General

@readers: I see. So this would force people to use other means to buy certain things, and they may have to spend mesos over a course of a few days to get everything they desire. Thank you for the information.

@wellness: "Due to the nature of Maple Points some things cannot be bought such as certain items limited to Prepaid and Marvel Machine."
+ there is supposedly a limit on transactions - 5 per day, maximum of 5 billion mesos spent or received each day as limit is 1 billion per transaction. This gives these technically illegal transactions an advantage over the Meso Market especially if you're dealing in larger quantities of NX.

@darksword: These are the types things that make you wonder. Is there an inability for them to fix these issues or are they not trying due to lack of a foreseeable future? It's the type of question I would ask.

What is it about the black market deals which make them a competitive option?

Lets address it one by one.
---
Maple Point Tickets in general:

Maple Point Tickets to be used for the Mesos Market provides an area of coverage for legitimate mesos to Maple Points to trade.

It can't complete against the black market trades via code or gift, but it is a safer option. Due to the nature of Maple Points some things cannot be bought such as certain items limited to Prepaid and Marvel Machine.

In short, it's a step in the right direction.
---
The mesos market will be hurt regardless. If Nexon wants to stop bots, they have to target the source. The hacks themselves and those who are supplying them.
---
The reason why Nexon doesn't make as money as they could for MapleStory is the lack of pushing the game forward to truly cater the players of the current MapleStory.

Things such as revising content to make the rewards more worth, or reducing the damage ranges between free-to-play and pay-to-win in non-Reboot servers, keeping connected with the community by dealing with their scrutiny but not punishing them, and of course putting suggestions into reality.

The fact that we have similar bugs re-occurring in patches, patches where after it being tested bugs somehow reaches to the live game, and hackers/bottings to continue destroying the game simply shows the state of the game. Complete instability. Nexon can claim that they've done their efforts to contain any value, but at the end of the day, many players sees the lenses of, "there's still issues with the game", without knowing what's actually going on due to the lack of transparency.

And that's only the surface of the issues with MapleStory.

@beefly: I'm not so self-centered as to think the game will shut down because I quit.

Also, there are other elements to consider about the pay2win which has persisted, but you know, that isn't related to my questions.

@wellness: I was supporting what @littletlk was saying, just because you quit doesn't mean the game is doomed to shut down any minute. If anything I think 5th Job helped increase population for awhile. When I quit at Tempest I thought "maple is dead" but by then everyone was praising LHC anyways. I probably said that because me, my friends, and my guildies all quit around this time, in fact I actually stuck around because of PvP. It's good to have an open mind about this.

Whenever MapleStory appears on a place being viewed often such as Youtube or r/all, people who already quit complain how massively pay2win it was, and probably more so currently, unaware that now you can get cubes without NX compared to back at BigBang/Chaos where NX was the only option to cube. Players who run into these comments will think "gee if maple is so pay2win back then, and if its even more so now I don't wanna touch this game!" and they end up misinformed.

@beefly: I understand your analogy. At this point, I want you to explain which questions would be outdated. That's what my focus is on.

@wellness: Would you believe what a person says about something important if he has no new information in the previous years? He doesn't know what changed, worse he may assume it's all the same. All he can talk about is the history of it up until the point where he stopped gathering information.

It's like reading an old science book, it has outdated information and maybe even wrong information (ex: GRIDS).

@beefly: I think your analogy needs expansion, but I think I get it.

Still, I'm not sure how it is relevant to this post, so I need you to explain which questions this relates to and why.

@wellness: If there was 1 acre of forest left, and by then everyone decided to not cut down that forest to the point where it's not a concern. if I brought up "we should stop cutting down this acre of forest", then people would think I don't follow current events.

@loxiona: At least it isn't rng.
@beefly: I don't really follow your reasoning.

@wellness: You can't ask too many questions because you are outdated on what Nexon has already answered, such as the effect of Reward Points on gameplay. Or even the effect of Meso Market if it takes off.

@wellness blade and soul isn't as bad as maplestory, but it's still pretty p2w. They have events similar to marvel occasionally.

The currency exchange system appears to be working well in that game and I wouldn't be surprised if the korean company NCsoft is making pretty good money from it. Maybe it even caught the eye of Nexon

@littletlk: I don't know. There are multiple reasons why people may be turned off. For instance, there is a stigma behind pay2win outside of Maplestory and the psychology that's involved in rng items, and Nexon is still notorious for having promoted that type of microtransaction system. Also, lag and bugs -- and other games with appealing business models and more content. I don't think it's just because people are saying it is or could be dying.

On the other hand, given the chance that people would be turned off from playing because of these types of posts, I don't see any problem with that since it's their decision to make. I'm just asking questions about this specific game item; this questioning can help people to make informed decisions and have a healthy gaming experience, and there is no attack component to it. I'm not forcing people to jump off a cliff. I should be able to ask them at any time as a natural right, as they may choose to ignore me.

Even though I'm not playing the game right now, I can still look into it and ask questions or share some other knowledge related to gaming in general.

Also, consider: if Maplestory shuts down, then perhaps it deserves to. There are a lot of games out there where people actually whine and attack the company and they game is still running strongly.

@genostigma: Great point. This is true -- it makes it less dangerous to buy and sell nx -- though since this comes after years of people being scammed and banned for buying/seling nx, perhaps it isn't exactly the reason. I feel like they would have added it already. Perhaps it's a way for them to try and mimic the success of Reboot in the normal servers and have hybrid Reboot/normal pay2win servers that will give them money -- because you still need someone to go out and buy nx for the tickets. It definitely increase the quality of life of some of the current rich players who want to make legitimate nx transactions and anyone who wants easy legitimate mesos, though.

@wellness:
Do you think, that just MAYBE, people like you parroting this idea that Maplestory is "dead" are turning off new players and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? And that because you DON'T play, you are helping to ruin something for other people by being overly cynical and negative?

I am absolutely tired of this hipster attitude so many have about Maple. It's "cool" and "trendy" to hate on the game and talk about how it sucks and it's dead. And this all comes from people who don't even play the damn game.

@loxiona: I see, I see. I don't know much about that game. Does Blade and Soul have the same amount of RNG items and farming scheme also? What else is important?

tbh I think they're just copying what other mmo's have done (Blade and soul). The currency exchange system on that game works almost the same way.

@genostigma: what if you want to marvel?

New maple point tickets will surely reduce the scams inside the game. Instead of buying Nx codes (in-game) and risk getting scammed...hey wait there's Maple Pts selling for the same rate! Risk free baby!

@beefly: Oh, okay.

By old events, I mean the constant 2x, marvel machine, hot week, maple leaf high, etc.

The point with the 6 month thing is that since it's a normal 6 month lag, that's how long we'll wait to see if they're dishing out updates after each major one. I don't know the current cycle, though. They could have a backlog of updates they've already worked on and are just waiting to release.

@wellness: When i said updates i mean any updates including filler updates and events. BMS and VMS literally had no patches that added anything, i don't think they even had bug fixes.

Also maple has recycled old events since its second year with holidays. I wish they recycled old events like Visitor or Agent.

6 month lag is nothing new in fact it's been like that since pre-bb. The fastest they did was RA which is a huge surprise to everyone, but otherwise a 6 month gap between GMS and KMS is totally normal, especially if GMS is waiting for the holidays like summer break.

@beefly: Who knows. They're also recycling old events. And given there is a base 6 month lag in major updates,
we'll have to wait months after each update to see. *edited for clarity

@wellness: Well BMS and VMS barely had any new updates before they got shutdown, so I'm pretty sure GMS is far from dead.

EMS is a weirdo, and technically still exists.

@beefly: When Nexon still had DFO, they gave only a 1 or 2 month announcement before the close, and all of the same signs are happening in Maplestory (unfixed bugs, lag, money-grab items). The difference is in the amount of the updates. Maplestory so far is being updated consistently despite the seemingly unchanged quality of life state of the game.

Nexon America support is also still lackluster.

@rachelll: What he said must be what I was referring to when I said "I think they are talking about KMS." Since the article I saw said the same thing about "best 2015 blah blah" and then talked about Korea and China. Here's the source I found.

https://mmos.com/editorials/most-profitable-mmos-mmorpgs

It mentioned DFO's success, so yeah, definitely NOT excluding the East.

@horsechub We're talking about ONLY Global Maplestory and Nexon America. Did you make sure the source you read wasn't including ALL Maplestory versions or the wrong version like KMS? Just because one version is successful doesn't mean another versions won't shut down otherwise Nexon NA would still have DFO.

@rachelll: Thank you for the interesting numbers. I suppose you can say Nexon has shown us they're more of a company first than a game-maker.
@beefly: I don't know Nexon's perspective on this, but I don't think they will necessarily care about regional availability if it isn't popular or profitable enough.
@horsechub: I don't see how the first part is important. For the last part, that could be a reason and benefit, but there are also other reasoning and questions -- like the ones I considered, which could make it more of a way to try to profit. It should be considered due to the timing of release and how they neglected anything like this after the MTS debacle. It can be abused just the same.

@horsechub: Where are you getting those numbers? The most recent yearly financial report they posted showed something way different than you indicated for NexonNA
https://puu.sh/urKQ9/f2a9482835.png

Revenue=/=profit

2016 Full Year Financial Report:
http://pdf.irpocket.com/C3659/Wc5N/uNV2/OfrG.pdf
(Page 6-7 for summary of each region)

2015 Full year Financial Report:
http://pdf.irpocket.com/C3659/TM54/vTJS/D1UX.pdf
(Page 5-6 for summary of each region)

They're killing it in Asia but are dying in Western markets

@wellness: "I don't play the game anymore"

>Proceeds to comment on the current state of the game.

This game isn't dying anytime soon. They make so much money. SO much. They profited $253M in 2015 and they're still in the top 10 most profitable mmos. This doesn't mean they made $253M, this means on top of literally all their expenses, this was EXTRA. Their numbers aren't even going down so relax.

Anyway, this is just to combat the selling of nx that already exists in the game through skeevy methods and legitimizes it and makes it easier for most people.

@rachelll: I hear it's MapleStory.. but I think they [any news source I googled] are talking about KMS.

Perhaps the decrease in population in maple isn't as damaging to profits because before it was probably lots of people spending a decent amount of cash. Now it's fewer people spending lots of it. Before it was a bunch of 12 year olds with no money, those who stayed grown up and got a job.

@beefly: Nope, but it would make a lot of sense for maple to be the most profitable or at least the one with the least loss. It's hard to imagine only 1 or 2 games being the reason for a segmented loss of $40 million USD over a year though

It's not so much that I believe that maple is going to close but Nexon America is a business and the goal of a business is to make money

@rachelll: Do you know what is Nexon America's most profitable game for 2016?

@wellness: Even if the game is dying it's the only MapleStory available for the West now. I don't think GMS will close otherwise the West will no longer have access to any with the exception of Australia with MSEA. KMS, JMS, and CMS are doing just fine these days, I'm sure KMS is just kind of letting GMS live because it's potential player base is half of the world.

@littletlk: Well, there's no denying that Nexon America is hemorrhaging money (hopefully tomorrow's Q1 financial release will show a turnaround) and there's a significant YoY decline in players

@littletlk: Well, that's my personal opinion, but the thing is they can keep the game open even if it's essentially dead. So it's more of a question of when the game will hit rock bottom and if it already has. I don't think they're putting many resources into it. The Maple point coupons can be something for the players, but it can also be seen as a last-ditch money-grab thing since you have these botters which decrease the value of mesos already -- and there are still botters everywhere -- and they aren't focusing on fixing a lot of the bugs (like ranking pictures). These are questions that can be important if you want to make a decision to buy them or not.

Getting kinda fed up with people like you who seem to insinuate that the game is close to closing any second.

I hope it helps, as somebody who doesn't spend any real life dollars on this game.
Honestly, though most players, who don't go against ToS, won't be able to purchase much points due to the rate at which mesos sell for.
It would cost well above 400-500m per 1k maple points if you take into consideration the meso rate, so until something happens with the stupidly high amount of mesos that are in the game it will most likely be one giant poop show.