comfy

comfy // Ain Bishop

[comfy @xpecy1]

@ygorkzada Been working on this staff for months, your time will come 🙏

[comfy @xpecy1]

The staff that was once cursed finally hit

[comfy @xpecy1]

@ReallyBunned I want to be like HazelBun when I grow up 🤩

[comfy @xpecy1]

@kappasaan Starforce ate my money... I aimed for 17* early when only 1.5m a tap... 200m and never hit 15...

[comfy @xpecy1]

@kappasaan Trying to be like pogee!

[comfy @xpecy1]

A maybe unintended consequence after adding in Boss Essence?

[Bunned | MSU @ReallyBunned]

This also got us thinking about how differently this might have played out before Boss Essence was introduced.

Previously, you could still receive the rewards while floating in the map before the death timer removed you, which gave parties a small buffer for unusual situations like a clear and party wipe happening almost simultaneously.

Boss Essence was introduced for a good reason - to preserve boss rewards and prevent them from being spread across too many characters.

But it also seems to have removed that small buffer, creating rare edge cases where the party has no opportunity to react or leave before losing access to the rewards.

Hopefully situations like this can be considered, both for our run and as a possible edge case to address in the future.

@MaplestoryU @nexpacetime

[comfy @xpecy1]

If you prefer looking at combat power instead, here's the same thing but using 50m CP as baseline

[comfy @xpecy1]

For those looking to clear Will Hard/Normal, this shows the difference between arcane force and levels.

With lv 245 and 760 arcane force being the baseline you can see three clear things

- Arcane Force is the biggest damage increase, especially at the 990 and 1140 threshold
- Levels below 245 affect damage twice as much as levels above 245
- Hit the next tier of AF > get to 245 >>> 250 is luxury

[comfy @xpecy1]

@neonbucc New difficulty on an existing boss... that's just your Extreme Lotus suggestion lol. Good call.

[comfy @xpecy1]

https://t.co/65JcYqfr0y

NEXPACE responded, and credit where it is due: this is a real explanation, a real apology, and a real date.

The biggest line for me: Will was tuned down on purpose, because Gloom, Darknell, Verus Hilla, and Black Mage are all still coming and they did not want difficulty inflation across that pipeline. That is a defensible reason, and it existed the whole time. One paragraph like it, published three weeks ago, would have prevented this entire month. The tuning was defensible all along, and the silence around it is what cost a month of trust.

What was actually delivered:

- A top-tier difficulty on an existing boss, August 20, moved up from its original schedule. The content the top end asked for.
- Prestige elements, Boss Souls, and Androids as new reward directions, with the Guild and Style revamps carrying them later this year.
- A stated principle for Power Crystals: separate the places where entry barriers ease from the places where value must be protected, so earned value does not change "too abruptly or unpredictably."
- Inter-world reward integration by October or November

What is still open, and I say this while giving them full credit:

The leveling question. Nothing here says whether levels past 250 will matter on August 20 or for Black Mage. The people grinding today still do not know what their hours buy.
The new difficulty's rewards. Will compressed its top end into a raffle and an identical-stat title. August 20 shows whether "appropriate distinction and rewards" means something different this time.
Dates. Four bosses are named, which is more roadmap than this game has ever published, and none has a date except the one being rushed.

August 20 is the real test. Notes are words and patches are actions, so this note earns the benefit of the doubt for exactly three weeks. I hope this is the beginning of more transparency from NEXPACE.

[comfy @xpecy1]

We actually agree on nearly every point. The EXP curve is absurd, easing it was overdue, and I have no problem with 245 as a destination. I am definitely not defending a system where the only paths past 250 are paying farmers, botting, or grinding twelve hours a day.

But follow your own timeline. If lowering the boss and cutting EXP was the plan, then NEXPACE watched people run the 250 to 255 race at the old rates, knowing the finish line was moving, and said nothing. The players you are thanking MSU on behalf of did not need the racers to get burned for this to work. The same developer's note with one paragraph of notice, even a month earlier, gets you everything you like about this update without wasting anyone's time.

So that is my whole position: the destination can be right and the way people were routed there can still be wrong. And it matters going forward for exactly the reason you gave. If nobody can realistically reach 275, then either Black Mage ships below 275 or the curve gets cut again, and somebody is grinding toward the old numbers right now. They deserve to know which is coming. That's really it.

Good exchange. This is the conversation NEXPACE should be having with us.

[comfy @xpecy1]

You are right that the note mentioned adjusting levels for Will, and I will give them that. Everyone knew the level was either staying at 250 or coming down. What nobody knew was how. There is a real difference between lowering the entry gate and lowering the boss itself, because the boss's level is the damage math, and shipping Will at 245 with more HP quietly made every level past 250 worthless. Nobody read one vague line in early July and priced that in, and even now, five days after release, the actual change has never been stated anywhere.

On the ban, agreed, anyone who botted deserves it and loses the argument. I just would not stretch one ban into doubting everyone who leveled honestly.

On Black Mage: there is no schedule for four bosses. There is a four word tweet from Keith in March and nothing since, and that is kind of the whole issue. Grinding toward 270 only makes sense if Black Mage still needs 270 when it arrives, and Will needed 250 in every other version and shipped here at 245 without a word. I benefited from that change, and at 249 so did you. Neither of us can tell the next player whether their grind will hold its value, because the rules live in NEXPACE's head instead of on paper. That is all most of the frustrated players are actually asking to fix.

[comfy @xpecy1]

I hope you are right about the mid-tier engine, because that is the argument I have been making since before Will released: more players reaching endgame is the only durable base this economy gets. And the 60M math you describe is real. I am one of those players, and I am upgrading for exactly the reason you give.

Two things I would separate, though.

First, the price window. NXPC set its all-time low on July 19, four days before the update. Measured from a fresh bottom, almost anything is a pump, and measured from a week earlier the same chart reads as the worst price in the token's history landing days before release. Four-day windows prove whatever the person picking the window wants them to prove. I would not build the bull case on them, and I said the same thing to the doom side about their windows.

Second, the whale question was never about whether they can exit. You are right that they cannot, and that cuts the other way: locked-in capital that has stopped buying is not a vote of confidence, it is what Flame's post sounds like. A Dreamy Belt traded above 1.5B and last sold for 450M. That is not doom-posting, that is the current bid. The mid-tier engine you describe creates demand for cubes, starforce, and mid gear, and I agree it is working. It does not create demand at the top of the market, and the game needs both, because the top is where every seller's prices anchor.

So we mostly agree: accessibility is working and worth keeping. The missing piece is a reward structure that keeps the top end buying. That part is a design question, and it is still open.

[comfy @xpecy1]

@zZzWeedyzZz Ah like a special tier of raffles for trio clears and below? I like that, definitely a possible option!

[comfy @xpecy1]

I am a level 245 Bishop at 60M combat power, and this release put Hard Will within my reach for the first time. Under Lucid-style tuning I would have been weeks away.

The changes everyone is angry about were to my favor, but I still think the top players are right. And if you are an average player who isn't fighting Will this week, this is still about you, because the top of the market is where the price of your gear is set.

Let's start with what I wrote before Will released: I expected rewards to spread across far more clearing teams. Hard Lucid launched with 6 raffle slots per server at 500M NESO each, because NEXPACE expected one clearing team per server. Will launched with 27 slots per server, paying 250M NESO plus 250M in crystals each. It is clear they wanted more teams to clear Will, and the slot count is the proof. That part I expected. What follows is what I did not.

The tuning is where it went wrong, because it was disproportionate to the effort players had put in. Will's HP went up significantly, but the boss level came down: Hard Will is level 245 here and Normal is 240, while other versions of MapleStory run Will at 250. Damage in this game caps at 5 levels above the boss, so level 250 is all you need now, and every level past 250 that players grinded out for this fight bought them nothing. The 4th V skill update also arrived with this patch, far earlier than the original patch order. And the same patch cut the EXP needed per level above 225 by 20%.

Now look at what that did to the players who prepared for six months. The strongest parties pushed past 120M combat power and past the 988 arcane force breakpoint expecting a wall like Hard Lucid, and their clears are public: 6-man parties finishing with more than 15 minutes left on a 30 minute timer. Teams averaging around 70M cleared in the same first week. The players who grinded to 252 and 255 paid the old EXP costs aiming at a level 250 boss, and the gap they built was gone immediately. Even if the next boss comes back harder, those levels no longer set anyone apart, because reaching them is now 20% cheaper before counting the new maps and the event XP bonuses on top. And nobody knows when the next boss is coming.

Here is what the race actually paid, and this part deserves precision because some of the anger overstates it. The first 5 parties across all Worlds received two exclusive cosmetic NFTs, a Giant Spider effect and an Arachnid Stinger weapon skin, plus a First Spider Exterminator title. Exclusive cosmetics do exist. But the exclusive title has exactly the same stats as the Spider Exterminator title that every clearing party in the event period receives: All Stat +10, ATT and M.ATT +5, Boss Damage +10%. The race for the exclusive layer was over in less than 24 hours. And below those 5 parties, a 70M clear and a 140M clear are indistinguishable for the whole event: same title, same raffle odds.

And those raffle odds are already thinning. My server sits at 40 entries for the 27 reward slots, with three days still left in the first cycle. At Hard Lucid's launch, one party per server cleared and every clearer was paid the full 500M in the first window. At Will's launch, the first window is already oversubscribed, and the expected reward per entry is below 340M and falling, counting crystals at full value. The dilution that took Lucid months arrived here in week one.

To be clear about my own side of this trade: I think opening the endgame was right. Hard Lucid went from 69 weekly raffle entries in April to 479 in July because upgrades got cheaper, and Will was clearly built to continue that. More players reaching endgame is good for this game, I argued for it before Will released, and I am not walking it back.

But the question under the anger is real. If a 70M team clears the newest hard boss in week one, what is the reason to be 140M? The answer used to be at least the dojo ranking, and the weekly dojo event rewards ended with this same patch. So right now the honest answer is: nothing.

And that answer reaches every seller in the game, because the top players are the buy side of the high-end market. Who buys the pitched boss items? The players investing to be first through new content. A Dreamy Belt used to trade above 1.5B NESO. It is under 500M now. When the top stops needing to upgrade, the repricing does not stop at pitched items, it travels down through every tier of gear. You do not need to own a pitched item to feel it.

I do not think the mistake was accessibility, because the accessibility worked. The mistake is that NEXPACE compressed all of the prestige into a single flag and turned everything after it into a raffle. A prestige system needs layers that keep working after day one: a clear-time ladder, seasonal exclusives for the fastest teams, titles that record when you cleared, anything that keeps 140M meaningfully ahead of 70M in week two. This release widened the base of the game and left the peak as one race that ended in a day.

Then there is the part that turned disappointment into anger. On July 1, the developer note diagnosed the problem in NEXPACE's own words: the reward experience had been "diluted much faster than we originally intended." The same note promised "a comprehensive rebalancing of our boss and reward structures after a thorough testing and validation," aimed at "restoring the genuine fun of growing stronger and earning meaningful rewards."

Three weeks later, growing stronger is exactly what stopped mattering. Levels past 250 buy nothing. A 70M clear earns what a 140M clear earns. The note did say entry requirements for Will would be adjusted flexibly, but it never said the boss itself would ship 5 levels lower than every other version, and no note since release has explained the result. When the deal changes for your most invested players and nobody explains why, every player fills the silence with their own theory, and all of those theories are worse than any honest explanation would have been.

So NEXPACE is at a decision point, because making the game accessible and rewarding the most invested are both correct goals, and this release served only one of them. The repricing at the top is not a prediction, it is already visible, and it continues for exactly as long as releases continue in this manner. I will not guess which fix they choose, because a clear-time ladder, seasonal exclusives, or rewards that scale with performance would each do the job without taking anything away from players like me. But understand that this isn't just a few top players complaining, this is a core reward structure issue impacting every player that MUST be addressed.

[Nexo l Flame @ysky_skkk]

Since MapleStory N creators and ambassadors are barred by the terms of service from talking about the current state of MapleStory N,
I'm writing this post on their behalf.

Oh, ambassadors? Most of you probably didn't even know ambassadors existed, or who they are.
Honestly, even those ambassadors don't know what MapleStory N is. Haha.

Contrary to the main narrative creators are pushing, let me explain why you should NOT play MapleStory N right now.

It's actually simple. NXPC prices, EXP requirement relaxations, and item values are all hitting new record lows every single day.
Tomorrow will be cheaper than today, and next week will be far cheaper than tomorrow. If someone asks you to play together, push it off as long as possible.
In fact, if someone invites you to join them, I'm certain that person should be your #1 priority to avoid in life.

Next, the things they touted as differentiators from web2 KMS — reactors, dynamic pricing, NFT scarcity, RX experiences, web3-exclusive rental systems — none of it has come together properly.
They've simply delayed launches, left features abandoned, or postponed them indefinitely.
What even is web3's identity here? What would make any user pick MapleStory N over a web2 game?

The biggest issue is that the operations team acts like complete amateurs.
They have no spine. Earlier this year, when they released Lucid, they declared:

"By releasing bosses in this direction, item burn has become far larger than before, marking a turning point where NXPC inflow now outpaces outflow.
We will continue with this patch direction going forward!"

Then their actual actions were the exact opposite. They suddenly started handing out Power Crystals left and right, launched a web shop, adjusted dynamic pricing, and began helping low-spend players catch up.
What accelerated this even further was breaking completely from the original KMS patch order — handing out 3rd and 4th job skills along with common skills just to boost player power, letting 30m players ($3K invested) clear Hard Lucid, the ultimate endgame boss, right alongside 100m players ($80K invested).

As a result, everyone ended up receiving essentially the same rewards. The dev team realized this far too late, scrambling to admit their failure and apologize just three weeks before the Will boss release.
They promised a complete overhaul of boss and reward structures through rigorous testing and verification, guaranteeing both the joy of growing stronger and meaningful rewards.

Yet Will — the new boss released 5 months after Lucid — turned out to be weaker than Hard Lucid had been 5 months earlier!?
Back then, for the first few weeks, only an extremely small number of parties with over 100m combat power and fully starred 22-star gear could clear it. Now, thanks to management's coddling, even 50–60m players are clearing Will.
Players who originally only intended to run Normal end up running the exact same boss as people who invested 5 to 20 times more than them, without ever needing to invest in gear.

MapleStory N repeats its failures over and over. And then it repeats its apologies.
That's all there is to it. There's no compensation — they just tell players that the losses suffered along the way are unavoidable.

Some might say the current front-runners' gear is really just over-investment and self-satisfaction. But nothing in what MapleStory N said when releasing Hard Lucid this year, or in the developer notes before Will's release, ever framed it that way.
If anything, they actively encouraged over-gearing and gave players a goal to chase.
So the front-runners saw that and enhanced their gear, grinding hard on the strength of it.
The outcome was devastating, and it makes no sense.

If they had defined the front-runners' gear as over-investment from the start, all but a tiny handful (3-5 people) would never have bothered trying to stay ahead the way they did.
Now that most of the front-runners have finished their enhancement, it feels like the team is just trying to squeeze money out of everyone below them.

I genuinely regret starting MapleStory N. Even getting the server-first clear on Hard Will brought me zero joy. Since anyone can clear it, it gives me chills to think that if players on other servers had just prepared a little harder, a party that invested less than a twentieth of what we did could have taken the server-first clear instead of us.

If reading this makes you uncomfortable, that's just the poison NXPC has drip-fed into you.
From here on, no one is going to pay top dollar for your gear, and no whale is ever going to pay top price for newly released items again.

[comfy @xpecy1]

@zZzWeedyzZz What do you mean by that?

[comfy @xpecy1]

Full developer's note: https://t.co/6iwQLjdMZp

[comfy @xpecy1]

I think the biggest problem is the lack of transparency and genuine long term roadmap. We were told about rental coming in q1 2026 and Black Mage in 2026, but no information since. Our version has huge boss HP buffs and earlier V skills but no explanation.

Explaining why they changed enhancement costs is good, but why not explain why they are deciding to give way more power crystals, lower cost cubes, etc? I understand that the long term goal is to get more players clearing higher tier content, but the top players should not be left in the dark or feel they are upgrading pointlessly.