Nexon Transparency/Communication Survey

After how Arwoo got himself hated on the official forums and the subreddit within a month of introducing himself, it was time for his boss to step in and do some damage control.

http://forums.maplestory.nexon.net/discu...munication

(Note how the "longer post" promised never mentions the issue that triggered the whole mess, that of banning a forumer for what they said on reddit).

So all their brainstorming has led to this survey https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/maplecomsurvey, because obviously what people have been posting across all media for the past half dozen years (at least) can't be how the community really feels.
[video=youtube;ZlzoLPPifzo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlzoLPPifzo[/video]

I just want them to do something about all the botters in Arcane River. No second chances just banned permanently.

I just want them to do something about all the botters in Arcane River. No second chances just banned permanently.

I'd rather they do that, but also stop the hack from reaching the game. Otherwise, banning will be pointless, as there will always be another botter to take the place of any banned ones.

In the end it's pretty much like: we want to talk to you guys, as long we hear what we want, and not actual criticism that can be annoying sometimes, but usefull.
Edit: still, they don't like to hear fails that they did(at least they didn't), so this make harder to the game to improve.

"What is your highest priority non-game issue we should fix? Related to website, forums, etc..."

I feel this on alone takes away all my interest on the survey. haven't all the issues that have caused comunity managers to leave started as in game issues? If anything they just should be more transparent on telling the comunity what goes on when they try to deal with those issues, but then they risk looking incompetent / unconcerned, so they can't be more transparent in the end?

They should try to improve how they deal with in game issues instead, and that alone will save them from so many troubles in the forums and out of the game in general.

I just want them to do something about all the botters in Arcane River. No second chances just banned permanently.

in order to solve the botting problem they need to attack the issue of why people bot in the first place

in order to solve the botting problem they need to attack the issue of why people bot in the first place

Greed? lol

Botters have a business because there is a market, there is a market because either people are too greedy and want more and more poweer or because they simply don't have the time / don't want to wait. NOBODY bots for levels anymore.

I do think though, that items like cubic blades and nodes should have greater dropchances. Those two could also drop from bosses.

Boss: Look we're trying to care!
Also the Boss: Johnson! Pretend to care.

As I always say (after Merge) I would have never guess that EMS was actually handling stuff pretty well. There was no mercy for hackers. You where found doing something remotely close to hacking or abusing a glitch/bug. Perma banned and chain banned, meaning that any account logged from that IP was banned. And for new hacks/glitchs/bug they where adressed pretty soon and in most cases, after every single patch, they changed something making old hacks useless and making the hackers work their way up to hack again.

Ofc this made the hackers become actual professionals in their work, and making hacks pay2use.

They had this GMs team that involved 2 or 3 actual GMs, considered Admins and having the "GM" in the beggining of their names, and all the skills base for a GM; and like 4 or 5 lower rank GMs, with less power, having a "NX" in the start of their name and a non GM character with a class they like. They all where pretty active and you could get to talk with them at least once a week. GMChaos used to be stalking people on invisible mode and handling chatbans to any player using curse words (I had that once lol)

That and 2 forum mods (that where actual players and got their payment in monthly maple points) had the whole escenario controlled. Ofc they werent perfect. But things we (migrated players) had for granted, came back after merge. After a hack wave and a horrible security breach that gave access hackers to every single account they like, things got gradually better on EMS to the point that most of the issues where solved and the dmg to the game/echonomy was reduced. We had problems and tons of bug, but compared to GMS we had a godly like Nexon Staff that did noticed what the comunity had to say.

If you bored enough take a look, forum still up.
https://forum.nexoneu.com/forumdisplay.p...sh-Channel

I wish that CM would take a look at it. GMS forum is so confusing. pomegranate ton of useless sections and none of the good ones even exist. (Where the pineapple is the market section? like seriously that was better than AH for big items :c)

Greed? lol

Botters have a business because there is a market, there is a market because either people are too greedy and want more and more poweer or because they simply don't have the time / don't want to wait. NOBODY bots for levels anymore.

I do think though, that items like cubic blades and nodes should have greater dropchances. Those two could also drop from bosses.

not even greed. the grind is bad enough for some items that regular gameplay is repetitive enough that you may as well be botting while you're farming for them. pet autobuff and pot have added absurdly silly levels of automation already.

not even greed. the grind is bad enough for some items that regular gameplay is repetitive enough that you may as well be botting while you're farming for them. pet autobuff and pot have added absurdly silly levels of automation already.

I admit some ways of farming stuff are pretty repetitive. Commerci is probably the most effective way of farming cubic blades and cubes, yet its really boring because there is absolutely no challenge. I'd wish KMS would take the area and turn it into minigames with random challenges, like Fritto portals. Also daily bosses could be a lot more easy and enjoyable to do if all worked like Ursus and each person got their drops through an individual UI. Elite mobs should drop more cubic blades and elite boss drops should be cleaned up to take away so many junk they give. An idea I had was let elites drop Dark coins or something and set a permanent store for people to buy the items they want out of it. Set a daily limit to each item to avoid exploiting. That could help control some of the damage hackers do to the economy...

Arghhh so many ideas and no power to actually change something in game. IF ANYTHING,THATS WHAT SHOULD CHANGE BETWEEN COMUNICATION BETWEEN NEXON AND THE COMUNITY.

Like this will do anything.. ongoing issues since this game started that will never change.

You don't need to ask us whats the problem.. go look at the game itself and the forums. This is just another grab at "trying" to care and to drag us around even more.

Nexon's response to the survey result has been posted:
http://forums.maplestory.nexon.net/discu...-and-plans

Greetings, Maple Community!

We’d like to give our sincerest thanks to all 1603 of you who participated in our MapleStory Community Survey. Additionally, we’d like to share the results of the survey to you along with our plans. The results of this survey had confirmed many of the content and planning we had already prepared to improve our transparency and communication to the community. Our ultimate goal is to establish greater communication from us to you and provide more ways for you to communicate to us.

Here are the results of the survey:





We started the survey with an open question on how we can be more transparent and many of the answers we received reflected the statistics shown above. A very large portion of the collected responses requested that we provided more transparency in regards to hackers and bans.

Maplers provided feedback such as:

• “Full disclosure of evidence and procedures during ban appeals.”
  
• “Provide information as to how hackers and botters are being handled.”
  
• "Give more information with how evidence is gathered."
  

However, we withhold information related to ban evidence because it can be used by hackers to avoid future detection. Additionally, an official post was made with further reasons as to why we cannot disclose the evidence:

As players have mentioned in this thread, there are various reasons as to why we do not publicly share the evidence:

1. We wish to ensure fair treatment for all players whether they're vocal or nonvocal. Presenting an individual case to the public doesn't give the case entitlement over others. For a widespread issue such as this, we gave equal attention for all accounts banned from the Arcane Umbra exploit.
   
   
2. We don't promote public defamation. Making an example out of a player is not a method we endorse to deter players to follow the rules. By presenting the evidence of banned individuals publicly, we'd be encouraging peers to attack and harass individuals found guilty.
   
   
3. Bans and ban appeals are between the investigations team and the individual that was banned. The community at large is not the jury that decides whether the banned are innocent or guilty. The reason for this is because evidence presented by the appealing player will always be skewed towards their favor. Due to this, the community team would need the evidence and proof acquired by our investigations team and that evidence cannot be made public for the reasons stated above.
   

In our efforts to provide more transparency with the banning process, we have plans to set up a Q&A session with our Customer Support (CS) and Investigations team.

Another large portion of the responses in regards to transparency voiced feedback such as:
“Being more involved in the community and listening to the suggestions made.”
“More transparency regarding bugs and what issues are known.”
“Providing more information on concerns reported by the community.”

Listening to community feedback, suggestions, and responding to them has always been the Maple team’s priority and this hasn’t changed. Communication is a two way street and the sentiment from our community is one of our indicators for the direction to take.

It’s through clear communication not only from our team, but from the community as well, that allows us to relay feedback and act upon them with the rest of the team. For example in the past few weeks, Maplers provided constructive criticism and helped bring to our attention various topics, such as:

• Introduce Buff Freezers into Reboot
  
• Making it so skills hits could register 1 damage onto Frankenbalrog
  
• Ensuring Maplers entered on the left side in the Maple Leaf High rooms
  
• Adding the Shop function on Lotusroid
  
• Reducing the drop rate of Easter event related consumables
  
• Increasing the carry limit for each Easter event consumable
  
• Reducing the Golden Rocker Rider Animations
  

The list above is only a handful of examples of how the community assisted our team and this isn’t including even more suggestions that are being worked on.

-----

According to the survey results, over 50% of those who participated in the survey wished to see Developers Notes and more presence on fan sites.

Our aim is to provide answers on various concerns within the community through more communication from our producer and developers.

Fan sites are a great resource to gauge the sentiment of our Maplers that we’ve been using, and we will continue to grow our presence on various fan sites. Currently, the bulk of our presence is on our official platforms, but interacting and responding to more Maplers on more channels is within our plans. We’ll be sure to swing by fan sites often, but please visit our official platforms for important notices and information.

We’ve also noticed that the majority of the respondents do not visit the official forum as seen from the results:





Many Maplers have expressed that they don’t visit the forum for a wide array of reasons
Comments from Maplers consisted of:

• “It’s faster to obtain an answer in chat rooms than to wait for someone to post.”
  
• “Not a fan of forum and prefer quicker responses.”
  
• “There’s not a lot of activity on the forum”
  

Due to the lack of interest, it’s clear to us that the forum is not serving its purpose as an official platform where Maplers can interact with both fellow Maplers and staff as much as they had hoped.

Much of the feedback emphasized that responses are scarce due to the low activity, and that many prefer instant means of communication such as chat-rooms.
From the responses we gathered, we decided that we’d plan to put together a platform which could:

1. Allow for more open and faster conversations between staff to Maplers on an official platform.
   
2. Foster a helpful and friendly community to assist Maplers with questions and concerns in real time.
   
3. Keep Maplers well informed and updated in real time.
   

To hit all these points, we will be introducing the Official MapleStory Discord server this month. There’s still much planning to do with the server, but ultimately, we would like to bring our Maple team under one roof with you. This doesn’t mean we’re dropping the forum or planning to pay any less attention to fan sites as well. We value all the suggestions, feedback, and even the constructive criticism posted onto the forum and it will remain as valuable platform for:

1. Events and contests
   
2. Updates and special announcements
   
3. Documenting Feedback, Suggestions, and Bugs
   
4. Guides and fan creations
   

-----

We asked the community where many of you would like to see the most improvement in regards to the game and over 40% of the responses wished to see improvements to the overall sever stability.

We have and will continue to do our best when tackling server stability and content that Maplers cannot access due to disconnections.
We have addressed a number of stability related topics and we’re currently working to resolve existing ones. Here are some of the topics we’ve fixed in the past few weeks and ongoing topics we’re working to fix:

• Dragon Rider Party Quest and the Soaring skill causing disconnects.
  
• Reducing the lag Maplers have reported to experience during 2x EXP events.
  
• Created a buffer time between double miracle cube time and cube sales.
  
• Investigating all possible causes for the Event Hall lag and applying multiple changes to mitigate the lag.
  

Again, these are ongoing cases that we are working to address.

We’d like to thank you again for providing us with your feedback on how you wish to see MapleStory improve. We will continue to do our part and listen to the feedback provided by the community and provide even greater transparency through our plans we have shared with you.

- Arwoo