Dear Maplers,

This week’s update will be mainly focused on upcoming changes to UGC - mainly the Design Shop. Currently, we are seeing a truly massive number of creations from the community in the Design Shop, and in order to enhance the overall experience for both shoppers and creators we are going to make a few important changes.

Designer’s Shop Change

Objective of the Change

The main objective of the changes are to ensure that:

1. We support great designers with creative mindset with better exposure and better revenue share structure
2. We protect original creations from other players copying their designs
3. We provide shoppers with a better experience, focusing on high quality and more creative designs
4. We protect the shop from content which explicitly violates the Terms of Service - especially sexually suggestive/obscene, copyright and trademark designs
5. We ensure review of the designs are based on clear guidelines, to avoid applying different standards to different designs

The Thought Process

We reviewed current design shop structure and noticed a few issues. Because the cost of registering items on the shop is free for the first one, and only slowly rising with additional listings, and because we are refunding the full Listing Fee when design submissions are removed from the Design Shop, we have seen many players blatantly copying another player’s design, or uploading the content which clearly violates the ToS without any risk of losing Merets.

This was hurting the shop in many ways:

• Designs stolen from other creators were thrown into the shop with minimal risk
• The shop became overloaded with designs that clearly violated ToS, again due to a lack of consequences
• Because of the large number of low-effort designs, copying another creator’s design and offensive designs submitted by bad actors, many wonderful, original creations became buried in the shop

Thus, we have decided to tweak the shop fee structure to provide higher upside for the great content creators while better filtering out designs being submitted by bad actors.

Upcoming Changes

With the update on November 8th, we are going to change three things:

• Listing Registration Fee will increase to a flat 490 Merets for all Design Shop listings
• Creators will now get a 75% cut from the sales on the Design Shop, up from 70%
• Registration Period will increase from 30 days to 90 days
• Designs submitted in bad faith, with a clear intention to copy another creator’s original work or violate the ToS, will not be refunded, including both the listing fee and template cost (This will apply to the ad walls as well)

This change is to ensure that original creators have the potential to succeed in the shop. Also, by providing a 90 day registration period with a greater cut for the designers, we hope to see more meaningful creations and fewer items overloading the store, making the original creations harder to find.

Finally, by doing so, players duplicating designs to make easy Merets will now risk losing actual initial investments. We have a 10 day review period on Merets being delivered to creators, and will work to ensure that anyone who submits designs in bad faith will not be able to get any Merets from the sales and lose their original investments.

Review Process Improvements

The Customer Support staff handling the UGC submission and review process have been going through very tough times. We saw a much higher volume of creations coming in than expected, and lots of high level terms created confusion within the team. Additionally, since we work with teams in other countries, there are differing understandings of what is considered unacceptable. As a result, there were cases where some designs have been incorrectly removed. We sincerely apologize for your inconvenience and to improve this we have made a few internal changes to improve on our consistency:

• We have added more details to our UGC review guidelines
• We have simplified categories and criterias with detailed examples we have seen in the actual Design Shop
• We are improving our training to ensure we are consistent when removing designs
• We are reviewing tools which could help us automatically identify obvious violations, to allow our team to focus more on important reviews

While this might take more time to get to the level where everyone is satisfied, we promise you will see improvements in the UGC review process quickly, and please continue providing feedback if you see issues with our decisions.

Other Upcoming Changes

This week’s update will include few important improvements.

Fairfight Update: We are reducing the impact to players above Lv. 50, resulting in most players seeing a 10%+ increase in damage, and the classes with a high dependency on buffs and passives will see even greater damage increases

10053 Issue: We are adding a new feature to the game with the Chaos Rising Update on November 8th that helps mitigate disconnections. This change will automatically seek to re-establish connection with the server, and it’s highly likely you won’t notice the disconnection after we apply the change. Some of the cases you will see loading icon on the center for very short time, but if you are experiencing long disconnections, you may see multiple reconnection attempts.

Please note that if you click Cancel during the reconnection attempt, you will be disconnected and receive the 10053 error. There are also a few edge cases that the game client will default to a disconnection with the error code, including but not limited to:

• If the disconnection happens while loading into the game from character selection
• If the disconnection happens while loading into mini-games or dungeons
• If the disconnection happens while loading into new maps or channels

We expect most previously affected players will not see the 10053 issue after the update but we will keep monitoring to make sure. With this change, we hope to make everyone’s gameplay experience much more enjoyable.

Meso Seller and Bots: We are continuing to identify and block bots. Last week we have banned 30,000+ accounts and yesterday alone we have banned 10,000+ accounts. Also, to combat ad spams via walls and ad balloons we will be adding level requirements to use them. Also, whispers will now have a Lv. 25 requirement and group chats a Lv. 50 requirement. We are discussing additional measures and hope we can make gradual improvements to combat the bots without affecting your gameplay

Dungeon Limit Reset (BETA): It is finally coming to the game, please try out the dungeon limit reset beta feature and see how it is working for your daily grind. Remember, you can reset the limit only once per account each week, so choose your character wisely.

QoL Improvements: We are improving a few functions - house size reduction, Wardrobe Swap, Quickslot Bar swapping - also we are adding five different weapon templates for our talented designers!

Thanksgiving UPDATE!: We are going to celebrate the Thanksgiving with a ton of content. You will have the chance to earn a special turkey mount, decorations, outfits and other vanity items. Please look out for more details, and join us on Thanksgiving weekend for more!

December Teaser: We are already preparing our update for December, we will start to share some of the updates and improvements for December around Thanksgiving.

Optimization: This is still in our books, but we currently don’t have any details to share yet.

We will be providing much more detailed updates on the Chaos Raids with the patch notes and other announcements. While we thrive to deliver the best gaming experience to the community, some of the decisions might not seem perfect, and our actions might seem slow. We understand the expectation is high, and will work hard to improve ourselves to satisfy our great community. Please continue to provide us feedback, as while we might not be leaving comments on each individual comments, you can be assured we are reading and listing up the feedback to review.

This week is going to be huge for the community, and looking forward to see the community knocking off the Chaos Raids. It will be challenging but you will love it!

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