How many people are REALLY still playing Maplestory?

KMS players are NOT GMS players. The fact that Nexon fails to realize this is why GMS is failing in my strong opinion. It doesn't have to be a completely different game from KMS, but much like JMS and TMS, you have to cater towards your audience or die. Nexon has ignorantly chose the latter.

I disagree with this. I don't think that GMS is failing because Nexon America isn't trying to cater towards their players. They are trying to cater towards us, and that's what's been screwing us over, in my opinion. They don't have nearly as much experience as the people who run KMS, and it shows. So far, Nexon America's attempt at making changes so that GMS differs from KMS has caused the game to become a huge mess.

I truly believe that GMS would have done much better if we received exact updates from KMS, with our own content sprinkled here and there. Rather than how it is currently, where every now and then we receive altered content for the most part.

Let me attempt to clarify what I mean, since I usually don't do a good job of explaining myself.
1. An example of the type of content that I wish GMS would stick to doing:
New Leaf City - A unique area, made for us, that Nexon America can do pretty much whatever they want to with. Things like this works fine, because even if the content becomes terrible (like most players feel it has become now) you can just ignore it in-game, and do everything else the game has to offer. People can give their feedback, and eventually Nexon America can try again at making it into something that people would enjoy.
2. An example of GMS's attempt to change content coming from KMS that, because they lack experience, didn't work out so well:

 Spoiler

This one's tougher, I have a few examples in mind, but players have also complained when this was eventually un-done (mostly because it positively affected them in some way). The example I'll give here is Party Play Lion King's Castle (I very much expect people to disagree with me on this, but that's fine. This is simply my opinion.) As people should remember, LKC continued to stay as a Party Play area much longer than it had in KMS. During the update that upgraded LKC into a 'Theme Dungeon', GMS decided to keep Party Play around longer. I don't think we ever got much of an explanation as to why it eventually lost Party-Play, but I believe it was because of the "bad air" that the area started to gain. We had an issue where people were unfairly increasing the low-spawn there, and the issue grew because players started to except the exploit as an okay occurrence. Another problem with this was that most high-level players decided to continue grinding at LKC way past the normal level range that LKC was intended to cover. This meant that places that could have been more widely used were instead ignored, because LKC was too good. (There's probably more, but that alone made it so that I never touched LKC while it was party play, I hated the idea of continuing to grind on 120ish mobs forever.)

Eh, this part got long and ramble-y, so I'll put it into a spoiler tag. My point is, they're not good at making their own adjustments to existing content, and because of that those changes either cause huge problems or eventually get reverted to what they should be in later updates (for simplicity's sake I guess).
I know most versions of Maple make changes to the game, and people seem to be okay with that; but our Nexon's just not good at it. =/

It would have made much more sense for Nexon America to only make changes to content that they made. That way, if something went wrong, it would have had a much lower affect on the overall game and they could eventually learn from their mistakes and improve their content, as well as try and keep it up-to-date with how new KMS content is made.

Anyways, that's just what I think, though. I know for sure that plenty of people disagree. Plenty of people liked things like LKC with Party Play, the Luminous/Kaiser/AB changes, and the messy Unleashed UI - I'm just not one of those people, is all.

EDIT: All of that said, it also probably doesn't help that Nexon America seems to require permission to do anything out of the ordinary, but maybe there's a reason that they've been put into that position now~ *cough* previous mistakes they've made *cough*