When I hear someone say "My little brother was hacking on my account", "My little brother vote abused for my characters", "My little brother played on my character while I was in the bathroom and called someone a bad word":
I suppose the name of the off topic forum should be changed to "@ImJakeFromStateFarm 's thought dump"
It’s common knowledge that doing 8 ticket gacha runs increase your chance of getting good items tenfold. @Jeen @Lyrium
This is what happens when you set the bar so low for balance changes by appeasing requests like increasing an intentionally bad by design classes 1v1 potential. By amounts that are so negligible that doesnt make any real difference at the end of the day, everyone will now throw in their requests.
personally i was always a noob back in the day. making it to a higher level and going beyond what i was able to do in the old days is fun, but it just isn't nostalgic. it was one of my biggest triumphs of all time when i finally made it to 3rd job. i think i was still in my 80s when big bang happened. i spent most of my time pre big bang as 1st and 2nd job. there's no ignorant noob culture or sense of wonder because everyone knows what they're doing now, and if they don't they can go look up a guide for literally anything. bosses like zak and HT aren't some impossible far off thing that only "those crazy badass 4th job people" can do, it's almost become just another ordinary routine. personally i don't think any private server can recreate that old feeling though. you would literally have to bring in a ton of people who have never played before to bring back noob culture, and how would you even do that? i don't think many people just randomly start playing private servers for dead MMOs they've never heard of. plus you would also have to make the server low-rate. there's also the fact that the average person didn't have access to basically unlimited NX like we do. you're poor? go sell ap resets or gach real quick! or even npc equips! being stuck in that cycle of noob poverty and getting excited over ever meso you made was a big part of the fun. now you can make a bil like it's nothing. the biggest problem of all though is that we're basically stuck in this single version of maple permanently. maple was exciting because new stuff was constantly getting added. the hype when pirates got released was unreal. new maps, new bosses, new quests and PQs, etc.. you looked forward to not knowing what was coming next or what the next update could hold. now we pretty much can't have that because it would shatter what little illusion of nostalgia we do have. adding post big bang maps and classes is pretty much out of the question, and adding new, unique, custom content doesn't feel entirely right either. that's to say nothing of how ridiculously difficult it is to make custom content. the only real solution is one that is never going to happen in a million years. nexon would have to make a "maplestory classic" server, starting out at an old version, and working their way through adding entirely new content and avoiding the horrific mistakes they made over the years. it would never happen though. even if they miraculously rounded up the old dev team and got enough players to make the endeavor profitable, they would never be able to resist the allure of the money they make off stupid game breaking things like cubes and the like. old maple is dead, and we have to accept that. this game is such a huge part of my life that watching it slowly be killed by nexon over the years was legitimately emotionally painful. playing royals is like having a cat for many years, and it dies, then you try and avoid the pain by getting a new cat. you love the new cat and you go on to have a great unique relationship with it, but it will never, ever be the old cat. it's seriously like dealing with a death or something. that might sound weird or creepy, but think of it this way: some of the best friends i ever had were made in old maple, and now i haven't talked to them in years because we don't have that game connecting us anymore, so when i lost the game i lost them too. people are literally missing from my life like a death happened. as dark as it may sound, playing royals is really just a form of denial and emotional coping i think a lot of us are using to fill that hole where maple used to be. we can't keep playing forever though. eventually we have to move on. i don't think most of us want to though. there's a very old saying among maplers. it used to almost be a joke. it was very lighthearted in nature. now, whether we realize it or not, it's been twisted into a really dark, even depressing statement by our circumstances. it's three simple words that embody the entire mindset of our playerbase. our desire to carry on the "torch" that is maplestory into a dark and uncertain future. words that signify that we are the last of an old guard that may never die out, protecting and preserving something that died to the rest of the world a long time ago. those three words are: "Nobody quits Maplestory"
