2013-10-16, 10:20 PM
KhainiWest Wrote:3) Purely luck based enhancement system
Actually, I think part of what has messed up Maple Story is the fact that "perfect" because achievable with a 100% certainty, given enough money was thrown at it. WAY back in the day, if you landed 5/7 60%'s on a weapon that started out above average, you got a brofist from fellow players. If you landed 6/7, you were awesome. And if you had a +7, you were pretty godly. And should one of those slots be a 10% scroll and not a 60%? Oh baby. Prices for 8, 9, 10, and 11 attack work gloves were tiered and exponential.
Now? Add +50 attack to an Empress Weapon or better weapon, or...settle for throwing a few event 70%'s and hope for +12 attack or better? There's no middle point where a weapon is finalized at +25 attack or +30 attack or +35 attack. You might have partially-perfected stuff that hits the market when someone quits and wants to play a new class, but it's still basically valued as a "perfect-in-progress" weapon due to the remaining slots, which leaves a pretty big gap between reasonably scrolled and "perfected" stuff.
(Yes, I realize that "perfect" is a bit of a misnomer given that a pinnacle scroll could have given +9 attack to a single slot, and an Incredible Chaos could give as much as +10, as rare and unpredicable as that may be.)
---break, changing gears---
Ultimately, I do see how potential is a problem. And at this point, Maple Story is FAR too invested in the system to get rid of it. You can't completely undermine potential, or else the people who spent thousands of dollars to do millions of damage on each line of attack will be infuriated. ...and given how Maple Story's entire financial system is based on the abuse of them, you can't cut that completely or the entire game will explode.
What the game needs is some sort of scaling and diminishing returns system. Like...I think maybe +100% stat is a reasonable goal for someone who really puts the effort in without spending NX. So, up to +100% stat worth of equip potential is applied at full effect. Then, maybe the next +50% worth of percentage-based stat bonuses are cut in half, then the next +60% to a third, then anything beyond "+210%" is applied at a one-fourth rate. So a character that has +310% Dex now would get...
+100% at full rate
+50% at half, so +25
+60% at a third, so +20
the last 100% at a quarter, so +25
= +175% Dex applied to the character (Xenon would need a different formula though, since they have three main stats.)
And I suppose weapon attack could use some similar scaling too, since Bonus Potential often gives a lot of +attack, plus the huge aforementioned difference between perfected stuff vs using more normal, "chance to fail without the certainty of a shield scroll or no-boom CSS's to save the slot" stuff.
But in the end, such scaling would make it so there is still the ability to improve and get stronger, but the dimished returns makes it so you're not doing 5x more damage than the free player who has really been trying to keep up and found themselves destroyed by the pay2win potential system.