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.