How many people are REALLY still playing Maplestory?

I enjoy this kind of stuff.

And that my friends is how to kill a pika thread

I'm sorry, I don't enjoy this kind of stuff.

Stop stuffing your opinions and conclusions down our throat. I don't think many of us enjoy reading this, nor going pages and pages on about this. You might not give a damn about how threads turn out in the end after N pages of arguing about why Nexon is dying, but we do. It's nice to see everyone give a little of their opinion at the start because some perspectives can be refreshing, but if you're here to machine-gun people's opinions down then the thread certainly gets ugly in more ways than one. You're doing this in a forum where people still play Maplestory, calling people masochists etc.. So what if some of us are?


I'm going back to the literal interpretation of the original question (that may or may not involve botters/hackers/Nexon dying). People play Maplestory in different ways... a spectrum across once-in-a-lifetime and hardcore. I can't answer "REALLY" because that's different for everyone. For now I'm looking at it as a consistent player who keeps logging back in. If you're asking for exact numbers (as in the question "many"), then you will have to ask Nexon to give us a look on how many active accounts are there (we'll assume no one logs in just to see if their character is still there or not), where "active" refers to people who have logged in at least once to play in... say... a couple of weeks.

Now... people log in at different times for different durations. A snapshot of the current active player count (e.g. through Maple.fm) is not going to be accurate because you can't capture the entire population. The closest approximation would have to be through the most recent Hot Time (when was the last one...?). These days you find far more Miracle Time or 2X EXP/drop, but people don't necessarily log in at the start of the 2X and log out at the end of it... there are bound to be some numbers of people who come in late, or entirely avoid 2X e.g. for the lag (I'm sure some of you agree with me). Botters are easy to account for, because they are a (relatively) constant number, so that's just a baseline correction. I don't think the number of botters would increase during 2X...?

You can attempt to use Fermi estimation here, but the orders of magnitude are really too small that the errors start to eat into the accuracy of the answer. Fermi estimates aren't good for modelling or population distributions (I think). I would prefer not to attempt this. Suffice to say, from the answer you get, you still need to take into account the number of people who don't buy NX, and the distribution of the amount of NX bought by those who buy NX. We know a small group of such players buy A LOT of NX. It's more a question of... can these people make GMS float?

Looking at the events that GMS has, yeah many are a bit filler, but they have increased diversity in some ways. In-game events and mini-games do add variety and interest. We also note that during some big patches, there are always Welcome Back events to lure back old players who have left. This is Nexon acknowledging the fact that gamers come and go, and it is going to be true for many MMOs. Hey, even FaceBook users eventually use it just for chat and occasional updates/group events. What happened to the initial fad about looking at your friends all day, getting distracted by it? Not to say nobody uses it looking at people anymore, but generally your FB usage goes down after some time. Why? Because you move on. You have work to do. Life is more important. But people still use it anyway, and when you have new friends you'll spend a little longer of FB checking them and their friends out. Similarly for Maplestory. New updates => opportunity to lure back old players and lure in new players => increase in active players. There is a huge population of old players, and an even larger population of people who never played Maplestory. Each population has its own set of difficulties in getting lured (back) into Maplestory.

How successful are these updates in increasing player population... I'll let time decide. At least... enough has changed for me to want to come back to explore again. You guys can continue bickering about the eventual outcome of Maplestory. Just don't forget that there are plenty of processes that do matter.

edit:

We have that?

We have the opposite

Hadriel