Gaming ecosystem MapleStory Universe and its CEO have shared some big changes coming over to the web3-powered game economy of their blockchain MMORPG, MapleStory N.

What Changes Are Coming to MapleStory N?

In an effort to revolutionize the “reward experience” in MapleStory N, the web3 gaming community can look forward to seeing a variety of economic changes implemented in the future. These are said to include Dynamic Rewards, Dynamic Pricing, and the introduction of the $NXPC token. All of these are set to revamp how core item systems work.

The Dynamic Rewards system makes it so that items now drop from fields or bosses per cycle, but in limited quantities. So, instead of there being an infinite amount of items with a specific drop rate, the supply is set to be limited per cycle instead. If there are 1000 swords in a field and they’re all farmed during one cycle, you can’t get the same item anymore from that field until the next supply cycle begins. This encourages players to head to areas that aren’t visited very often and continue farming for items there. It looks like fields can accumulate items from one cycle to the next, making the ones rarely visited potentially even more worthwhile going for. Of course, the rarer the item, the lower the supply of that particular item per cycle. This encourages players to change their farming strategies, as repeatedly farming the same place that works best for your level will no longer be the best tactic to go for. Depending on demand, this could also make it harder to get the reward that you want, as someone might get the desired item before you manage to.

Dynamic Pricing is designed to change how item enhancement costs work. With this new system, item enhancement costs won’t be fixed anymore. Instead, the prices will change depending on market demand, so if more players do the same enhancement, the cost will increase, but if demand is low, then the price will drop accordingly. Introducing this demand-driven pricing system aims to prevent “excessive enhancement inflation,” requiring players to figure out the best times to make their upgrades instead of just enhancing the same items over and over at any point in time.

By introducing Dynamic Rewards & Pricing, item supply and enhancement costs will be more regulated, thus “fundamentally preventing inflation in game,” according to the CEO’s X thread.

Both of these systems are further made possible by introducing $NXPC, the core ecosystem token of MapleStory Universe but also a key token in MapleStory N.

How Does $NXPC Work in MapleStory N?

The $NXPC token makes it possible for item supply changes to be made organically depending on real market demand, while being used for 2 important features in MapleStory N, the web3 version of the well-known MMO. These core features are NXPC Fission and NFT Fusion.

The NXPC Fission function is a burn mechanism in which you burn $NXPC tokens in order to receive an NFT basket that will contain a certain number of game items. This is said to be the only way of issuing game items, so $NXPC holders will be able to use this function to directly issue game items. In fact, Fission is said to be the only way that even the developers can use to obtain items that they then store as rewards, using tokens that the team owns to activate the function.

NFT Fusion is basically the reverse version of Fission. This means that if you have the necessary types of game items and the right quantities, you can combine those collected NFTs to fuse them into $NXPC tokens. Recreating $NXPC thus requires completing an NFT basket, which you do by collecting all the right game items that would make up the basket. According to the CEO, players will need to work together to make the NFT Fusion process possible. You can work with a couple of players to pool your NFTs together to form a complete NFT basket, activating the Fusion process to get $NXPC in return. Each participant thus receives $NXPC depending on how much they contributed to the pool.

These complementary features, together with the previously-mentioned dynamic systems, all combined with the $NXPC token, seem to make for an innovative player-driven market that puts the control of item supplies into the hands of the community, with the value of items said to be “naturally stabilized through organic participation in the market,” per another deep dive thread by Nexpace’s CEO.

It’ll be quite interesting to see how these big economy changes come together into practice. Hopefully this all helps MapleStory N have a powerful community-driven web3 economy that truly shows to a wider gaming community how on-chain reward systems, if done right, can make MMORPGs even more enjoyable and engaging than they are in their traditional web2 forms.

An official launch date for this Avalanche-powered MMO does not seem to be available at the time of writing. Find out how MapleStory Universe is redefining web3 gaming in our interview with VP & CBO, Dominic Jang. In December 2023, MapleStory Universe received a $100 million investment to fund development of their blockchain gaming ecosystem.