2012-08-03, 05:51 AM
Equating my posts to cancer? Ouch. Still, I can only think that would be offensive to those who actually have cancer, if only because reading a forum post one disagrees with is preferable to a slow and painful death. But then again, that's just me.
Suffice it to say, when a party of 6 permanent classes defeats a newly released boss without epic funding, hacking or NX benefits, with skill being the primary factor in their victory, then I'll believe the game has real difficulty. However, if a party's ability to take advantage of new content depends on power creep or bribery, then that kind of difficulty will never be real. To even call it "difficulty" is misleading. Still, I'm not sure if there's even a word to describe such a bastardization of gameplay mechanics.
The point is, MapleStory was freemium back before gachapon and cubes when NX items had no value and only made one's character look pretty. Oh, so very pretty. The current exploitative model, however, can hardly be called such. When NX devalues the meso to the point where one can buy mesos with NX, and inflation has risen to the point where items cost more mesos than the cap, well, that's hardly freemium if the emphasis is on the premium. The only difficulty then is the real life difficulty of getting money.
And like I said, either here or somewhere else, that's nothing more than class discrimination, not real difficulty.
Suffice it to say, when a party of 6 permanent classes defeats a newly released boss without epic funding, hacking or NX benefits, with skill being the primary factor in their victory, then I'll believe the game has real difficulty. However, if a party's ability to take advantage of new content depends on power creep or bribery, then that kind of difficulty will never be real. To even call it "difficulty" is misleading. Still, I'm not sure if there's even a word to describe such a bastardization of gameplay mechanics.
The point is, MapleStory was freemium back before gachapon and cubes when NX items had no value and only made one's character look pretty. Oh, so very pretty. The current exploitative model, however, can hardly be called such. When NX devalues the meso to the point where one can buy mesos with NX, and inflation has risen to the point where items cost more mesos than the cap, well, that's hardly freemium if the emphasis is on the premium. The only difficulty then is the real life difficulty of getting money.
And like I said, either here or somewhere else, that's nothing more than class discrimination, not real difficulty.