Do you guys think MapleStory is FUN?

Yeah this is what i'm starting to believe.
Like seriously, despite all the horribleness and negativity that's maplestory from the terrible customer service to the bland, repetitive, pay2win gameplay, excessive disconnections, and hackers/botters this game still has thousands of players coming online every day.


This guy named IImaplers quote is exactly how i feel and been thinking. (This quote also made me laugh so hard for some reason):

I think the "pay to win" concept is a little exaggerated, it's an illusion based on the fact maplestory has such little content. So bossing, a big piece of content, if not the only end game content, requires a certain threshold of money spent to even stand a chance. It's the new goal is now efficiency, which causes massive investments, unless 1 of three happens;

You happen upon a lucky glitch

You cheat

You have been playing for years.

Back in the day bossing was a very small part of maplestory, it being only of zakum, and being capable of challenging it at 130, where you weren't even at half the experience threshold to 200. The focus shifted because of one factor, and I'll make sure everyone see's it;

Profit.[SIZE=2]

The ultimate goal to any free to play game is to be able to play a game and turn a profit significant enough to make reasonable growth. Maplestory actually offered this by simply training, where certain mobs at a certain point would drop equipment that was worth something. Zakum was for the elite, and I would argue for majority of it's life, Horntail as well. But as a casual player you could turn a profit training, and the more you trained, the closer you got to those bossing squads. Maplestory recognized this apparently, but instead of seeing it as a success, saw a method to exploit this "goal" by offering other enhancement materials, starting out with dark scrolls, which were only gachaponable upon release. This wasn't really gamebreaking since the explosion effect really added risk to reward, although I feel the ratio could have been different.

Then the cubes came out, where people could buy that bossing potential (pun intended), which skipped majority of the training growth aspect. Before it was about Drops:Ratio:EXP to your class, unless you were previously funded. Potential made clean equips neigh worthless unless it came with a decent potential, but even then because of the tiers, class restrictions, it's not like they were a hot item. People don't want to invest money into a level 10 item with 4% int, especially since leveling speed became a joke. I mean I don't say that in terms of "WELL EVERYONE SHOULD WORK FOR THEIR LEVEL', it's more on the lines of, 1-150 might as well be a cash shop item, because you mainstream the same maps, only focusing on the exp:hp ratio. That's it, and most of the time you can 1hko everything anyway.

They took the funding from simply training, put it all in one basket at bosses, and give you the option to solo any boss in the game to maximize said profit. I believe that this was the company's main goal to begin with, to exploit that option by daggling in the air saying "It's possible, but do you have the pockets/time to achieve it?".
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As for you poll it's going to be hard to get an accurate pool when you appear argumentative to those who are saying they essentially do have fun playing maplestory. Based on the tone of your post, people are going to try to prove you wrong because you don't think people can have fun, and made that clear in the opening statement. People are naturally going to come out of the woodwork to declare that they do to defend their ideologies, decisions, and in general themselves.[/SIZE]