Unpopular Opinion: Mapleland won't be a success long term when it arrives to GMS. Look at Old School Runescape.

I'm gonna get a ton of hate from OSMS lovers but I'm being as brutally honest as possible.

A lot of people here and on the Artale Discord seem to be really hyped about Mapleland. I get it. Artale has a lot of features that are unrecognizable from the old school experience. It takes away from the spirit of OSMS. I can totally justify wanting an OSMS 1:1 server.

However, look at Old School Runescape. It started off as effectively Runeland. There was a ton of hype. However, based on this chart, that quickly died down. Jagex was losing players both in RS3 and OSRS back in 2013-2014. That all changed when they started rapidly pumping updates to OSRS. Look at OSRS today compared to 2014. It's day and night. While Mapleland is arguably #1 in MSW for Korea, I don't see this lasting long term in the west.

The playerbase back in the mid-2010s of OSRS was already aging into older kids or at legal age. Artale playerbase today is mostly full of people who are old enough to have kids or work full time jobs. It's just not realistic of a commitment to be playing a game that's extremely slow of a progression. When it's 1x and no autoloot, you're going to rely more heavily on party quests to level. Soloing is extremely flexible and you can play for 15 mins whenever you want. The over reliance on party play is just not healthy long term. PPQ might be the meta for getting through the 50s-80s but at least there are viable alternatives in Artale. In the original Maplestory, grinding was extremely unfeasible due to hefty potion upkeep costs and extra time spent looting. With MSW's channel system, it's really difficult to enter a specific channel. Unless Mapleland instances PQs and allows you to queue hop a specific channel, I don't see how the over-dependency on PQs is a sustainable game.

Artale has a quality of life similar to OSRS Runelite but to a lesser extent. OSRS struggled to maintain its playerbase because the quality of life was so terrible when compared to games in the mid-2010s. Now look at Maplestory's base quality of life. It's tenfold worse than even OSRS without updates or Runelite. I get it. People want the nostalgia factor. However, once that wears off within a few months, the playerbase starts to die. There's a reason r/Maplestory dislikes OSMS as a server idea. OSRS wouldn't be around today if the GMs didn't invest time into implementing Runelite-esque features or even legalizing Runelite.

And when the quality of life and progression is really slow, you're going to get way more botters because there's more demand for people trying to pay their way to win the game. I'm willing to bet the player to bot ratio will be much higher with Mapleland than Artale. Remember OSRS in the early stages? Yeah way more bots per player. So much so that the joke stuck around for years. The original Maplestory had far more bots per player than the original Runescape. Not to mention duping was also massive in the OG Maple. Korea Mapleland doesn't have this problem due to laws but if it comes to the west, I wouldn't be surprised if every channel is full of Orange Mushroom Empty House bots.

Now this gets worse because if Mapleland contains some P2W MTX like the original Maplestory had, you're going to see way more P2W instead. The original Maplestory's cash shop had 2x coupons, meso bags, and gachapon items (which contained overpowered items like Pink Adventure Capes). I would suggest removing any items that are quality of life. Artale has this too but at least this can be exchanged with in-game mesos with players. That's a similar concept to OSRS Bond system.

Am I trying to say "OSMS bad OSRS good" or "Mapleland bad Artale good"? Yes. I'm tired of OSMS servers being praised to oblivion. I feel like big bang servers need more attention. It was an update that brought a lot of quality of life. However, I still support Mapleland coming to the west. I just don't think that it will have the same amount of success as Artale, let alone Old School Runescape. I think people need to really evaluate how many players will be sticking around longer than a few months after the initial hype.