I first started this blog last year when I first started playing Maple Story (hence the Knight, was playing a Dragonknight ZhanZha0 (thats me on the Left) on the Cassiopeia server up to level 119... having some company helps keep the momentum going).
First the Ego trip. A little info about my online gaming history. Personally, I like playing FPS and RPG games offline, and these have been reflected in my online gaming history.
Age Of Conan - Signed up as beta tester;)
My first steps into the online arena had been Counter-strike and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and even a game called Guns, where you basically run around with a melee sword and a firearm killing your opponents while performing Matrix worthy stunts like running up/along walls and fipping over fences.But my real passion is from RPG and action/adventure games (ala Streets of Rage 2). But until they can port the action advernture experience into an MMORPG (the upcoming Conan online game on the left looks promising), RPGs are he way to go for me.
My online game experience has been limited to 4 games primarily: Feng Yun (Feng Wan) online was the 1st, followed by Maple Story, Guild Wars and JX2. Granado Espada is on the list..... provided I can squeeze time for it between my course and work. Still, Maple Story has been the game that I spent the most significant time on (leveling to level 119 legitimately, most of it alone, without assistance or "cash shop" items took me many months), and its a good game as any to start off with.
Maple Story stand out in a number of ways even now among the crowd of MMORPGs. Imagine a 2D world populated by cartoon style graphics and animations (with character designs reminiscent of the original SNES Tales of Phantasia).
No level cap (so far), no PK(player-killing), the ability to form guilds and played by gamers from as young as 6 to who knows..... and its FREE. Did I mention that it reportedly has more than 50 MILLION players worldwide...
I was originally introduced to the game by my best buddy, who played a warrior class (crusader). Thats him on the right. Who knews it could be so addictive just.
Back then, Cassiopeia was the newest server up, and one could really seee the results of improving one's "ranking with bouts of power leveling. I was actually in the top 12oth highest level DK (Dragonknight) in that world for a short period of time;)
So what it it was composed mainly of "fetch" quests and and "kill 300 of monster X and collect 500 of item Y? The carrot of just 1 more level, one more item to power up your character just so you can take on higher level "mobs" was surprisingly enticing.
The Cash Shop
Another interesting thing about the game as the ablity to spend real-world currency to buy game items (that cannot be bought in-game) to personalize the look of your character from the game's "cashshop". Sunglasses, lightsaber "skins", tatoos, hairstyles, even pets. All those tiny purchases add up, and the company must really be raking in the big bucks.
Also purchasable from the cashshops are limited period/usage items like ingame shopping stalls to peddle items you want to sell, charms that negate the penalties received upon death, the ability to teleport to different maps instantly, and even items that temporarily improve the grinding rate, by increasing experience, or miso (ingame currency) and item drop rate.
Epic Zakum Battle
But the experience was not without its pitfalls. Even with 3 (now 4) servers and 20 "channels" or instances per world, players used to hog the "good maps", asking "tresspassers" to CC(change channel). Some going as far as to attempt to annoy you from the map even if you were there first.
Even when you are willing to share, some people just want the whole "map" for themselves. It gets worse for maps with "legendary" monsters which spawn once every few hours....
Yes, even without the ability to "kill" someone in game, there are ways to annoy someone else. The main tactic is to KS (kill steal). By going after another character's mob, one can effectively stop that character from making any progress. Plus since the game assigns every character with a reputation score called "fame", "Fame Bombs", where a person calls up a whole game of players to mass "defame" someone else became a real threat.
No, There is no skill called "fly"
Unfortunately the worst thing to happen to the game literally went to the dogs, with blatant hacking which totally ruined the experience for me as well as most legitimate players. And one can see the weirdest hacks in Maple.... other than the expected "God-Mode" and Bots, there are hacks that literally pull all monsters within the map towards you, hacks that allow you to go to areas where one is not supposed to end up in, and in a related hack, ones that allow you to fly....
Legit community tries to help by reporting cases of hackers, but to no avail. When hackers can fly and hide in areas of the map where normal players cannot even reach, its an uphill task to spot, much less identify and report a hacker.
The fact that they use names meant to confuse also complicates matters (although its one of the indicators of a hacker as well). One hacker in Maple Sea, Cassiopeia used a name saintovvl, with 2 "v"s instead of a "w", so anyone who spots him only sees saintowl.... and when he was reported, he even framed the reporter for being the hacker instead.
Yet another hacker...I give up....
Its been an ongoing war between the hackers and the company to clamp down on hackers, but with so many maps "ruined" by hacks (imagine, as a combination of all the above hacks, having a map totally empty because every single mob has been repositioned to an unreachable area), one day, I just finally gave up.
One day, a hacker started arguing about the pros of hacking... and many players jumped to his defence. Thats when I realised that the cheating population in the game was so significant and/or that hacking is so widely accepted in Maple Story that many find nothing wrong with it...., and nothing can be done about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment