Lore Gian

Old Equips

The hat that ChickenAttk is wearing in particular is this Talking Witch Hat from an old Halloween event. I love weird old Maplestory equips like that. There were even democrat and republican balloons for the 2012 presidential election.

It came out around the same time as this video of Spieglemann explaining the electoral college:

It was an interesting time in Maplestory. Part of me wishes they would still have events like this, but I'm not sure if they'd get away with this in the current political climate.

Nostalgia

It's surreal thinking about how I've had this Maplestory account for so long. Growing up, I usually had cheaper laptops that could barely handle the game, but I would always try to download Maplestory on them and cause the computers to overheat. Good times lol.

Back in the day, Party Quests (PQs) were the best way of leveling up. PQs involved joining groups with random players to do some mini games or puzzles and then defeat a boss together at the end. Romeo and Juliet was one of the biggest ones and there was usually a decent amount of downtime to chat with other players. It was fun making friends with random players in-game that way.

On the Maplestory fan forums like r/Maplestory, a lot of people discuss whether or not they miss old Maplestory or their childhood. It's hard to distinguish nostalgia for the actual game vs nostalgia from those carefree days as a kid where it was easy to spend hours gaming. I think it's a little bit of both. The general consensus seems to be that current Maplestory is a better RPG with its streamlined progression, while old Maplestory had better social aspects since the game required you to group up with people for most content.

Nowadays, the game is geared more towards solo play, a pattern that most MMORPGs have been heading towards for a while. While I do enjoy some aspects of solo play, part of me misses the "forced" socialization that was done through grinding together in MMORPGs.

Old Maplestory was a product of its time. Social media was in its infancy, so MMORPGs like Maplestory served as glorified chatrooms for meeting people.

There are still social aspects and party bossing in current Maplestory, but it's dedicated primarily for end-game bosses. You’re expected to do most of the progression by yourself. In-game chat has become more of a rarity since people use Discord to communicate. I started recently getting into the Challenger World event server with one of my friends, but we were struggling thinking of things to do together in the game because he was approaching end-game and I was still in the beginning stages. We could have tried leveling together if he made a new character, but we realized it wouldn't have been as efficient or enjoyable as it was in older versions of Maplestory. So now he's just waiting for me to catch up so we can do bossing together, yet at this point, it may just be easier for us to play another game together.

Still, I've been enjoying going through the solo progression myself. Although it's a different experience, modern Maplestory still has a lot to offer. In particular, I've been enjoying the lore of the newer Grandis classes and practicing bossing. But it's always fun to go down memory lane with this game. It still has that satisfying mindless grind type of play style.

And on the bright side, they just announced that they started testing out a Classic World server for Maplestory that will emulate old Maplestory gameplay.

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