Maple Story 3D and Maple Story 2. Does not seem like a hoax.

I'm not saying Nexon is perfect, all I'm saying is it's a lot better than it's competetion in the free MMO world. If you can honestly go play a game like Trickster or Flyff and tell me that it's being run better than Nexon is running maplestory, I'll shut up. I know that you can't do that, because I've already tried most of the other free MMO's for the same reason you are posting about. Before the MTS came out I felt exactly the same way about balance. I agree that Nexon really messed up the economy with these boxes but I still say it's more fair than other games.

No Free to Play MMO can be 100% fair, they have to support the game some way and the cash shop is the way that they do that. At least the best weapons and items are tradeable. In many games, you can't even trade the cash shop equipment which completely crushes the in game equipment (Cough... Trickster.... Cough). I think Maplestory is about as fair and balanced as a Free to Play game is going to get. Yeah, it makes people who pay real money able to be godly and rich with little to no effort, but at least it also makes cash shop items available to other players who are willing to put forth the effort.

Just for the fun of it because I was bored, I added up my MTS History. Apparently I've bought $626 (626,537 NX Cash) worth of NX with mesos. Lol