Big Bang Is In the Air

As much as I agree with rayhovite's input in what would have been smart business tactics to beat the other companies to release, I must honestly disagree with the apocalyptic results he predicts. December will be a good time to release it since people will have already tried all the other news that interests them. Hell the WoW patch will be almost old by then. New releases at the same time will conflict, releasing a bit later might even work to their benefit, especially if it's free of the worst bugs a premature release would have caused. A few casual spenders might be lost, but since potential systems release I have a feeling that hard core players comes much closer to match the small spender generated profit for Nexon anyway. It was most likely clumsy handled of Nexon to hype it like they did, but it will by no means result in failure. Personaly I rather take a better tested late release than the alternative.

Bah, no release until December. But, there will be tespia. Hopefully for more than a week.

I can guarantee you that I'd have faaar more fun and enjoy myself way more in Maple if I was lv 200. For me the fun stuff in the game starts then. Grinding for levels is no fun at all.

What you can do in level 200 that you can't do now? If you don't find grinding fun, then quit ms. "Fun" may start at max level in some other game, but in MS that's definately not the case.

and back to topic:

How does kMS work on Vista/7? Maybe Big Bang will fix those issues? They said that maple will run smoother, no?

From what we hear.... they still have issues with Vista and 7 if not worse issues for the x64 platform. In short, Nexon is close to earning the ASSCLOWN award for their blundering of MapleStory.

Look at how long it took for them to begin addressing the Vista/7 and x64 issues. 5 years after the first OS with it rolled out the door to OEMs and Retail. In 5 years they never though... maybe we should fix this? How pathetic, stupid, and retarded can you be? Forget firing people, these people deserve to be shot for this. Talk about lazy developers who didn't want to do their jobs. Hell the GMs and other admins are just as lazy and incompetent. My God how hard is it to implement an IP range ban to block a hacker once and for all? Geez... if SouthPerry and other websites and forums can do the same thing, shouldn't an MMO be able to as well?

Seriously, who the Hell is running Nexon? Who the Hell is over their IT department? Who the Hell is over QA? Who the Hell is over R&D? A bunch of goddamn retarded monkeys with half a brain and an IQ of 2? My God! How hard is it to not screw up and blunder as much as Nexon has?

I've told them for over a year what was needed on their forums:

IP Range Bans and proxy blockers.
More GMs and GM presence in the game.
Compatibility for Vista/7's HAL and the x64 platform.
More security with data transmissions like AES encrypted packets and clientside/serverside file checksums.
Stronger encrypted files for the client.

and many more...

Seriously, someone has got to get Game Informer or IGN to do a scoop on this. Nexon needs to have them not just rattle the sabre at them but turn them over their knee and beat the Hell out of them.

That's already happening. Everyone is nitpicking the blog and finding certain wording to be a little worrisome. Now rather than looking forward to Big Bang, users are starting to dread it. And that's not including the minority that don't want Big Bang to arrive. Hyping something up too early is just as foolish as delaying something. Polyphony Digital can tell you all about that.

This blog could not be any more damaging for Nexon in the way it is structured. Who's going to be leveling now? Who's going to be buying NX? If the big update will make life easier in the digital aspect, why charge NX now? I certainly won't put a few bucks down for 2x exp. Yes it will always be easier to level, and leveling, as Fiel sorta pointed out, follows a similar pattern to Moore's law. However, this update is on the horizon, so a lot of people aren't going to be leveling or charging NX because the update and the teasers are so close. It's just dumb marketing at the most crucial time of the year. I'd fire some people over this.

On top of hyping BB up so soon (and in the worst way possible [hint: don't mention changes to exp curves]) that's a problem, it's also not releasing it in time.






WRONG. i have been talking as if Nexon SHOULD launch Big Bang as soon as possible. I have already shown graphs and explanations about why that should be the case. This blog serves more as damage control rather than an explanation of why they are launching this update so late. How long had KMS finished with a decent version of Big Bang? You can't argue that Nexon had to wait for each test version's continuous changes since they plan on making their own changes, so they could have grabbed any variety of the later code.

My question is: what took so ****ing long? How did you miss such an important time target? You can't even get a release date down? Are you ****ing kidding me? If you had concerns at all, at least once, over the release time interval, why didn't you hire more programmers? All the other MMOs are getting their sh!t together and barely making their schedules on 3D games, so what the hell is your excuse with a 2D game? Why should you not be fired? Pretty sure I'd be fired if I missed such giant milestones in my line of work!

Let me make that clearer. Everyone is bringing their big guns to the fight this holiday. Nexon doesn't even have a switch blade. They say it needs more testing to see if it will pierce butter. If I were an MMO publisher, I would put Nexon as the laughing stock of the year. While other companies are putting up notices detailing their major updates which are arriving on time, Nexon gives you, the Maple community, a blog that basically tells you they can't get it done on time and they want your pity. Oh you want me to test and report teh bugs?

Lol. Go **** yourself. I'll be playing Black Ops while you should be doing your ****ing job. Seriously, how much of an insult is that? While all the big games and entertainment come flooding in, Nexon wants YOU the gamer to do their work for them, all in the name of releasing an update they should have already finished months ago. This deserves a major:



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? Is this a pathetic attempt to diverge people's attention away from a super MMO that has just been made a lot easier and more fun for casuals? I'd say it's pretty inexcusable they couldn't get this patch out the door in time. Consumers don't want to hear excuses. Whether you're marketing or technical or executive, it doesn't matter. Think about it. The name of the game is differentiation. Maplestory was among the first successful MMOs, right? While that is awesome, it will look terrible for Nexon to release Big Bang after WoW Cataclysm because now Nexon looks like it's playing catch up, and is late to the party at that. "Oh, Maplestory is revamping everything? But WoW did that already, and FFXIV is doing that too. What's so special about that?" The last thing you want to do is make yourself look like an imitator (let's forget all the crap they stole from Ragnarok Online for a second!), because it makes it all that much harder to grab market share.

All I can do is shake my head Nexon's way because they will have completely skipped over the best time of the year to make a good buck. But hey, not my portfolio. I'm glad my fellow Maplers have discussed much of Big Bang with me, whether they believe I am right, wrong, or confused. I'm glad they have educated themselves just a bit more.

By the time they get BB out the door, I'll have dabbled in WoW, Assassin's Creed, Black Ops (definitely!), and gotten some new tech goodies like the new AMD 6xxx graphics cards. I imagine many of my fellow peers will have the same story to tell. A lot of that money could have gone to Nexon, but, can't say the same now.

Southperry is full of some of the brightest folks in the Maple community. You can't fool them. Nexon might not be the most transparent company, but the wonderful thing is that it has made the brilliant Maple community figure them out through extractions and excellent deductive reasoning. With all that in mind, pretty sure most people see this as an inexcusable blog post for what ultimately reveals yet another chapter in Nexon's journey through incompetence.

Even if I'm a Tespia supporter, I kind of agree with you.

Yeah, they're doing an horrible job with the marketing, and they'll probably end up losing a bunch of money.

Meh. They're changing things. Probably not for the best, either.

Thanks for the december birthday present!

On a side note: Either lots (not all) of world tour is going bye bye, or we won't get the same exp curve as KMS did, those are my predictions.

edit: Nexon----> Hire rayhovite and jamie already, it would make your lives alot easier.... and where the HELL IS MY COMPATIBILITY?!!

I won't be playing big bang if they don't make some serious efforts to let us actually get through boss runs... this is the only game in my
ENTIRE GAMING HISTORY that I cannot finish a serious boss run, only it's because of technical issues instead of a lack of skill.

That's already happening.

The thing about everything you said is that it doesn't matter at all. Nexon has never followed the normal rules or done things players expected of them.

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.

- 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?

- 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.

- 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.

- 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.

- 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?

- "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.

- "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.

^Actually, we still haven't gotten the patch that made Poison Mist and Power Guard based on accuracy.

^Actually, we still haven't gotten the patch that made Poison Mist and Power Guard based on accuracy.

Poison mist has been based on accuracy in GMS for some time now.

- 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.

Honestly, this is the only importance I can see in this blog post. And it's not that much further from common sense compared with everything else that can be inferred here either; I just see the blog as a cold, hard confirmation that can be shoved back up their ass when/if they don't stick to our expectations.

I'm quite happy that it is coming in December for the sole reason that they have plenty of time to code it and test it. If they have a dedicated team of 10+ professional programmers and over 100+ testers, the transition to big bang should be thorough enough. +1 Nexon (and -1 for not knowing how to spell "road").

Poison mist has been based on accuracy in GMS for some time now.

Power guard remains unchanged though. I wonder why.

Poison mist has been based on accuracy in GMS for some time now.

No it hasn't. I made my F/P at the end of July and starting misting O1 at level 90. I was missing with Fire Arrow quite often, but Poison Mist still brought monsters down to 1 HP every time.

Power guard remains unchanged though. I wonder why.

same reason why they'll remove cooldowns from ultimates.

No it hasn't. I made my F/P at the end of July and starting misting O1 at level 90. I was missing with Fire Arrow quite often, but Poison Mist still brought monsters down to 1 HP every time.

I haven't been able to test it myself but I heard reports of people using poison mist at skeles at level 80 and sometimes they would go through the mist unscathed.

You have to take into account that mist still tries to poison every second so a small chance to miss wouldn't make much difference.

Poison mist has been based on accuracy in GMS for some time now.

Having a % success rate(like brace, only poisons 60% of the time) when inside the Mist =/= based on accuracy.

First off...

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?

Maybe, but according to my sources, the WoW patch... didn't turn out well. A few WoW friends I know are really in shock of the changes... and in not a very good way. Balancing is off the window, designs became a bit more iffy, lolbugseverywhere, etcetc.

Back on topic... I'm siding with Fiel here. Doesn't it make marketing sense to be able to pull players WHEN THEY HAVE TIME TO PLAY? In addition, it would be extremely stupid to release BB this month. Sure they could rush it, but then we'd have a carpload of bugs and other issues to deal with to the point that the game would become really unplayable, making NexonNA lose money in return. :|

I want BB here in GMS just as bad as anyone else, but I don't want it rushed out and broken like a shattered mirror. I rather have it tested throughly via Tespia, and have it out when there'll be more people to enjoy BB with. And guess what... it just so happens that people have more time to play games in general on winter break.

I was really worried about the massive wave of glitches/bugs that would come with the BB Patch.
I'm actually quite happy they delayed it so they can work longer on it.
Less buggs/glitches with a huge patch like this is worth waiting for if you ask me.

Rushing things is never good...