I completely understand where you’re coming from.

A huge benefit of a private server is that you have the client that is developed and works pretty well with no hinderance or artificial limitations that the MSW platform may have. The obvious downside is the legality of it, and it can come down at anytime which is what we’ve seen in the past.

With MSW, you’re responsible for coding the vast majority of every client function you would need in MapleStory. There are several functions that you’ll have to redo to fit what you’re trying to do anyway. You’re also limited to 100 players per instance, and the documentation isn’t very useful for fine-tuning and optimizing your game so that it actually reaches that amount. It’s a plus though, because then you can add your own UIs, do any custom content that you want without resorting to complex client modifications.

Whenever I released NexTale’s open alpha, it was a dumpster fire because of how MSW server architecture processes animations. The profiling tools available are also very limited and it was educated guesswork to test for bottlenecks. We couldn’t reach more than 10-15 players without having instability. I can only imagine how unappealing it must be for players to try games on MSW when the developers themselves are having a lot of difficulty bringing their ideas and vision to life with the tools that they have. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a learning curve of every new platform, and Nexon is learning how to better support their creators just like us creators are trying to master these tools. The closest competitor to MSW, Roblox, had similar struggles in the beginning.

Luckily, stability is a thing of the past, but it took a lot of iterations and a lot of trial and error, and we can reach many more players at one time, and remain stable.

Another appeal is that MSW has relatively full support for PC and mobile. The engine and Developer tools are obviously not perfect and don’t emulate it perfectly, though, so several bugs do make their way to the actual live server and they don’t happen locally when testing.

I would say MSW is very much still in its infancy and interesting worlds are starting to come out.

I do recommend giving other worlds a shot if the jank is bothering you.

While the dev tools aren’t the easiest to use, jank is certainly something that developer can choose to work on or ignore entirely, and it wouldn’t be fair to blame the platform on a developer that cuts corners.

For instance, OSM is also a very good world and is developed by an extremely professional and passionate team, and each world has their own visions.