Nexon Forced to Reveal Top 10 Spenders in Korean MapleStory: #1 Spent $176K in 2022

January 7, 2024 Omer Altay Comments

In a South Korean Fair Trade Commission Report, Nexon revealed the top 10 spenders per year in the Korean version of MapleStory. This report covered randomness elements in the game, so the spending is strictly related to Cubing (rerolling bonuses on equipment). The top spender in 2022 spent a whopping $176,452.

The top spender going from $27,463 in 2019 to $176,452 in 2022 is nuts. While I've always known that free to play MMORPGs are top heavy in player spending, it still surprises me to see such insane figurures.

The Korean regulatory body alleged deceptive and unfair practices at Nexon regarding these probability based items. More specifically, the way in which the randomness in cubing happened wasn't fully disclosed to consumers. Nexon also changed the way cubing worked multiple times without telling people. One instance of this is how certain 'good' bonuses from cubing was tweaked to appear less often.

Another issue was that between July - December 2013, Black Cube's rating increase probability decreased slightly every day from 1.8% to 1.4%. In January 2016, the Black Cube's legendary rank increase chance also decreased from 1.4% to 1%.

The Korean Fair Trade commission's issue with Nexon is that these changes weren't disclosed. Customers reasonably expected the behavior of these items to continue working as they did. Secretly changing them without telling customers seems deceptive.

The full report is available here, but it's entirely in Korean. Google Translate works okay though.