Maplestory. Big Bang patch.
This is where they introduced item potentials and cubes. Those who know what I'm talking about will probably groan just reading this.
Basically, it was the start of a really manipulative pay-for-power slot machine mechanic to tweak out your gear with insane stats, stats which were unobtainable without paying for in cash. It was random in all the worst ways, it wasn't uncommon to hear people drop 100 bucks on ONE piece of equipment.
It definitively put characters who rolled potentials on their equips on a whole different tier compared to other players. The game followed this trend with later updates adding more absurd power enhancements, growing the gap between "funded" and free players.
Maplestory is F2P though, so a cash shop is pretty much expected. There's no real PVP so all of your gear is strictly PVE. As such I wouldn't call item potentials P2W exactly, but the new areas and bosses added in later patches seemed to be balanced around the expectation that players would have a certain level of power upgrades through the cash shop just to complete it.
The community has been slowly drying up over the past years. It's a shame, that game was really something in its time.
This is where they introduced item potentials and cubes. Those who know what I'm talking about will probably groan just reading this.
Basically, it was the start of a really manipulative pay-for-power slot machine mechanic to tweak out your gear with insane stats, stats which were unobtainable without paying for in cash. It was random in all the worst ways, it wasn't uncommon to hear people drop 100 bucks on ONE piece of equipment.
It definitively put characters who rolled potentials on their equips on a whole different tier compared to other players. The game followed this trend with later updates adding more absurd power enhancements, growing the gap between "funded" and free players.
Maplestory is F2P though, so a cash shop is pretty much expected. There's no real PVP so all of your gear is strictly PVE. As such I wouldn't call item potentials P2W exactly, but the new areas and bosses added in later patches seemed to be balanced around the expectation that players would have a certain level of power upgrades through the cash shop just to complete it.
The community has been slowly drying up over the past years. It's a shame, that game was really something in its time.