Mapleroyals is a game which you invest hundreds and thousands of hours, emotion and effort to, and all of a sudden it all adds up. To absolutely nothing.
Just like life, you invest uncountable number of hours into your studies, to get a diploma/degree to get a job, then work countless hours on that job to an early grave. and in the end it all adds up to absolutely nothing.
It's not your job. When you're not having fun any more, do something else, or quit for a while. I think the complexity of MMORPGs makes them feel more real than they are. Remember, you're free.
I never sold leach and enjoyed my unwashed sin a lot up to 155. HT runs seem out of reach but mostly because of the community. I have no regrets, i definitely got much much more fun out of this char than any of the people I've seen playing washed chars. so all that stuff about having to do this or that to become strong or have fun is bull. If i wanted to go HT now restarting a sin would be just as easy as through the other road but i enjoyed the nostalgia of real play at every level. I recommend it to anyone.
A handful of people actually pm-ed me in game to talk about this, and i thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. Allow me to add in a slight context here, this post is meant for players to identify their common source of frustration and find ways to overcome it, WHILE understanding that there're many other ways to have fun here! I DO NOT in any way mean to say that this is the only way this game must be played, take this with a pinch of salt, then play the game your own way!
The best advice I can give is: Find a Guild/Group of friends. I was/am lucky enough to have great guildies and friends. my experience during the game was great thanks to them. they helped me to overcome all these difficulties OP listed above and vice-versa
Just have fun, and ignore the so called ``salty ones`` who only make playing about winning and not the fun experience its supposed to be. I have experienced alot of this in LPQ during my early times before i learnt how to do ,Stage 8, properly. Just ignore it and have fun!
I think theres only 1 hard truth and thats hp washing. why we need this for the nostalgic feel is beyond me. its stupid. i spent my time leveling up a bish i enjoyed it but sitting there selling leeches trying to get good int gear all so i can make an attacker to truly have fun. im burned out. but i know if i make an attacker now when im not prepared it will slip away into nothing unless i can find some cool people who don't care about an unwashed attacker. Need to remove washing alltogether attackers will require HB unless they are just high enough level. maybe some HP equips. maybe a potion that increases defense or something. or just make attackers able to barely survive most attacks aside from ones that you can actually avoid that way they need to not just sit there spamming ability with auto pot pets on. Warriors would just be so beefy they would take like 1/5 of the damage so it wouldn't be a big deal. Honestly i hate washing its stupid. truly has ruined this experience for me. like i said i enjoyed leveling my bish but i was forced to do that because of HP washing.
I am a relatively new player (started in June 2017) who experienced these difficulties, overcame some of them, and gave up on the rest because I realized what I really want in this game. When I started here, I read through as many guides as I could found on the forum. Many of them were very well-written and pleasant to read. Eventually, the countless helpful articles written by @Shiyui inspired me to choose Bishop as my first character. Over the next 3 months, I achieved one goal after another: reaching LV120, passing gen20, 1-hit wolf spiders, 1-hit ULU1, and 1-hit ULU2. Like many other new players, I obtained most of my mesos from selling leech. Honestly, I hated selling low-level leech in the beginning. To this date, I still don't ever want to go to Ghost Ship because I spent too many hours in those dark little chambers. However, after I reached the point of 1-hitting ULU1, things started to feel better, because there was a weird sense of satisfaction associated with killing densely-packed mobs on multiple layers, seeing the ground covered by meso bags and equips, and getting godly cravens / thief tops / thief bottoms from time to time. By the time I reached LV180, I became another new source Bishop who could 1-hit skeles with MW10 and gen20. I also bought enough AP resets to wash my NL to 15K HP. Some of my friends suggested that I settle for 15K HP. However, for some reason I really wanted to have 30K. As a result, I sold some hours of skeles leech and leeched my NL to LV140 at ULU2. With those mesos, I was able to wash my NL to 30K-capable: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/latest-accomplishment-thread.2508/page-308#post-603750 After washing my NL and resetting base INT, I tried looking for boss runs despite the fact that I haven't purchased good gears (I had a 4 WA clean PGC, 2 WA clean FS, 10 WA WG, and 73 WA craven at that time). And this is where things turned downhill. I am not a very social person, and the few good friends I had couldn't run with me very often due to time differences. As for random parties, there is widespread damage discrimination. Whenever someone says R> Zak or R> Krex, I would PM them "LV143 NL". Sometimes I don't get a response, possibly due to my low level. Sometimes the organizer asks for my range, I reply "3.5K", and got no response after that. Sometimes I manage to squeeze into parties, but unpleasant things still happen during the run: Scenario 1: someone else asks me "Cape ATT? Shoe ATT?". After I tell them, they say "...", "noob" or "LMAO get better ones". Scenario 2: another new attacker couldn't afford using stoppers in zak because he / she doesn't have a mage. That player gets flamed. Even though it wasn't directed at me, I still felt bad. Scenario 3: someone else was mocking in his guild chat how terrible my damage was, and how he must had 1K+ more range than me at my level. Little did he know that my Bishop was in the same guild. This incident made me realize that many others may have done the same thing, and I just didn't know about it. For Radiance members who are reading this, it happened when my Bishop was in another guild, which eventually died before I joined Radiance. Those experiences didn't really anger me. I just thought it was quite immature of them to look down upon others simply because they do more damage. However, it was clear to me that I won't have good bossing experiences without buying good gears. So I decided to put in a bit more effort. At that time, skeles leech fell out of favor, but petri leech was surging in price. Therefore, I created an I/L and got it to the point of 1-hitting petri. I made around 18B selling petri leech, and bought a 13/81 craven, 12 ATT cape, 9 ATT shoes, and 15 ATT SCG. I also passed TT30. I don't really know what motivated me to do it in the beginning. Possibly because I didn't really have another hobby to keep me occupied after work. Possibly because leech was made easier when I was watching TV shows on a 2nd screen. But as I leeched more, I started to really enjoy giving fast leech. I learned telecasting, which in my opinion is a super cool technique: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/simultaneous-teleport-and-mage-ultimate-a-k-a-telecasting.108717/ I also discovered several rotations that synchronizes very well with mob spawn timers: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/telecasting-and-rotations.113753/#post-636289 https://royals.ms/forum/threads/telecasting-and-rotations.113753/page-3#post-662992 After that, it became a pleasure for me to sell leech and do these rotations, because they have a very nice rhythm that felt like music. Sometimes I would even tap my foot while doing them. It was also a pleasure to hear positive feedback from my buyers. Most of them are very thankful of me for the good leech I gave at reasonable price These motivations sustained me to make another 22B from leech, almost enough for a 19/91 craven. When one such craven came to the market, I almost decided to farm another 1-to-3B and buy that one: https://royals.ms/forum/threads/s-19-91-rc.118965/#post-672396 However, when I was placing the bid, something didn't feel right. After some self-reflection, I realized that I don't really care about 19/91. It would give me 400 extra range on my NL, which probably means 2000-3000 higher lines and 1-minute faster Zak / Krex? Many competitive players may care a lot about it, but I really didn't give a damn. Instead, using the liquid mesos to buy some nice chairs and merch event scrolls during anniversary seem like much more appealing alternatives. Therefore, I backed out of the bid. That was the turning point for me. Although I set good gears as a goal, I realized it was never my primary motivation, and it wasn't why I enjoyed this game. Without a goal of gears set in mind, I no longer feel rushed to make mesos. This allows me to relax and have more fun in Royals. My game-life balance also improved quite a bit after that realization. In the future, I think I will just casually farm and sell leech whenever I want to. If I never get a perfect weapon, if I never upgrade shoes / gloves / cape on my NL, if I never reach LV200 on my Bishop and NL, it's totally fine for me. After all, I play the game to have fun, and I am doing it wrong if I am rushing or forcing myself to do anything in it. Thank you for reading my story. I am in no ways suggesting that others should agree with me. I just want to share the perspective of someone who "gave up"
I Guess for my hard truth is joining here and playing only and I mean ONLY my bucc as my only character in this server until 145 ish. I used my bucc to earn mesos and hunt everything and try my best to go for boss runs. Now my bucc has decent damage. I also got a few bils I Guess (both eqp and mesos combined) Then I created other characters and sometimes use my bucc to leech them (otherwise PQ), and I managed to get up a 130+ drk and 110 cdit. But then I have my friends that tell me how much further I could have gotten if I had put my effort into a bishop from the start o__o
But that's like being told that you could've improved the world instead of playing videogames. It's true but you had fun instead of torturing yourself.
My advice is that just enjoy what you play as any class can strive. In terms of mesos gaining without mages, this can be through gacha, ap resets or boss runs. Most importantly is to make friends and connect with people.
It's been 370+ days since I started Royals. Up to this point, I've accomplished a lot but really, it's not possible to come this far without assistance of any form imaginable. The one thing I would advice any experienced players out there is to know that you were once new and to guide new players who choose to help themselves. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing a new player go through the hard times like you did (not sadistic) and blossom at the end.
Not a problem if your time is worthless to begin with. At least that's how I feel about all my leisure activities. I don't expect much of anything out of it, and you can only be pleasantly surprised.
