What Maple is up to

Weeelp, I started playing Maple again. My boyfriend wanted to play so I gave in. We ended up creating matching characters of the opposite gender, mainly because Angelic Busters can only be female and he wanted to try one and I didn't want to look like a lesbian. 

Anyway, just thought I'd let you guys know how the game is now days.

For starters, the game is so extremely easy now it isn't even funny.... let me give you some examples. 

We started completely fresh on Windia. I already have 20+mil, a mount thats 100x more badass than the level 200 mount, and I have literally not died one single time yet since I made this character.

 I chose one of the new classes, a Kaiser. Don't get me wrong, I have to admit, they are pretty dang fun but its probably because they are so overpowered. I started maybe two weeks ago and im already at level 65. I actually had to not level this week because my boyfriend is away and will need to catch up, and some days were spent in the market or getting leaves so consecutively there were really only about 3-4 days of training/questing. 

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Also, I can also already turn into this crazy badass looking thing and completely obliterate anything for a few seconds...

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The skills Kaisers have make them look like they were built for solely for KSing, probably worse than Mechanics were when they came out. Leveling once would currently probably take me a half hour or less, especially with the exp the quests give me. There is this new thing with an NPC, Tot, that gives you a whole bunch of starting items and stuff from the cash shop to try out such as a hair coupon, smegas, quest completers, clothes, a pet sheep, pet items like the hp/mp users and the item pouch, etc. He also gives you weapons every 10 or so levels.  

Tons of people are hitting 200 daily. The drop rate of items is a lot higher now... I found two Nependeaths Honey in less than 5 minutes. I wanted to punch myself in the face, I dont know if you guys remember, but I spent weeks trying to find one of those for a quest at one point.


Another thing, the community is as bad as ever, and the economy has gone to shit. I was fussed at for taking up a good FM spot for selling "junk" (Maple weapons, which are apparently junk now)

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Since money is so easy to get now, people are richer than ever, which means anything that isn't scrolled or enhanced in some way is pretty much cheap junk. But its whatever, this is all I need to get by in the game, and I don't really have to deal with anyone else in the community except when im selling stuff. I haven't tried any of the PQs yet.

All in all though, its still pretty fun. There are just a lot of changes to get past and people to ignore.

I kind of wanted to get back into maple a few days ago, but I had a feeling that it would be like that now. Nexon has always put their wallets before their players, and they realized that the game was too hard and little kids with a lot of their parents money (I was one of these kids) would quit the game because it was too hard, which destroys potential income for Nexon.

Honestly, the difficulty in leveling up in Maple is what made it so much more rewarding when you finally hit level 30 or 70 or 120. I can't remember how long it took for me to get to 70 but it took a hell of a lot longer than 2 weeks.

It might be fun to play for a couple of weeks like you are doing though, but I feel like in the end I am just going to keep missing the old maplestory, with PQs, grinding for ridiculous hours on end, and meeting all the friendly people (ok that's a lie, but I met you guys so that is something). Are any of you guys interested in going back for a short period of time and fucking shit up?

I wouldn't mind going back but my computer definitely can't run it anyway.  Bryan has a gaming computer that could but I'd have to get permission to download and use it, so if not everyone is picking it back up I'm not going to bother.

But yeah, I mean, easy means that the people are different too.  Already I feel like I'm way too old to be playing that game, but the easier it gets the younger the crowd is.  I just want a moderately difficult MMO with nobody younger than 16 with lots of PQs.  I don't understand why that is so hard.

I don't really know what the age majority is on Maple now, I haven't asked a single person what their age is. My guess though is that they're all around 14 year olds who try to act like they're 20.
I don't think the age has changed much really. I think its just were older and find it more annoying to deal with now... at least thats how I feel. 

Another thing. There is a patch coming up where they are raising the level cap to 250. Not that any of us have gotten close to 200, but it is something they've never done before. 

Also, Im not 100% sure on the community. I personally chose to deal with as few people as possible, because really I just wanted to play a game with my boyfriend and not much else. I could have just had a bad run-in with a jackhole. Although, I do see a lot more people scamming and hacking... I once went to try and do a quest to gather a certain item, got to the map I needed to be in, and there was a vac/botter on literally almost every channel. I think Nexons security has gone way down. Oh and I thought this was funny, if you go to the create a character screen and just type random gibberish for the name (like asdkjhsd), there is a 50/50 chance of it being taken...

Not only that, I dont remember if this was already in effect when we were there, but now you can only report one person a week, and theres a fee..... GG Nexon. 

I don't think they are quite as greedy as they were before, though. They did give out quite a bit of NX stuff, but part of me thinks its like how a vampire gets the first taste of blood. Once you see what its like, you want to continue getting it, and thats just their way of marketing probably. 

The game is only easy if you plan on not playing competitively. If you plan on playing competitively, as in for damage percentage (getting into scrolling/item enhancement, NX gambling, serious marketing, etc) then it will be hard. Now that things are easier to get, that means you have to work twice as hard than before at being better than somebody else. What was rich to us then is now poor to most people, and all of the HP items we had then aren't half as good as what people can craft or scroll now. 
If you're not playing competitively and its just for fun, then its easy enough to get by with being unfunded. (although this could be just because im a Kaiser)

But yeah, I'm here if you guys do want to do something on Maple, anytime.

Wow.. It's been a long time since I've heard "GG Nexon"...  That actually brings back a lot of memories.  But yeah, I agree with Omar.  It'd probably be kind of fun but we'd end up comparing it to old MS and complaining.  I might be up for it though, but I think it would be interesting if we tried out some other MMORPGs.  My computer has gotten much better so I can actually handle things beyond 2D now...

A while ago, I tried an MMORPG called Elsword with a friend which is like only PQs and a fighting game with a strong emphasis on characters.  It was pretty interesting but I thought it got repetitive.  I think it might be fun with friends though, especially since its so dependent on being in a group.  Just throwing ideas out there

The thing about RPGs though is, they are ALL repetitive. There is no getting past the basic "kill monsters to get equips just to kill more monsters" concept. All RPGs do the same general thing and it got repetitive for me long ago no matter what style or take on it was, but it is always more fun with friends either way. But yeah, im up for whatever.


Oh, one more thing... I forgot to mention that the main reason why everyone is so overpowered now is because they got rid of the secondary stat on equips a few patches ago. In other words, Warriors no longer need dex, mages no longer need luk, everyone just puts everything into one single stat now.

I will try anything too, my computer cant handle super graphic intensive games but it can definitely do better than maple..

@Angie You have got to be kidding me. This game is designed for 8 year olds to be able to get through now...

That... kind of defeats the purpose of stats.... like completely....  The whole point of stats is to be able to customize your character for different ways of playing (like preferring speed over power or something).  I mean, before at the very least, there was nodex and crap, but now even that is gone.  This game is stupid

How about LoL? I have avoided looking into that game because I have heard from friends that it is extremely addictive but I feel like if we just play together it should be a lot easier to control any compulsive urges to keep playing.

Ughh, anything but LoL. That is the one game I never want to try again. 
The majority of my friends are addicted to it. I tried it for a little while but I fail so hard at it that I just gave up in the end. 
The LoL community is extremely noob unfriendly. If you don't know exactly what you're doing people will easily get pissed off at you. Especially since half of the "noobs" (they call these people smurfs) are people that are experienced with the game that just make new accounts, which makes them all the more agitated at real new players because they're used to rank games and crap. And theres no way to avoid the people like that because League just automatically puts you in a random team in your level range.

Another thing I hate about it is how it requires your complete undivided attention for a good 40 minutes, roughly. If you go afk for longer than 3-5 minutes during a game people will get pissed/report you or you'll just die or get a bad rating. And I cannot begin to describe my despise for some of my friends addictions to this game because of that. You also cant leave a game unless you want to get reported which people do often, unless you explain to your team mates why and they understand. If you randomly DC during a bad match though, you're pretty much reported. I dont know how many reports you can get before you're banned from the game.

I also found the characters hard to learn, especially if you play more than one or two... its hard remembering all of those different builds and how each character is supposed to be played. You pretty much have to look from a guide for everything you do or die. 





HOWEVER, obviously, my opinion on the game is biased. Im sure you would have much better luck at it seeing that you're a lot more left-brained than I am, I just really suck at the game and I get very bad noob luck.

Haha we dont HAVE to play it angie, I was just throwing ideas out there. I don't want to play something that not everybody agrees with, and I don't really want to play a game that requires me to be absorbed for 40 minutes straight without being able to divert my attention. That seems like work, not a game.

LoL's learning curve is only beset by the people who introduce the game to you, i think in the group that i play games with we've taught about 5 people now from scratch and they are all half decent players in about a few weeks or so. Still steep learning curve.

I have lists of MMO's if you guys are interested in playing some games together, not soley RPG's but still i have a few a dedicated list of games that are decent if you are all intereseted.

Go for it lars, the more options the better.

I just tried playing maple yesterday out of sheer boredom. I made some class called "Jett" which had a retarded backstory. Something about a futuristic bounty hunter crashing his space ship and his bff became evil. It was like a pirate except 10x flashier and really over powered. Also you automatically start at level 10 with your first job skills. I quit before I even leveled up to level 11 thats how bad it was. Also there is some weird ass farmville type game within maplestory. I honestly don't know what happened to that game.

Lol I wondered if you had gotten on. I was transferring Azeill over to Windia (free event) and I was looking at the guild and everything, and I noticed that everyone had ?? next to their names for level and job except ShenronBow, which usually means they were on recently. 

And yeah, I tried that farmville game. Its pretty lame but it passes time. I've never tried a Jett or even really looked into them at all so I have no idea what they're really about other than what you just described. 

Lol, if all of us do end up coming back, we should all be hipsters and each make a different original adventurer.

Shen wrote:

Go for it lars, the more options the better.

I just tried playing maple yesterday out of sheer boredom. I made some class called "Jett" which had a retarded backstory. Something about a futuristic bounty hunter crashing his space ship and his bff became evil. It was like a pirate except 10x flashier and really over powered. Also you automatically start at level 10 with your first job skills. I quit before I even leveled up to level 11 thats how bad it was. Also there is some weird ass farmville type game within maplestory. I honestly don't know what happened to that game.

Ahahaah, i said this before an i'll say it again maple can only pass for its social aspect as it is now progressing, so it's actually expected for them to do something along the lines of imitating "farmville" as a game model. I mean it really is a matter of time before maple goes to the point of complete social encompassment and begin doing things such as sharing with friends or the "ask a friend for help" method of play, mark my words.

Anyway i do know a few decent MMORPG's that dont require an abundant amount of processing power, so lemesee.

Dungeons&Dragons Online. (DDO for short, probably one of the older and still better formulas of RPG's i've played, its also not what you think the actions arent turned based in the sense of classic D&D and most combat is taking place real time in a relatively interesting fashion. Also all areas are instance based so the idea of party questing is pretty much the thing for everything, not to say you cant solo its more interesting if you group up. There's a bit of content lock but it's manageable.

Puzzle pirates: (lot of focus on teamplay, simple but addicting puzzles, and probably the best implementations of puzzle into a over arcing game play i have seen executed to date, although gets kind of repetitive and is probably more of a background play from time to time, not to mention the painful in game currency/irl currency transfer rate and the reliance of irl currency to do certain things, but hey its not meant to be played in prolong durations but more on the lines of instances.

Eden Eternal: a small Anime style MMORPG i played a while back, nothing to noteworthy but it did have a decent take on how the class systems work an the fact that you can pretty much be anything at anytime brings something of interest. Other then that pretty standard MMO grind, party quest, etc, etc still a decent MMORPG non the less.

Aion: I am contractually obligated to recommend this game to you all, not really but i know someone who works with the company. If i would say something to rival WoW in open worlds and content i would probably have other games in mind but this game comes close, lots of content, great worlds, and quests just up the ass to the point of becoming obnoxious, good expansive game though if you're looking to hunker down into an MMORPG without restrictions, forewarn though you will probably lagg in this one.

Warframe: Okay i know it looks like it will make you're computer explode but speaking from a personal experience i ran this thing on a 5 year old laptop on high resolution and it was running relatively smoothly, then again that was the beta since i was playing and who knows what has happned since then, still great game, free to play, one of the best free to play titles out there that's to be assured, third person shooter, action, parkour goodness.

Minecraft: eh? ehh? ehhhhhhh? *nudge*nudge*

Anything particular you guys looking for?