MapleStory

I love Maplestory. I've played it mostly on and a little off since 2004. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on this game in the past few years alone. There's so much great about this game, from the game itself to the communities and the people you can meet through it. But the worst part about this game has remained consistent from day one and that's Nexon themselves. Day after day, week after week, year after year, Nexon continually prioritizes short term profits and what can only be perceived as shafting the player for funsies over the actual health of the playerbase and game itself. Every positive change that the community has begged for years to receive is met with a huge caveat to it that takes you one step forward two steps back, or just sends you ten steps back outright. During the past two years of Inkwell's leadership of GMS, during this whole "Go WEST" mindset, every single unique change we've gotten to our server is exactly that or exists as a very clear attempt to grossly fund the Classic MS project that shouldn't have a single thing to do with GMS itself. On the other end of that, when KMS makes positive changes to their game and gives players things they've explicitly been asking for, without any caveats to it, it just doesn't come to GMS. Every. Single. Server. In the entire world has Universal Cash Shop now. We don't. Why? These consistent failures, these consistent, cheap attempts to garner favor while not actually solving any of the most core issues this game or playerbase has taken me from someone who maintained at a minimum MVP Diamond month after month to someone who has found GACHA GAMES of all things to be more rewarding to spend money on. Anyways, no, don't play this game. Not because the game itself is bad. It's not perfect, it has a lot of issues, but all of those issues exist exclusively to manipulate and force players into spending money because Nexon is too chicken ♥♥♥♥ and greedy.

Promise QoL features and "Go West" changes that benefit us and are optimized for our server and gameplay. Deliver half baked QoL features, cut wanted features that other servers get, don't communicate and nerf the gms exclusive rewards after posting patch notes.

Terrible game. Terrible devs. Terrible communication. Terrible players. I hate this game, do not download

we must increase profit at the expense of our future profit and game existence. we must shoot ourselves in our foot because the suit and tie told us to

I first played maplestory in 2006 as a kid. Loved the game. I remember chatting so much with people all over the country and making great friends. I've played it a couple of times as an adult now and it's absolutely terrible. The community component of the game sucks. It feels much more like a solo game now than it was when it first launched where it was more community based. I recently played either this year or last year and I got to level 150-ish in a few hours due to an event they were having (absolutely bizarre). And I recognize that ya know, communities for games change. So I recruited my partner to play with me. BRUH, we didn't even have a single quest we could do together because we started off in different maps and were leveling up so fast we couldn't even stay together. We tried to find group quests or some way to at least party up but it was such a terrible experience we gave up. Sometimes things are better off left in the past, lol. This was one of them.

Do not play MapleStory. If you're returning because you remember the game from 2003, that game is gone. Not changed. Not evolved. Gone. The social MMO where people spent hours in Kerning PQ, hung out in Henesys, and explored the world for the fun of it exists only in your memory. Modern MapleStory is an endless treadmill of daily quests, weekly bosses, event checklists, and progression systems stacked on top of progression systems. Nearly every upgrade path is tied to RNG. Cubes, flames, star force, familiars, inner ability, Etc. Success is random. Failure is random. Sometimes your reward for months of progress is watching your gear explode. Want to farm efficiently? Better get comfortable with the idea of spending $100 USD on a Vac Pet and after 3 months a 15$ per month subscription. A convenience item that has become mandatory for progression. Better yet, that Vac Pet is only usable on a single "faction" without a universal cash shop, in a game that actively encourages maintaining a roster of 6+ characters for account progression. RIP your Wallet. You will spend years building characters, optimizing gear, learning bosses, and convincing yourself the grind is worth it. Eventually you'll realize you've developed a Stockholm syndrome relationship with a mushroom game run by a company that appears to neither play its own game nor listen to the people who do. Every year players provide pages of feedback, identify problems months in advance, and explain exactly what needs improvement, which is met with silence or rarely a "fix" that consistantly misses the mark. The longer you play, the more you start to wonder if the community understands MapleStory better than its own developers.

As of writing this, I do not recommend playing the game as it currently is. Small background: endgame player in Heroic, reaching 11 years of consistent gameplay, I generally love the game. I don't have many hours on Steam due to playing on the dedicated launcher for the game, but would guess I have over 2500 hours alone just on grinding, not including bossing or afk time. Why do I not recommend playing? I'll explain in a little more detail below. The balance is awful, all the "exclusive" classes (Sia, Erel, Kanna, Hayato, Mo Xuan, Lynn) are insanely unbalanced and rule the current meta. It's gotten to a point where people are dropping characters they worked on for years just to play these classes because they will do the same damage or even more with like half the gear. or in Lynn's case their overpowered support skill will just make them useful without any real gear. Nexon keeps nerfing events, which is basically creating the problem and then selling a solution through battle passes and such. Heroic servers were initially meant to offer an experience that is more catered towards people who like grinding and don't want to pay to win, but Nexon keeps introducing more pay to win to the game. things like Sauna (afk room that gives you exp, you charge maple points to stay in said room), the MVP system (you get a rank assigned to you based on your spending the past 3 months, which gives you the option to skip certain content, gives you more exp coupons, a damage buff and more) and vac pets. (pets that have increased pickup range, these can be renewed at the price of something around 10$ a month per pet and usually one pet costs 70$ to even initially obtain). The familiar system lacks significant QoL and is just insanely grindy, there are many garbage lines you can roll instead of something useful and the chance to tier up is just not good for how grindy it is. Star speck boxes and Pitched whisper crystals need significant improvements, as well as trace restoration missions. Safeguarding is way too expensive, and for some reason your success rate also gets halved when you're already paying crazy amounts of meso which ups the variation on average attempts you need to pass your enhance attempts. TL;DR - a lot of p2w, very poor balancing, massive lack of QoL. It's fine to play as a casual, but definitely don't go into this game if you're competitive about games and want to take the game seriously.