How many people are REALLY still playing Maplestory?

And should we care? (Someone else brought this up but I thought it was interesting) Folks toss around population numbers and such but what if a small or large portion of remaining players are hackers/bots? Earlier this month I had actually visited one of the old school servers I used to play on and while walking through some World tour maps, I spotted a hacker/robot person. I changed channels but encountered yet another and another and a couple more after that.

People hitting entire screens worth of mobs without a matching skill is an issue that is not new and they can mostly be avoided if you know what you are doing but what about the long term effects? Is it possible that the only reason why Maple's population has not hit rock bottom is because the numbers are being kept afloat by illegitimate characters? It would explain why so many suggestions (demands?) from the community seem to fall on deaf ears. Since the players online never appears to drop below a certain threshold, the developers see no problem and therefore have no need to listen to feedback or make changes.

The A better Maple project sounded like a good idea but I see more rage about how that turned out more than almost anything else..

Meso farmers wouldn't be botting so much if there weren't enough real players to buy all the meso and items they collect.

This probably would be a more debatable topic if It focused on how many southperrians still play MS.

I'm personally only waiting for the update to Jett before I totally drop MS. I wont deny I feel like playing MS a lot of times but then I think about how ridiculously expensive it is compared to most games out there or how much freaking time it would require instead, only to get half as far as someone dropping a 1000$ during marvel machine days.

I don't think the community staff is completely out of touch with the game. Girasol clearly seemed, to some degree, to be in tune to what players want. The big problem is that they lack autonomy, meaning that for virtually every small thing they have to get approval from Korea (see: Cash Shop sharing event).

It's quite sad, the most active times for MapleStory lately are during Miracle Time events. A lot of people seem to only log in to spend money and that says a lot about the game.

Meso farmers wouldn't be botting so much if there weren't enough real players to buy all the meso and items they collect.

I had a longer reply but I like your logic better. (although to be politically correct, I would think that it would only take a few big spenders not reading the terms of service to be more than enough to encourage botting)

I don't think the community staff is completely out of touch with the game. Girasol clearly seemed, to some degree, to be in tune to what players want. The big problem is that they lack autonomy, meaning that for virtually every small thing they have to get approval from Korea (see: Cash Shop sharing event).

It seems that if they do have an ambitious member, they would realize that MapleStory/Nexon doesn't give them the freedom or recognition to do what they want so they take their talents elsewhere.

Meso farmers wouldn't be botting so much if there weren't enough real players to buy all the meso and items they collect.

A hilarious experience I came across was during the alphta test for reopening DFO. Bots started out around 13$ for 10m. Next day itw as 8$ for 10m. Day after it was 3$ for 10m. Couple days later its 1$ for 10m. Couple days after it was 1$ for 100m.

Even more hilarious was the bots were COMPETING against other bots for selling their botted mesos. They just kept undercutting each other.

i log in to afk

I get interested again every few to 6 months. Login to try out new things.

I used to be very active around 6 months ago. Now I am checking it out from time to time instead of being serious about it. It is just too hard to catch up now.

And should we care? (Someone else brought this up but I thought it was interesting) Folks toss around population numbers and such but what if a small or large portion of remaining players are hackers/bots?

I took a sample of 7000 active characters.
Over 1200 were obviously bots.

I shared this finding on the Nexon forums and was promptly permabanned and my thread was deleted.

I took a sample of 7000 active characters.
Over 1200 were obviously bots.

I shared this finding on the Nexon forums and was promptly permabanned and my thread was deleted.

You were exposing them too much. They were getting dat embarrassed feeling

You were exposing them too much. They were getting dat embarrassed feeling

It's not my fault all they want to catch is the low-hanging fruit in the FM rather than the bots out in the field that I'm placing neon signs all over pointing out their locations

After I hit level 200 2 years back, I've only been logging onto Maple every once in a while for a little while. It's just hard to keep up with all the constant updates/classes, & all the new scrolling techniques that render the previous as outdated. It's just so sad to see a game that initially required organization and team effort to train and fight bosses turn into a contest about soloing bosses and getting to 250 while 1HKOing everything on the map

It's not my fault all they want to catch is the low-hanging fruit in the FM rather than the bots out in the field that I'm placing neon signs all over pointing out their locations

But that requires them to do work =(

But that requires them to do work =(

but I'm literally doing half of their work for them.

I go on maple, fight certain bosses, talk for an hour, reset my shop and then poof. Not as grind-y compared to before but I don't play as much as I did 2-3 years ago. ^^;

Given that they must have video proof of people hacking in action, and that some players have odd/cryptic IGNs like mine (e.g. cbdccb1; yes people have asked if I'm a hacker or not), they can't freeze characters just because they have names that are very hacker-like.

Now... I came back onto Maple, but I feel rather disheartened to have to level my Shade to 150 just to get the bloody ring. Worse is that those flying orbs on the Shade are server-triggered, so each time I boss or train, I have 0.5-1 second gaps between attacks because the server sends a packet to my client saying "summon an orb to hit something". This is terribly disruptive during Zakum, and I can't quite describe my frustration here.

Hadriel

i log in to afk

I don't even understand how people can do this anymore with the ridiculous memory leaks Maplestory has.

A hilarious experience I came across was during the alphta test for reopening DFO. Bots started out around 13$ for 10m. Next day itw as 8$ for 10m. Day after it was 3$ for 10m. Couple days later its 1$ for 10m. Couple days after it was 1$ for 100m.

Even more hilarious was the bots were COMPETING against other bots for selling their botted mesos. They just kept undercutting each other.

The thing that made it even more hilarious was that there were hacks that turned people into advertising bots.
Someone would download hacks and while the hacks were running they'd spam this message advertising some Chinese farming site without even knowing it. It even tried to use the megaphones in your inventory too.

but I'm literally doing half of their work for them.

You don't know man, Nkmzbvx9 with all default kanna equipment could be a legitimate player you know.