MapleStory Global Is Moving Away From Korean Parity Amid Controversial Changes
Back in January, a hard limit on meso earnings. Prior to that, the studio also got caught secretly manipulating cube drop rates to address the surplus of legendary gear, prompting the Korean FTC to slap them with a hefty fine.
Both instances naturally caused concern among the global community who would rather not have the changes ported over to the global version of the long-running 2D MMORPG. The good news is that the western development team won’t be making the same mistakes as their Korean counterparts.
Hanbyeol Oh, VP of Production for Nexon US, confirmed in a letter to the western community that they’ll be taking a slightly different development path. No limits will be placed on meso earnings and cube rates will remain as they are. No changes will also be made to intense power crystal prices or the spawn rates of the raid boss Ursus.
That doesn’t mean that they’ll be cooking up updates from scratch either. They’ll still be porting over content and features from the Korean version but will now be tweaking them even further with western audiences in mind.
“Over the past 20 years, we’ve seen great changes in the markets where MapleStory is serviced,” Hanbyeol said. “If we’re going to create the MapleStory that our fans are dreaming of, then simply localizing content created for [Korean MapleStory] is no longer enough. I believe that [Global MapleStory] must follow its own direction, separate from KMS.”
He notes, however, that it may take some time for western players to notice the differences between the two versions. He also acknowledges that there will be times when the western devs will miss the mark but promises that they’ll do everything they can to address any issues and continuously improve the experience.
