Free-to-play schemes could be unlawful, warns OFT

Software has bugs? A piece of software of this magnitude has bugs and crashes? Martha, quick, get the car, we need to get to the police station!

Sarcasm aside, Vista was notorious for breaking compatibility, so obviously Nexon didn't want to upgrade to that. And then you have a huge upgrade to Windows 7. Nexon runs EVERYTHING on their stack on Windows. Can you imagine the huge backend and frontend upgrade costs that would be? Yeah, I wouldn't switch if I didn't have to either.

Bugs and crashes that go unhandled, uncared about, for months, even hitting years. When you try to mention them to the developers, your tickets/posts just get ignored. That's horrible, and a clear reason for people to not want to play. There are bugs that have existed since the content that has them was added, and was never even acknowledged after tons of reports and complaints from players.

Then there's things that aren't bugs, but just massive flaws in the gameplay. For example, we have the Root Abyss bosses which are decent concepts and attempts to make the gameplay more modernized and less "hold down a key," yet there's all kinds of issues with them. The biggest, for me, is where you have to pay attention to everything Von Bon does, yet he's layed incorrectly and falls behind every single other animation in the entire game. How can you possibly watch him when there's two clock animations infront of him, completely blocking any view you have of him? How are you supposed to deal damage if you can't watch him because your attack animations cover him up? It's such a silly thing, and if the game has a layering system it's pretty easy to fix (make his layer top priority on drawing so he always appears in the front). Even outside of that, his animations break all the time and death balls come from no where, you can get hit from his entire map attack that can be dodged by jumping, but you don't know its coming because he never actually began the animation for it. All kinds of stupid, silly issues that shouldn't even exist, but now that they do they could be fixed and aren't. Now granted, RA is new so there's potential for it to be fixed, but this is just the most recent example in problems that they introduce and potentially never do anything about.

It's not a problem when bugs exist. Every program has bugs(serious or otherwise), I'm not an idiot, I know this. It's a problem when they sit around for months upon months without even the slightest attempt to fix them, or not even an acknowledgement that the problem exists and they are trying to do something about them.

I'd agree with you if they were still on 800 x 600. But take into consideration that back then all maps were made for 8x6, and now they're moving into widescreen. I think they're trying to update the game for more recent technology. And I think the game runs on DirectX 8. But what would they need anything better than DX8 for, really?

I won't pretend to be the most knowledgeable about DX, to be honest, but I have to imagine that it has multiple new features and what not to make things easier, especially on the end PC. I don't see any reason why MapleStory should be taking 2+ GB of system memory when it used to take a fifth of that. Yes, I get that features get added and things change, but to that extent with no major revamp to the engine and design? That seems off to me.

An MMO is a time sink. It's no surprise that people would have to spend thousands of hours on it. Dollars? Maybe. If you want to. You don't have to spend money, but you have to spend time. Your argument could be used against any F2P MMO, really.

MMOs are a time sink. That's fine. That's the point of an MMO really, to be a time sink. To be able to completely alleviate that by spending money defeats the purpose of an MMO, and overall makes people feel cheated. The worst part of it in Maple's case is that only a few people (in comparison to the amount of players) can possibly spend the time necessary to keep up with the ever increasing power gap. The rest have to spend so much money that they could buy and move into a house if they saved it all. I've lurked random potential threads(here and otherwise) and have seen people mention how much they've spent on the game (in Cube or Dollar value) and I've seen it as an absolutely, absurdly, stupidly high amount more than just a few times. To even consider the fact that anyone willingly pays the amounts mentioned gives me a headache.

Whatever, I'm done here. I've said what I want to say. I'm not going to get into another pointless argument, I see a ton of them on these forums (whether I'm involved or not) and I'm just plain sick of them. It's not like anything I say will ever change what anyone thinks, or how Nexon will act, anyway, so I don't know why I bother anymore.