original iteration of the game was unappealing to a lot of players, I do think its important to highlight their attempts to retrofit the game to the West. 2. "Design was stark contrast to MS1" This is my opinion, but MapleStory 2 was not intended to be like MapleStory 1. It is a more traditional MMO, aimed at a different target audience. Nexon would have no reason to make all their players abandon-ship on one of their most popular games. 3. "Pay-to-Win mechanics" I'm not sure why you omitted details here, but expand on it for you. First of all, your information at 12:30 onwards is largely obtuse and incorrect. 12:39 - Trading was only disabled for the very first Closed Beta Test, and was enabled in the second Closed Beta Test and forward. 12:53 - "Autoplay mechanics" involved Fishing and Performing. For starters, these autoplay mechanics were given out as daily and event rewards. While you could pay for them, most players had hundreds of autoplay coupons saved up, never using any of them.They provided almost no tangible reward, aside from trophies (achievements) which did not affect the player. 12:56 - "Gems which are used for RNG enchant upgrades". I'm not even sure what you're referring to here, but catalysts used for upgrading were never sold in the cash shop. 12:58 - "Gears and weapons" were also never sold in the cash shop. Not sure where this information comes from. 13:00 - "XP boosts" were sold once ever as part of a package deal when the Runeblade character came out, however the level cap was 60 at the time, which was essentially required to be done via the story quests, to which the XP bonus did not apply to. 13:02 - Once again, not sure where you got this information from. Lootboxes for non-vanity items were never sold. And jumping ahead a bit here, 18:04 - I'm not sure why you made this claim. I double checked the source you got this image from, and nowhere on the entire page does it make any claims of being from the cash shop. They were purchased with currency acquired by completing the aforementioned missions. ---- I can provide screenshots if you're curious, but the Community Manager gave some information regarding the shut down (as much as he can, considering he has an NDA to uphold). He mentioned "things like money and population are unrelated to [the shutdown]", and " A few weeks prior to the news, he mentioned how "of all of Nexon's games here in Global, MapleStory 2 has the second most players". I don't expect you to have found any of thi s infromation, but I thought it'd be interesting for some people to hear. MapleStory 2 was doing relatively fine compared to a lot of the other games still chugging along today.
The population based off of steam stats is extremely misleading. The steam release was terribly buggy and it was well known among the community to only play the game through the nexon launcher. There was other technical reasons behind not using the steam client like account name and payment.
Ragnarok Online 2 had same fate, MS2 had potential to be good, but they fucked it up made it another boring grind, MS1 had more charm, MS2 didn't when it came to end game content
Peter shaw that’s a fact I was hoping pvp was gunna be good but they took the completely wrong turn for pvp and even gear killed the game instantly dropping from 70k players to 5k
i knew nexon couldn't handle end game/pvp/non p2w elements. So i just played the game till level 60-70 for the story. and that was about it lol. I saw a couple cool houses, and i really thought the abilities in the game with playing music and etc. were really cool. shame it died so quick but apparently the korean and chinese servers are still going? does this say something about western markets? are we just too easily dis-satisfied?
My reaction when this video showed up in my feed was crazy. I played Maplestory 2 on release for about 2 days. I switched gears and played another game with the intent to come back to it. I COMPLETELY forgot about it until this very day when I saw the title of the video.
I downloaded the game in 2018 & put it in my MMO queue, got completely burned out on MMOs & RPGs in general for over a year, & when I finally fire it up, the game is already gone.
@@LikaLaruku ouch.. well i'm just waiting for a gem of an mmorpg pops around.. i haven't enjoyed alot of them as much as i did some of the old ones like iris online and mainly FLYFF wich i used to play tons back in the day.. i do like PSO2 but i don't know how big the current download is as when i played on the japanese server it was like 200 GB.. if they actually compressed it for once then it should be fine but i'm not waiting for 200 GB to download because that is going to take wayy too long and i have no clue how i waited trough that the first time around 😂 i did sort of enjoy archeage but i didn't like the class system as much.. and i did also like blade and soul quite a bit but can't download it because for some reason it doesn't give me an option to change the download location wich sucks ass because it means it can only clog up my main drive wich is already pretty small but it's my main because it's an ssd
Maplestory 2 was trash. Ugly ass 3d models making everything look like a fucking balloon. It looked it was made using an engine from a Facebook game from 2010. Maplestory 1 was GOAT because it had its own feel to it. Nice anime pixel art, really nice music, simple gameplay, and nostalgia.
Exactly my words... I really miss the game. I played that game since launch all the way to the end... I don't think I will ever find an MMO that can so efficiently fulfill my soul. To this day I'm trying to find something that would give me the same feeling like MP2.... I feel like I've already tried everything... I wish I was born in Korea...
Combat wasn't tab target in MS2 though, it was action-based. What a weird article. The main reason myself, and a lot of others quit playing, was progression at the end was locked behind item power which required you to get random drops from dungeons that you could only do a certain amount of times a week. You would grind a boring dungeon multiple times hoping to get an item to let you enter the higher tier dungeons to get more items to do the same. It was soul-crushingly bad.
Yea and they fixed that by having beta reset you could do once a week which double the time you could do them,but they also fucked it up by lowering the Gear Score requirements for high level dungeon so new and weaker players could join which killed it to the point where no one was doing none of them except the people who grind to the point where they could nuke Fire Dragon in less than like 5 mins for a crap ton of upgrade material.
Exactly this. Timegating dungeons and raids killed the game for hardcore players and made it hard for casuals to find anyone willing to play with them. Really a shame, very fun game for a time.
@@thatguyonline5083 Yea it was so bad . I was a super late game player and helped allot of noobs the were sitting in Group lobbys for 30mins and more becouse of how bot infested auto grouping was. Hardcore players only wanted to play with you if you van turbo clear .
i watched teaser and really hyped. I just know that it launch on steam but steam never recommend maple story2 for me even i opened it every single day. and then ta-da..... server closed.
The first red flag I had when playing this game at release was finding out that there was a daily limit on how many dungeons you could do unless you paid. I played maybe a week or two then forgot about this game. It's a shame because I loved the aesthetic. The city portions of the game were cute and a nice contrast from generic medieval fantasy number 200 that we get with every MMO.
I just wanna clarify, the extra dungeon runs via paying is not on the GMS2 version which is the server that happens to be shutting down. Its a thing in the other servers but GMS2 surprisingly stayed completely f2p
I just didn't find the game interesting or fun enough with the base combat and skill system. The houses and social aspects seemed great. Quit very early around lvl 15. Similar thing happened to me with Wildstar which had an odd and unintuitive talent system but I stuck around for much much longer.
Game that literally had no early or mid game. You just boosted yourself trought the absolutely mindless story that was less intresting than a rock. THey even knew it sucked so they made the levelling fast as hell. Once u got to end game you qucikly realyzed all there was to do was grind endlesly dungeons that were fun for the first 10-20 times but quickly ran out of juice.
not to forget the fact upgrading past a certain point was basically impossible when it came to gear unless you paid for it.. and even then it was nearly impossible
Yeah, I played it and I loved it... then it became so, so boring. The flashy effects and the cool house customisation can't hold an MMO player forever :/
@@litchtheshinigami8936 No . I grinden my way to end game gear . You didnt need to spend any money . The biggest problem was there was no us for your +15 perfectly rolled leg weapon.
If im being honest, this news actually made me pretty sad. I was one of the people who sank a lot of time into maple story 2, and even got two of my characters into Kiritas. Its just... knowing that something you spent a lot of time on is just all of a sudden getting taken away... just... hot damn.
That's why when I see a lot of other people dropping a game, I do too, even if I like the game. Otherwise, you're just setting yourself up for that feeling of loss when the game just inevitably goes away.
Ahh. I absolutely loved Maple Story 2. For the first two weeks. I absolutely loved how customizable everything was and the monster's that people created from it. I mean, no other game can you walk into town and see a picture of Thanos' bare ass on the billboard. I myself got pretty popular for spouting a full ahegao outfit. Sadly, it was as you said. The endgame was much too grindy and people got super bored of it. I did too, it's really frustrating to kill a giant fire lizard over and over again just to get epic weapons that weren't even for your class. But at least I still stuck around for the social aspect because I had a lot of fun making music and it was a real joy to play music in front of other people, but eventually people stopped playing and it's no fun playing to an empty audience.
@@trappist404 that was the reason i dropped the game (well, that and RNG with gear upgrade.) don't mind grind at all, but gating that grind looked so surreal
yeah i feel ya on the getting bored part, even by level 50 i was grinding the same shit over and over to get gear that was either worse or like you said not for my class
I played this game for a year straight constantly with +15 weapons for each update (legendary, mythic, blah blah) . It had so much potential and I loved how cute everything was. It was ass that it just became the same thing over and over.
Destiny went half cash shop...they stil around EA went full loot box...they hated nexxon went full cash shop...everyone hates em never go full cash shop
unironically they should have gone full cash shop. the video is wrong on a bunch of things. Gms2 didnt have p2w at all nor did it have much you could buy due to it, yet the ones that do are still around. Surprising! Listening to reddits bad business, and the shareholder pdf only proves it further that it shutdown over money. lmao.
I actually had a lot of fun with this game... until I reached the end game. I swear to god, the Koreans cannot design an MMO without godawful end-game grind. There was a ton of awesome player customization, housing, etc. Sadly, the devs and publishers were slow and incompetent from what I remember during the interviews and live sessions. They were also insanely greedy and restricted so many basic things that should have been free (like dungeon limit). A very unique and fun MMO ruined by lazy and greedy owners.
It was always something that made me question if Asian markets are just much easier and more accepting to things or if western people play hardball too much. Asian markets seem like they have a much lower bar to give them a chance and will throw money at them and spend hundreds of hours grinding and rarely complaining unlike others but can be quick to abandon. So often I just find Asian games lacking. Visually look great, but in order for it to look good, it runs poorly quite often or not well optimized but if it has fun combat and looks good, its not optimized and no content. All of these games also want to bleed you dry and charge hundreds for basic things while barely playable. I know for mobile games we just know by the company what practices they will do based on their history.
@@Kiobao i think it's because the west sets the standard at world of warcraft. asian regions have just been dominated by F2P games during that same span of time.
Well apparently you don't understand anything. The way cash shops works in Asia are different since they have contracts with cyber cafes where you get in-game cash according to the time you play in there. Plus most people don't play on their homes, instead they go to those places. It's obvious Korean games were never for the west market, and you wanting them to be "less greedy" is just dumb... It was never for you and the ones really at fault are the guys from PR who say shit to sell the game for a market it was never meant to be in. As a Korean I believe the gambling culture in Asia is garbage and pretty much shit as it has always been, but it's so incorporated in most countries there that if you want something different from a company who is trying to sell a product, you gotta be pretty stupid when the whole enterprise culture revolves around the money. Also, I believe it's pretty obvious but I would never expect much from any free to play game.
@@신-r2r If what you said is true, then it's a failure by the publishers to localize the game to that region's market. They should know going in how badly it will be received. They likely want to quickly cash out but that's very short sighted and risky since it can just outright fail like ms2 and many others
As someone who played from the start up until it was announced it was shutting down, i can say that the reason of the huge decline in playerbase happened at the time chaos raids was released is because there was a huge issue with the players that the dungeon cap was so limited. They decided to put in a temp dungeon reset so you could get in an extra 15 dungeons a week but then this just made it feel more like a chore. (and people hated how they was pretty much forced to max out otherwise their progress would be behind everyone else) after they refused to remove the caps despite a vast majority complaining about them the player base just left. the huge decline happened around that time. i always knew putting dungeons behind a cap would remove a large group of people wanting to play. as many people have jobs don't always want to grind a game for hours when they get home. i heard one hardcore ms2 player sometimes was staying up to ungodly hours just to progress at a fast rate and putting their health and job at risk. (so they ended up quitting eventually) it really promoted an unhealthy way to progress and game, and if we all was allowed to progress at our own pace (with small limits) then people would of wanted to return. i know a lot of my friends stopped playing just because of how behind you get with everything if you didn't constantly grind weekly. many forgot to go back to the game once they was finished with their two days worth of dungeons. It's such a shame because the game had one of the best things i have ever seen in an online mmo (the ability to customise and make your own clothing) this was the reason i was interested in the game to begin with. and it makes me sad we will probably never see anything like this again. and it was such a brilliant concept. making my character unique is something i am mainly interested in when it comes to mmo's and this was one of those games you could do that without paying big bucks. rip ms2 you will be missed
this is true, i also quit right when the raids were released. i was not weak, was ready to go into the raids, but than i found out even being strong it was not enough to deal with the raids or to even find parties. I was like 4.9K power and i didnt have a pet (nobody knew pets were important, i only found out about it after i quit). and couldnt find any party and once i found it was like a loooong time to finish the raid bcuz we kept dying. This with the obligation of doing all the weekly / daily dungeons on all characters were killing me, i ended up quitting
Great DOAG as always, but as a former Maplestory 2 player, there's a couple important points that I believe are missing or are inaccurate. 12:53 Most of the items listed here were not actually available for purchase, specifically lootboxes, gear, and gems. Maplestory 2 did a surprisingly good job at making the game not pay to win (by Korean MMO standards) and while there were instances of paying giving an advantage, these were mostly on the smaller side of things in my opinion. 16:38 To expand on the issue of "grindiness" of Maplestory 2, the problem was not only that players had to run the same dungeons over and over, resulting in boredom, it was that rewards were time-gated, meaning you could only receive a limited amount of rewards per week. Time-gating these rewards which were needed to power up gear meant that, in combination with the RNG upgrade system, most of the playerbase would begin to fall behind in progression, simply due to RNG. 17:46 The Skybound update was cited to be the first big update to Maplestory 2, but there was another large update that happened before this which included the raids. This is where the first instance of large player loss occurred, as shown in the chart at 18:39, because due to the grindy, RNG-filled progression system, many players were left in the dust if they were unable to participate in raids (which were also time-gated). And this is also not including the whole Pet System debacle that many Maplestory 2 players will recognize. 18:05 The update didn't include the reroll scroll or the lootbox that were shown in the video in the cash shop. It actually didn't include anything even remotely similar to those kind of items. What it did include was more time-gated tasks required for progression which players would soon refer to as "chores". Overall, I wanted to point these out for accuracy, although the resulting deduction would still be the same.
Another former player chiming in. MS2 was hobbled long before it ever made it to global. Tons of pay-to-win mechanics were removed for global, but nothing was ever adjusted to compensate. The english team seemed limited in what they could change and the prevailing theory is that any changes had to be passed along to the korean team first. Shout-outs to Jung-soo, CMKyrios and the rest of the people Nexon management sent to the front lines with no ammo.
This is exactly what I was thinking throughout the video. When it comes to p2w aspects MS2 was actually really good compare to other mmo I played. I was able to get to the end game with the top tier equipment unlike MS1. The only payed aspects were cosmetics and convenient items like unlimited fast travels, you can argue about buying meso(in-game currency) but I never find that as a problem. I remember the gem system being the worst and the developer actually listen and improve the system. The worst thing about MS2 was the excess grinding, which is what made me quit. I don't mind a little grinding but MS2 pretty much requires player to make bunch of alts to grind for items because of the time-gate. It's sad to see it close because I genuinely had a great time with the game
Was so excited when they added raids my guild was ready and everything only for none them could learn the fight. Ended up running with random and beating it and after awhile just quit playing cause couldn't find a group to do the raids with consistently
Yeah, I played MS2 for a couple of days (so not that long at all), but even crafting and gathering were time gated. You could only successfully gather and craft a certain number of times per day, and once you hit it, that was it until the next day.
Wow! Seeing NTK flash on the screen was a blast from the past. I think I was even in that screenshot just out of crop. You might have mentioned the game was called Baram when it came out in Korea. Honestly, I'd love your take on where the game is at. The state of the game in the U.S. vs Korea is incredible. Great video!
A little more info on why "Mabinogi II: arena" looked so different from the original mabinogi, is because of Vindictus. Vindictus, in Korea is known as "Mabinogi Heroes", the game is supposed to be a darker, more realistic take compared to the more light hearted Mabinogi's "live your own fantasy life" take, the former being a full on 3rd person action game (which in my opinion still today features one of the best action combat systems in the market, despite the poor optimization and aggresive monetization tactics typical of asian MMOs) and the latter being a more classic style, point and click mmo, putting a strong emphasis on you being able to create your own way of living in that fantasy world. Mabinogi II: Arena was supposed to bring the 2 togheter: a top down, more de-tached camera angle, typical of point and click games like Mabinogi while keeping the dark, gritty theme from Mabinogi Heroes. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Nexon was trying to appeal to 2 different audiences with vastly different tastes and ended up pleasing neither.
as a vindictus player that mabi 2 did like like if you took the skin of vindictus and plotted into a diablo style dungeon crawler so gross no wonder they cut development. I wonder if that chinese mobile vindictus game took some of the assests from it tho.
@@CEDL0W and whats Great the game is infact still going strong, i still play it to this day, every day. we recently got a new content update with G24, we got a cross over event 2 weeks ago. and last year they merged 3 of the 4 servers together so the servers are more populated as 3 of them got merged and looking into getting the remaining 2 servers merged so the entire playerbase is together.
they should have just stuck to the original mabinogi and improved on that.. i know i would like to play it that way.. i actually played the original for a while but because there was nobody online (those that were online were afk) i just didn't have as much fun as i could have had
funny enough i actually started playing ms2 when it was doing terribly (sept 2019) and the community that was left over was so friendly and kind i really fell in love with this game and quickly managed to catch up on all the content i missed, and managed to join the top 10 guilds on the region and made a lot of good friends, but shortly after it was announced to close and it was so heartbreaking and still is heartbreaking for me, there was a small community but it felt like everyone knew each other and i miss this game so much and i miss all those people i will never get the chance to see again :(
This is really sad, this game had SO MUCH potential. it's amazing how they can come up with such incredible designs in some parts of the game, yet miserably fail others.
@@MohanABK theres a ton of lore on how a small group of players sold carries and got boosted by GMs and just destroyed the game by getting the devs to overtune everything so only they could do it and sell carries to weaker players
Never understood why they made a Maplestory 2. They should have just kept the game going on the main server and added a V62 "classic" server and they'd have done fine with both the newer and older players being satisfied. Nexon seems to be ran by idiots though so whatever. I'm simply a weed dealer but I have better customer service and am more innovative than Nexon despite being a single person.
I never watched a death of a game video where I played the actual game until now. This game was so amazing and was my first time coming back to an mmorpg since I stopped playing Runescape 7 years ago. Rip maplestory 2 you will be missed
I saw a video a while back where a player saved up an entire month's worth of stat re-roll coupon. For demonstration purposes, they only tried to roll for 1 perfect line on the gear instead of 2. After an entire month's worth of grinding, like 100 coupons or so, they didn't even get close to the lines they wanted on their gear. So basically if you weren't paying to win, an entire month's worth of grinding was absolutely worthless, and players wouldn't let you into endgame bosses unless you met certain gear requirements. In MS1 you CAN actually reach endgame without pay to win. It's hard and grindy, but it's doable. MS2 they pretty much threw your RNG out the window.
As an avid fan of Maplestory 2, I just wanted to share my thoughts on the game closing down. I can't deny that the game was in a VERY rough shape at the beginning. The game was plagued with bots (which thankfully got fixed around early 2019) and there were so many rng gated aspects of the game when it first released. The timegating and endgame grind itself also left a lot to be desired. However, something I have to point out is that the devs actually listened and pushed out patches that fixed many of the issues. The project new leaf overhaul actually helped the game a lot because it outright fixed many of the systems in the game such as accessory socketing and gemstones now being a 100% chance to succeed rather than it being rng. In addition, they made the slow but guaranteed method of weapon/armor enchanting actually viable for progression, and removed mechanics such as fair fight in dungeons which drastically increased the speed at which people were able to clear them. In fact, the dev team was actually loved by a lot of people in the GMS2 community because they actively listened to the players and tried to work with us. If you're coming from other nexon games, you'd know exactly how unusual it is for them to give a shit about us. In addition, they actually strove to keep the global version of ms2 as f2p friendly as possible. The video itself pointed to p2w as a potential failure but the reality is, the global version actually lacked many of the p2w mechanics. Unlike in the Asian servers, you couldn't pay real money to enter dungeons after capping, and you couldn't buy the scrolls that allowed to you roll for better stats. The devs actually added these items into other ingame features so you were able to obtain them without shelling out cash. In fact, the lack was p2w features in the global version was a breath of fresh air compared to other nexon games considering how they could have milked the game for everything it was worth. The game wasn't perfect by any means. Changes often took a long time and the dev team often pushed changes as a reactionary measure rather being proactive. In addition, the game itself was also marketed as a casual and social game rather than the dungeon and raid grind it really was, there were lots of different bugs that would often hamper a class' ability to function properly, leveling was so fast many players didn't bother exploring and looking around different maps besides for the ones the main story forced you to go to, and the game was very unfriendly towards newer players meaning lots of players dropped the game within a week or so and never got to the endgame. As for the content, the awakening expansion was great at first, but because they released ALL the content at once, many players were able to speed through dungeons and raids and get to the endgame within 2-3 weeks. Just for reference, the awakening content was actually split into 2 parts for the other servers and were released separately but the global version got both parts crammed into a single expansion so we blazed through everything practically the moment it was released and had nothing to do for six months. Despite these flaws however, I was hoping the game would have lasted a bit longer especially because the game itself was in its best state despite having the lowest amount of players in a long time. The newest expansion and content cycle was looking to be the best one yet with staggered releases that gave players time to gear up and prepare for the next fights, and the raids were legitimately fun and challenging when they were first released. Its a damn shame that we couldn't get the second part of the expansion since I know a lot of people who truly excited to run through the dungeons and raids that would have been released. All in all, I legitimately enjoyed the ms2 experience and this game actually was the first mmo where I joined a guild and felt attached to the community. Its not surprising that the game is being shut down, but seeing all the time and effort that both the devs and dedicated playerbase put towards the game just go down the drain is definitely saddening.
Something to add, its true that the changes had a long waiting time but that's mainly because Nexon America is just a simple publisher for the game; they lack any team or power to do changes which killed the game because people were never going to wait for 6 months until KMS say "Ok do it". Even now, it seems like CMS2 and KMS2 are waiting to see whats going to happen in the April patch which should be this week, because they're losing players every single day. Its a very casual game for hardcores because they finish everything in 3 days and horrible for newcomers and they keep forgetting about the casual player base. I really believe MS2 team did what they could to fix this P2W core game by not adding the P2W mechanics but at the end it was awful because the game was designed with that in mind. Like KMS2 premium membership gives extra entrances to the dungeons, outfits gives stats (pay outfits) too many things that, it was impossible for the team to fix.
Hot take: the reason the game died on NA was because it wasn't P2W ENOUGH! Does it really make sense to say a game died for being P2W when so many games are doing hardcore P2W successfully?
Why I left Maplestory 2: I played Maplestory 2 when it first launched, I met a guild leader online and we instantly became friends. I stayed active in that guild daily and became close to its guild members. For 2 months, I played alongside that guild and I knew my guild members as if they were an extended family. The game was a gettaway for me consistently. But when my life became too demanding, I had no choice but to leave Maplestory 2 for a few weeks. When I came back, I was removed from the guild and found that I fell too far behind in the game to be relevant anymore. I simply stopped coming back after that.
2 mons was really nothing much, GL was probably just a dick and guild would probably not accomodating to newbies if they cant tolerate people who fell behind.
I remember grinding potion solvents in an area next to Hensys, but there was a bot when I went there doing the same thing. I didn't pay much mind to it until I noticed it went away, and only half an hour later I found out it broke off its pathing because I kept taking the solvents, and it just started murdering EVERYTHING it came across.
Gold standard for gaming analysis on YT. Few content creators take off their player hats and think about the business side of things, but you've done that in spades. Excellent video and production!
I find it incredibly ironic that Maplestory 2 died cause it didn't make more money than their cash cow...Maplestory 1... No matter what, the original Maplestory will live on, like an angry overbearing parent telling their kids to shut up and leave the room
I've put 200 hours into MS2 since launch, so here are my thoughts: They actually did a great job when it came to monetization. It was more f2p than most MMOs. The focus really was on cosmetics. Even the few things you mentioned like quick travel items were given out handsomely in frequent events. I don't think I ever actually ran out. Saying that being p2w was a reason for dying just seems strictly incorrect (at least on NA, which the articles mentioned were addressing). MS2 not having extensive PVP wouldn't have mattered. This was shown early on when they had a game mode dedicated to it called Mushking Royale. You got some rewards for playing it, and that is the ONLY reason many people played it. Players would literally team up against people actually playing the game. They would label you a PKer and kill you on sight. People literally didn't fight, in a battle royal, just so they could last until the end of the game for the rewards. The biggest killer was RNG progression and time gated dungeons. Because the progression was RNG and you could only run a certain amount of total dungeons in a week for drops, whether or not you got to move onto the the harder content the following week was out of your hands. This was especially killer due to not having player trading, you HAD to get the drop yourself. This also caused some players to feel like if they wanted to play with their friend who got screwed on RNG, they would have to waste a dungeon run on content they don't need or they had to already complete their max amount of runs for the day. They actually started listening to players a lot more toward the end especially, they even had dedicated community members they would talk to called Joddy Squad. Although idk if these guys were representative of what most players wanted. At some point there are only going to be hardcore players left, which often conflicts with what casuals (the people who keep a game alive) want. As for why I quit, the end game was grinding. There was little progression outside of grinding. I think the biggest thing Nexon needed to do was support the social aspects of the game more, to the point of tying a lot more of the games progression to them. MS2 was unlike a lot of other MMOs in that it promoted doing things that really only had value socially, like the mini-games that would pop up. The only problem was that you couldn't just do these things if you wanted to get anywhere in the game. I think they missed an opportunity to challenge how MMOs are traditionally played.
idk if you watched the video but they're still making a shitton of money over seas, they're not going down as a whole, but their NA division might be, that's not the closing of a company, that's just a bunch of people getting laid off.
Maple m is getting worse and worse each updates. Buffing a top class ignoring the weaker classes,removing guild attendees reward,non exciting events. Hope it closed down soon
Actually, economically they are doing the opposite. Dungeon and Fighters was more profitable than League of Legends in 2018.' Rather, what's happening with Nexon right now, requires you to understand what is happening in Korea. You see, Nexon's Founder basically said "I'm DONE". And is basically trying to sell his stocks and major ownership of the Company. AKA Selling the Company. PROBLEM. No One Bought It. So what are they doing right now? Dieting. They are literally killing EVERY Non-Profitable Game both in-development and in-service. Only focusing on the Profitable Ones. So that other companies would notice and buy them.
The biggest dip in population was when cDev was released in November since the community wasn't aware of pets being the strongest thing in the game, and the fact that no content creator who played in Korea didn't share the information to have an advantage over everyone else. As a result, many people felt like their time was wasted and the fact that they'd have to wait about a month and a half to have a max pet due to the timegating unless you spent millions of mesos to speed up the process mean't they were severely behind.
I love Jake Song's games. The only thing that's always dragged them down for me is the pay2win and it's a shame. I've been playing Archeage Unchained since launch and it's quickly become my favorite MMO ever. Hope he does a good job with it in the future. He's got some good ideas.
I miss maplestory 2, i was about to come back to the game as i been thinking about it for a while now wanting to play it again, just to find out it was deleted.. I havnt played ms1 yet, but i can already tell that i wont like it as much as i did ms2. I miss making scores, collecting all instruments, making outfits ect. i didnt really realize how much i liked ms2 until it was now gone. It will never come back, but ill still be wishing for some odd reason it does. Ill try out ms1 but it isnt my type of game, i am more attracted to design so the 3d in ms2 and the colors caught my eye
24:15 "It's time for everyone's favorite part of the video..." The hot jams. "It's time to solve the mystery of Maplestory 2's ultimate demise." Oh... Yeah that part too.
I just want to say, I'm really enjoying your increase in the film noir asthetic throughout the video. It adds a really nice framing device on each video. Thanks for the great content.
Loved the beta testing for Maple Story 2, chaos and the sounds of music playing from random people. Used to be apart of a musician guild where we would gather and teach others how to convert music and create parts for other musical instruments. Loved those days in beta testing, never did go back though.
Found this from the MS2 subreddit! I created my assassin in August, so around when it came out. I started actually playing in October and started hard-grinding this like MS. I found a wonderful guild which I will always treasure, we were like a huge online family trying to do raids, comparing our dmg. Although I quit before being able to try BlackShard Nexus out (only got to Pink Bean and those color dungeons), I still liked to chat with my guildmates on Discord. Kind of saw it coming, but still sad over the closing/failure of MS2. Overall, the only reason why I was able to last a year was definitely because of my guildmates. Having them made the grind (although boring), much more fun.
I've been binging this series the last few days, you go great depths exploring just how these games ended and to see the details unfold is fascinating and very entertaining. I personally had played Matrix Online in beta and it was such a blast of nostalgia to see it covered in a previous episode. I was hoping to suggest another game to cover, Tribes: Ascend. I saw that you already covered Hi-Rez's Global Agenda and that you have mentioned Smite and Paladins in several videos, so I assume you're somewhat familiar already with the studio, if not Tribes itself. Tribes 1 and 2 were classics in the early days of the FPS genre and there was a lot of excitement around Ascend when it was announced. People thought it had potential to get picked up on the e-sports circuit and there was the super hype and hilarious reddit vs 4chan match during beta that got a lot of attention. I was so sad to see it fail because it had such palpably immersive gameplay in terms of movement and speed that I haven't seen replicated since. I would love to see it get the post-mortem send off it deserves in hope for a revival sequel one day.
As a viewer that is watching one of your videos for the first time, I have to say that I'm satisfied. You are concise and pleasant to listen to. You also highlighted a lot of reasons why I stray away from Korean MMO ports. This was great! Subscribed~
The game felt like a passion project that ended up being filled with a bunch of soulless, passionless, half-assed content. It's like some person who has no experience in game development or should have a say in how to make games, said the game should follow some corporate checklist of stuff to add to it, instead of looking at the current game and add things that fit best. As a result, the game developers had to change many aspects of the game to try and make the dumb content/mechanics more feasible.
i played this game the year it ended, and my character was so hard man, i made my own ripped black jeans, and metal leather jackeds i loocked sick af, playing my electric guitar with metalliuca and gojira songs, riding my motor bike, too bad it ended like literally 1 week after i geared up, sad
I remember playing this game in a discord server with some friends, and we would soon stop playing it after a couple of weeks. I guess that just shows how this game really wasn’t the best.
This is really sad, i`ve been playing on and off almost since launch, this was my comfy autumn game. I loved the art style and the customization option. I never got to max level but i didnt really care, i just wanted to enjoy the art and music while doing a couple of quests and chatting with friend while i`m building my house.
The end game raid with extremly high requirements, forcing you to do the same fire lizard dungeon a hundred times hoping it drops the 1 item you needed with the correct attributes, is mainly what killed the game It made endgame a insane grind. I had to have done that dungeon 200+ times and still didn't get what i needed for the raid release
Hey man, just so you know, Steam charts are a bad representation of Maplestory's playerbase. The majority of players on MS1 and MS2 play through the Nexon launcher, and Nexon doesn't disclose the amount of players going through there. A 2020 estimate done by players by looking at active players above a certain level to cut out alternate characters approximates there's about 30,000+ active MS1 players, while Steam only shows a fraction of that. It'd be safe to say MS2 was similar. Generally Nexon games have bugs when running through Steam launcher so it's advised to avoid it.
It kind of breaks my heart that MS2 is going so quickly. I enjoyed the little time I played it. I first played it sometime last year right after Maplestory Fest when they introduced Striker/Eye of Lapenta Raid. Personally I was okay with the art style. It was different, but it was still cute and Maplestory-esque with some spin-offs. The map design was kind of annoying at times due to the isometric perspective (falling off the map happens way too often). But the music direction still kept true to MS1 and I felt strong nostalgia playing it. However, I think Nexon was a little too dependent on the nostalgia aspect. I did notice that at some point the main storyline of all the classes was exactly the same. I only made 2 characters but quickly noticed that I was following the same exact storyline twice with different classes. While MS1 is similar in a way, it provides way more side quests that are actually fun and build on the lore of the game. MS2 at some point was essentially grinding the same exact raids to increase your gear score. I remember the last time I played I was trying to reach a GS that would allow me to enter Eye of Lapenta raids. It got tiring with there also being a weekly exp and drop cap (something that I can see why its implemented for asian markets, but shouldnt have been implemented in a western market). There simply was nothing else to do to progress your playing experience besides grinding. There were things like mini games and recreational activities but these were really just tasks to do that the player was forced to entertain themselves with. Aside from doing tasks to fulfill achievements, it lacked the magic of MS1, which was exploration out of curiosity. I found myself sometimes looking around the same corners for chests but there wasnt much appeal/no need to go to other areas to do anything. MS1 used to be incredibly community based as well with party quests to collect incredible gear but later switched to a more solo style which separated the player base. MS2 seems to have tried to replicate party quests, but people were forced to them out of necessity, not voluntarily or for fun. For MS2, their community revolved around recreational activities that quickly lost their magic. I felt like the game as a whole was overshadowed by MS1. The content felt half done and dated. Even with Project Newleaf, the game seemed to be lacking something at the core whether it was some sort of sincerity and passion or the fact that it still tried to stick closely to MS1. The game should have taken a different direction rather than playing just on the nostalgia of the first game.
4,000 hours in I was so burnt out... By the time the sky expansion hit, I was fed up as it simply just added MORE life skill chores... the game was over run with bots. I wanted to switch my main to a Soul Binder, LOL it was waaaaay too late for that. My guild was like the top 3 in the server. Everyone was too focused with their life skill grinding and the NEW added life skills from the sky expansion AND on top of that, everyone switched from the normal dungeons strictly to the new chaos dungeons to grind and I mean GRIND to upgrade their legendary gear. The market was DESTROYED there was no way to earn mesos (the non premium currency) the only way to earn mesos was to GRIND hard on lfie skills to craft gear and HOPEFULLY rolls a really good statted accessory or to grind dungeons 24/7 in the hope of a good drop to sell that in the market... Back to switching my main, it was basically IMPOSSIBLE to switch, the casual scene was overrun by BOTS and I mean A LOT OF BOTS, all the dungeons you would Que with it would just be bots and you were basically solo-ing a dungeon... it went from a 5-10 minutes to complete a dungeon to a PAINFUL... PAINFUL 40-60 minutes. There was basically no scene for the casual players, the new 10 man raids were so hard (HARD as in you NEEDED perfect statted gear and weapons to even make a dent to the boss) DON'T forget they were timed... Soooooooo, all the top guilds monopolized the dungeons and the casual players had to pay a pretty penny for a carry... Don't forget what I said earlier, you needed to GRIND REALLY HARD to even make mesos... At that point I was so burnt out, I'm glad I got out early and sold my account... I heard it got worse from there down the road, and then the game just died... OH YEAH, PVP WAS BROKEN, DON"T GET ME STARTED ON THAT... IN 3 SECONDS YOU GET ONE SHOTTED BY A MACRO OF COMBINATIONS OF ATTACKS FROM A WIZARD.. LITERALLY oh yeah, to get a full set costume it'll cost you around $200-$300 USD to complete :)
Wow, the fact that anyone else remembers this proves to me that it's not just a figment of my imagination. I remember the release of 1st job skill trees being so strong in pvp that many people would use 1st job rather than any other, up to and including 4th even though the latter are much harder to obtain. Seriously, 1st job Ryan's lv 1 skill poison spore was so overloaded that for a measly 1/3rd of a mana bar you could send out three gelatinous, sad looking pucks that, upon contact would deal good damage and let you initiate a grab, which if you got lucky would send the opponent onto the third slime at the very end which would prevent them from falling, allowing for ANOTHER grab unless they charged a mana cancel. To top it all off, THEY HEALED YOU. Also skill trees came one by one so the newest one was usually flavor of the month except for the people who understood Grandchase's version of wave-dashing and were actually good at the game. There were a lot of broken mechanics in the game but my memories of the game still occupy a place in my heart 10 years later. PVM was kinda awful though.
I remember trying so hard just to play the game and download it. The first email account I ever made was to create a Nexon account and play MapleStory 2. I lost that account.
It'll be a sad moment when "Death of a Game: Warframe" pops on my feed. I hope that game lasts as long as it can and has a happy ending, I'll be there for the entirety of the journey as well.
Nope, they aren’t standing on their own well currently with their updates, they need to fix it now before even thinking of a sequel, especially with Warframe mobile coming
the death of maplestory 2 is sad to see, though that makes the live of maplestory original even more wholesome. the game has been out for ages yet still has a large fanbase, even with private servers being very alive (im even friends with the owner of one). i never got into the game(s), but i can see why many people still enjoy them to this day
@@why_is_da_heavy_dead It's such a shame, I absolutely loved Battlerite but Stunlock just.........didn't do anything right, and balance was so off, it was such a promising game
that's what they get for excluding SEA... it's where some of the money is, ragnarok mobile got so much cash just in SEA (all because of nostalgia) it's there where i actually saw in real time the largest sum someone would actually pay for an in game item (especially for a mobile game) 50k dollars for one mount and 20k+ each boss monster cards wtf..
I liked it until i hit endgame and then the RNG hell started. Not only was the RNG stats on gears atrocious, you had an daily and weekly limit to obtain said gear. That killed the game for me in less then a month. Too bad i liked the sandbox part of the game despite all the copyright rules which killed the cloth design part of the game.
as a player that grew up on ms1 and eventually became a top player in ms2 this video doesn't touch any of the reasons for why the game failed. It's almost insulting.
I just found out about your channel due to the Dirty Bomb video and i am already subbed, you make great content! Also a game that u could talk about is Battlerite, was a really good game but died due to poor management from the developers
I had the fortune to play MS2 during the 2nd Closed Beta Test in July of 2018, and religiously played the game from launch in October until mid-December. Maplestory 2 will forever hold a special place in my heart for the joy it provided me during that time, but its failure was all but sealed by that December. The main killing factor for the majority of the casual playerbase was the monotonous grind for a *chance* to upgrade your gear every week coupled with the unreasonably high entry bar into the Chaos Raids introduced in late 2018, NOT P2W. Most of the casual playerbase just couldn't keep up with the gear score requirements, and most importantly, *it was impossible to run dungeons with a public lobby* due to the complex mechanics, limited lives, and again, high gear score requirements. Many of the end-game players, myself included, relied on Guilds filled with people who played Korean MS2 to teach us the mechanics in Discord servers. You expressed doubts about how much Nexon changed the game's monetization from the Asian market to Global, but Nexon actually changed a TON. The global release of MS2 had a considerable amount of P2W aspects removed either during the CBTs, at launch, or right after launch. To name a few: - On Asian servers, weapons had a chance to break when failing enhancements. You could buy an item with merets (real cash) to prevent breaking. This was removed. - On Asian servers, you could pay an increasing amount of merets to infinitely respawn during raids. This was removed and replaced by a limited amount of respawns using in-game currency. - On Asian servers, you could pay merets to bypass your weekly dungeon limit. This was removed. - On Asian servers, a variety of items that affected progression were available for purchase in the Cash Shop. In GMS2, the only items that affected progression in the Cash Shop were Elixirs that were also available for F2P and auto-perform and auto-fish tokens. While auto-perform and auto-fish did give EXP, because leveling was so fast, they were seldom used to level and thus can't be said to contribute to progression all that much. Everything else in the Cash Shop was purely cosmetic, and Nexon actively encouraged user-generated content that the creators would get a cut of in merets. The development team of GMS2 didn't just use the CBTs to figure out how to further milk money out of their playerbase. They actively listened to us and made changes, removing P2W mechanics and providing free ways to obtain items like Stat Rerollers that you had to pay for on Asian servers. The Skybound Expansion "Cash Shop items" you mention at 18:13 were NOT AT ALL from the Cash Shop. They were available as rewards from completing Sky Fortress missions, which were 100% F2P. Also as a small nitpick, though the playercounts on Steam pretty accurately reflect the relative population of GMS2, most of the core playerbase used the Nexon Launcher because the game came to Steam slightly later. You do mention this earlier on in the video, and I realize that there's probably not an easy way to get the Nexon Launcher playercount, but the Steam playercount shouldn't be taken as the true number of people playing. All in all, fantastic video. It was interesting hearing the background of Nexon and Wizet, and a great explanation of Nexon's finances and outlook on GMS2. You covered all of the major updates and downfalls and explained everything clearly to an outside audience.
Kind of pointless to complain about a lack of pvp in MS2 of all things along with questing. For most people who played MS1 they were MS veterans hoping for another social experience similiar to pre big bang ms1 but what they got was wow questing done alone to max level and no socialization whatsoever. For a game that praised itself on social gatherings most you did was quest alone to max level and grind dungeons with only a few people. Alot of what made MS1 good was the downtime and fact that monster grinding got players to work together. For most of us including the two guilds I was in we just dropped the game after reaching max.
most of the socialization i saw was people being trolls, e-boys/girls, and blatant disregard for peoples sexuality. not to mention all the nsfw customs, billboards, etc. it wasnt as socially accepting as ms1, but then again times change and so do social norms but.. its hard to feel comfortable in a community that either hates you, mocks you, or fetishizes you. ms2 wouldve been great, but people suck.
If anything, socialization was actively bad if you wanted to grind, because you only wanted to queue with the best players and never change, for the absolute sh%t grind that it was required.
In 9:20, you mentioned that the "company's profits are up, but could have been offset by developing and launching the title" But that chart shows net income - all revenue minus all expenses (which includes the costs of development [R&D] and launch [which I assume is marketing]) So there wouldn't be an "offset" as you might put it, because all factors have been incorporated in to that bottom line.
I'm wondering if I'll ever see DOAG: Dungeons and Dragons Online It was my first MMO love, and I've chased the feeling it gave me ever since. It hurt having to leave it, but Warner Bros greed just got to be too much.
I had no faith in the game before i even had a chance to play it. I simply watched Korean footage and came to the conclusion that this is one of those "Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle" kind of games. It's the kind of game that developers fear would fail so they slap a familiar coat of paint over a original game to draw in crowds. It took me probably 2 weeks to realize nah, this ain't the game I spent hours in sleepy woods in before bed, nah, this ain't Maple Story bruh.
The aesthetic of Maplestory 1 was one of the main reason it was successful I think. It gave off a feeling of being in a childlike cartoon, like how the monsters reacted when you hit them. Making it 3D just makes it lose that charm.
i think the appeal is also its still pixel art. like, yeah now theyre using other software to incorporate skills and cutscenes, but its still all pixel art. which is very rare in current mmo times. it takes a lot of effort to make sure everything looks good on-scale, and even moreso if you zoom in. ms1 is great but imo its dying out. ive never seen people play except when a new job comes out, and even then theres no socializing ):
MapleStory is an awesome game and defined my childhood , and i love playing the Reboot server on the original game to this day ( a server with no micro-transactions available to speak of ) . On a side note , I`d love to see you cover Awesomenauts , an awesome 2D MOBA with saturday-cartoon inspired graphics . It definetly has a small playerbase still , but its impossible to find a match .
Gotta say, that blurry AF teaser image for MS2 that never came to fruition looks a lot better than the Minecraft landscape they ended up using. Maplestory apparently had an anime series. They kept the art style for the monsters & went in a totally different art direction for the humans for some reason. Between the anime & the sequel MMO, it's hard to say which had the uglier/creepier character designs. Korea: "Moh,bee,nou,gee." NerdSlayer: "Mah,buh,nah,jee."
I was all in on Maplestory 2. Worlds number one berserker for the opening months of the game, in the top guild Kuai. All of the criticisms you leveled at it are completely fair, and remarkably accurate N.S. It became a full time job to maintain that position and I was putting 100$ a week into the game for a few months before I finally realized I had been caught in the cash shop trap that I had dodged for all those years. It finally got me and with sadness, I set down my controller (it's best played with a controller by far) and wallked away last year. I wasn't the only one, clearly and here we are. I hope this is a lesson for ftp game developers in the west. You simply can't do that to people. It's a slow, insidious manipulation of the player base for profit. In any other industry, this would be illegal. From then on, any time I see "cash shop" I simply pass on the title. Period.
I remember making a ton of videos on Maple Story 2 because of how much fun I had with Maple Story 1. Honestly, if they just minimized the usage of the cash shop and released the multiple major updates day 1, then maybe this game might of still been relevant in the west. It's really sad to see a game like this close so early.
I played the hell out of this game for months after the initial global launch, and I'd like to clarify that GMS2 was not actually pay to win. The benefits of paying for a membership, being that you could teleport around the map, could also be set up for free with teleporters in your player home. The dungeon cap was terrible, but you couldn't actually reset it with money. It was 30 dungeons a week for EVERYONE. I think there was a genuine attempt to make a completely free to play game, but it was WAY too grindy at end-game. It lost much of it's player count because of the grinding.
The first MapleStory was an MMORPG I played, as a kid, for hours a day. Easily put thousands of hours into it over the years and met a number of really cool people. At the time, it was the best MMO I found for socializing and meeting people who were just hanging out after a long day of grinding. This was when getting to level 70 actually meant something and wasn't something you could do within just an hour, if even that. I even got my sisters and dad into it as well as some of my friends at school. Just hearing MapleStory's BGM playing in this video gave me nostalgia. Of course, MapleStory 2 was a game I decided to play once it finally released for NA and I thought it was fun. Up until end-game and I started realizing how much time (or money) it'd take for me to play the game any further. People didn't really socialize as much and I could tell early on that the gear differences between players could easily cause some elitism. It was like how people in MS1 with Zakum helmets thought they were cool and liked to show it off, when Zakum was the only boss.
On 31 August 2022, Tencent announced that Maplestory 2 would close its servers in China on 2 November 2022. Straight from the wikipedia page... guess it's korea only now.
Hello everyone! I hope you have been surviving this outbreak. What better time to sit inside and watch youtube videos? I hope you guys enjoy this video on Maplestory 2 as much as I enjoyed it (Tom knocked it out of the park right?) Sources in the description. Thanks for the support, everything (including views and likes) is helpful. We will get through all of this together :).
Love your 'Death of a Game' series. Keep it up. Seriously, it has amazing quality and research behind it.
Thanks for the video NerdSlayer! I loved MapleStory 2, the first month was glorious, everyone was having fun and not caring too much about the endgame. People fishing, dancing, playing instruments, creating awesome houses... Too bad it was a grindy RNG mess afterwards.
Also, the first big update (that gave more dungeons), needed a prior huge grind to get a great combat level for your character to even attempt it, leaving casuals way behind. Since casuals were leaving, the dungeons were filled with bots only, and the grinders were already at the top, everything pretty much fell apart. I had already moved on when New Leaf came out, and so did many of us.
Another great video. I am honestly sad MS2 didn't work out as I really enjoyed the game in the beginning, until that horrible grind and having to watch the playerbase drop off.
Recommendations for future videos as always.
Exteel - NCSOFT
A mecha MMO shooter game that had a dedicated community and strong mech customization.
Ghost X - GameKiss
A sci-fi MMO with a streetpunk unique style and a rather unique gameplay model for the time.
Good video overall, and I agree with many of your points, but I have a few problems with some. I don't blame you for this, as it is probably pretty hard to keep up with all the information as an outsider, but I hope I can provide some transparency.
1. "Nexon focuses on the Asian market"
You didn't really go into detail on what "Project New Leaf" was - it was an update catered to the Western market addressing almost all of the pain points of progression. Most of these updates were GMS-exclusive, however they ended up making their way to other regions in the future, due to their positive reception. While I agree that this update was too late, and the original iteration of the game was unappealing to a lot of players, I do think its important to highlight their attempts to retrofit the game to the West.
2. "Design was stark contrast to MS1"
This is my opinion, but MapleStory 2 was not intended to be like MapleStory 1. It is a more traditional MMO, aimed at a different target audience. Nexon would have no reason to make all their players abandon-ship on one of their most popular games.
3. "Pay-to-Win mechanics"
I'm not sure why you omitted details here, but expand on it for you.
First of all, your information at 12:30 onwards is largely obtuse and incorrect.
12:39 - Trading was only disabled for the very first Closed Beta Test, and was enabled in the second Closed Beta Test and forward.
12:53 - "Autoplay mechanics" involved Fishing and Performing. For starters, these autoplay mechanics were given out as daily and event rewards. While you could pay for them, most players had hundreds of autoplay coupons saved up, never using any of them.They provided almost no tangible reward, aside from trophies (achievements) which did not affect the player.
12:56 - "Gems which are used for RNG enchant upgrades". I'm not even sure what you're referring to here, but catalysts used for upgrading were never sold in the cash shop.
12:58 - "Gears and weapons" were also never sold in the cash shop. Not sure where this information comes from.
13:00 - "XP boosts" were sold once ever as part of a package deal when the Runeblade character came out, however the level cap was 60 at the time, which was essentially required to be done via the story quests, to which the XP bonus did not apply to.
13:02 - Once again, not sure where you got this information from. Lootboxes for non-vanity items were never sold.
And jumping ahead a bit here, 18:04 - I'm not sure why you made this claim. I double checked the source you got this image from, and nowhere on the entire page does it make any claims of being from the cash shop. They were purchased with currency acquired by completing the aforementioned missions.
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I can provide screenshots if you're curious, but the Community Manager gave some information regarding the shut down (as much as he can, considering he has an NDA to uphold). He mentioned "things like money and population are unrelated to [the shutdown]", and " A few weeks prior to the news, he mentioned how "of all of Nexon's games here in Global, MapleStory 2 has the second most players". I don't expect you to have found any of thi s infromation, but I thought it'd be interesting for some people to hear. MapleStory 2 was doing relatively fine compared to a lot of the other games still chugging along today.
The population based off of steam stats is extremely misleading. The steam release was terribly buggy and it was well known among the community to only play the game through the nexon launcher. There was other technical reasons behind not using the steam client like account name and payment.
That moment when Maple Story 2 died before Maple Story 1.....
"Parents should never have to watch their children die"
-said every parent who's lost a child
@@Red_Lanterns_Rage Not Nexon when talking about their Children :D
@@ZunaZurugi I meant the first game as the parent lolz
Asheron's Call: Happened to you too, huh?
Ragnarok Online 2 had same fate, MS2 had potential to be good, but they fucked it up made it another boring grind, MS1 had more charm, MS2 didn't when it came to end game content
This game was super fun in beta, but when it finally released there's just no reason to play after max level lol.
Peter shaw that’s a fact I was hoping pvp was gunna be good but they took the completely wrong turn for pvp and even gear killed the game instantly dropping from 70k players to 5k
The game was so damn fun
But they fucked progression, gear was riddled with rng etc.
Raids was so min max that getting rng gated gear was mandatory
I had that issue with TROVE.
Yea, I had 60 hours in 2 weeks played, endgame sucked hard.
i knew nexon couldn't handle end game/pvp/non p2w elements. So i just played the game till level 60-70 for the story. and that was about it lol. I saw a couple cool houses, and i really thought the abilities in the game with playing music and etc. were really cool. shame it died so quick but apparently the korean and chinese servers are still going? does this say something about western markets? are we just too easily dis-satisfied?
My reaction when this video showed up in my feed was crazy. I played Maplestory 2 on release for about 2 days. I switched gears and played another game with the intent to come back to it. I COMPLETELY forgot about it until this very day when I saw the title of the video.
i played it on release too.. tbh i didn't expect it do crash this quickly.. i got to endgame myself too but eventually it just wasn't as fun
I downloaded the game in 2018 & put it in my MMO queue, got completely burned out on MMOs & RPGs in general for over a year, & when I finally fire it up, the game is already gone.
@@LikaLaruku ouch.. well i'm just waiting for a gem of an mmorpg pops around.. i haven't enjoyed alot of them as much as i did some of the old ones like iris online and mainly FLYFF wich i used to play tons back in the day.. i do like PSO2 but i don't know how big the current download is as when i played on the japanese server it was like 200 GB.. if they actually compressed it for once then it should be fine but i'm not waiting for 200 GB to download because that is going to take wayy too long and i have no clue how i waited trough that the first time around 😂 i did sort of enjoy archeage but i didn't like the class system as much.. and i did also like blade and soul quite a bit but can't download it because for some reason it doesn't give me an option to change the download location wich sucks ass because it means it can only clog up my main drive wich is already pretty small but it's my main because it's an ssd
Maplestory 2 was trash. Ugly ass 3d models making everything look like a fucking balloon. It looked it was made using an engine from a Facebook game from 2010.
Maplestory 1 was GOAT because it had its own feel to it. Nice anime pixel art, really nice music, simple gameplay, and nostalgia.
I"m glad i dropped it, game was nice, but end game really hurt the game the leveling experience was so much fun compared to MS1
this game had everything i wanted in social, aesthetic and genre and was rlly one of a kind, so sad that it was poorly developed/managed
Exactly my words... I really miss the game. I played that game since launch all the way to the end... I don't think I will ever find an MMO that can so efficiently fulfill my soul. To this day I'm trying to find something that would give me the same feeling like MP2.... I feel like I've already tried everything... I wish I was born in Korea...
@@Simkets Have you tried ffxiv?
@@import3dguest yes
@@Simkets I was actually planning on playing the game, not knowing any of this. Sad to see it gone before I tried it
@@Dead_Weight21 😥
Combat wasn't tab target in MS2 though, it was action-based. What a weird article.
The main reason myself, and a lot of others quit playing, was progression at the end was locked behind item power which required you to get random drops from dungeons that you could only do a certain amount of times a week. You would grind a boring dungeon multiple times hoping to get an item to let you enter the higher tier dungeons to get more items to do the same. It was soul-crushingly bad.
Yea and they fixed that by having beta reset you could do once a week which double the time you could do them,but they also fucked it up by lowering the Gear Score requirements for high level dungeon so new and weaker players could join which killed it to the point where no one was doing none of them except the people who grind to the point where they could nuke Fire Dragon in less than like 5 mins for a crap ton of upgrade material.
And the fact that they hard nerfed the world boss farming that everyones actually likes doing
Exactly this. Timegating dungeons and raids killed the game for hardcore players and made it hard for casuals to find anyone willing to play with them. Really a shame, very fun game for a time.
@@thatguyonline5083 Yea it was so bad . I was a super late game player and helped allot of noobs the were sitting in Group lobbys for 30mins and more becouse of how bot infested auto grouping was. Hardcore players only wanted to play with you if you van turbo clear .
Me: hmm I wonder how maplestory 2 is doing. I haven't checked up on it in a while.
Nerdslayer: death of a game, maplestory 2
Me: ooooooh nooooo
lol that's exactly what happened to me
I never even got to play it. even though I had it downloaded. lol.
i watched teaser and really hyped. I just know that it launch on steam but steam never recommend maple story2 for me even i opened it every single day. and then ta-da..... server closed.
That was me when I wanted to play Mabinogi Duel again
Same man
The first red flag I had when playing this game at release was finding out that there was a daily limit on how many dungeons you could do unless you paid. I played maybe a week or two then forgot about this game. It's a shame because I loved the aesthetic. The city portions of the game were cute and a nice contrast from generic medieval fantasy number 200 that we get with every MMO.
Yep, a grindy mmorpg which allowed you to only do a maximum of 30 dungeons a week.
story was great, but once you hit end game OMG such grind fest
yeah that dungeon limit killed it for me for sure
I just wanna clarify, the extra dungeon runs via paying is not on the GMS2 version which is the server that happens to be shutting down. Its a thing in the other servers but GMS2 surprisingly stayed completely f2p
I just didn't find the game interesting or fun enough with the base combat and skill system. The houses and social aspects seemed great. Quit very early around lvl 15. Similar thing happened to me with Wildstar which had an odd and unintuitive talent system but I stuck around for much much longer.
Game that literally had no early or mid game. You just boosted yourself trought the absolutely mindless story that was less intresting than a rock. THey even knew it sucked so they made the levelling fast as hell. Once u got to end game you qucikly realyzed all there was to do was grind endlesly dungeons that were fun for the first 10-20 times but quickly ran out of juice.
not to forget the fact upgrading past a certain point was basically impossible when it came to gear unless you paid for it.. and even then it was nearly impossible
Yeah, I played it and I loved it... then it became so, so boring. The flashy effects and the cool house customisation can't hold an MMO player forever :/
@@litchtheshinigami8936 No . I grinden my way to end game gear . You didnt need to spend any money . The biggest problem was there was no us for your +15 perfectly rolled leg weapon.
i enjoyed the game for a few hours
@@litchtheshinigami8936 paid for what? the game was entirely f2p
23:47 "There's is a reason I don't get excited for Korean MMO ports.."
EPIC VOICE comes in.
Albion Online!
Pretty nifty timing for an ad, YT...kudos.
Nice icon
Google analitycs paying off
That got me good, I felt that on a whole deeper level
If im being honest, this news actually made me pretty sad. I was one of the people who sank a lot of time into maple story 2, and even got two of my characters into Kiritas. Its just... knowing that something you spent a lot of time on is just all of a sudden getting taken away... just... hot damn.
That's why when I see a lot of other people dropping a game, I do too, even if I like the game. Otherwise, you're just setting yourself up for that feeling of loss when the game just inevitably goes away.
Welp... back to the first one i guess...
Ahh. I absolutely loved Maple Story 2. For the first two weeks. I absolutely loved how customizable everything was and the monster's that people created from it. I mean, no other game can you walk into town and see a picture of Thanos' bare ass on the billboard. I myself got pretty popular for spouting a full ahegao outfit.
Sadly, it was as you said. The endgame was much too grindy and people got super bored of it. I did too, it's really frustrating to kill a giant fire lizard over and over again just to get epic weapons that weren't even for your class. But at least I still stuck around for the social aspect because I had a lot of fun making music and it was a real joy to play music in front of other people, but eventually people stopped playing and it's no fun playing to an empty audience.
and don't forget that you couldn't even properly grind that fire lizard, as you were limited to only s few runs per day/week
@@trappist404 that was the reason i dropped the game (well, that and RNG with gear upgrade.) don't mind grind at all, but gating that grind looked so surreal
So it turned into classic wow. xD
yeah i feel ya on the getting bored part, even by level 50 i was grinding the same shit over and over to get gear that was either worse or like you said not for my class
I played this game for a year straight constantly with +15 weapons for each update (legendary, mythic, blah blah) . It had so much potential and I loved how cute everything was. It was ass that it just became the same thing over and over.
Looking forward to death of a game: raid shadow legends
Julien me too, man. Me too
lmao
death of a game 2040:league
Implying it was ever alive.
@@Momogamer9 more like dota
never go full cash shop
Destiny went half cash shop...they stil around
EA went full loot box...they hated
nexxon went full cash shop...everyone hates em
never go full cash shop
You start to wonder how EA goes full cash shop and full bare minimum copy paste games and still make money
Then lose it all without a refund :(
unironically they should have gone full cash shop. the video is wrong on a bunch of things. Gms2 didnt have p2w at all nor did it have much you could buy due to it, yet the ones that do are still around. Surprising! Listening to reddits bad business, and the shareholder pdf only proves it further that it shutdown over money. lmao.
not the reason ms2 failed. lmao
Man, hearing the log-in music from Maplestory takes me back. It was one of the first MMOs I ever played back in 2003.
I actually had a lot of fun with this game... until I reached the end game. I swear to god, the Koreans cannot design an MMO without godawful end-game grind. There was a ton of awesome player customization, housing, etc. Sadly, the devs and publishers were slow and incompetent from what I remember during the interviews and live sessions. They were also insanely greedy and restricted so many basic things that should have been free (like dungeon limit).
A very unique and fun MMO ruined by lazy and greedy owners.
the casual party game stuff was pretty fun.
It was always something that made me question if Asian markets are just much easier and more accepting to things or if western people play hardball too much. Asian markets seem like they have a much lower bar to give them a chance and will throw money at them and spend hundreds of hours grinding and rarely complaining unlike others but can be quick to abandon.
So often I just find Asian games lacking. Visually look great, but in order for it to look good, it runs poorly quite often or not well optimized but if it has fun combat and looks good, its not optimized and no content. All of these games also want to bleed you dry and charge hundreds for basic things while barely playable.
I know for mobile games we just know by the company what practices they will do based on their history.
@@Kiobao i think it's because the west sets the standard at world of warcraft. asian regions have just been dominated by F2P games during that same span of time.
Well apparently you don't understand anything. The way cash shops works in Asia are different since they have contracts with cyber cafes where you get in-game cash according to the time you play in there. Plus most people don't play on their homes, instead they go to those places.
It's obvious Korean games were never for the west market, and you wanting them to be "less greedy" is just dumb... It was never for you and the ones really at fault are the guys from PR who say shit to sell the game for a market it was never meant to be in.
As a Korean I believe the gambling culture in Asia is garbage and pretty much shit as it has always been, but it's so incorporated in most countries there that if you want something different from a company who is trying to sell a product, you gotta be pretty stupid when the whole enterprise culture revolves around the money.
Also, I believe it's pretty obvious but I would never expect much from any free to play game.
@@신-r2r If what you said is true, then it's a failure by the publishers to localize the game to that region's market. They should know going in how badly it will be received. They likely want to quickly cash out but that's very short sighted and risky since it can just outright fail like ms2 and many others
As someone who played from the start up until it was announced it was shutting down, i can say that the reason of the huge decline in playerbase happened at the time chaos raids was released is because there was a huge issue with the players that the dungeon cap was so limited.
They decided to put in a temp dungeon reset so you could get in an extra 15 dungeons a week but then this just made it feel more like a chore. (and people hated how they was pretty much forced to max out otherwise their progress would be behind everyone else)
after they refused to remove the caps despite a vast majority complaining about them the player base just left. the huge decline happened around that time.
i always knew putting dungeons behind a cap would remove a large group of people wanting to play. as many people have jobs don't always want to grind a game for hours when they get home. i heard one hardcore ms2 player sometimes was staying up to ungodly hours just to progress at a fast rate and putting their health and job at risk. (so they ended up quitting eventually)
it really promoted an unhealthy way to progress and game, and if we all was allowed to progress at our own pace (with small limits) then people would of wanted to return.
i know a lot of my friends stopped playing just because of how behind you get with everything if you didn't constantly grind weekly. many forgot to go back to the game once they was finished with their two days worth of dungeons.
It's such a shame because the game had one of the best things i have ever seen in an online mmo (the ability to customise and make your own clothing) this was the reason i was interested in the game to begin with. and it makes me sad we will probably never see anything like this again. and it was such a brilliant concept. making my character unique is something i am mainly interested in when it comes to mmo's and this was one of those games you could do that without paying big bucks.
rip ms2 you will be missed
this is true, i also quit right when the raids were released. i was not weak, was ready to go into the raids, but than i found out even being strong it was not enough to deal with the raids or to even find parties. I was like 4.9K power and i didnt have a pet (nobody knew pets were important, i only found out about it after i quit). and couldnt find any party and once i found it was like a loooong time to finish the raid bcuz we kept dying.
This with the obligation of doing all the weekly / daily dungeons on all characters were killing me, i ended up quitting
Great DOAG as always, but as a former Maplestory 2 player, there's a couple important points that I believe are missing or are inaccurate.
12:53 Most of the items listed here were not actually available for purchase, specifically lootboxes, gear, and gems. Maplestory 2 did a surprisingly good job at making the game not pay to win (by Korean MMO standards) and while there were instances of paying giving an advantage, these were mostly on the smaller side of things in my opinion.
16:38 To expand on the issue of "grindiness" of Maplestory 2, the problem was not only that players had to run the same dungeons over and over, resulting in boredom, it was that rewards were time-gated, meaning you could only receive a limited amount of rewards per week. Time-gating these rewards which were needed to power up gear meant that, in combination with the RNG upgrade system, most of the playerbase would begin to fall behind in progression, simply due to RNG.
17:46 The Skybound update was cited to be the first big update to Maplestory 2, but there was another large update that happened before this which included the raids. This is where the first instance of large player loss occurred, as shown in the chart at 18:39, because due to the grindy, RNG-filled progression system, many players were left in the dust if they were unable to participate in raids (which were also time-gated). And this is also not including the whole Pet System debacle that many Maplestory 2 players will recognize.
18:05 The update didn't include the reroll scroll or the lootbox that were shown in the video in the cash shop. It actually didn't include anything even remotely similar to those kind of items. What it did include was more time-gated tasks required for progression which players would soon refer to as "chores".
Overall, I wanted to point these out for accuracy, although the resulting deduction would still be the same.
Another former player chiming in. MS2 was hobbled long before it ever made it to global. Tons of pay-to-win mechanics were removed for global, but nothing was ever adjusted to compensate. The english team seemed limited in what they could change and the prevailing theory is that any changes had to be passed along to the korean team first.
Shout-outs to Jung-soo, CMKyrios and the rest of the people Nexon management sent to the front lines with no ammo.
This is exactly what I was thinking throughout the video. When it comes to p2w aspects MS2 was actually really good compare to other mmo I played. I was able to get to the end game with the top tier equipment unlike MS1. The only payed aspects were cosmetics and convenient items like unlimited fast travels, you can argue about buying meso(in-game currency) but I never find that as a problem. I remember the gem system being the worst and the developer actually listen and improve the system. The worst thing about MS2 was the excess grinding, which is what made me quit. I don't mind a little grinding but MS2 pretty much requires player to make bunch of alts to grind for items because of the time-gate. It's sad to see it close because I genuinely had a great time with the game
Was so excited when they added raids my guild was ready and everything only for none them could learn the fight. Ended up running with random and beating it and after awhile just quit playing cause couldn't find a group to do the raids with consistently
Yeah, I played MS2 for a couple of days (so not that long at all), but even crafting and gathering were time gated. You could only successfully gather and craft a certain number of times per day, and once you hit it, that was it until the next day.
Wow! Seeing NTK flash on the screen was a blast from the past. I think I was even in that screenshot just out of crop. You might have mentioned the game was called Baram when it came out in Korea. Honestly, I'd love your take on where the game is at. The state of the game in the U.S. vs Korea is incredible. Great video!
Math guy
A little more info on why "Mabinogi II: arena" looked so different from the original mabinogi, is because of Vindictus.
Vindictus, in Korea is known as "Mabinogi Heroes", the game is supposed to be a darker, more realistic take compared to the more light hearted Mabinogi's "live your own fantasy life" take, the former being a full on 3rd person action game (which in my opinion still today features one of the best action combat systems in the market, despite the poor optimization and aggresive monetization tactics typical of asian MMOs) and the latter being a more classic style, point and click mmo, putting a strong emphasis on you being able to create your own way of living in that fantasy world.
Mabinogi II: Arena was supposed to bring the 2 togheter: a top down, more de-tached camera angle, typical of point and click games like Mabinogi while keeping the dark, gritty theme from Mabinogi Heroes. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Nexon was trying to appeal to 2 different audiences with vastly different tastes and ended up pleasing neither.
meh i never cared for either game, it was clearly for Asian audience, tried both, got bored, very grindy and pay to win
Man the original Mabinogi is still one of the most unique mmorpg’s I’ve ever played. Will never forget the time I spent on it.
as a vindictus player that mabi 2 did like like if you took the skin of vindictus and plotted into a diablo style dungeon crawler so gross no wonder they cut development. I wonder if that chinese mobile vindictus game took some of the assests from it tho.
@@CEDL0W and whats Great the game is infact still going strong, i still play it to this day, every day. we recently got a new content update with G24, we got a cross over event 2 weeks ago. and last year they merged 3 of the 4 servers together so the servers are more populated as 3 of them got merged and looking into getting the remaining 2 servers merged so the entire playerbase is together.
they should have just stuck to the original mabinogi and improved on that.. i know i would like to play it that way.. i actually played the original for a while but because there was nobody online (those that were online were afk) i just didn't have as much fun as i could have had
funny enough i actually started playing ms2 when it was doing terribly (sept 2019) and the community that was left over was so friendly and kind i really fell in love with this game and quickly managed to catch up on all the content i missed, and managed to join the top 10 guilds on the region and made a lot of good friends, but shortly after it was announced to close and it was so heartbreaking and still is heartbreaking for me, there was a small community but it felt like everyone knew each other and i miss this game so much and i miss all those people i will never get the chance to see again :(
That was quick, the african coffin dance guys didn't even finished the dance
This is really sad, this game had SO MUCH potential. it's amazing how they can come up with such incredible designs in some parts of the game, yet miserably fail others.
Where did it fail? I'm trying to dodge concepts in my game to avoid failing, but my game is similar to this game...
@@MohanABK theres a ton of lore on how a small group of players sold carries and got boosted by GMs and just destroyed the game by getting the devs to overtune everything so only they could do it and sell carries to weaker players
Never understood why they made a Maplestory 2. They should have just kept the game going on the main server and added a V62 "classic" server and they'd have done fine with both the newer and older players being satisfied.
Nexon seems to be ran by idiots though so whatever.
I'm simply a weed dealer but I have better customer service and am more innovative than Nexon despite being a single person.
I never watched a death of a game video where I played the actual game until now. This game was so amazing and was my first time coming back to an mmorpg since I stopped playing Runescape 7 years ago.
Rip maplestory 2 you will be missed
Play Old School RS
@@stevieoneder8091 "Welcome to OSRS, get out while you still can before the addiction sets in!"
Stevie Oneder the Runescape I loved isn’t in osrs sadly. I tried it, but something about the magic I felt when I played it isn’t there
@@taliyahc2452 That's because the true old Runescape is long gone.
Taliyahc what happen to our account..
I saw a video a while back where a player saved up an entire month's worth of stat re-roll coupon. For demonstration purposes, they only tried to roll for 1 perfect line on the gear instead of 2. After an entire month's worth of grinding, like 100 coupons or so, they didn't even get close to the lines they wanted on their gear. So basically if you weren't paying to win, an entire month's worth of grinding was absolutely worthless, and players wouldn't let you into endgame bosses unless you met certain gear requirements. In MS1 you CAN actually reach endgame without pay to win. It's hard and grindy, but it's doable. MS2 they pretty much threw your RNG out the window.
Oh Shoot, I had to do a double take there when I saw my character. Thanks for the credit.
The true endgame of ms2 was playing Anime openings on the Stage
As an avid fan of Maplestory 2, I just wanted to share my thoughts on the game closing down.
I can't deny that the game was in a VERY rough shape at the beginning. The game was plagued with bots (which thankfully got fixed around early 2019) and there were so many rng gated aspects of the game when it first released. The timegating and endgame grind itself also left a lot to be desired.
However, something I have to point out is that the devs actually listened and pushed out patches that fixed many of the issues. The project new leaf overhaul actually helped the game a lot because it outright fixed many of the systems in the game such as accessory socketing and gemstones now being a 100% chance to succeed rather than it being rng. In addition, they made the slow but guaranteed method of weapon/armor enchanting actually viable for progression, and removed mechanics such as fair fight in dungeons which drastically increased the speed at which people were able to clear them. In fact, the dev team was actually loved by a lot of people in the GMS2 community because they actively listened to the players and tried to work with us. If you're coming from other nexon games, you'd know exactly how unusual it is for them to give a shit about us. In addition, they actually strove to keep the global version of ms2 as f2p friendly as possible. The video itself pointed to p2w as a potential failure but the reality is, the global version actually lacked many of the p2w mechanics. Unlike in the Asian servers, you couldn't pay real money to enter dungeons after capping, and you couldn't buy the scrolls that allowed to you roll for better stats. The devs actually added these items into other ingame features so you were able to obtain them without shelling out cash. In fact, the lack was p2w features in the global version was a breath of fresh air compared to other nexon games considering how they could have milked the game for everything it was worth.
The game wasn't perfect by any means. Changes often took a long time and the dev team often pushed changes as a reactionary measure rather being proactive. In addition, the game itself was also marketed as a casual and social game rather than the dungeon and raid grind it really was, there were lots of different bugs that would often hamper a class' ability to function properly, leveling was so fast many players didn't bother exploring and looking around different maps besides for the ones the main story forced you to go to, and the game was very unfriendly towards newer players meaning lots of players dropped the game within a week or so and never got to the endgame. As for the content, the awakening expansion was great at first, but because they released ALL the content at once, many players were able to speed through dungeons and raids and get to the endgame within 2-3 weeks. Just for reference, the awakening content was actually split into 2 parts for the other servers and were released separately but the global version got both parts crammed into a single expansion so we blazed through everything practically the moment it was released and had nothing to do for six months.
Despite these flaws however, I was hoping the game would have lasted a bit longer especially because the game itself was in its best state despite having the lowest amount of players in a long time. The newest expansion and content cycle was looking to be the best one yet with staggered releases that gave players time to gear up and prepare for the next fights, and the raids were legitimately fun and challenging when they were first released. Its a damn shame that we couldn't get the second part of the expansion since I know a lot of people who truly excited to run through the dungeons and raids that would have been released.
All in all, I legitimately enjoyed the ms2 experience and this game actually was the first mmo where I joined a guild and felt attached to the community. Its not surprising that the game is being shut down, but seeing all the time and effort that both the devs and dedicated playerbase put towards the game just go down the drain is definitely saddening.
I totally agree to your sentiments :(
Something to add, its true that the changes had a long waiting time but that's mainly because Nexon America is just a simple publisher for the game; they lack any team or power to do changes which killed the game because people were never going to wait for 6 months until KMS say "Ok do it".
Even now, it seems like CMS2 and KMS2 are waiting to see whats going to happen in the April patch which should be this week, because they're losing players every single day.
Its a very casual game for hardcores because they finish everything in 3 days and horrible for newcomers and they keep forgetting about the casual player base.
I really believe MS2 team did what they could to fix this P2W core game by not adding the P2W mechanics but at the end it was awful because the game was designed with that in mind. Like KMS2 premium membership gives extra entrances to the dungeons, outfits gives stats (pay outfits) too many things that, it was impossible for the team to fix.
Hot take: the reason the game died on NA was because it wasn't P2W ENOUGH!
Does it really make sense to say a game died for being P2W when so many games are doing hardcore P2W successfully?
MS2 did a lot of things right and I thank them for the experiences they gave us.
@jvalex18 "work well in NA" "only really think about Black Dessert" Hahaha, funny!
Why I left Maplestory 2:
I played Maplestory 2 when it first launched, I met a guild leader online and we instantly became friends. I stayed active in that guild daily and became close to its guild members. For 2 months, I played alongside that guild and I knew my guild members as if they were an extended family. The game was a gettaway for me consistently. But when my life became too demanding, I had no choice but to leave Maplestory 2 for a few weeks. When I came back, I was removed from the guild and found that I fell too far behind in the game to be relevant anymore. I simply stopped coming back after that.
Damn. That’s really sad :( cold blooded guild leader.
should have made a discord
2 months is a long time in any mmo
Moral of the story: Tell your guild leader that you have to deal with life and not to kick you.
2 mons was really nothing much, GL was probably just a dick and guild would probably not accomodating to newbies if they cant tolerate people who fell behind.
Shoulda called this game bot story 2
Your picture what is it of.....itss ....its amazing🤭😬
no kidding there was so many bots
Ah the good old race war between the red and blue bots
bots basically disappeared in a couple of months because it was dead game lmao
I remember grinding potion solvents in an area next to Hensys, but there was a bot when I went there doing the same thing.
I didn't pay much mind to it until I noticed it went away, and only half an hour later I found out it broke off its pathing because I kept taking the solvents, and it just started murdering EVERYTHING it came across.
Great video! Excellent summary. Extra points for using a Detective Conan sound track at the end.
A big problem in MS2 was getting queued up with a bunch of bots when doing dungeons, which was also the main way to gear up.
that was fixed in 2019, I remember that too
Players would more commonly look for other players to grind dungeons with on party finder
Gold standard for gaming analysis on YT. Few content creators take off their player hats and think about the business side of things, but you've done that in spades. Excellent video and production!
I find it incredibly ironic that Maplestory 2 died cause it didn't make more money than their cash cow...Maplestory 1...
No matter what, the original Maplestory will live on, like an angry overbearing parent telling their kids to shut up and leave the room
lol mabi is still alive and ms2 was confirmed to have more players than mabi & vindictus, just less than maplestory
I've put 200 hours into MS2 since launch, so here are my thoughts:
They actually did a great job when it came to monetization. It was more f2p than most MMOs. The focus really was on cosmetics. Even the few things you mentioned like quick travel items were given out handsomely in frequent events. I don't think I ever actually ran out. Saying that being p2w was a reason for dying just seems strictly incorrect (at least on NA, which the articles mentioned were addressing).
MS2 not having extensive PVP wouldn't have mattered. This was shown early on when they had a game mode dedicated to it called Mushking Royale. You got some rewards for playing it, and that is the ONLY reason many people played it. Players would literally team up against people actually playing the game. They would label you a PKer and kill you on sight. People literally didn't fight, in a battle royal, just so they could last until the end of the game for the rewards.
The biggest killer was RNG progression and time gated dungeons. Because the progression was RNG and you could only run a certain amount of total dungeons in a week for drops, whether or not you got to move onto the the harder content the following week was out of your hands. This was especially killer due to not having player trading, you HAD to get the drop yourself. This also caused some players to feel like if they wanted to play with their friend who got screwed on RNG, they would have to waste a dungeon run on content they don't need or they had to already complete their max amount of runs for the day.
They actually started listening to players a lot more toward the end especially, they even had dedicated community members they would talk to called Joddy Squad. Although idk if these guys were representative of what most players wanted. At some point there are only going to be hardcore players left, which often conflicts with what casuals (the people who keep a game alive) want.
As for why I quit, the end game was grinding. There was little progression outside of grinding. I think the biggest thing Nexon needed to do was support the social aspects of the game more, to the point of tying a lot more of the games progression to them. MS2 was unlike a lot of other MMOs in that it promoted doing things that really only had value socially, like the mini-games that would pop up. The only problem was that you couldn't just do these things if you wanted to get anywhere in the game. I think they missed an opportunity to challenge how MMOs are traditionally played.
Nexons been on a downhill slide for years and years now, im sure you could put out an episode on that whole company soon
given how nexon iirc is currently bruning prob will be a episode
@Karm G why the hell would you want older version of MS1 when it was more of slug to level, i hated it, Big Bang update totally fixed the game
idk if you watched the video but they're still making a shitton of money over seas, they're not going down as a whole, but their NA division might be, that's not the closing of a company, that's just a bunch of people getting laid off.
Maple m is getting worse and worse each updates. Buffing a top class ignoring the weaker classes,removing guild attendees reward,non exciting events. Hope it closed down soon
Actually, economically they are doing the opposite. Dungeon and Fighters was more profitable than League of Legends in 2018.'
Rather, what's happening with Nexon right now, requires you to understand what is happening in Korea.
You see, Nexon's Founder basically said "I'm DONE". And is basically trying to sell his stocks and major ownership of the Company. AKA Selling the Company.
PROBLEM. No One Bought It.
So what are they doing right now?
Dieting.
They are literally killing EVERY Non-Profitable Game both in-development and in-service.
Only focusing on the Profitable Ones. So that other companies would notice and buy them.
The biggest dip in population was when cDev was released in November since the community wasn't aware of pets being the strongest thing in the game, and the fact that no content creator who played in Korea didn't share the information to have an advantage over everyone else. As a result, many people felt like their time was wasted and the fact that they'd have to wait about a month and a half to have a max pet due to the timegating unless you spent millions of mesos to speed up the process mean't they were severely behind.
I love Jake Song's games. The only thing that's always dragged them down for me is the pay2win and it's a shame. I've been playing Archeage Unchained since launch and it's quickly become my favorite MMO ever. Hope he does a good job with it in the future. He's got some good ideas.
I miss maplestory 2, i was about to come back to the game as i been thinking about it for a while now wanting to play it again, just to find out it was deleted.. I havnt played ms1 yet, but i can already tell that i wont like it as much as i did ms2.
I miss making scores, collecting all instruments, making outfits ect. i didnt really realize how much i liked ms2 until it was now gone.
It will never come back, but ill still be wishing for some odd reason it does.
Ill try out ms1 but it isnt my type of game, i am more attracted to design so the 3d in ms2 and the colors caught my eye
24:15 "It's time for everyone's favorite part of the video..." The hot jams. "It's time to solve the mystery of Maplestory 2's ultimate demise." Oh... Yeah that part too.
I'm trying to remember what song that is, but it's just slipping my mind.
@@DeputyDerp it's from Detective Conan. ua-cam.com/video/tiBJUPN1Fxc/v-deo.html
I just want to say, I'm really enjoying your increase in the film noir asthetic throughout the video. It adds a really nice framing device on each video. Thanks for the great content.
Extra note: after the games shutdown Nexon put the games assets on their website.
Not assets only 2D art
but how is that relevant
Wouldn’t think this was dead but now I’m curious 0.0.
its just boring
It's about to be. The game is quite literally shutting down in North America in May.
As a korean Im..... impressed by the pronunciation of the names... you did an amazing job haha
I practiced some Korean because I almost moved there to start my career. Gamsa haeyo
NS: "were working on Mabinogi's sequel"
Me: "you mean prequel, Vindictus is a pre-"
NS: "Mabinogi Arena"
Me: "wait another one!"
Dude! I've been watching you for a while now. Your video quality has gotten so good. Especially your enunciation and the speed you talk. Well done!
Loved the beta testing for Maple Story 2, chaos and the sounds of music playing from random people. Used to be apart of a musician guild where we would gather and teach others how to convert music and create parts for other musical instruments. Loved those days in beta testing, never did go back though.
Song brings back memories. Everytime I logged on, I stayed at the menu for at least 15 minutes before I chose a world and channel.
Oh boy, another Death of a Game, time to get the chips ready.
Found this from the MS2 subreddit!
I created my assassin in August, so around when it came out. I started actually playing in October and started hard-grinding this like MS. I found a wonderful guild which I will always treasure, we were like a huge online family trying to do raids, comparing our dmg. Although I quit before being able to try BlackShard Nexus out (only got to Pink Bean and those color dungeons), I still liked to chat with my guildmates on Discord. Kind of saw it coming, but still sad over the closing/failure of MS2. Overall, the only reason why I was able to last a year was definitely because of my guildmates. Having them made the grind (although boring), much more fun.
I've been binging this series the last few days, you go great depths exploring just how these games ended and to see the details unfold is fascinating and very entertaining. I personally had played Matrix Online in beta and it was such a blast of nostalgia to see it covered in a previous episode. I was hoping to suggest another game to cover, Tribes: Ascend. I saw that you already covered Hi-Rez's Global Agenda and that you have mentioned Smite and Paladins in several videos, so I assume you're somewhat familiar already with the studio, if not Tribes itself. Tribes 1 and 2 were classics in the early days of the FPS genre and there was a lot of excitement around Ascend when it was announced. People thought it had potential to get picked up on the e-sports circuit and there was the super hype and hilarious reddit vs 4chan match during beta that got a lot of attention. I was so sad to see it fail because it had such palpably immersive gameplay in terms of movement and speed that I haven't seen replicated since. I would love to see it get the post-mortem send off it deserves in hope for a revival sequel one day.
As a viewer that is watching one of your videos for the first time, I have to say that I'm satisfied. You are concise and pleasant to listen to. You also highlighted a lot of reasons why I stray away from Korean MMO ports. This was great! Subscribed~
I wonder if you could possibly talk about Dungeon Fighter Online probably Nexon's biggest revenue maker which has existed for around 15 years.
The game felt like a passion project that ended up being filled with a bunch of soulless, passionless, half-assed content.
It's like some person who has no experience in game development or should have a say in how to make games, said the game should follow some corporate checklist of stuff to add to it, instead of looking at the current game and add things that fit best. As a result, the game developers had to change many aspects of the game to try and make the dumb content/mechanics more feasible.
i played this game the year it ended, and my character was so hard man, i made my own ripped black jeans, and metal leather jackeds i loocked sick af, playing my electric guitar with metalliuca and gojira songs, riding my motor bike, too bad it ended like literally 1 week after i geared up, sad
I remember playing this game in a discord server with some friends, and we would soon stop playing it after a couple of weeks. I guess that just shows how this game really wasn’t the best.
same.. after a few weeks we were like well there is nothing else to gain in the game
This is really sad, i`ve been playing on and off almost since launch, this was my comfy autumn game. I loved the art style and the customization option. I never got to max level but i didnt really care, i just wanted to enjoy the art and music while doing a couple of quests and chatting with friend while i`m building my house.
1:43 That main menu's theme hit me like a nostalgia truck.
The end game raid with extremly high requirements, forcing you to do the same fire lizard dungeon a hundred times hoping it drops the 1 item you needed with the correct attributes, is mainly what killed the game
It made endgame a insane grind. I had to have done that dungeon 200+ times and still didn't get what i needed for the raid release
Hey man, just so you know, Steam charts are a bad representation of Maplestory's playerbase. The majority of players on MS1 and MS2 play through the Nexon launcher, and Nexon doesn't disclose the amount of players going through there. A 2020 estimate done by players by looking at active players above a certain level to cut out alternate characters approximates there's about 30,000+ active MS1 players, while Steam only shows a fraction of that. It'd be safe to say MS2 was similar. Generally Nexon games have bugs when running through Steam launcher so it's advised to avoid it.
because it wasnt a game but daily weekly chores
So is Animal Crossing Pocket Camp, but that game seems to be doing quite well.
It kind of breaks my heart that MS2 is going so quickly. I enjoyed the little time I played it. I first played it sometime last year right after Maplestory Fest when they introduced Striker/Eye of Lapenta Raid. Personally I was okay with the art style. It was different, but it was still cute and Maplestory-esque with some spin-offs. The map design was kind of annoying at times due to the isometric perspective (falling off the map happens way too often). But the music direction still kept true to MS1 and I felt strong nostalgia playing it. However, I think Nexon was a little too dependent on the nostalgia aspect. I did notice that at some point the main storyline of all the classes was exactly the same. I only made 2 characters but quickly noticed that I was following the same exact storyline twice with different classes. While MS1 is similar in a way, it provides way more side quests that are actually fun and build on the lore of the game. MS2 at some point was essentially grinding the same exact raids to increase your gear score. I remember the last time I played I was trying to reach a GS that would allow me to enter Eye of Lapenta raids. It got tiring with there also being a weekly exp and drop cap (something that I can see why its implemented for asian markets, but shouldnt have been implemented in a western market). There simply was nothing else to do to progress your playing experience besides grinding. There were things like mini games and recreational activities but these were really just tasks to do that the player was forced to entertain themselves with. Aside from doing tasks to fulfill achievements, it lacked the magic of MS1, which was exploration out of curiosity. I found myself sometimes looking around the same corners for chests but there wasnt much appeal/no need to go to other areas to do anything. MS1 used to be incredibly community based as well with party quests to collect incredible gear but later switched to a more solo style which separated the player base. MS2 seems to have tried to replicate party quests, but people were forced to them out of necessity, not voluntarily or for fun. For MS2, their community revolved around recreational activities that quickly lost their magic. I felt like the game as a whole was overshadowed by MS1. The content felt half done and dated. Even with Project Newleaf, the game seemed to be lacking something at the core whether it was some sort of sincerity and passion or the fact that it still tried to stick closely to MS1. The game should have taken a different direction rather than playing just on the nostalgia of the first game.
Jeez Louise, did Trump pay you to build this wall?
4,000 hours in I was so burnt out... By the time the sky expansion hit, I was fed up as it simply just added MORE life skill chores...
the game was over run with bots. I wanted to switch my main to a Soul Binder, LOL it was waaaaay too late for that. My guild was like the top 3 in the server. Everyone was too focused with their life skill grinding and the NEW added life skills from the sky expansion AND on top of that, everyone switched from the normal dungeons strictly to the new chaos dungeons to grind and I mean GRIND to upgrade their legendary gear.
The market was DESTROYED there was no way to earn mesos (the non premium currency) the only way to earn mesos was to GRIND hard on lfie skills to craft gear and HOPEFULLY rolls a really good statted accessory or to grind dungeons 24/7 in the hope of a good drop to sell that in the market... Back to switching my main, it was basically IMPOSSIBLE to switch, the casual scene was overrun by BOTS and I mean A LOT OF BOTS, all the dungeons you would Que with it would just be bots and you were basically solo-ing a dungeon... it went from a 5-10 minutes to complete a dungeon to a PAINFUL... PAINFUL 40-60 minutes.
There was basically no scene for the casual players, the new 10 man raids were so hard (HARD as in you NEEDED perfect statted gear and weapons to even make a dent to the boss) DON'T forget they were timed... Soooooooo, all the top guilds monopolized the dungeons and the casual players had to pay a pretty penny for a carry... Don't forget what I said earlier, you needed to GRIND REALLY HARD to even make mesos... At that point I was so burnt out, I'm glad I got out early and sold my account... I heard it got worse from there down the road, and then the game just died...
OH YEAH, PVP WAS BROKEN, DON"T GET ME STARTED ON THAT... IN 3 SECONDS YOU GET ONE SHOTTED BY A MACRO OF COMBINATIONS OF ATTACKS FROM A WIZARD.. LITERALLY
oh yeah, to get a full set costume it'll cost you around $200-$300 USD to complete :)
After the expansion, they changed how the drop works with bosses. I forget what changed but I remember it got harder to obtain the gear you want.
Death of a game: Grand Chase?
a slow death indeed :(
such an incredible game :( Will miss it forever
don't do this.. The main theme song is popping up in my head now.. :(
But GC actually turned into Elsword anyway and players jumped over
Wow, the fact that anyone else remembers this proves to me that it's not just a figment of my imagination. I remember the release of 1st job skill trees being so strong in pvp that many people would use 1st job rather than any other, up to and including 4th even though the latter are much harder to obtain. Seriously, 1st job Ryan's lv 1 skill poison spore was so overloaded that for a measly 1/3rd of a mana bar you could send out three gelatinous, sad looking pucks that, upon contact would deal good damage and let you initiate a grab, which if you got lucky would send the opponent onto the third slime at the very end which would prevent them from falling, allowing for ANOTHER grab unless they charged a mana cancel. To top it all off, THEY HEALED YOU. Also skill trees came one by one so the newest one was usually flavor of the month except for the people who understood Grandchase's version of wave-dashing and were actually good at the game. There were a lot of broken mechanics in the game but my memories of the game still occupy a place in my heart 10 years later. PVM was kinda awful though.
Oooooooh that nostalgia just hit me like a fuckin truck.
Now I'm bedridden
I remember trying so hard just to play the game and download it. The first
email account I ever made was to create a Nexon account and play MapleStory 2.
I lost that account.
Make a Grand Chase video, as a brazilian player i never understood it's ending (especially when the game was still doing well in here :b)
original devs took back control and they thought people would jump to elsword if they ended grand chase jokes on them i don't think anyone did.
It was plagued with hacks and subsequentially P2W, to the point of no return, the same case as Gunbound.
Wasn't it because of Elsword?
I haven't even played it yet because it never released in my country. And here I was still hoping to be able to play it.
It'll be a sad moment when "Death of a Game: Warframe" pops on my feed. I hope that game lasts as long as it can and has a happy ending, I'll be there for the entirety of the journey as well.
Someday. Not today, but someday. Maybe when the corona virus wipes us all out.
Tbf these usually involve neglect. If warframe dies it’s probably because they make a sequel.
Evil Taco or the mismanagement from the devs
@@IAmAnEvilTaco *cough* looking at Destiny *cough* and Destiny 2
Nope, they aren’t standing on their own well currently with their updates, they need to fix it now before even thinking of a sequel, especially with Warframe mobile coming
the death of maplestory 2 is sad to see, though that makes the live of maplestory original even more wholesome. the game has been out for ages yet still has a large fanbase, even with private servers being very alive (im even friends with the owner of one). i never got into the game(s), but i can see why many people still enjoy them to this day
Next DOAG: Battlerite
Proof: Battlerite Gameplay Trailer 0:32
God, just about time. I wanna hear a comprehensive analysys of Stunlock Studios stepping on the same rake over and over again
Sergey Rolinskiy hopefully the video is just the simpsons clip of sideshow bob stepping on rakes
@@why_is_da_heavy_dead It's such a shame, I absolutely loved Battlerite but Stunlock just.........didn't do anything right, and balance was so off, it was such a promising game
Hope so, I commented on his last DOAG video with Battlerite as a suggestion and he heart reacted it. :)
You know you fuck up when the original game is still going.
That Detective Conan soundtrack at the end, love it
I got a Phantasy Star Online 2 ad from Sega. It’s time for me to go back to my roots. May Maplestory 2 rest.
Holy crap, was it really all the way back in 2018? Even right now, it feels like it just came out a couple months ago.
that's what they get for excluding SEA... it's where some of the money is, ragnarok mobile got so much cash just in SEA (all because of nostalgia) it's there where i actually saw in real time the largest sum someone would actually pay for an in game item (especially for a mobile game) 50k dollars for one mount and 20k+ each boss monster cards wtf..
I liked it until i hit endgame and then the RNG hell started. Not only was the RNG stats on gears atrocious, you had an daily and weekly limit to obtain said gear. That killed the game for me in less then a month. Too bad i liked the sandbox part of the game despite all the copyright rules which killed the cloth design part of the game.
This is some of the best content in youtube. You just earned a subscriber
This game was amazing. I played this game ever since it came out! I loved the charachter costumization and the community! So sad to see it go...
I've always wanted to try maplestory 2 but I don't have a pc and it's sad that it died and the servers shut down before I could even try it
as a player that grew up on ms1 and eventually became a top player in ms2 this video doesn't touch any of the reasons for why the game failed. It's almost insulting.
So... do you want to fill us in then? What do you think killed it?
It's been a month since you didn't reply I am also interested to know your reasoning
I just found out about your channel due to the Dirty Bomb video and i am already subbed, you make great content! Also a game that u could talk about is Battlerite, was a really good game but died due to poor management from the developers
It's next on the list :)
This one just makes me sad. I really liked this game, and i sunk a considerable amount of time into it.
Dude I love your Brand the Noir theme is a personal faveourite of mine! keep up the amazing detective work, Subbed
i was a legendary founder, i got scammed by nexon by them removing the game.
I had the fortune to play MS2 during the 2nd Closed Beta Test in July of 2018, and religiously played the game from launch in October until mid-December. Maplestory 2 will forever hold a special place in my heart for the joy it provided me during that time, but its failure was all but sealed by that December.
The main killing factor for the majority of the casual playerbase was the monotonous grind for a *chance* to upgrade your gear every week coupled with the unreasonably high entry bar into the Chaos Raids introduced in late 2018, NOT P2W. Most of the casual playerbase just couldn't keep up with the gear score requirements, and most importantly, *it was impossible to run dungeons with a public lobby* due to the complex mechanics, limited lives, and again, high gear score requirements. Many of the end-game players, myself included, relied on Guilds filled with people who played Korean MS2 to teach us the mechanics in Discord servers.
You expressed doubts about how much Nexon changed the game's monetization from the Asian market to Global, but Nexon actually changed a TON. The global release of MS2 had a considerable amount of P2W aspects removed either during the CBTs, at launch, or right after launch. To name a few:
- On Asian servers, weapons had a chance to break when failing enhancements. You could buy an item with merets (real cash) to prevent breaking. This was removed.
- On Asian servers, you could pay an increasing amount of merets to infinitely respawn during raids. This was removed and replaced by a limited amount of respawns using in-game currency.
- On Asian servers, you could pay merets to bypass your weekly dungeon limit. This was removed.
- On Asian servers, a variety of items that affected progression were available for purchase in the Cash Shop. In GMS2, the only items that affected progression in the Cash Shop were Elixirs that were also available for F2P and auto-perform and auto-fish tokens. While auto-perform and auto-fish did give EXP, because leveling was so fast, they were seldom used to level and thus can't be said to contribute to progression all that much. Everything else in the Cash Shop was purely cosmetic, and Nexon actively encouraged user-generated content that the creators would get a cut of in merets.
The development team of GMS2 didn't just use the CBTs to figure out how to further milk money out of their playerbase. They actively listened to us and made changes, removing P2W mechanics and providing free ways to obtain items like Stat Rerollers that you had to pay for on Asian servers.
The Skybound Expansion "Cash Shop items" you mention at 18:13 were NOT AT ALL from the Cash Shop. They were available as rewards from completing Sky Fortress missions, which were 100% F2P.
Also as a small nitpick, though the playercounts on Steam pretty accurately reflect the relative population of GMS2, most of the core playerbase used the Nexon Launcher because the game came to Steam slightly later. You do mention this earlier on in the video, and I realize that there's probably not an easy way to get the Nexon Launcher playercount, but the Steam playercount shouldn't be taken as the true number of people playing.
All in all, fantastic video. It was interesting hearing the background of Nexon and Wizet, and a great explanation of Nexon's finances and outlook on GMS2. You covered all of the major updates and downfalls and explained everything clearly to an outside audience.
Kind of pointless to complain about a lack of pvp in MS2 of all things along with questing. For most people who played MS1 they were MS veterans hoping for another social experience similiar to pre big bang ms1 but what they got was wow questing done alone to max level and no socialization whatsoever. For a game that praised itself on social gatherings most you did was quest alone to max level and grind dungeons with only a few people. Alot of what made MS1 good was the downtime and fact that monster grinding got players to work together. For most of us including the two guilds I was in we just dropped the game after reaching max.
most of the socialization i saw was people being trolls, e-boys/girls, and blatant disregard for peoples sexuality. not to mention all the nsfw customs, billboards, etc. it wasnt as socially accepting as ms1, but then again times change and so do social norms but.. its hard to feel comfortable in a community that either hates you, mocks you, or fetishizes you. ms2 wouldve been great, but people suck.
If anything, socialization was actively bad if you wanted to grind, because you only wanted to queue with the best players and never change, for the absolute sh%t grind that it was required.
In 9:20, you mentioned that the "company's profits are up, but could have been offset by developing and launching the title"
But that chart shows net income - all revenue minus all expenses (which includes the costs of development [R&D] and launch [which I assume is marketing])
So there wouldn't be an "offset" as you might put it, because all factors have been incorporated in to that bottom line.
I'm wondering if I'll ever see DOAG: Dungeons and Dragons Online
It was my first MMO love, and I've chased the feeling it gave me ever since. It hurt having to leave it, but Warner Bros greed just got to be too much.
I had no faith in the game before i even had a chance to play it. I simply watched Korean footage and came to the conclusion that this is one of those "Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle" kind of games. It's the kind of game that developers fear would fail so they slap a familiar coat of paint over a original game to draw in crowds. It took me probably 2 weeks to realize nah, this ain't the game I spent hours in sleepy woods in before bed, nah, this ain't Maple Story bruh.
The aesthetic of Maplestory 1 was one of the main reason it was successful I think. It gave off a feeling of being in a childlike cartoon, like how the monsters reacted when you hit them. Making it 3D just makes it lose that charm.
i think the appeal is also its still pixel art. like, yeah now theyre using other software to incorporate skills and cutscenes, but its still all pixel art. which is very rare in current mmo times. it takes a lot of effort to make sure everything looks good on-scale, and even moreso if you zoom in. ms1 is great but imo its dying out. ive never seen people play except when a new job comes out, and even then theres no socializing ):
MapleStory is an awesome game and defined my childhood , and i love playing the Reboot server on the original game to this day ( a server with no micro-transactions available to speak of ) . On a side note , I`d love to see you cover Awesomenauts , an awesome 2D MOBA with saturday-cartoon inspired graphics . It definetly has a small playerbase still , but its impossible to find a match .
Gotta say, that blurry AF teaser image for MS2 that never came to fruition looks a lot better than the Minecraft landscape they ended up using.
Maplestory apparently had an anime series. They kept the art style for the monsters & went in a totally different art direction for the humans for some reason.
Between the anime & the sequel MMO, it's hard to say which had the uglier/creepier character designs.
Korea: "Moh,bee,nou,gee." NerdSlayer: "Mah,buh,nah,jee."
Yeah I should know that being Korean and all...
I was all in on Maplestory 2. Worlds number one berserker for the opening months of the game, in the top guild Kuai. All of the criticisms you leveled at it are completely fair, and remarkably accurate N.S. It became a full time job to maintain that position and I was putting 100$ a week into the game for a few months before I finally realized I had been caught in the cash shop trap that I had dodged for all those years. It finally got me and with sadness, I set down my controller (it's best played with a controller by far) and wallked away last year. I wasn't the only one, clearly and here we are. I hope this is a lesson for ftp game developers in the west. You simply can't do that to people. It's a slow, insidious manipulation of the player base for profit. In any other industry, this would be illegal. From then on, any time I see "cash shop" I simply pass on the title. Period.
That nostalgic maplestory music
I remember making a ton of videos on Maple Story 2 because of how much fun I had with Maple Story 1. Honestly, if they just minimized the usage of the cash shop and released the multiple major updates day 1, then maybe this game might of still been relevant in the west. It's really sad to see a game like this close so early.
I played the hell out of this game for months after the initial global launch, and I'd like to clarify that GMS2 was not actually pay to win. The benefits of paying for a membership, being that you could teleport around the map, could also be set up for free with teleporters in your player home. The dungeon cap was terrible, but you couldn't actually reset it with money. It was 30 dungeons a week for EVERYONE. I think there was a genuine attempt to make a completely free to play game, but it was WAY too grindy at end-game. It lost much of it's player count because of the grinding.
The first MapleStory was an MMORPG I played, as a kid, for hours a day. Easily put thousands of hours into it over the years and met a number of really cool people. At the time, it was the best MMO I found for socializing and meeting people who were just hanging out after a long day of grinding. This was when getting to level 70 actually meant something and wasn't something you could do within just an hour, if even that. I even got my sisters and dad into it as well as some of my friends at school. Just hearing MapleStory's BGM playing in this video gave me nostalgia. Of course, MapleStory 2 was a game I decided to play once it finally released for NA and I thought it was fun. Up until end-game and I started realizing how much time (or money) it'd take for me to play the game any further. People didn't really socialize as much and I could tell early on that the gear differences between players could easily cause some elitism. It was like how people in MS1 with Zakum helmets thought they were cool and liked to show it off, when Zakum was the only boss.
Oh the next episode is Battlerite. I played that game, that episode is going to sting
On 31 August 2022, Tencent announced that Maplestory 2 would close its servers in China on 2 November 2022.
Straight from the wikipedia page... guess it's korea only now.