After a 2-year wait, the Web3 version of "MapleStory" officially launched yesterday. This is the biggest blockchain game ever, and "Have you gone to the island?" became one of the hottest topics yesterday. After the official launch at 6 PM last night, the servers were immediately full, and some players seemed to encounter issues with not receiving verification codes during the new user registration due to the influx of new players.
The in-game currency $NXPC was launched simultaneously on multiple exchanges including Binance, Bybit, Bitget, Upbit, and Bithumb during the TGE, with the current price at $2.87 and a circulating market cap of $483 million.
How to start the game? What is the gaming experience and gold farming yield like? After personally experiencing and gathering information, I will summarize it for you in this article.
For more background details about the game, you can refer to:
Starting the Game
Go to the official website, click on Game Start in the upper right corner, and you will be asked to connect your MetaMask wallet. Please keep your mnemonic phrase safe!
If you have not registered an account before, you will need to register an account using your email. Then install the downloader and wait for the game to download and install before you can enter the game. After that, logging in is also done by clicking the Game Start button on this page to launch the launcher, without needing to log in within the game.
Gaming Experience
In the Web3 version of MapleStory, players can only choose from the early versions of the adventurer classes (i.e., Warrior, Thief, Mage, Archer, and Pirate). Old players may feel this is akin to the pre-V077 version before the introduction of the God of War class, but in reality, the game content including skills, maps, quests, and other aspects like UI are not much different from the current Web2 version.
Nevertheless, due to the significant changes in the economic mechanism and the GameFi characteristics of Web3, the overall gaming experience has seen substantial differences in various aspects.
When creating a character, players cannot input their own character names; the system will randomly generate a string of letters as a temporary character name. The name cannot be changed until the character is minted on-chain as an NFT, and the condition for minting is that the character must reach level 65 (although the level requirement is only 60, another requirement is to defeat "Bat Demon Balrog," which requires at least level 65 to challenge).
So when I first entered the game, a bunch of English names were chasing after the green snails, and I couldn't catch up at all… It took me a lot of effort to drop 5 green snail shells, and I couldn't even see other players… I entered the server relatively early, and the screenshots I took weren't impressive enough, so I borrowed some screenshots from other players I saw in the WeChat group:
The early leveling process in the game has been significantly simplified. After completing this task, you go directly to the classic "Pearl Harbor map."
Then you will be asked which first job you want to choose, and after making your selection, the system will automatically raise your level to 10 and teleport you to the job change point for the job change.
Then you will go to Henesys to complete a series of simple monster-killing tasks. After finishing, regardless of your level, you will be directly raised to level 30 and teleported to the job change point for the second job change. After this, you will follow the guide to complete themed dungeons, and only before the third job change at level 60 will there be a small segment where you need to take on quests and level up by killing monsters.
In the game, monsters usually drop in-game currency $NESO and potions. The drop rate for NFT items is currently very low; in my over 4 hours of gameplay, I only dropped 2 lottery tickets. There is no longer a gold shop for buying potions, but you don't need to worry about running out of potions, as monster drops are plentiful and will gradually drop more efficient potions based on your level.
You can quickly check what equipment can drop in the current map. As you can see, the current drop quantity for accessories is very low, and the drop rate is naturally very low.
Another way to obtain powerful weapon equipment is by defeating bosses. In the Web3 version, defeating a boss does not directly drop equipment; instead, it is equivalent to obtaining a "lottery ticket," which means you need to defeat bosses daily and roll for equipment with players from the entire server.
I completed the kill of the easy difficulty Zakum, but only rolled $NESO and did not obtain the Zakum helmet.
From the above image, you can also see that the game has done some localization, but the completion level of this localization can be described as "crippled"…
Overall, being able to play a childhood game in my industry is truly moving, but there are still many areas for improvement in the experience, such as better multilingual support including localization, and improved new player guidance. Due to the significant changes in the drop mechanism, I hope that interesting Web3 version exclusive events can be introduced in the future, but that's a bit far-fetched since the game has just launched and needs time.
How the mechanisms related to NFT items will develop also requires some time to verify. From a Web3 perspective, the in-game currency $NESO can be seen as a no-threshold Play to Earn, while NFT items are Play (Hunt/Raid) to Raffle, especially with the boss rolling mechanism requiring conditions to be met and then hoping for good luck.
Gold Farming Situation
Currently, players entering the game with a gold farming mindset are very dissatisfied with this. Due to the nature of Web3, everyone hopes this would be a game-rich gold mine, but the reality is that the current gold farming yield is even lower than the Web2 version.
Setting aside the equipment drops (NFT market) which need time to test the buying pressure (of course, the game has an official equipment recycling mechanism, but this aspect of gold farming cannot be judged right now and relies heavily on luck), the most direct way is to farm monsters for $NESO and then exchange it for $NXPC. The current exchange rate is 100,000 $NESO for 1 $NXPC, which is too high given the current drop rates.
Citing data from @ZiYu0210:
The prerequisite here is still reaching level 200, and you need to bring the in-game $NESO onto the chain for exchange, which also requires a minted game character. Therefore, to realize the gold farming output in the game, users really need to play to a certain depth. Currently, only players who participated in early activities and tests and received large airdrops are making money.
This is actually a very contradictory point. If you want to continuously attract gold farming players, either the exchange rate or the drop rate needs to be modified at least one of them. If not changed, the game may face significant challenges, as it would then rely on players who genuinely want to play the game, or the output of NFT items could become a good gold farming channel. However, to obtain the top-tier sets, you cannot compete without spending money, and for Web3 players, spending money is equivalent to reinvesting, but how can this near-zero gold farming convince gold farming players to spend their first money? (Let alone reinvest…)
For players who genuinely want to play the game, the overall experience of the Web3 version may not easily persuade them to switch from the Web2 version.
This is a game that can be both grindy and casual, with the fun lying in playing with friends. How the game will develop and be adjusted in the future will gradually reflect how serious NEXON is about this chain game project and what kind of development strategy it has, so for now, I still hold an optimistic attitude and wait and see.
So, today, have you gone to the island?
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