MapleStory

.

at least drugs kill you

This game is my personal HELL!

Nexon go

PICK REN

badly managed, p2w

I played this game a lot on launch, and have not played this game much since over the years for a few reasons. It is a beautiful game with a lot going on. Always something to do, but understand this entire game is DESIGNED to WASTE your time. Not occupy your time: WASTE IT. The grind is INSANE, so I've made a habit of only playing when XP events are happening, to see where the game is at now. NEXON doesn't respect your TIME. Period. This has improved over time, but in 20 years it is abundantly apparent through the way they handle many of their mechanics that they still don't respect your time. My biggest complaint is their death system, which is better than the original system a long long time ago, but improving a bad system doesn't make it a good system; just a more tolerable one. I remember when dying at level 50-60 was hours of set back as you lost XP. Now after level 200 they put a 20 minute long 80% XP AND item drop penalty on you when you die. This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't have quest givers on Mob Maps that will keep hitting you while you are talking, AND you can't MOVE or ATTACK while TALKING to NPCs, or have boss mobs that often deal extreme damage that can spawn on top of you and one of the draws of the game is that your abilities often fill the entire screen with numbers obscuring your character's position under all the noise. Some quest givers just stand in the middle of mob spawn locations, meaning there is a high chance you will die if you have to read it, and is doubly true if there are flying enemies. Note I didn't say WANT to read it; HAVE to read it, because It is trying to give you an item or there's a conversation selection. This isn't an issue if you out level the content by a good margin of 10 or 20 levels. Considering the game is named for being story oriented this is VERY frustrating. Then completing an area's story, even if it is the only area for a level range (mostly just high level content), often gives no where close to enough XP to get you to the next area. Super grindy farming for XP to move on and see the next part of the story. Even gaining 5 levels per 1 I can barely get a level up before completing a story section in the Arcane River (200+ zones) where there aren't other story zones to level in. The XP portioning is devastatingly off-balance; likely because they want to sell more XP boosts. The actual game play is pretty fun, but I just can't see this game retaining an audience when they can't stop penalizing people's time. If you die, you might as well take a break, and if you take a break (at least for me) you are one step closer to dropping the game again. Just to be clear: I understand the need for consequence of death. Appreciation of what one has often comes from the lose of something. My complaint isn't that there is a death penalty, though in my opinion this is bad game design no matter which game it is, but instead the length of penalties and how the game functions in a way that is sometimes inviting to death thus wasting the player's time. I want this game to be amazing, and in many ways it is, but I can understand why people would put this game down as I will probably do as soon as I complete this event. Maybe in a few years I'll come back and try it again to see if these people will ever learn, but I often wonder how this game survives in the modern industry outside of being free. I'd never pay to play this game, and have a hard time justifying spending money in their Cash Shop because they don't respect my time. If you do decide to play, enjoy the game for what it's worth (free).

Based on my limited time with this game, I would not recommend Maplestory, mostly because Nexon is super greedy. 10/10 wouldn't do again. There are really a lot of deep issues, and it was best explored by this reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/Maplestory/comments/1ukkf5u/the_current_state_of_gms_progress_overshadowed_by/ Maple really has become a beast that asks too much from it's playerbase. I hope Nexon can look at the abuse of the "Go West" players and view ways to make it a less money-hungry grab, and give out features that exist in other regions.