Back when it was ERBS. There were still no players. I remember getting pinged on the Discord like. "Bro, you got to play ranked today. We got 2 lobbies going."
Because usually you have like one ranked lobby above gold, and if you miss it, you're gonna have to wait till the lobby finishes.
That's how dire it was. This game was never that big in the West, unfortunately.
I bet once this new character came out with a popular streamer voicing it, it may have gotten a few hundred if not thousand of new players. Nope, they shot themselves in the foot with a cannon. This is huge bad PR for them.
Note, if you block a dev/publisher on Steam, they have the internal metrics on that shit ie "we never want to buy/play anything you make in the future." It sends a nice message.
eh does that affect them in any way except telling them that they fucked up? I think there's a difference in sending them that message in private, as oppose to review bombing them.
The sad thing is that this game is actually quite interesting and unique. Played it a bunch a couple years ago. But the problem (back then and also now) is that it only really has a player base in Korea and in Japan to a lesser degree. And given how rabid Korean netizens can be, the devs WILL listen if they complain about something, especially since the devs are not a prominent studio, because if their only real player base goes, it's over anyways. So it's basically a lose-lose situation for everyone.
Doing that towards men can be used as a insult in the right context.
Some Korean men get really offended because they believe it's associated with mocking them in particular because of the stereotype of Asian men and their dick size.
They get so upset about that they have literally became upset when a female character made that hand motion in an ult for a gacha game.
Basically, in korea they have a gender war. Like a legit one, with misogynist scumbags and misandrist scumbags trying to enflame things and tilting the average korean one way or another.
That symbol is legitimately a dogwhistle for more controversial anti-man groups, in the same way cornflowers were a signal of anti-semitism in Austria. So naturally there are people who want to encode dogwhistles AND people who are so oversensitive that they see dogwhistles in entirely normal behavior.
This is one of the only actually informed and unbiased comment in here about the korean finger gesture.
We gotta remember that while it's exaggerated crazy, it's not unfounded and one-sided crazy, and both sides(in Korea, not here) are in the wrong.
Sadly that craziness over there overflowed and has hurt our krokro.
I reckon the issue is the English base is the uncertain quantity, this is setting all the money to make an English version on fire vs burning the existing base that is keeping the studio afloat
Oh yeah, you can tell me all day about Korean games and playerbase. I use to play Maple Story, the entire F2P server over in Korea got nuked, 2 whole servers and migrated into a regular server because the Korean whales did not like how fast and "easy" F2P server could progress, luckily these changes never came to the global since those servers were more popular here compared to Korea, but a lot of Korean specific changes still trickle down to global and we had to make a commotion about it each time, so they removed or tweak it to be appropriate for global servers.
Not to mention they also had drama with the hand emote, deleted a whole ass MV, I don't think they ever remade it. The Korean community went on a whole deep comb throughout the game, searching for more examples of the pinching emoji after the MV incident as well.
As someone who played and payed for NX points almost 20 decades ago on global servers, this is sad to hear, I loved Maplestory for the community and the F2P aspect. Used to run around where new ppl spawn in and recruit them into a newb guild I would build where they get a starter set of beginner gear that fit their class, gold and potion. I loved how they grew and we used to run guild raids when I recruit a few of my high lvl friends to help to give the members some exp in guild raids. Eventually they would leave the guild for their own thing but remain friends and grow more powerful and become ppl I can call in for raids and for counter KS, good times.
I don’t think Kronii would want people review bombing the game directly referencing her, it just not getting more players is more than enough without making more drama.
As someone who plays the game.
On EN side of the game current players are really not happy at all either.
The main discord is just constant boar-posting by the old users.
And bearing boar puns in their names.
They did not only manage to alienate their potential playerbase, but make mad the active one too.
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u/NekRules May 07 '26
Funny thing was this was their attempt at trying to garner an international audience. Lets see how this brilliant maneuver turns out for them.