Reward Experience (RX)

For the past 20 years, MapleStory has redefined the landscape of online games. With a player base exceeding 250 million and revenue of $5 billion, these statistics reflect MapleStory's established position as cultural content that has entertained multiple generations.

Not all games successfully create IP-based services that thrive for more than 20 years, as MapleStory has. Yet, many game development teams strive for this achievement. What is the secret behind long-lasting games like MapleStory? What enables their sustainable live services? Some might point to fancy visual graphics or massive in-game content, but the true focus lies in offering endless fun.

If players, no matter how many times they play a game and consume its content, still experience new things and have fun, the game will continue to be loved. To achieve this, the development team needs to accurately identify the game's intrinsic appeal and design it to sustain players' continued immersion. The key to sustainable services lies in consistently delivering this intrinsic fun.

Then, what constitutes the core "fun" element of MapleStory? It can be defined as a reward experience ("RX"), the sense of achievement and satisfaction from obtaining items. It is the pleasure you feel when you finally get the item you have wanted in an RPG game. The sense of achievement that comes after a long grinding is the true reward a game gives you, creating a long-lasting memory that resonates deeply. MapleStory has been loved by players for decades because the development team successfully designed, implemented, and delivered this RX.

From the development team's perspective, the core of RX would be quite simple: you just give players good items. In single-player games, the development team has unlimited discretion, allowing them to give endless rewards to players, making RX design relatively easy.

However, the same cannot be said for online games, where sustainability is of utmost importance. Online game players have different purposes and propensities, so designing a reward system that is satisfactory to all players is no easy task. Players start playing at different times and for different reasons, and their preferences for leveling-up routes and content vary significantly. These diverse players mingle in the game world. They fight, compete, collaborate, and trade, ultimately creating the entire game ecosystem.

In this massive and dynamic world, an interesting paradox arises. An item that looked decent when you were alone in the field now seems lackluster among other items. This, coupled with the variable significance of items in online game economies, makes providing a satisfactory RX to players quite challenging. For an ideal RX, developers need to keep introducing attractive items, but this task is complicated by the risk of diminishing the appeal of existing items. Balancing the introduction of new items while maintaining the significance of existing achievements requires a delicate RX design.

To create an ideal RX in online games like MapleStory, it is essential to provide items that offer both practical significance and a sense of satisfaction to players. This approach necessitates consideration of two main factors: utility and rarity.