Making Pure Mesos in MapleStory

What they probably need to end up doing is a real meso sink. JMS has a decent one with Cross Brigade's gear and scrolls, but it needs to be something that users constantly use, instead of using until you get a good one then never needing to touch it again.

I'd like to see a cube lottery, 1 million per ticket (allowed to buy as many as you want, and the NPC would say how many tickets have been sold for the number of prizes) and every day they draw some number of tickets and give those people a cube each.

It's like converting mesos to NX, but without a fixed rate, and without the problems the MTS brought (item laundering, duped items couldn't be tracked through it)

I'd like to see a cube lottery, 1 million per ticket (allowed to buy as many as you want, and the NPC would say how many tickets have been sold for the number of prizes) and every day they draw some number of tickets and give those people a cube each.

It's like converting mesos to NX, but without a fixed rate, and without the problems the MTS brought (item laundering, duped items couldn't be tracked through it)

That's actually a decent idea. Would really attack the insane amount of money needed to properly play the game.

Maybe even a select % of tickets gets better cubes, since we have 1294102934 varieties at this point.

My main issue is that MapleStory is essentially a country with two currencies that can't be freely exchanged with each other. As long as one of the currencies (NX) isn't generated from activities inside the country and provides benefits significant or greater than the one that is (mesos) it's going to be difficult to balance the economy. I guess you could think of things bought with NX as imports, sort of? idk.

What they probably need to end up doing is a real meso sink. JMS has a decent one with Cross Brigade's gear and scrolls, but it needs to be something that users constantly use, instead of using until you get a good one then never needing to touch it again.

I've always wondered why there was never a meso option for all the Coin Shops that we are subject to in various events throughout the year. The old Silent Crusade did a decent job at it with 10M Shoulder Scrolls and 7.5M? (can't remember) Shoulders. Buy, blow up, rebuy, fail scroll, buy, fuse junk ones and so on.

The new method of using coins is not only tedious, 20 bosses for 100 coins, but very slow, several days for Mystic Equips. I usually spend my coins on the 60 coin pendant which I fuse until I get a good one to send to a mule or keep for myself.

Now, if they changed the system, I might be using mesos to buy and fuse these pendants, but as you say there is a limit where I get a pendant that is good enough. But that's not where I most want to see this proposed system implemented.

Consider the Tempest store, how many of us would have shelled out mesos to complete the set on an alternate characters or AB or Kaiser or whatever was (re)released at the time. How many of us would have loved to straight up buy the scrolls we needed to scroll our equips? Things like the +7~+9 scrolls, ICSoG or Clean Slates would have flown off the shelves. The Tempest Rings and Shoulders and maybe Pendants would likely have done the same.

This is where I really like the idea, people with little mesos can continue to do the coin quests and sell their exchanges less than the store would sell them to make mesos and lift themselves up through the economy. While the wealthy could just buy the rings, etc., whether from the aforementioned or from the stores outright as a meso sink. They/I would then proceeded to blow them up using ICSoGs until I got a high-attack one. Myself and others would be tossing ICSoGs and Clean Slates on everything. Mesos trickle down, or mesos trickle out, a system I can approve.

That sounds pretty absurd.
Where would a level 120+ get the meso needed to buy NLC potions? Not all classes have a self-healing skill, many still need actual potions that cost several thousand meso each.

I was mostly going off of the rumor Justin mentioned about meso drops already being completely removed in KMS, as I've heard of it as well. Supposedly the only way to make pure meso is by selling etc and and crappy equip drops to NPC shops, which is harsh on low leveled characters, but not so bad past a certain level. Another alternative would be for potions (and DECENT potions, not white potions ffs) to drop much more frequently instead of meso, but have no NPC value.

Plus, this move would make meso worth a lot more - so a lot more worthwhile for botters. They have no problem making thousands of characters and leveling them 1-60 over and over and over again where the meso drop. Like all anti-botting strategies, you're hurting the legits while the bot-drivers are only slightly inconvenienced.

There's a setting for botting programs to auto suicide, to not overlevel if the person is farming a certain item or botting a certain map with desirable drops. This only hurts legits, much like the decreased drop rates which were added as a "countermeasure." Nexon needs to acknowledge the problem that there is a huge base of hackers and needs to fix their security... Instead of applying bandaids to a freaking amputated limb of a game.

I took this into consideration when choosing lv60 to be the cut-off. It's better than no meso drops whatsoever, if the KMS thing is actually true, no? (I'm still seeing meso drops in recent KMS videos so I'm going to guess it isn't--unless it's REALLY recent.)

Anyway. Getting from lv1~lv60 is stupidly fast these days--on some of the popular botting classes it only takes a few hours. EXP gain is so fast at these early levels, botters might have to spend more time auto-suiciding or making new characters than actually botting for pure meso. Even then, it wouldn't stop high level botting--NPCing etc drops from ToT would probably net more meso than botting at a lv60 or below area for pure meso--not to mention the nebulite boxes, confusion fragments, mmbs, and other rare drops frequently sold by botters in FM.

I do agree this would be a pomegranatety way to go about "fixing" the problem, but there isn't much Nexon can do right now short of upping security enough to keep botters at bay and then deleting all of the current meso carried by players and letting the economy rebuild itself--but that would create an uproar as well. I think there's so much meso in the system right now that even if botting stopped, it would take years for the economy to stabilize itself through meso sinks.

I like the bandaids to an amputated limb metaphor. I'd just said to someone yesterday that Nexon needs to actually clean up their pile of pomegranate, instead of just trying to kill the flies that swarm to it.

They need to figure out a way to inconvenience botters without affecting legit players. Like, say, aggressively banning the accounts that the botters transfer mesos to. Put up an announcement on the website, first: "If you buy mesos from, or receive mesos from, a hacker, you are guilty of crimes against the economy and will receive a meso wipe and temporary ban". Then, every time they catch a botter, ban anyone they've traded with. It's not possible to drop trade large amounts of mesos, so the botters' "accumulative" accounts where they trade all the items in order to sell in the FM and the accounts meso sellers use will start getting banned left and right.

This sounds like a good idea, but I'd be worried about whether these botters were trading with unsuspecting people, too. What if the system isn't sensitive enough and autobans someone who was oblivious to the fact that the items/mesos they've traded for were hacked? I mean, often their gibberish names are obvious enough, but I see a ton of these gibberish names with mushroom shops all over the FM. If they're already selling or trading directly to others it might be hard to track down who's trading with who.

This sounds like a good idea, but I'd be worried about whether these botters were trading with unsuspecting people, too. What if the system isn't sensitive enough and autobans someone who was oblivious to the fact that the items/mesos they've traded for were hacked?

I suppose there's room for them to maliciously buy something from someone to get them banned... but for the most part, meso selling is a business, and they're not going to give away mesos just to screw with people.

My ideal solution would be to remove meso drops from all mobs and replacing them with 'daily quests' that are the only source of meso in the game. Doable only a few times a day.

Go a step further and integrate captchas so that bots can't auto accept and do them.

This will essentially put all players on equal ground with the amount of meso they could introduce into the economy per character daily. While some hacking would speed up the non-legit farmers. As a whole, botters and their effect on the economy would be slowed down due to not being able to bot all night, while still allowing normal players their fair access to meso.

What they probably need to end up doing is a real meso sink. JMS has a decent one with Cross Brigade's gear and scrolls, but it needs to be something that users constantly use, instead of using until you get a good one then never needing to touch it again.

Make Maple Leaf High permanent but make the totems expire and cost more? Experience would need to be toned down.

Make Maple Leaf High permanent but make the totems expire and cost more? Experience would need to be toned down.

Make an NPC sell high-stat expiring android hearts, badges, medals, titles. The meso-rich will gladly pay for more damage. No need to make them go through quests or collect points before they're allowed to pour their meso into the sink.
Also, give the town-donor medals worthwhile stats.

The concept of being "wealthy" in maple story has been redefined the day MTS died. You are forced to buy NX if you want to be "wealthy"... and well, wealthy is a term that raises question on what it exactly means in the context of maple story.

If you want to be wealthy by making only pure mesos, I suggest trying to simulate an orphan trying to make it through different stages of life. Start from primary school, then work your way up to, say, end of high school. This will hopefully help you with your answer.

Additional Options and Silver Karma scissors will probably be a good meso sink. I can't remember exactly how much the scissors cost, but it's quite an amount.

I suppose there's room for them to maliciously buy something from someone to get them banned... but for the most part, meso selling is a business, and they're not going to give away mesos just to screw with people.

There's also the problem of people botting to fund their closet hacking mains. These people would go through multiple steps to avoid their mains getting banned, probably even trading through multiple players, or buying resellable items from shops (maybe even getting them banned in the process)

I really don't think there's a way to reliably stop this effect than to take an active role in updating security against these third party programs. Ideally, they'd need a solution that doesn't hurt legitimate players, while having an effect on hackers and script kiddies paying for VIP tools...the problem is, I don't think there's another effective solution.