Ideas for Maplestory Classic, taken from Artale.

Last year, North America received Maplestory Worlds Artale, a fanmade version of classic Maplestory with many quality of life updates.

While Artale's reputation has declined since earlier this year, there are lots of ideas from I'd like to import from Artale. Besides skill changes of course. What are some quality of life changes Classic could borrow from Artale's playbook?

1. Auction House. Let's start with the giant elephant in the room arguably the most polarizing debates of classic Maplestory. On one hand, many people don't find this authentic because back in the day, CH1 FM spamming was the way to go. Then we later introduced Store Permits which caused people to fight for early room spots. Or some traded on forums like BasilMarket. On the other hand, people just don't have the time in the world to search up the best offers for items. Just look at Old School Runescape. The same concerns were met when the Grand Exchange was proposed. For its first two years, this idea was heavily disliked. Then Jagex effectively manipulated the questions of polls so players would support this idea. Guess what? Since that day, almost everybody prefers the GE. And you know what's funny? OSRS player-to-player trading was way more organized back in the day. Certain areas had certain markets for items like Fally for ores/bars. While in Maplestory, we never had specific FM portals for specific items. In the modern world, the Auction House is a huge addition. Let's not forget that Maplestory did have Maple Trade System, an item-to-NX trading system. While the official Auction House didn't come until ~late-2013, MTS was very similar. I think the Auction House can benefit the economy. Not only does it provide a massive meso sink of 5% tax per item for the convenience but also makes obscure items like Zombie dolls for a quest relevant. Maybe Nexon can monetize this auction house by selling more total slots or buy limits per day. I can make an entire thread about the Auction House.

2. Limited monetization. Monetization and Nexon have always been a glove and hand for many years. No matter the era, whether it's 2005, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2019, or even 2025, there's a lot of overpowered pay to win NX. Even back in the day we had HP washing but that wasn't the worst part of it. Gachapons that yielded items like Pink Adventurer Cape, Racoon Masks, Brown Work Gloves, Chaos Scrolls, etc. Then you had double XP coupons that also increased training speed. I believe Vicious Hammers were also added as well, which allowed for more scroll slots. Meso bags were also added. What did Artale monetize? Mostly quality of life items like pets, VIP teleport rocks, raid tickets, death charms, inventory bags, etc. Alongside cosmetic items. However, Artale is run by what 10 developers compared to an entire company so it's easier to pay salaries. Inevitably, we'll see lot of monetization and that's fine. It's just we can't go back to 2009 days of monetization because you bet it'll cause a huge wealth gap and people who don't swipe are left in the dust. As long as we limit this mostly to cosmetics and quality of life, I'm good with it.

3. Tradable Cash Shop Items. Which brings me to my next point. In the original classic Maplestory, Cash Shop items were not tradable. Instead, you had to rely on gifting it to another player's wishlist then hoping they will give you the mesos. This lead to a lot of NX scams. I remember the countless amount of BasilMarket threads. Even high level players scammed noobs that had the real money. Thankfully, Artale made these items tradable and sellable to Auction House. In doing so, swipers can conveniently turn their real money into mesos. And because every Auction House trade had a 5% tax, this gave a nice bit of meso sink. Think Runescape Bonds. They help the in-game economy but also provide a free player an option to access premium items. This is how I was able to progressive adequately in Artale without paying a cent.

4. Easier Looting. In Artale, you don't press Z to loot. Instead, your character will automatically pick up the monster drops as you walk over them (provided you dealt 50% or more damage). Does that mean pets are useless? Nope. In fact, the base radius is so tiny that a pet makes it at least 3x the size so effectively you loot everything without even trying. Obviously, this can be a bit too much of an easy mode so we'll have to come up with a compromise. On the other hand, OG Classic's looting system was too slow and inefficient. You probably spent more on potions for those added few seconds of touch damage while looting the drops than just not looting, on top of slower kill speeds which worsened level speeds. A vac pet would've just looted this automatically without you walking over. However, we need to bridge the gap between non-pet and pet owners. A good compromise would be to make it so a press of the Z key loots much faster while a pet would greatly increase the loot radius of Z key. This also allows for drop parties. Speaking of which, items dropped by players do not get the additional radius or faster loot to balance this out.

5. Anti-griefing. A lot of the issues OSMS players have accepted back in the day was griefing. Griefing as in stealing a map or summoning a powerful monster pouch to kill a player. Did you know that in Artale, this is actually a bannable offense? Now it's hard to really define who has establishment of a map or what the purpose of summoning that pouch was but I'm sure Nexon might be able to come up with a criteria? We don't want a system that lets trolls do whatever the heck they want without any accountability. We need a system that prevents or mitigates their gain. I'm not sure of any real solution. Maybe summoning sacks only allowed in non-town areas? Or create more instanced mini dungeons at a meso cost per hour where only invited party members can join?

6. Bounty for reporting bots. Because Artale was (and probably still is) overrun by bots, the developers were unable to catch most of it. Instead, they gave players incentives for catching bots themselves. For each bot you successfully reported, you were given 3 untradable VIP Teleport Rocks. Only the first player to successfully report the bot was credited. Now it may seem like it means less revenue for Nexon because they're giving away NX items for free. However, keep in mind that spotting then banning a bot takes up labor time and costs resources. So if they counted on passionate players to do this and rewarded them, it's a win-win.

7. Potions per Stack. In the original Maplestory, many potions (and ETC items) had a maximum stack of only ~100 or 150 per slot. The pills had more, which made them the preferred choice. In Artale, every item has a max stack of 9,990. That means that if you have auto HP/MP with pets, you can just use Blue Potions that heal only 100 MP. With HP pots you can't really use that tech unless you take very little damage because pets can only auto HP every ~2 seconds. On one hand, a good reason to support this is because a lot of monsters drop lower end potions. This higher stack makes the lower end potions more useful. On the other hand, this makes higher leveled potions less useful and also means less revenue for Nexon. A good compromise would be to allow all potions to have a base stack of 1,000 per slot. For pills or higher end potions, this can be bumped up to 3,000. And if they want to make more revenue, maybe selling max stack per slot buffs by 1% for NX wouldn't be a bad monetization.

8. Gendered Gear. In Artale, both genders can wear either equipment. For example, a red Sauna Robe was only equippable by female characters. In Artale, both genders can equip either Blue or Red Sauna robes. I never liked the idea of limiting gender options. I mean why in Runescape are males allowed to wear Rune Plateskirt? Also, this helps the economy and liquidity. It makes it so both sauna robes retain their value instead of reliant on how many use their character as male or female.

Overall, Artale has had its reputation hampered but there are a lot of cool ideas that Classic Worlds use. What are some other Artale ideas we could include as well?