I find GMS went down the drain for me when v62 updates were released. I detest pirates.
Wow. That's amazingly OG. I felt the same way until I played them.. they do bring some varied gameplay to the table even though they're ostensibly just graphical rehashes of other class moves. I think my largest complaint about pirates was that it was targeting the entirely wrong (imo) path.
More on topic, I've always felt that Nexon valued money much more than the player experience (which is interesting given that generally, one leads to the other). It was apparent that their code/QC processes were terrible but they didn't improve whatsoever until much later and even then I don't think it was more than a token gesture. I think Nexon knew the gameplay and community focus in the game's organizational systems were so good that those alone would keep players and they could cheap out on the player experience.
From my perspective, what really ruined the game was when the gameplay became dumbed down even further than it was already. People still played even though Nexon's community management (note: player experience) was so godawful. Their friends still played. At least with the community, there were issues that each player could solve on their own. Perhaps not in ideal ways, but they still had some means of control over their experience. The gameplay, on the other hand, is not something that you can fix or modify. You can pick different classes, but you can't change how they work.
Before the gameplay was dumbed down, people would complain that the gameplay is "just a pot spam anyway" or "you have to grind for so long to get anything worthwhile" and I really feel those were strengths. I'm not saying there's an amazing tapestry of gameplay at work, but I think Nexon (in this context, I mean the people behind the 3rd and 4th job stuff, not necessarily Nexon America) fell backward into something that felt really good to play - there were tons of micro decisions to be made and they did determine whether you lived or died.
There were immediate consequences for the failure to make correct decisions (although it was much too severe - 10% EXP back in the day was a brutal punishment) and long-term consequences of your decision-making in the form of economy. You could just hit the potion key after every hit, but then you'd be hurting your ability to participate in the economy. So it was always a tension between getting EXP immediately and having the money to buy the things you wanted which led to better EXP as well. I think this was an unintentionally powerful tension.
Having an essentially unattainable goal of level 200 (the "impossible grinding") also was unintentionally powerful, I feel. It shifted the focus for me from competing with other players (although that was still an entirely viable way to play the game) to more of competing with myself. You had to put in a lot of effort to be successful and it felt good to be high level and since 200 was essentially out of reach, it was something of a test to see what you were made of. I can definitely see the pros and cons in this, but to me, it really defined the feel of the game.
So when the new classes started being released and outmoded everything that came before as a final duck you to the players that had invested so much effort, I was really unhappy with all of it. The balance of the game is so important and they did
not think any of them through very well. That could've been fixed or repaired. I feel it was expressive of the fact that Nexon cared more about new business than existing relationships.
The ultimate end of what the game used to be came from the offensively-titled Big Bang patch. The hubris in telling all the veteran players that the birth of the Maple universe came in that patch. That patch took an entirely different direction. You had more HP, monsters did less damage, you got potions a lot more, made the EXP go much faster, and reduced the amount you needed. So essentially, it amounts to Maple EasyMode. Now the people that were paying for leech and complaining about how the game was too hard were heard and then... still paid for leech. Big surprise.
What this did was completely 180 on the soul of what the game was. What made it good, what made it bad. This was a different game. You might've liked it better, you might not have liked it as much, but you can't argue that they completely exploded the old meta and formed a new meta. Whenever you reinvent yourself that hard, that either shows you that you did it wrong originally or you lost your way.
I tried playing that patch for about an hour and I had never been so bored in my life. Waiting in doctors' offices was more interesting. Mowing lawns was more interesting. Walking around in the middle of nowhere was more interesting. I couldn't do it. I did not like the new game. So I quit right then and I haven't played since.
For me, that's the culmination of where they went wrong in order to lose me. The extreme focus on new business that lead to the decisions that shortchanged the community, destroyed what the game was, and ushered in a new game that was specifically designed for that purpose.
