Hi Maplers,
We understand that there are a lot of concerns about information that was recently revealed regarding the v.246 New Age: 6th Job update. First, we would like to truly apologize for causing concern due to the lack of prior information regarding New Age’s 6th Job content. We would like to clarify the development intentions for the parts our Maplers are currently worried about, and share future plans.
6th Job Advancement: Sol Erda
As we prepared the 6th Job Advancement update, our goal was to provide motivations to our players for character growth and enhancement, as well as provide content that players would be able to use actively and flexibly, without being limited to only mobbing. We wanted to consider the appropriate daily material acquisition rate and method, taking into consideration our existing players’ behavior, while also taking into account the difficulty level where newer players wouldn’t feel like it would be too much of a hurdle. We wanted to mitigate the negative aspects to the gameplay experience such as illegal tool usage or paying for services for other players to farm that occurs as a result of having an acquisition method that was mainly focused on mobbing.
With these goals in mind, we wished to lower the burden that our players might feel regarding play time and increase the accessibility for casual players by distributing the Sol Erda Energy and the Sol Erda Fragments through the Daily Quest. Additionally, we added the daily cap because we wished to narrow the gap that depended on playtime between the hardcore players and those who could not dedicate as much time to the game. We were planning to monitor the actual acquisition time of our players, the play time, and adjust the cap as needed. We understand that seeing changes like this being shown in gameplay videos and streams without detailed context from our team has caused a lot of anger and frustration with you all. We would like to apologize to our Maplers once again, since the design intention for this part has not been explained enough in advance. Regardless of the design intentions, we understand that there are many aspects to these changes that you are understandably concerned about, so in addition to the Daily Quest that will remain, we will remove the cap and explore separate improvement measures for parts that could be harmful for the gameplay experience.
Also, we would like to share that we have no plans to release the Sol Erda Booster at the same time as the 6th Job Advancement update. We will review the progress of our players’ 6th Job Advancement and determine if and when there is a need to further augment the ways in which players can obtain Sol Erda.
Frenzy Totem
We would like to confirm that - contrary to some information being circulated in the community - Frenzy Totems were always planned to function as they normally do outside of instanced maps and that is intended to remain the same in the New Age update. There was a bug in our test server regarding this functionality and we did not properly address this situation before the information was discovered and spread within the community. As mentioned in the v.246 patch notes released yesterday, the instanced maps are provided during the New Age patch duration for the Sacred Power fields, and the way the Frenzy Totem works in these instanced fields are as follows:
- Frenzy Totem effects will only apply to the hunting map of the character that used the Frenzy Totem. The effect will disappear once the character leaves the instanced map.
We understand that this kind of communication should have come out sooner and the context for why we made these changes should have been delivered at the same time we announced them. We hope that this memo can, at the very least, give you insight into how we implement design changes to our service.
Sincerely,
Mjollnir and the MapleStory Team