Note: This Producer Blog was originally posted on the MapleStory 2 Website on Friday, September 21st.

Dear Maplers,

This is MapleStory 2 Producer, LAMBCOOK. I'm going to take a stab at the ultimate question of the day "How will MapleStory 2 make money?"

Perhaps that question isn't what you wanted to ask. You might be wondering "Is this game going to be Pay-to-Win?", "What can I buy with my Merets?" or more importantly....

"How can I get a Mint Body Pillow in the game?"



I assure you that most of the answers to those questions actually relate to the answer to the big question: "How will MapleStory 2 make money?"

First, I need to let you know what we are trying to do. We're working really hard to make MapleStory 2 the right free-to-play game for most people. We know we can't make every single person happy with every one of our choices because at the end of the day, the purest form of a "Free-to-Play" game would be a "Free" game. Because we're striving to offer you the best game experience with MapleStory 2, we need ongoing financial support of the game as well.

So how will MapleStory 2 make money? Short answer, with STYLE.

Here's what we've already covered regarding what we are NOT selling:

• We're not going to sell outfits that have stats
• We're not going to sell Lumistones that increase the stats on outfits
• We're disabling Meret Revival, so there is no buying your way to victory

Instead, we'll be offering many ways to style up your character or offer convenience items:

• Premium Shop: Direct sales of various cosmetic and convenience items
• Premium Club: Premium service with a wide array of benefits
• Design Shop: Direct sales of player-designed cosmetic items
• Style Crate: Random redemption of various outfit items

Premium Shop is where we will have a huge catalog of cosmetic items spanning from sunglasses to a bear mount that carries you in her bare arms. You can try out any outfit to see how it looks before buying, and you don't have to worry about getting the wrong sizes! Neat, right?



There also are myriads of convenience options offered in and out of the Premium Shop. The Premium Shop has items like Guild Summon Scrolls, which allows you to summon online guild mates to your location. And outside of the Premium Shop you will have additional options, such as buying channel or world chats from the chat menu.

Premium Club is what its name says, a service packed with a large number of convenience features. One of my favorite benefits is the unlimited Rotors Walkie-Talkie, which allows you to go to any town you've already visited without paying a single meso. It's not just members who get the benefit of Premium Club either: If you party up with a Premium Club member, you also get a slight (5%) boost to your move speed too.

Design Shop is where you can buy items that other players have carefully designed for you. We're already seeing lots of unique costumes we couldn't come up with ourselves in the Design Shop, and we're really excited to see what players will come up with next! There are more than 100 design templates available to work with. We treat Design Shop as a platform where getting started as a designer will cost you some initial setup fees (like buying the templates and listing fees), as well as a flat percentage fee from revenue you make, but the rest of the proceeds go to you so that you can design more costumes or buy other things from the Premium Shop!

In addition to direct sales of many cosmetic items, our Premium Shop will be selling the Style Crate for 300 Merets when MapleStory 2 launches. While this is a loot box, we are taking a much more transparent approach to this type of item. Each Style Crate contains 1 random outfit piece out of 100 outfit items. Each item has the same 1% chance of appearing. We will disclose all 100 items in each crate and update the list regularly. We'll be curating the Style Crate to ensure that it has a selection of adorable, cool or quirky outfits you can use to complete a set or mix-and-match to create your own, unique one-of-a-kind looks.

In case you don't get an item you like, fear not! You can recycle the ones you don't want into special coins that you can redeem towards other vanity items or rare outfits only available through the Style Crate Coin Shop.

We really believe that MapleStory 2's unique look and style with an amazing variety of cosmetics makes it possible to go this route. It's just so irresistibly cute!



Point being, none of these outfits are a required part of your journey in the game. They are pretty awesome to look at, and that's what we're banking on. If we've done this right, the added benefit of this direction will be that we can focus on making the game fair and balanced better for every player. And did we mention that all cosmetic items you get from Premium Shop, Design Shop, and Style Crate are permanent?

As a final note, please know that things are always subject to change based on your feedback and data. We and the MapleStory 2 development team are working day and night to figure out the best ways to implement your suggestions and incorporate them for Official Launch. Thank you all for your patronage and I can't wait to share more details with you soon.

MapleStory 2 Producer,
- LAMBCOOK

P.S. Dungeon Revival Removal: A little more on this for those who are interested. While we are removing the Meret revival system, we think that some players may have been using this system for its rightful purpose, as a failsafe system for those who'd like additional chances. As such, we'll be looking into adding more free "safe revival" or "meso revival" options for dungeons while balancing the difficulties appropriate to amount of available failsafe options. We're eager to listen to how these changes feel once we launch, so keep your suggestions coming!

P.P.S. Why sell EXP Tonics for Mushking Royale?: With the Gold Royale Pass Bundle and EXP Tonic getting added to the game, we're hearing some concerns from players. The original intent of the bundle and EXP Tonics for sale was to give an option for players who don't have enough time to get to max level before Head Start and obtain all of the limited time unique vanity items included. As explained above, style is our game and we'd like to offer enough options for everyone to obtain them.

Note: This Producer Blog was originally released on the MapleStory 2 website on Monday, August 13th.



Hey Maplers!

This is Nimei, one of your producers for MapleStory 2. This is my first time writing a Producer Blog for this game, and I get to discuss one of the toughest and hottest topics during the Closed Betas: how we will be setting up the region servers in North America.

During Closed Beta 1, when we were originally deciding where the servers should be placed, we had set them right in the middle of the United States. Our original goal was to have one regional North American server that players from Los Angeles to New York could use to congregate and play together. Unfortunately, there was an issue with this idea: lag. With the servers set up in the middle of the US, players who weren't near the servers were experiencing serious latency issues. This included lag when using skills, picking up items, or even dodging damage from bosses. As a raider myself, I could see that the lag was noticeable enough to ruin a party's progress in dungeons and raids.

With the amount of feedback that we received from Closed Beta 1, we decided we had to run a second Closed Beta in order to, among other things, run a few more latency tests before deciding how we should set up our servers.

If you can imagine that the servers act as a WiFi signal, placement of the servers is key. If you place a server in the corner of your house, it may not reach the opposite corner. We had to strategically place them so that the entire area is covered, and North America (US and Canada primarily) is pretty big, with major cities on both coasts.

During Closed Beta 2, we decided to introduce an additional region server giving North American players the choice of which server they wanted to play in. This method improved latency, but divided the player base in North America. We also explored having special cross-server channels which would act as a "WiFi" extender: one main central server, but with different channels dedicated to each region. That way, players could pick and choose which channel they wanted to play in based on their latency, but would still be able to play with friends across the country.

Now that the second beta test has ended, our three main findings are:

• The increased latency caused by those playing far away from their region's servers had a significant enough impact on enjoying MapleStory 2, making a single region located in the center of the continent impractical.
• While it does end up splitting the North American players into two groups, having a North America West and East region greatly improved overall latency and player enjoyment.
• Having one central server with channels in different regions was a good idea in concept, but test results show otherwise. Across the three scenarios, this simulation generated the worst results. There were a large number of disconnections and longer loading times when playing, as well as multiple back-end issues that, while not apparent at first, would significantly impact long-term server stability.

After running through multiple test scenarios to ensure that we laid the right foundations for MapleStory 2, we decided to keep the North America East and North America West regions since stability is one of the most important factors we have to consider for an MMO. Overall, it was critical for us to provide the best possible service, and that means setting a stable foundation with a stable network.

Thank you for sticking with us as we work on improving MapleStory 2, and keep an eye out for more Producer Blogs to come!

- Nimei