Hey! I played Maple waaaaay back in the day, from around May of 2006 to around October of 2007. Recently started playing Maple again, and boy, it's not the same game any more. Then I heard about private servers that use the source code from before big bang, and I knew I had to join one. Maple was a big part of my life when I was younger, and I wanna be stuck in the past! Everything I've read says MapleRoyals is the best private server, both for the quality of the staff, and for the awesome and relatively large community. Unfortunately it looks like they are not currently allowing for new accounts to register. Is there a rough idea of when this will open again? I honestly can't wait to see old school Maple again. Also everything I've heard says this server uses the code from v 0.62, but it looks like you're currently changing to 0.83? Is that correct? Why the change? From my understanding both of these version were years after I had left the game, (I think Pirates were released over a year after I left) will 0.83 be too different from what I remember? If I recall, I think NLC came out like 3-4 months before I stopped playing, to give a rough idea. I realize the server is 3-4 years old at this point, is the community still active? Have most people left, or is the player base still sizeable? Is it growing? Do they ever do holiday events, like the orange slimes from Halloween 2006? Anyway looking forward to playing as soon as possible!
Hey, welcome! A few things to help answer your questions a bit. There's no current approximate date for when we'll be able to re-enable character registrations, as there's a handful of things that need to be done before that can happen. And each thing branches off to need more things, you kinda get the idea. Check back every week or so. We're still a mix of v62 and v83 content, upgrading to a v83 client basically allowed us to have more freedom with things from what I understand. I'm not a developer, but I've started to get a general idea of why things are as they are. You'll probably find pirates to be a bit difficult to understand at first, maybe. Horntail (HT) is the current 'end game' boss, whereas Zak and Krexel are in between. Krexel is the Ulu City boss, he's mostly just a tree-wall for EXP. Zakum is good for zak helms (best end game helmet), and some skillbooks for classes. NLC is useful for things like bigfoot, headless horseman - all area bosses that are good exp for attackers. NLC also has the best potions for just about all classes imo. The community is still pretty active, before we went down for these upgrades we had upwards of 1k players online a day. All FM rooms were filled across multiple channels, bosses highly hunted, etc. We reached over 2k players during a double exp event (which was only done as compensation for some major rollback we had with the old source code, which is another reason for the upgrade). And yes ,we do holiday events! The major ones are the primary ones: Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas then we do Lunar New Years (currently active), Valentines will be next, then sometime in the summer we have our Anniversary event. I've made custom FM and Amherst themes to match the major holidays like Halloween and Christmas, though I contemplated the idea of doing a more summery one someday. Take a look through the announcements and Events subforums for some ideas about events, we tend to use the same base core and then change it up a bit for the bigger ones. Upgrading to v83 like this will also allow us to give out more chairs that were previously broken as event rewards, as well as GM event rewards.
Hey Lewis, welcome to Royals!! Spoiler: Too slow! Sadly there is no estimated time for registrations to be open, as you've seen we've recently upgraded to v 0.83 and still have quite a lot of fixes to put in place before the server is open to new players again. Wouldn't want to spoil your playing experience and that wonderful hit of nostalgia because of a few bugs so it's best to wait and play it as it was meant to be. I would maybe check back once a week and see if there has been any change, you can keep an eye on the updates in the announcements section to see how the progress is going. The version we're using is still going to be very similar to what you remember. The move was mainly to have a more stable source code in comparison with v 0.62. There is a lot of v 0.83 elements that aren't part of Royals. Sure, there are some new things that you won't have seen like Pirates and we do have the ToT maps (which I don't even think were part of v 0.83) but have been added in to try and make leveling a lil easier at high levels. It is a private server so we can expect little additions like this but believe me when I say it still very much feels like part of the old game. I had stopped playing GMS in 2008 and playing Royals now just feels exactly how it did back in those days (although without the crazy KS wars). The community here is still super active, even although a lot of people are currently taking a break while the bugs get ironed out I think it's still safe to say it's still the most popular private server out there. Once everything is back in working order again I'm sure those numbers will start to climb into the thousands once more! We do have holiday events. Currently (even during this problem solving period) the Lunar Festival event is active. In the past we have valentines events, Christmas, Halloween and much much more! Again, with the source code changed it gives the opportunity of making events more interesting and personally I can't wait to see what they throw at us! Plus the GMs will hold seperate events also. I had typed a wall of text but it seems I type too slow because Sila beat me to it!!!!
Thank you thank you! Glad to hear the community is active. Some of that stuff you mentioned existed back when I played, like Zakum, and I think I remember hearing rumors of Horntail/4th job coming out of Korea way back then. Does the server include Cygnus knights and Aran? I'm trying to get an idea of when exactly .83 would have been. Still looking forward to getting into this. Here's hoping they get the problems hammered out. =D
V83 included Cygnus and Aran but we wont be implemented new classes. If new content comes out, it won't be for quite a while because it'll be handpicked and looked at extensively first. This might help some: http://www.basilmarket.com/General-What-Came-When-in-GMS-Wiki-2907 But keep in mind we're kind of custom picked in some things. Like we chose to implement Temple of Time, currently no pink bean but ToT serves as a good training place. Also Ulu City.
