The fatal flaw with the current business model.

Since it was just posted on this site, I thought it'd be relevant to bring up the article on "Nexon: Market optimization key to free-to-play":

"I think there's also this stigma of Asian free-to-play games being pay to win," he continued. "Whether they've played our games or other Asian games or not, that's just a stigma that's out there, so that's another concern players have."

When the CEO of the company dances around the issue of Pay-to-win and writes it off as just a stigma attached to "Asian-developed games" and not a valid concern, you know how that might affect their philosophy in managing the game.

"When you look at Asian games, regardless of what their payment models is, or what their monetization scheme is, or how they design the game, that’s being designed for multiple markets . . . They can’t actually tailor the experience exactly towards any particular market, and it’s always going to lean towards the market where it originated."

And since Maplestory doesn't have a local development team (as far as I know), this is more or less saying the Maplestory is stuck with the Pay-to-win model and they're fine with keeping it that way. He does go on to say that he has respect for domestic developers such as Riot and Valve and how they basically understand the Western market much better, and yet Nexon itself has no clue how to actually cater their own game (Maplestory) to a Western market.