2016-03-01, 11:40 PM
The good old days weren't that good. I wasn't a first gen player, but I reached lvl 200 back when it was hard, (I grinded for about 1.5 years at 12 hours a day,) and ended up at rank 86 in the Khaini server, which then had over a million characters.
At the top of the heap, where my friends and I played, there was a lot of hacked gear, a lot of stress, and a lot of addiction. I quit Maple Story, despite my supposed success with it, because past a point I felt no longer as a person playing a fun game but a drug addict. A lot of my friends felt that they'd rather be doing something else, but they kept playing. The good old days had HP washing, which cost a fortune, and resetting skills was so expensive that many people abandoned high level characters because they were screwed up and resets cost so much they couldn't fix them. Double experience changed everything, because at that point it became feasible to get to 200, before that, not even Tiger was close.
I think the deal-breaker was when they lifted the cap of lvl 200. My rank was what I was proud of, because I grinded so hard to get it, but in the end, when the lvl 200 cap got lifted I was "offered" a "chance" to take what had been mine already. I think it was that point when I basically decided there was nothing that would ever get me to play this game again. In a game that necessitates the amount of grinding that old-school Maple had, taking away a lvl 200's rank basically means bye-bye.
When my attention was half-assed, I think some of the Cash Shop decisions were in the right direction, such as the permanent safety charm and the permanent vip teleport rock. But the eternal problem of this game was that great gear cost a fortune and in order to keep up, you had to discard your old godly gear for what you could get for it, and get "new" gear that was created by the latest "improvement." The top players sold their old stuff when they felt the change coming, got new godly gear and kept at the top that way. But, in a game this expensive, getting gear constantly wasn't very nice to the players.
I think Maple was always more fun to the relaxed, casual players, but the extreme commercialization of it was always distasteful to people. The addiction and need for grinding was also quite extreme, so as someone who quit during the "good old days," I can assure you there were problems with it back then too. I think the biggest problem now is that Nexon has pissed off so many of its customers that the game is dying. If it had run Maple Story responsibly, I think it would be more fun now because all the players wouldn't have quit.
At the top of the heap, where my friends and I played, there was a lot of hacked gear, a lot of stress, and a lot of addiction. I quit Maple Story, despite my supposed success with it, because past a point I felt no longer as a person playing a fun game but a drug addict. A lot of my friends felt that they'd rather be doing something else, but they kept playing. The good old days had HP washing, which cost a fortune, and resetting skills was so expensive that many people abandoned high level characters because they were screwed up and resets cost so much they couldn't fix them. Double experience changed everything, because at that point it became feasible to get to 200, before that, not even Tiger was close.
I think the deal-breaker was when they lifted the cap of lvl 200. My rank was what I was proud of, because I grinded so hard to get it, but in the end, when the lvl 200 cap got lifted I was "offered" a "chance" to take what had been mine already. I think it was that point when I basically decided there was nothing that would ever get me to play this game again. In a game that necessitates the amount of grinding that old-school Maple had, taking away a lvl 200's rank basically means bye-bye.
When my attention was half-assed, I think some of the Cash Shop decisions were in the right direction, such as the permanent safety charm and the permanent vip teleport rock. But the eternal problem of this game was that great gear cost a fortune and in order to keep up, you had to discard your old godly gear for what you could get for it, and get "new" gear that was created by the latest "improvement." The top players sold their old stuff when they felt the change coming, got new godly gear and kept at the top that way. But, in a game this expensive, getting gear constantly wasn't very nice to the players.
I think Maple was always more fun to the relaxed, casual players, but the extreme commercialization of it was always distasteful to people. The addiction and need for grinding was also quite extreme, so as someone who quit during the "good old days," I can assure you there were problems with it back then too. I think the biggest problem now is that Nexon has pissed off so many of its customers that the game is dying. If it had run Maple Story responsibly, I think it would be more fun now because all the players wouldn't have quit.