Play MapleStory

This game is like that really easy girl in middle school. You played with her for a while and got bored with her, but you hear her call your name and for whatever reason you go back to see if anything has changed, and every time you go back, nothing has ever changed. Now, almost 8 years since you've met her, and you two still meet up every once and awhile to diddle. This game, man.

For claification sake, I've played this game since Beta and I love the overall animation and playstyle imaged as a 2D platformer. I guess this really hit a nostalgia nerve for me and my yearning for the old Mario Brothers mechanics. And while I hate to bash something I fell in love with, this is no longer the game that I use to know.

Back in the early days of MapleStory, you had your 4 standard classes: Mage, Warrior, Archer, Thief. Mage and Warrior had 3 subsets each; Archer and Thief had 2 subsets. Finding equipment and hanging out with friends was easy because there was just a few servers and not that many maps. The level cap was set as a crazy 200, but the mindless grinding wasn't so bad, cause you could easily be with your friends and if you found an equip you couldn't use, one of them could and vice versa.

But Maplestory grew. On the surface, you would think this is a good thing; more people = more friends = more equips. True, but Nexon saw this as an excellent opportunity to milk its players through microtransactions.

As the game grew, Nexon built more servers and maps, creating virtual spacial rifts between players. It became more and more difficult to get to the same map as a friend without using a teleport rock (a microtransaction item) or wasting a bunch of time. Nexon created pets, vanity items, world transfers, shops; all for real money. When that wasn't enough, they created more character types, those who couldn't share the cash shop items with the original characters, essentially urging players to rebuy cash items. The new characters also lead to the nerfing of some of the original characters under the guise of "improved" for rebalancing issues. Nexon raised the level cap to 250, milking players for even longer. They created a lottery system called gachapon for in-game items using real money, not to mention special event "lotteries".

Don't play Maplestory. It's not what it use to be. The fun is sucked out of it. Don't waste tons of time and money on it like I did.

I remember waking up as a kid, excited and eager to start up my dad's computer, hopping into the world of Maplestory, ready to take on whatever the game was going to throw at me that day. Needless to say, I was hooked. The cartoony yet oddly satisfying visuals, the huge world that was set before me, the deceptively simple class system, all things that I adored about it. For a while, I couldn't get enough of this game. It was my first MMO ever, and, to this day, probably still my favorite. Nothing comes close to the fun I had while killing mushrooms in the starting zone, slaying Balrogs on airships, destroying robots in Ludi, and finally, conquering Zakum. I made many friends, joined a slew of guilds, and mostly, just had fun. That's what videogames were about back when I played Maplestory, and in a sense, it seems like they've kind of lost that recently, although that's a different topic entirely. Maplestory now seems to be much more oversaturated in terms of classes and things to do, actually making it an overwhemingly experience rather than an extremely enjoyable one, one that I had when I played. Needless to say however, I still had a HUGE amount of fun with this game, and is hands-down one of the best experiences, if not THE best, I've had in gaming. I cannot speak to the community now, but when I was playing, it was a bunch of generous and fun loving people, one's that were willing to help others when they needed it. I miss Maplestory, specifically old Maplestory, even more specifically v.066, when things were simpler and I had a bunch of NX to spend on a different hairstyle.

I miss you Maplestory.
Thanks for giving me the game of a lifetime.

Review as follows: Simple version up top, detailed on "read more". Note: I have played this game for well over 2,000+ hours over the years, and long before it was released on steam; how I ever racked up that many hours I will never know, but the game is not worth even 1 hour of your playtime.

The good:

• A classic 2D action platformer
• Many character classes
• Many areas to explore

The Bad

• Character classes are horribly balanced
• Classes do not particularly stand out from each other (their niche's all blur together now)
• There is a huge problem with botters and hackers (people using cheats)
• Traveling is a serious pain, and they draw it out ALOT to make you want to spend $$ money to make it easier.
• Items purchased with $$ have a time limit (usually 90 days)

The Worst

• The game is so horribly coded it takes approx 2+ minutes to start even on high end computers
• it will often take several attempts to start the game in order to start up properly (you will be getting lots of errors)
• The game crashes FREQUENTLY you could be playing for 5 minutes and it will crash so hard you must force shut down your computer
• The game servers frequently need extended maintanence (often emergency maintenece; occurs several times a week)
• They force you to pay $$ real cash to have or upgrade abilities your character should have to begin with (such as the ability to hit criticals with magic attacks; which is INVALUABLE)
• They make quests and grinding require so much travel you are essentially forced to purchase teleport rocks or other timesavers
• Dying is exceptionally easy at higher levels, even the best gear can get you killed in as little as 5 hits (which you can get hit about every second), if you want to avoid the 10% exp loss you have to buy consumable "charms" to negate the 10% exp loss (which is many hours of work at higher levels).
• Looting is atrocious (essentially requires spending $$ to get pets and items to have them loot for you.
• They create artifical demand

On to the detailed and truely abominable things that make this game horrendous, almost beyond words.

Fundamentally flawed
The simple act of looting is to push the "loot" button which is both "Z" and the numpad 0. As you progress through the game the method for fighting "mobs" is at the bucket loads, you will be killing 4~12 monsters within every 5 seconds. Each monster drops 2~4 items which are money, a misc monster drop, a potion, and a "ticket fragment" of sorts to do a special instance run that is always dead (no one does them.). So for every item you want to pickup, you must push "Z" and you will find that you will quickly be pushing that key hundreds if not THOUSANDS of times every few minutes. And if you dont loot those items you make essentially no money. The entire economy is seriously inflated to begin with too. If you want looting to be convenient be prepared to shell out about $30~$40 every 90 days for a pet and its "gear" to make it run around to loot things for you.

You are forced to struggle with inventory space. At first you may think that you have plenty of space, but you quickly find out that the "Use" items and "misc" tabs will quickly be overlowing from NECESSARY items (the several hundred or THOUSAND potions you will be carrying, and have to replace every few hours or so). while the ETC slot will be filled with quest items, materials for crafting, and of course the hoards of monster drops you will be picking up (which usually only stack up to 200).

Items you buy with $$ are NOT account-wide. They use a nonsense "cash inventory" system which is only shared with other characters of the same class (except in some rare caes like the "adventurer" series of classes or the "cygnus knights." However after the addition of the resistance they have their own shared cash inventory as well. You may think that is good enough but it IS NOT! because there are 2x of all that combined in classes that have a cash inventory shared only with other characters of the same class (which is POINTLESS because then you would be leveling up the exact same thing all over again; as each class only has 1 build, a special exception is made few 2 or 3 classes which can be either 1 element or another). Please note I am not talking about how a magician splits off into ice/lightning or fire/poison, I am referring to how a single class with a single skillset can have skills you wont want to invest in because they have no real part in the only effective way to create your character; which can be ever so important as there are skills in future advancements that require some certain skills to be Maxed.).

They purposefully make things that should be everyday and easy access functions, exceedingly hard. For example, if you want to sell ANYTHING to ANY players, you want to go to the "free market" with about 50 other people, all spamming trying to sell things. If you want to sell ANYTHING as easily as it should be, you have to spend about ~$5 to buy a shop that your character has to man (lasts 90 days) just to sell things, which is horrendous in itself because you cant play the game, and it has a tendency to CRASH FREQUENTLY, and so hard you will have to FORCE SHUTDOWN YOUR PC!. So if you want to sell things as effectively as it should be, you have to spend $10 USD+ just to setup a store that will sell things for you (you set prices), and those can last 1 day to 7 days (getting more expensive for longer, up to $30 USD.)

Character balancing is pitiful
They come out with new character classes OFTEN! I swear, whenever you start getting your character to a high enough level to be happy with it, they release something that will outclass you in EVERY WAY! and you will essentially be forced to play that newest class since the monsters only get stronger to keep competing with the newest classes. And dont expect your old class to get revamped any time soon! it took them well over 3 years just to update the adventurers ONCE. and over a year for most anything else. In some cases the skillsets even change so completely you wont even recognize what to put your skill points into! but it gets WORSE! because if you make a mistake you will have to spend the $5+ USD to reset your points and hope you get it right the next time. It used to be that you had to spend about that much to reset a SINGLE POINT! and most skills require 20 or 30, im sure you can see how atrocious that is (the complete reset is only a new addition too, if you wanted reset you had to wait until they revamp your class again, because customer service WILL NOT HELP YOU!

Customer service from Nexon is essentially non-existant, in fact, 99% of any and all messages you will get from them are automated. And no matter how large or small your problem is, nothing will be done. Your account getting hacked, or a broken quest (some havent been fixed for 2+ years), maybe even missing items/progress from a rollback, you will not get any help.

There is no acceptable passive regen's (% or fixed numbers) for being in or out of combat, the only class that had one (the Jett) was removed with their revamp. So of course you must rely on potions ENTIRELY for you healing (unless you are a healer of sorts). The only passive regen you do have is 10hp for standing still for 10 seconds, and at higher levels (something you quickly reach) you have 7,000+ HP easy. while mana regen's at 3, which your mana is easily over 2,000 regardless of class (mages can go up to 30,000).

There are countless more horrible things I can tell you about, but i feel I have made my point, and I beleive this is enough reasons why this game is among the things you should never play. Comments and likes are greatly appreciated! lets get the word out on why this is an awful game!

A once-great game with a rather unique style, ruined by balance changes homogenizing all the classes, pay-to-win power creep, and no customer support.

Aside from the graphics of skills being different and some classes requiring ammunition to use theirs, it's all a matter of using the fastest skill that hits multiple times so you can hit the damage cap twelve times in a single attack. With the occasional buff to prevent the bosses from instagibbing you with one of their attacks.

The only challenge most bosses in this game have come from one of two factors:
1, Attacks that reduce your health and mana to 1, dispel your buffs, or take control away from your character.
2. Having HP totals somewhere in the billions, and a short time limit to bring that to zero. Not a problem for people who hit the damage cap with every attack (50,000,000), but for people too self-aware to spend loads of dosh on cash items to upgrade in-game equipment they're impossible.


Getting away from the game mechanics, the servers are infested with hackers and botters. How infested? There are more botters in the game than actual players. There's a "Report to GM" function, but if a GM actually responds to it, you should probably either buy a lottery ticket, or more likely slap yourself in the face because you are in a dream world where the impossible is possible. GMs only show up to host godawful events and spam emoticons while spouting lies.

On that note, the game has an autoban function built into it, which 90% of the time bans nonhackers doing something mundane for no reason. On the off chance a hacker/botter actually is banned, they'll eventually be unbanned because Nexon likes giving people "second chances" and unbanning everyone who was ever banned up to that point. Why? Because hackers spend money too ya know! Gotta keep profits up!

I said there is no customer support, but I was lying. There is a customer support ticket system, but it would probably better if it didn't exist at all. Tickets can go without a response for literally years. Nexon also has this opinion that having your account hacked into is the player's fault and refuses to compensate. One of the Global exclusive areas even has a quest line that mocks this, giving the middle finger to everyone who had their account broken into and laughing at them.


Long story short, Unique art-style Platformer-MMORPG that crashed and burned and then was grinded into the dirt. Cause of death? Power creep, pay-to-win, and apathy and malice from the company that runs it. Avoid it like the plague if the plague were also on fire and making rude gestures at you.

After I have experienced SO much about Maplestory, from playing it since 9 years ago plus on various private servers, I think it is time to hit delete key and post a caveat for curious 12-year-old like you to see. This game does not hurt if you play with some friends. Honestly, being playing with friends is the only good way to play this game since they serve as a reminder that you still have a real life. Without such link to the reality, it is too easy to be sucked into the scheme of Maplestory that is deliberately, fundamentally created to exhaust both your mind and wallet
Because remember: the philosophy of any MMORPG is to encourage competition between players strictly on the level of vanity and facile values, being how beautiful you look, how much money you have, how high damage can you hit...... Especially when you are lonely in the game, this emotion is easily ellicited because the game encourages so in any aspect. But the trick is, we all understand there is no ending to beautiful cash shop items and the amount of currency you possess, why can't we/I keep from not coming back to torture ourselves in the grinding and trading that ultimately lead to no real satisfaction?
Because those game developers(e.g. Nexon) understand how pleasure works in us. What human desires is not a specific, final object, but a differential value through a growing experience. That is to say, pleasure is only gained through change; and after you arrive at a threshold, being it posed by the game or your brain, you are only left with emptiness. And this is when you want to start the loop again, again, and again. This is precisely why we only want to make MORE money, why we want to spend MORE cash items, and get MORE levels/damage without it ending at a specific number. This is why Nexon created so many new types of characters and jobs: they want to give you the pseudo-novel feeling each time you restart the experience, while in fact, nothing has changed about how your pleasure works. It's an everlasting loop.
So instead of clicking the "Play Game" button. Why not think about something more valuable in your life? Whether or not you are willing to participate in this collective subconscious hell of pleasure looping is your own choice. If you really want to play, play it with friends. I am lonely, I don't have friends. Since I understand all these, I decide to quit.

cc pls

I like maplestory because the endless grinding and repetitive gameplay makes me forget that I don't have a job

Play it if you also like data entry and making spreadsheets for fun

Has become way to much of a Pay to win game... I've been playing on and off since beta version 0.16, when getting to level 30 was a challenge...

Hackers everywhere, regardless of the constant patches...

Me and my friends have played mapelstory since 2006 when hacking was a bit abundant. We've gone through thick and thin with this game and i even won my first major event item Nekomimi back then and i treasured it with all my heart. Sadly i can't say nexon treasured me at all even though i've spent quite a bit of money and give or take 7 years on it. One day I came back to my account with my items missing and my scrolled untradeable gear reset to 10 slots and basic stats. Personally i could've cared less about all my other items but my Nekomimi's were missing. I spent years collecting the few that Bellocan had in its server and treasured the pair i won for myself. So naturally i opened up a support claim asking if they could help get my Nekomimi's back. Almost 2 months went by up until i finally got a response asking if i checked all my characters .... which you know.... all of them being nekkid and the fact that i did check all my characters and their inventories and storage means it wasn't there. So i sent a reply saying that they weren't there and then the GM put a stamp on my claim saying it was solved and put me on my way. So there my characters sat being nekkid and all minus any untradeable gear locked to them. From that day forward i went and bought some NX and sent another ticket specifically for the Nekomimi's that were taken and the hacked account report and they didn't even bother looking at them. I sent about 3 more over the course of 2013 and gave up. I used the NX to get meso's and then try and find some more nekomimi's but being an item from 2006-2007 there were none for the weeks i spent in Free Market spamming buying Nekomimi's.
*Edit* Opened another ticket after retrying maplestory and got a gm response. Basically he's unable to help because "hacked accounts" are a touchy subject and they can't actually verify that you were hacked and that the items were yours and not just transfered to another account. This bit of info would have helped me in the first ticket but i can understand where the verifying it's yours can be a horrid downhill subject. So bellocan's pretty much dead so no chance i'll get another but the gm's aren't bad.

Nexon destroyed drop rates when they did the big bang patch and changed the Exp tables to make leveling up easier. Nowdays you're expected to either use NX to get more gear, merchant, or craft some gear which isn't always possible seeing how the use of Nx to buy meso has sky rocketed free market prices making the crystals needed to craft a bit pricy. Party quests were basically dumbed down over the years. Ludibrium party quest was turned from a 30min+ quest into a 10min+ quest. Guild rankings were taken down for no apparent reason and guild quest was made useless because of it. Guild questing was used to get points to rank up your guild and had to be coordinated with the group with certain classes and skills were a must in order to finish. Some of the party quests were even taken down with the big bang revamp like ludibrium maze, Carnival party quest, and some others. Nexon now also guts any decent way to get exp from grinding or party quests. Most of the old party quests give crap rewards and crap exp. Grinding gives moderate exp and have very low drop rates. I've seen a good chunk of new players resort to begging because when doing certain party quests for levels they'll be booted because they don't have strong low level gear or the gear will be out of date and party leaders won't accept them into the party.
Nexon also has a habit of gutting any places you can grind for exp.

TL;DR
Nexon has slowly ruined maplestory over the past few years by making it short and sweet instead of a long savory flavor. Also nexon's customer support basically can't help you if you're hacked for mutiple reasons.

If you like spending real money to get fake married to your fake 12 year old cyber-spouse, this is the game for you.
Also, kawaii in the sheets, senpai in the streets
#420 Kawaii

It's like Masturbating with sandpaper while pouring bleach down your urethra. 10/10

Socialize with 12 year olds in your favorite kawaii middle school simulator

Honestly this is a fun and cute game aesthetically, but thats it.
Unless you have the money to buy your way to the top, your going to be stuck grinding thru many, many, of your levels.

HOWEVER I do find this game really enjoyable when playing with a friend. Gets your mind off all the grinding (sorta kinda but not really.)

This game is crap why can't I stop playing it.

Played since beta in 2003.. even got all my screenshots from back then.. 10 years ago it was a great game! 10 years later the game is just horrible:



Pay 2 Win: If your very high leveled and dont have a single piece of cash shop items or hairstyles, you will get mistakenly banned for being a botter, or treated like ♥♥♥♥ by the community.. oh and for the people who do spend money on the game you would be spending $15,000 USD or more to get the results you want.. (cubes and all) while spending $50 on the game wouldnt get you anything except a pet and all its lame accessories



Hackers Everywhere: Now i don't care how secure your account info is, or how many antivirus scanners you got, or even if you use that anti-keyloggable steelseries keyboard, YOU WOULD GET HACKED.. skilled people know how to manipulate nexon's database, exploit the pando downloader, or even right through the cash shop and gain access to your character and pin.. NOBODY in that game is safe.. best way to be safe in that game is not to brag about your gears or show off in youtube videos



Lame Economy: The in game Meso currency cap used to be 2.1billion but with so many complainers they finally increased it to 10billion.. though 10billion couldnt even buy you a decent weapon in that game.. since very great or even godly equipments cost about 60bill~120bill a piece..


1. purchasing equips that cost more than the meso cap (which is pretty much everything in the game except pots) will require you to have a voucher.. you are 200.1% likely to get SCAMMED

2. large trades through the trade window violates nexons TOS, your likely to get mass perma banned for having fradulent meso or even trading with illegal website farmers

3. by the time you buy all the equips you want, you WILL GET HACKED.. nexon wont compensate you at all


Botters Everywhere: The reason why everyone bots in the game is because the economy is so jacked up and expensive, no legit person can even afford a decent equips set.. alot of people resort to botting to accumulate alot of mesos



Cocky Players: Alot of the players in that game are self centered losers with 2million damage range or higher, if your damage is lower than theres they would either kick you out of partys and raids, or killsteal the map your training on.. oh this happens very often during 2x exp events unless you play on one of those underpopulated brand new servers but they even started to do that over there too



Wrongful Bans: This happens ALOT and a good 85% of the people never do get their accounts back.. they have to start all over, some never play again.. you might be strolling through the free market, or henesys townsteet and walk into a map with a vac hacker, well your gonna get banned for hacking too not just that person, and nexon doesnt investigate nothing they just hellban everybody as they see fit, and when it does happen to you, their customer support takes great pleasure in refusing tickets and appeals



I would recommend La Tale instead of Maplestory.. to anybody who plays it.. you've been warned

Ø♥╬¶→╚! 漢字月意字 / 會意字假借字 转注字 / 轉注字 very good must buy and waste all ur money so u get a item for a month then u lose it and look like a homo

**Edit** : If you look below my original bit, I went into a little more depth about how this game is pay to win, if you're not convinced. I don't cover all the reasons, but I do cover one of the main ones. Please, take my word for it, you don't want to play this game past the early game.

EXTREMELY pay to win. The end game is utter ♥♥♥♥ for this reason along with various other problems ranging from lack of content to game breaking bugs that take forever to fix to extremely unbalanced classes.

Nexon just doesn't care. Don't play this game, it's not worth your time. Find a private server, their service and gameplay is generally better.


**Edit**

I'm going to add this in due to some comments I've been getting about the game not being pay to win. Sorry if it's a bit disorganized, since this was meant to be a comment, however it went over the 1000 character limit :

The potential system, to those who have not played this game yet, is basically an extra 2-3 stats tagged onto almost any peice of equipment. These stats account for the majority of a player's strength/damage, much more so than the stats you regularly get through upgrading items by in game means. These stats start out very poorly, and are rolled randomly by using what is called a cube. Occassionally, the tier of the potential will go up when you roll (This is quite rare, maybe 1 in 30 rolls give or take. Some people need around 100 if they're unlucky), giving access to better potentials. Note that these potentials are RNG, so as a warrior, you may very well get DEX, INT, LUK, M.ATK or any other useless stat 95% of rolls.

To get a single cube through in game means takes up to a week, more or less. Crafting them is ludicrously expensive and trying to obtain them from killing bosses is pointless due to the ludicrously low drop rate ( To get one cube, you'd have to do a twice daily boss each day for on average a month, give or take. I say this from personal experience ).

Of course, you could always BUY cubes. They're $1-$2 each (The $2 one is necessary for upgrading the final tier ), or they come in $10 and $20 bundles. Note that it's ONE DOLLAR TO BUY A SINGLE CUBE. Making a single end game tier item can take HUNDREDS OF CUBES, and that will get you almost NOWHERE progress wise. You need a FULL SET of these types of items to have a CHANCE at one of the end game bosses. This, coupled with the fact that group play is extremely discouraged in boss fights makes these end game bosses impossible (The HP on these bosses is in the hundred billions. Consider that I, a long time player who doesn't spend money can't shave even a fraction of their HP bars in 10 minutes. Now consider that most bosses have a 20 - 30 minute time limit).

It is also impossible to make money in the game from 'end game' activities, because unless you have an extremely high damage range, all the bosses you will be able to fight have useless drops.

I didn't even mention the fact that a lot of boss drops are trade locked unless you pay $2-$3 to untrade lock it for one trade.

Been playing for 7 years, and to be honest I enjoyed it up to a few days ago. For an entire week the game has been completly broken to the point where 1/3-1/2 of the playerbase can't even load. No actual fix has been released, and no anouncement by developers. Tech support and customer support don't help either. They've just ignored us and ran away with our money. To add salt to the wound they also had a double xp event when no one could log in. I've given up on this game and you shouldn't waste your time on it.

I've been a loyal player of this game for the past eight years (I started back in the Summer of 2006), and despite Nexon's blatant destruction of the game with limited customer support and not giving a ♥♥♥♥ about their playerbase...I can somehow still enjoy this game. As of recent, I mainly stick around because, yes, the game is QUITE fun if you find your little clique of friends, and because somehow, I enjoy the story of Maple's heroes fighting against the Black Mage. A few of the Hero classes have one hell of a backstory to them, and despite clunky, unfair gameplay mechanics, I like it. Yes, I'm aware Nexon couldn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about how their players feel, and yes, they break the game continuously while providing "patch updates" to cover up their intentional ♥♥♥♥-ups.

Long story short? Nah, can't really recommend it to anybody. Am I going to keep playing it? Probably; waiting to watch it burn is more like it. I can equate my experiences to sitting with a group of friends, enjoying their marshmallows around a campfire, when suddenly, a wild sasquatch arrives behind you and tosses someone into the flames. The question is: who will be next?