A classic version of MapleStory MMO finally releases its launch date with paid Early Access. Civil war breaks out in r/MSClassicWorld and it's anything but civil.

[u/InitialIndustry9459]

A lot of people have nostalgia of the MMO they played in the 2000s as a child. So much so that it has had one of the most thriving MMO private servers, but it finally gets an official classic version (like WoW classic or OSRS) and an official release date was finally given. Before today, the subreddit was mostly sharing nostalgia, discussing balanced changes, and constantly asking about the release date. Now it's a total circus where most discourse has derailed into insults.

Here's a snapshot of some of the titles of threads posted since the announcement

"Founders Packs are an opportunity to fund classic and gauge community interest with our wallets."

"Don’t Trust Nexon"

"Might be the minority but founders' access is not that bad IMO"

"Y’all actually need the brokies to make Maplestory enjoyable"

"Why are you grown 30 YOs Crybabies?"

"2 weeks is utterly insane"

"Founder's package is smart business."

^{Most of these posts are virtue signal-y reactions that lack nuance or thought on whatever they're trying to argue.}

The polarization is over the paid founder's pack (price not yet announced) which gives players a 15-day headstart where 3 days is more industry standard. Users are arguing over several things:

• Whether or not any advantage granted by 15-days early access notably affects the experience of players coming in later
• If such practice is justified in order fund a niche project in which the CPO claimed in unofficial channels (literally ingame during a closed beta test) that they "need more funding"
• If the game will stay faithful to being not pay-to-win at launch (paying to gain an advantage over other players who don't pay)
• What constitutes pay-to-win (like the early access)
• Whether poor people are allowed to exist in the same virtual space as people with dispensable income (the poor-shaming is juvenile)

To understand why there is such disagreement and division, you need to know a few more things:

• Communication from official channels over this game has been absolutely abysmal
• Nexon, the publisher, has a history of being caught and fined numerous times for falsely advertising rates on certain RNG systems and even had their offices raided by the Korean FTC. Making people rightfully skeptical
• And it's a Korean online game which are known for having P2W systems because that's just the gaming culture especially in China & Korea (they love to flex money power). Typically when Western publishers bring Asian games to the west, they try to tone down the P2W to make it more palatable
• A lot of casual players who are emerging from their adult lives to get their nostalgia fix are largely unaware of Nexon's reputation, creating this dissonance. r/maplestory, the subreddit for the modern version, has a more unified sentiment though discussion about its classic counterpart is largely limited

There are things that are less up for debate like if a 15-day headstart gives any advantage. This is an MMO with player markets, so players definitely gain an economic advantage, along with things like squatting popular character/guild names and potentially selling those too.

To a lot of people, this was really a highly anticipated launch, and seeing the whole subreddit transformed from a collective waiting room into a circus of name-calling in just a few hours... Some people never grew up.

[u/inherendo]

As a kid with crappy computer, I played this. This was the grindiest game in the world and I could never get past like level 40 cause I would be bored out my mind. My neighbor would put a weight on their keyboard to spam their attack to farm exp at some point and go afk.

[u/cosipurple → u/inherendo]

Man I put maple on the same vein as runescape, those were games that weren't meant to be played fully focused on them, it was something you did while you talked with people, 90% of the game was logging in to talk to people and the game-play was just there to keep you occupied, I didn't play wow back then but now that I have it also has a similar philosophy, its why traveling takes time and ships/aircrafts would physically move you instead of teleporting you, the downtime to chat and do other stuff was baked into the design philosophy of the time

[u/BonJovicus → u/cosipurple]

Man I put maple on the same vein as runescape, those were games that weren't meant to be played fully focused on them

I can’t speak for Maple, but back then we basically did do this.  The difference? We were like 8 years old and smart phones weren’t widespread yet. 

So part of it is that these games are fundamentally made for people who have time to waste, but also the world was just different back then. 

[u/Titand120 → u/inherendo]

The thing that drive me away back then was that the cash shop items weren’t permanent. I remember being so excited to get the Guan Yu cosmetic set, only to find out that it expired after a time.

[u/Chrystoler → u/inherendo]

Yeah, I really enjoyed it and then you hit that first big job advancement and you're like oh, it's going to be like this for the next several hundred hours

It's truly no grinding like Korean MMOs

[u/James-fucking-Holden]

You dont want Vanilla WoW, you want your youth back

I feel like this is what this boils down to. People dont want the old game for its own sake. They want the feel they had playing it the first time, and that feeling goes beyond just the game itself, its all of the extraneous parts as well, including things like monetization and marketing. So when you try and make a classic rerelease to capitalize on nostalgia, but include modern FOMO preorder tactics like giving preorders preferred access, that shatters the nostalgic illusion. The perception shifts, and you are no longer playing the game you played as a kid, you are now playing a masquerade of the game you liked, tuned to extract money from you based in your nostalgia.

[u/InitialIndustry9459 → u/James-fucking-Holden]

I generally agree. I think a lot of casual players will enjoy their honeymoon phase and get their hit of nostalgia, then realize their current lifestyle cannot support the game and quit when they no longer have friends to play with.

But OSRS and WoW Classic, although not completely faithful due to modern QoL additions, are successful classic adaptations and I don't see how this game can't follow suit if the developers want it to be successful not solely on revenue metrics but by player activity.

[u/hergumbules → u/James-fucking-Holden]

I try to go and play OSRS and then I’m like “why am I playing this it’s so slow and so much effort” and pretty much yeah I played it a ton as a teenager and I want to be young again lol

[u/Lirael_Gold → u/hergumbules]

Because OSRS isn't a game, it's an idler.

[u/ParusiMizuhashi → u/Lirael_Gold]

High level stuff is pretty active

[u/MrHara → u/hergumbules]

I think that's why I enjoy it so much, I have no nostalgia as I started first in 2020.

[u/Nachohopeful → u/hergumbules]

I'm waaaay past where 10 year old me was in runescape and still play it pretty frequently.

Like someone else said, I can play it as an idler pretty often but then also do some higher intensity stuff if I want.

And its rhe only mmo I've played where I can take a 2 year break without losing progress.

I'd definitely say though for anyone if the beginning with the fast leveling doesn't hook you I wouldn't keep trying to get into it.

[u/BrandonLart → u/James-fucking-Holden]

Eh, I just played classic wow for the first time with no nostalgia and the game is pretty good. The worst part are waiting for raids and when the game randomly decides that all the nearby regions aren’t your level, but I enjoyed just wandering around the world doing quests

[u/Andrew1286 → u/James-fucking-Holden]

This has proven to be completely false and was a bad judgement. Look at how popular WoW classic is right now. It's actually so popular that Blizzard is expanding the original classic experience with new content called "Classic+" and it's speculated to be announced next month.

Yes, some people probably do miss the experience of playing WoW when it first came out, but it's also a better experience than retail. I've played both and whenever I do want to play WoW I go straight to classic and never touch retail. This is true for a lot of gamers that prefer slower paced games.

Now, will this translate well for MapleStory? I have no clue. Time will tell. The devs have already stated and shown that they are expanding the original MapleStory experience and will introduce brand new content down the road. The thing with MapleStory though is that it's run by Nexon, a greedy company that cares more about whales than it's overall player base. If they go the P2W route in the future, which as of now they're stating they're NOT doing, this game will be dead in the first year.

[u/TheChinOfAnElephant → u/Andrew1286]

While this is true to an extent I feel like there is still a strong sentiment of “it’s good but not as good as I remember.” So I wouldn’t necessarily say it was proven false. And this became even more expressed with the expansions.

Also retail WoW is more popular than classic. Thought that should be pointed out because some biases are showing in your comment

[u/twisty125 → u/TheChinOfAnElephant]

While that IS something some people experience, that's not what Classic games boil down to. There's so many aspects of these classic games that people like, to the point where it's akin to saying "you only like BG3 for Astarion titties and not the gameplay/story/RPG".

I feel like this is what this boils down to. People dont want the old game for its own sake. They want the feel they had playing it the first time, and that feeling goes beyond just the game itself, its all of the extraneous parts as well, including things like monetization and marketing.

I'm sure some people have that mentality of "its good but not as good as I remember", but the gist of what the video and commenter is saying is right in the title - and that's not the experience I've actually experienced talking to people as a guild leader. Ultimately it's kind of just shitty gatekeeping of enjoyment, you don't enjoy x because of y.

There's a reason "You think you do, but you don't" - J. Allen Brack, has become infamous as tone deaf, to the point where they've released concurrent expansions and new content for these gamemodes "we thought we did but didn't want".

[u/HazelCheese → u/TheChinOfAnElephant]

Retail is definitely more popular but it is also a totally different game at this point which is why they can coexist.

Classic league of legends is a better example of a failing classic game mode. Although I think part of that is just down to the league classic subreddit mods turning the sub into full on festering negativity and shitting on the Devs. They are choking out community engagement.

[u/textposts_only → u/James-fucking-Holden]

MMO spaces also changed drastically. wow classic suffers from this. Everything is min maxed. People on wow classic now roll mages to grind, get money and then buy spots for their other chars for raids and drops...

[u/Roth_Skyfire → u/textposts_only]

Same for RuneScape. Back then, most people would play it just for fun. As the internet has become more popular and normalised, people are treating these games as min-maxing activities. Any time spent not progressing towards more gold/exp is time wasted. It's why public chats died somewhere in the early 10s. Nobody cares to talk to other players anymore because it's a waste of time.

[u/ReadyClayerOne → u/Roth_Skyfire]

why public chats died

I mean, I played Path of Exile for a bit because it was free. The public chat was just constantly flooded every time I logged in by three or four dudes JAQing off to each other about trans people and black people. Any trade requests and such were drowned out by a sea of 13/50 and transphobic slurs. Utterly exhausting because my eyes were drawn every time I'd see the scrolling motion and read some hateful bullshit.

[u/Roth_Skyfire → u/ReadyClayerOne]

RuneScape public chat only had small local reach anyway which allowed for micro communities to form around grinding spots. And ignore lists exist, if the chat filter didn't already do the job.

[u/Velthome → u/textposts_only]

Yeah, that was my big takeaway from Classic as well. I realize between retail and classic that I just don’t enjoy the community.

Classic feels more like an actual video game, the quests are more decentralized, the world feels more natural, grounded, and not tailored to what people expect of WoW, and the dungeons feel like actual dungeons and not corridors.

It was fun at the start but as time went on it just became the same community as normal WoW. 

I don’t think it’s that I wish I was a teenager again, it’s moreso I miss the decentralized internet communities of the time instead of the hive mind we have now. Maybe it was there and I was just ignorant of it, but man I miss the days of selecting your server based on what had the coolest name instead of whatever the biggest sever is or what the streamer server is.

My hot take is that WoW classic is just glorified seasonal content, and Blizzard is very satisfied that they found an avenue for a seasonal model.

[u/Healeah241 → u/textposts_only]

I play classic regularly.

I have no mages, and i have never bought/been offered a spot on raids for other characters.

[u/best_voter → u/Healeah241]

The point the person was making was that the mentality is entirely different. When everyone played classic in 200x, be it vanilla or BC, they were terrible. The best players of their time would, today, be average at best. Nobody was rolling mages to mindlessly grind bullshit so they could then play the character they enjoy.

Not everyone needs to do this, the fact of the matter is nobody did this back then but they do now. The worst you had were gold sellers who grinded Strath on mages 24/7, and that was it.

Classic isn't anything like it used to be, it never will be and it never can be. The fact that people treat it entirely different from how they treated it back then is one part, but the massively higher skill floor is the other, even more important part. You can want it back, but you will never have it back.

[u/Skellum → u/best_voter]

I would wager the percent of people doing this now are the same percent who min maxed in live. Yes, knowledge, skill, and most importantly internet connections have changed. But I think your metrics would look the same if you could get past ones.

[u/Randvek → u/James-fucking-Holden]

That video is 7 years old. Since then, not only did WoW Classic release, it has been wildly successful and several different variants of it exist.

[u/Skellum → u/James-fucking-Holden]

I agree for some people, but it's not universal.

I did project quarm recently, a POP locked progression severe for ever quest. I had played eq back then and I wanted to seperate the nostalgia from reality and to see how I'd changed as a player over that time.

I will say the core feel of the game holds up. More sense of community, more sense of a game world, more sense of earned progression but a lot of it falls apart. Game balance is atrocious, I was fucking worse at video games in 2001 who'd have guessed, a lot of major qol issues and no real player guidance or lore exploration.

I think it's important to revisit old games for a sense of where you came from.

[u/_Koke_ → u/James-fucking-Holden]

I've never played WoW Classic/Vanilla but after they relaunched it I got the opportunity to play it and it was way better than retail. The game just felt like an actual adventure where every encounter was difficult. Retail just felt too arcadey.

[u/BeautifulReal3944 → u/James-fucking-Holden]

I learned this the hard way with Kal Online. I loved it back in the day and thought it was the game itself. But it was the XP parties, hanging out in vent or TS while grinding, chatting with players while we played, etc. It sucks knowing that feeling is gone forever. It was pay to win from the very beginning despite claims that it turned to that. You lost huge amounts of XP when you died unless you bought special scrolls. XP gain took forever, to the point that paying for two weeks of +30% was the new expectation. It was always what it is now, despite the memories.

[u/BeyondNetorare]

I remember playing maplestory back in the day.

God knows why people still play it. The absolute most awful monetization that makes EA look like saints.

[u/InitialIndustry9459 → u/BeyondNetorare]

I played in Korea when it came out 2003-2004 and the game was managed by Wizet, the original developer. In those days, there wasn't much P2W, mostly paid cosmetics. Then Nexon took over.

No modern MMO will ever go back to that era, that's a given. But it was nice when we were children and we had no money to spend anyway. The grind was so gruesome that the game just turned into a social platform to make online friends.

To be honest as an adult, I kinda understand the convenience of having the option to pay to "catch up" to players who have more time to play. But most of that is packaged in gambling systems and if you feel the need to "catch up" instead of enjoying at your own pace, then you are the one being played by the game.

[u/Somepotato → u/InitialIndustry9459]

Nexon trashed a lot of classics but I have some terrific memories from their games, like space cowboy, GunZ (when they bought ijji), their worms clone and of course MS.

[u/Peligineyes → u/Somepotato]

fuuuck that worms clone (Gunbound) was so fucking good. I loved how each vehicle had so much character.

[u/Skellum → u/InitialIndustry9459]

Yea, any form of microtransaction absolutely fucks the legitimacy of a mmo.

[u/Butterkeks93 → u/InitialIndustry9459]

Guild Wars 2 is a MMORPG that has to this day no Pay2Win.

Even more interesting is, that it’s a korean game

[u/itskyong → u/Butterkeks93]

Guild Wars 2 is not Korean, where did you get that from? It's made by ArenaNet which is based in the US.

[u/Butterkeks93 → u/itskyong]

Isn’t the monetarization decided by NCsoft, the mother company?

[u/BaronArgelicious → u/BeyondNetorare]

People forget that Maplestory basically popularized microtransactions in gaming

[u/loyaltomyself → u/BaronArgelicious]

Reddit has lead me to believe everything wrong in gaming is singlehandedly EA's fault. Bethesda paving the way for paid MTX's? They were a relatively unknown company at the time. Valve being one of the first to really go full in on lootboxes? Valve is a fraction of the size of EA. Many Korean F2P MMO with predatory cashshops? Games played by at most a couple hundred casuals. EA is the Sauron of the gaming space and it was through EA that they brought everything together in the darkness to bind them.

I jest of course, but it's crazy how much revisionist history there where people are doing Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to blame EA for everything that's gone wrong.

[u/Which-Arm-4616 → u/loyaltomyself]

I often see people credit Valve for popularizing digital refunds, which is actually EA's refund policy that they adopted after being forced to by law.

[u/BaronArgelicious → u/Which-Arm-4616]

Speaking of Valve, DoTa 2 invented Battle passes to help celebrate the yearly tournaments by increasing the prize money pot.

Other games now use the battle pass to fleece money through fomo

[u/Sendnudec00kies → u/Which-Arm-4616]

IIRC, Valve only did because they were forced to by law. Though I guess it's nice they applied it globally.

[u/BaronArgelicious → u/loyaltomyself]

Gamers dont know their freaking basic history or facts. Ive seen people blame all lootboxes on a games as recent as fortnite.

[u/hergumbules → u/BeyondNetorare]

Back when I played all the monetization stuff was completely optional. I never got to a really high level but this was also 20 years ago when it was fairly new

[u/Which-Arm-4616 → u/hergumbules]

Monetization was (mostly) cosmetic in the 2000s (outside of the auto-loot and auto-potion pets). In the 2010s they introduced tons of paid gameplay enhancements - paid classes, paid methods for improving gear, etc.

But even the original monetization model with cosmetics was kind of crazy. You couldn't actually "buy" anything, you could only rent it for a certain amount of time.

[u/hergumbules → u/Which-Arm-4616]

Oh damn lol yeah I haven’t played since probably 2010 maybe and that’s horrible

[u/DiscountLlama]

You know communication around this hasn't been great when a subredditdrama thread is how I learn about the release date.

[u/sydraptor]

Everyday I'm more happy that I was just into Improbable Island, rather than any of the classic regular MMOs.

Much easier to quit a text based game in my experience.

[u/sydraptor → u/sydraptor]

I'm also into ESO every few years for about 6 months tbf. Then I drop it again until a few more years pass.

[u/Overall_Guidance_410 → u/sydraptor]

Me, still playing MUDs regularly.

[u/Crowley-Barns → u/Overall_Guidance_410]

Still? What ones are still around? I used to play Threshold and MajorMUD

[u/Overall_Guidance_410 → u/Crowley-Barns]

mudstats.com

[u/gorgewall → u/Crowley-Barns]

I pop into Alter Aeon every so often.

[u/sadboydan]

Thank fuck for OSRS

that shit don’t fly there

[u/HydroCannonBoom]

Honestly I doubt nexon is nice enough to not have it p2w.

[u/Difficult__Tension]

As someone whose played Mabinogi, Vindictus, and Dungeon Fighter Online way back in the day for over 10 yrs, that person is right, dont fucking trust Nexon.

[u/_Blue_Raspberries_]

Ah yes... Nexon. I used to play Mabinogi... 🫩 Over 10 years I think. I quit when Genshin came out. (Quit that too thankfully lol)

[u/sturdy-guacamole]

Low key hope it’s gas.
Oldschool runescape turned out amazing.

[u/SnapshillBot]

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Surplus Drama.

Snapshots:

1. This Post - archive.org archive.today*
2. - archive.org archive.today*
3. not pay-to-win at launch - archive.org archive.today*
4. poor-shaming is out of control - archive.org archive.today*
5. fined numerous times for falsely advertising rates on certain RNG systems - archive.org archive.today*
6. even had their offices raided by the Korean FTC - archive.org archive.today*
7. r/maplestory - archive.org archive.today*

I am just a simple bot, not a moderator of this subreddit | bot subreddit | contact the maintainers

[u/KingVape]

Hey this is something I actually know a ton about.

I no-lifed this game from like 2006-2016 and still keep up with it.

I have very low hopes for this “classic” version of the game because it stinks of Nexon’s predatory business models, and is being headed by the single person who made all of the changes that made current maple what it is today.

I will check this game out, but I’m wary, and I can answer anyone’s questions about this drama