Big Bang Is In the Air

Rayhovite is certainly pretty good at spreading FUD if he's affected any of you. Let's look at reality, shall we?

- This blog was important. It stated that not everything that's coming with Big Bang will merge seamlessly into the GMS client. He's probably referring to Masteria and some World Tour areas which won't work right due to mob stats.

Consumers don't want excuses. The blog could have users sit down and read the exact coding the dev has to do to implement content integration between versions, but it won't change anything. It doesn't impress, and it certainly doesn't buy time with consumers.

- Last year, Aran was released on December 10 in GMS and led to a huge surge in popularity for Maplestory. Hitting high schoolers with new content just as they're going into christmas vacation is a powerful pull. It worked then, why wouldn't it work now?

I already told you directly, Fiel. Last year there was little in the name of gaming/MMO competition. In fact, it was a paltry release line up for December, so there wasn't too much awaiting anyone coming out for vacation. There were a ton of titles released in November 2009 that caused a surge in sales, but nothing majorly new in terms of content in Dec 09. That isn't the case for Dec 2010. I already outlined the release lists and comparisons in other threads. It may very well turn out that Big Bang gets a surge of popularity, but as I already pointed out, they missed a crucial revenue apex. It's the same apex most other companies strive to reach in the holiday season (late Oct/early Nov).

- The traditional KMST --> GMS time lag is between 5 - 7 months. This is at a much faster rate than in the past which was 9 - 11 months. GMS has already accelerated their development. Considering that the final Big Bang patch happened at the end of August, I'd say a promise "by the end of the year" is unusually fast for them. They want to get this update out as fast as we all want it. But until that time, they can release teasers about how they're going to make it all work for GMS. They could not complete this "months ago" because it takes a long time to assemble everything into our version.

That is true, for the current rate of employment they have and its current rate of development output. I already said they should have hired more programmers/staff at least part time to address this issue, especially since they know their own cycle and how big this update is. They've known for a long long time about this revamp. They should have adjusted for this. There is no excuse, just like they've known for years about 64-bit issues, and have taken forever to even acknowledge there is a problem. Inexcusable.

- I don't believe that they will be leaving the skills as they are currently - it really does need to be changed. As for mage ultimates, lemme ask you this - has there ever been a time in the past where NexAM didn't accept 100% of skill changes and updates from Korea? Mage ultimates are going to get a cooldown.

- Like things were last year, we can expect 2x weekends, a black friday sale, maybe a turkey event or two (lol - I can't recall a single year where the turkey event was good), and some cash shop surprises.

Uh oh! Turkey day! it's gonna suck people! You heard it here first! =D

Hmmhmm... Fiel is certainly pretty good at spreading FUD if he's affected any of you. Let's look at reality, shall we?


-V62 brought us the Pirates update. There may be more than just 'like things were last year'.


- The purpose of Tespia is not that we're doing the work that good ol' "incompetent" nexon should have done, it's that crowdsourcing the bug reporting gets them hundreds of bugs that Q&A can't always catch. With a codebase as large as Maplestory, this is not surprising. I would suggest unit testing, but I don't know how their code generation works. Even WoW uses a test server for bug reports - same as Maplestory.

I understand fully the purpose of testing for 'beta' content. What I'm pointing out is that it is ludicrous to expect a flock of gamers to do this in this particular season. In February when things are pretty dry, it's not a bad deal. Gives people's minds content to chew on while finding bugs. But in this time? When games/movies/gadgets are coming in by the droves? Again, for content that's too little too late for this year? I'm sure Tespia will still fill up, but personally, the thought would slap my forehead "Why am i beta testing [for free] when I could be playing Gran Turismo 5?"


- Considering how extractions are viewed by the community, these few months of lag will also give users time to prepare for Big Bang. Thanks to KMST's awesome unpacked EXE release, we all now can enjoy formulas we would have loved to have in our current version of Maplestory. This gives maplers a lot of power to be able to anticipate how much damage a mob is going to do, how to calculate hit rates and avoid rates, and generally how to use Maplestory's functions to their greatest advantage. I'm sure many of you have noticed more warriors are going dexless these days to prepare for Big Bang when accuracy will become much less of a stat, correct?


So rather than spending, users will be 'preparing' for Big Bang. I will not equate preparing with spending because we don't know what kind of resets we'll get. Why spend money on any reset now? It would be foolish. So that's out the window. "These few months of lag will give users time to prepare" is another way of saying "there ain't sh!t to do, man", and for that to be the case in such a crucial revenue window is inexcusable. I cannot stress this enough, Fiel!

Preparing mentally for Big Bang is also making hype drown away, and so the big oomph factor dwindles in the months to come. You assume people WANT to prepare for Big bang. Some people like to blackout on media and information. Waiting time simply dwindles hype as well. I don't think we want that either.

Also, it's kind of hard to prepare for an update if you have Vista/Win7 compatability problems, no? I don't have those problems but I feel bad for my fellow Maplers that can't even boss properly to get the gear they need to prepare for this update. You can't really prepare anyway... some classes will have new ways of mobbing/leveling. Can't really practice unless you have a KMS client.


- "Is it a mere coincidence that this blog appears a day after Blizzard releases a giant patch on schedule which revamps much of the WoW game?" <-- I'd say so. Cataclysm was revealed more than a year ago, and Big Bang only three months ago. GMS has a time lag of 5 - 7 months, so it seems that GMS is right on schedule and the same with Cataclysm. It only makes sense that they would be releasing teasers to get the rest of the community geared up for Big Bang and educate them on what simply won't make the cut.

Why would you release teasers AND tell people about cuts? That's just.....stupid. Tell people about cuts first and then give the hype. I don't think it's 'coincidence', and I'm remembering the time when E3 was coming and Nexon 'coincidentally' made the day a 12 hour 2x exp day, because they had nothing in terms of content that could drift people's minds away from E3's content. it sucked for me because I wanted to level, but I worked for a gaming company at the time and had to cover the E3 event. Had no time to level. Busy on the show floor talking to booth babes, checkin' out new games, encoding/uploading tons of videos, etc. Hyping Big Bang as that blog tries to do just as WoW's major patch comes into play seems deliberate. I could very well be wrong.


- "Maplestory was among the first successful MMOs, right?" <-- Well, no, not really. There were plenty of MUDs in the 90s, and no one can deny how powerful Evercrack was back then. Also, World of Warcraft was released while Maplestory was in beta for GMS, but it was released in Korea back in 2003.

Thank you for the correction on the one compliment I tried to give Nexon. :p

Nice try, chinchilla.