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I'll be upfront here and say that a part of my intentions for making this post is to spread awareness regarding major issues that myself and others are facing right now. I don't want to come across as just writing a spam post, I genuinely want to get an outside impression of the situation here. Currently the situation is that one of my childhood games, a long time standing and incredibly unique MMORPG Maplestory is in extreme shambles due to many major controversies caused by the developer and publisher Nexon. I'll try to be brief with my explanations of the situation as all of the reddit thread links will have a more detailed description of the events I'm talking about. During 2020 through Q1 2021 there was a major scandal in the game's home region of Korea (referred to as KMS, Korean MapleStory) where rng gear enhancement items, called cubes and flames, were not functioning as they should have and had their rng rates rigged against certain outcomes. This information was only found out after months of data mining and testing by players, at which point spurred a mass exodus of players to another popular game at the time, Lost Ark. This reflected in the stock price of Nexon tanking during Q1 2021 as KMS makes up a large majority of revenue for Nexon according to their released quarterly earnings report. This leads us to now. In response to this, Nexon reorganized their internal development teams and cut a large amount of support from other regional teams in favor of KMS to try and retain their playerbase in an emergency situation. This reflected after months due to increasing server stability issues that would be considered game breaking bugs by any other playerbase, constant server wide crashes and only a handful of playable channels that didn't have extremely high server sided delay, I can say from firsthand that despite only living in the US east coast and connecting to servers in California it felt like I was playing on a game server hosted in the Philippines with 200-300 ping. Whenever these issues happened, such as the daily server crashes the entire week of Black Friday this past holiday, it took days or sometimes weeks for these issues to even be acknowledged. Contrasted with KMS that has perfectly stable servers, and if they ever do have issues they are brought down and fixed within an hour, and a lengthy apology with ingame compensation is issued. Many Korean players have even shared their thoughts after trying to play on the global servers (NA). In response to these and many many other grievances that Global MapleStory (GMS) players are facing, the community has banded together and formed a boycott against Nexon until demands are met and things change. In all actuality the demands are reasonable and what would be considered standard for a game company in this day and age. A short list of these demands paraphrased from one of the reddit threads on the issues is a follows: Fixing and promptly addressing server instability Fully revealing the rates of RNG enhancement items, especially those purchasable with real money Content roadmap for upcoming patches, due to lack of promised communication and transparency on Nexon's part Promptly addressing and fixing game breaking bugs that appear almost every patch, some of which have been ingame for literal years Proper compensation for players affected by the Dutch anti-gambling laws and Nexon's poor response to it Immediate addressing and fixing of the Nexon America account theft exploits due to poor player security and account recovery policies in place for their customer support team Nexon has currently addressed some of the issues yet general player consensus regarding this is still lackluster. Claims from unnamed Nexon employees on two occasions, here and here, have added validity to the idea that Nexon America is simply a publisher and has very little of any say in some of these issues. This memo proves nothing as all previous claims for the past few years, even from senior employees, have proved to be just words. The community concensus will be that we will still continue to vote with our wallets and make all attempts to have our demands met by PR pressure as well. It is often said that those who complain the most do so because they love the game the most, and in this case I believe that to be true. Many of us grew up playing this game, a few years ago in a community event stream Nexon mentioned that the average age of a player's account is 7 years old. We love this game and hate seeing it in such a sorry state, and we know Nexon has the resources and capital to make these changes. We want this game to be better because we want it to succeed, and we know it can. That all being said, what are your guys thoughts on the situation? I want to know how you feel about this, whether you're someone who has never heard of the game before or a veteran like myself. If you made it this far I sincerely thank you for taking the time to listen to my abridged explanation of the current situation and if you at all are interested in learning more, please take a minute to read/watch the videos and reddit threads I linked to, they will go into much further detail than I ever could, and please help us spread awareness of these issues if you can. The only way change will happen at this point is if Nexon is pressured enough to do so.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/BoycottSteamWorkshop Some of the reason this is bad is Only 25% of the revenue goes to content creators Small mods being charge money (basically new microtransactions) No quality control on valves part (Remember Early Access?) The state that it's in is terrible. I'm going to boycott it and so should you! Small mods being costing more then their worth