Sizer | Universe Guild 🍄

🚨 after beating T1, KC's 🇫🇷 chances of winning EWC26 have skyrocketed 🚀 1% 📈 19% Can home team go all the way and lift the trophy in Paris? 🏆

I am a bit worried to share what I have to say as someone who has been selected to be a part of the MSU Curator program… but I think I really need to get this off my chest. (Not a sponsored post) As someone who has personally made millions online with digital products and online services in the gaming space, seeing the recent direction that MSU has been headed has been really worrying me. So I wanted to share some thoughts that hopefully resonates with loyal players, and I hope this reaches the team. A good business always begins with a good product. If your product is bad, no amount of marketing will help you. And honestly, I doubt MSU will see any good returns with their current MSU Curator challenge. Compared to a lot of other Web3 games, a huge competitive advantage MSU had when it launched was the fact that there was already product market fit with MapleStory’s IP. And what made it extremely appealing and exciting to players was the fact that you could do certain things in MSU that you would never be able to do in regular versions of MapleStory — character transfers, minting NFT items, and dynamic pricing, safe RMT (real money trading) etc. However, overtime, I feel that MSU has completely lost its focus on investing into the aspects that made the game incredibly appealing in the first place — players can make real money by playing a really fun game. Instead, the team shifted its focus on MSU2.0 along with its Vibe Camp contest of $60,000. I understand that this is an ambitious project with long term potential, but I can’t help but feel that the timing of it couldn’t be any worse. There are still so many fundamental issues with the current game as it is, and players have been begging for certain features to be added and changes to be made, but instead we were given a product that nobody asked for. AI is obviously a really hot narrative right now, but at the end of the day, the technology isn’t good enough yet where you can just spawn extremely good quality games that people would actually stick around and enjoy playing. What makes you think that people would want to continue playing AI slop games long term when there are plenty of better games out there? How can you expect people with very little background or experience behind game development to understand the nuances and psychology of making a really fun game? I don’t mean to disrespect anyone that participated in the contest and spent a lot of effort into their game, but realistically, not that many people asked for this. So if this year long wait was to test the theory that vibe coding MapleStory IP web3 games were possible? Great. But was this something that the community wanted or asked for? I don’t think so. I’m glad that MSU has the infrastructure now built for when AI gets better but we really don’t know how far away we are yet. Instead, I hope the team can now shift their focus back on creating new features to MSU that would actually make their game/product better and attract far more players. For example, a rental system is one of those ideas that would only be possible because we are playing a Web3 version of MapleStory. There is tremendous demand and potential for it, and it will bring in so many new players as it did with games like Axie Infinity (and we can all agree that game is wayyy less developed than Maple). So please, I implore the team to refocus on making the existing product — that already HAS users — better. If the Black Mage roadmap gets pushed back, I don’t really care, because if I wanted to play that content, I would just play the regular version. The majority of the players play MSU because of its Web3 aspects, so the team should prioritize investing into creating more in-game Web3 features that people already want. And having a great product people love is the best form of marketing you could ever have — players organically sharing the game by word of mouth because of how good it is.