I’ve never been too big on MMO games (massively multiplayer online). The concept sounds incredible, enormous worlds shared with other players helping or hindering one another, and in the right game developer hands it can be. However, the reality rarely matches the dream. More often than not, the “online” aspect is less of a boon and more just an excuse to constantly probe my wallet. In a time not so long ago, a more naive and trusting mouse found a free-to-play mobile MMO and ended up maxing out multiple credit cards. For a lot of people, it sounds ridiculous that someone would nearly bankrupt themselves over a silly phone game, but it makes more sense when they understand the free-to-play business model. These games are propped up by what the industry affectionately call “whales”, where most people playing won’t pay a penny but their enjoyment is subsidised by people who spend a disproportionately large sum. To get them paying, they use the same tactics that casinos use to keep people hooked to slot machines, where your purchases give you a “chance” to obtain valuable rewards, often they’ll give you big rewards early on to give an unrealistic expectation of what to expect and make you feel like you’re making fast progress, that you’re good at the game. The games are specifically designed to have no real end or upper ceiling on how much can be spent and you get trapped in a cycle, the sunk-cost fallacy keeping you spending because if you stopped now, all that money you already spent will seem a waste. The lesson I learned here was that I have gambling addiction issues, even if I never go to casinos and never used a slot machine app before, these games are vectors for unregulated gambling, plain and simple.

MapleStory was not the game in question, but it was one of the original trailblazers for this type of business model and has been a popular game for two decades at this point. Popular as in, it makes a lot of money and still has a lot of players, but apparently people really hate its publisher company, Nexon. I mean, reeeeeally hate! For me, it was always something I knew existed but never dared to dabble in because of the time investment required and the fact that it had earned somewhat of a reputation for being “pay-to-win”, so it never had the chance to dig its claws into me back then. Still, over the years I’d keep getting small doses of MapleStory, maybe a cute GIF somewhere or it’d be mentioned in a gaming article elsewhere, specifically the mushrooms and its sorta-mascot “Pink Been” would constantly show up. And it always appealed to me whenever I did any sort of cursory research on it, an MMO but also a 2D platformer with cute sprite art, however I never took the plunge because of the reviews and feedback from most others who played it, warning of large financial commitments to all ye who dare.

Fast-forward to the tail-end of 2025, Christmas was over and I’d just gotten home after the usual family visits with a lot of time left before returning to work. I don’t remember specifically how I discovered it, but I learned that there were a lot of private servers for MapleStory, particularly popular were the oldschool servers that kept the game in a similar state it would have been in the late 2000’s. A private server basically means it’s unofficial, the server and game client are modified to not connect to any of the official services. That means all the pay-to-win and anti-consumer stuff gets stripped out and the server owners rebalance the game accordingly. This seemed like it might be fun to try, I could finally sate my curiosity about this game without running the risk of going into debt again, and I’d just no-life it until I return to work where hopefully by that point I’d have played enough to know what it was all about… Yeah, two weeks turned into 6 months and I was playing constantly, it had me in the same sort of grip as the game that had taken all of my money years prior, except this time money wasn’t a concern. The general gambling-like hooks remained, though, each monster that went down would drop a variety of items and on very rare occasions, an item might even be valuable! It kept me hooked, even without real money involved. Another big reason I kept on playing was simply that everyone else I met in-game was just so darned nice to me!

Early on, I wasn’t making good progress at all, mostly just exploring and doing the odd quest here and there, definitely not optimal play but that was never really the goal. The world of MapleStory is… Bizarre and incoherent, but in a delightful way! There’s the usual fantasy-style locations, forests and swamps, open plains, crammed with a variety of monsters and towns to visit, and then once you start exploring deeper you’ll find things like a land made out of Lego, a bootleg New York City complete with fake Eiffel Tower and Mount Rushmore, and the seemingly random inclusion of real-world locations like Singapore, Japan and Thailand. Oh, no, not lands inspired by those places and cultures like most games do, just straight up hop on a plane and you’re in Singapore now! Exploring this game was baffling, everything felt like it was designed by a totally different team and didn’t put in any consideration for what already existed, it’s utter chaos! For the record, I chose specifically to play on a server called MapleLegends because it was the first result I found. I don’t have any frame of reference to compare this world to, so I am going under the impression that this is more or less how the official game used to be.

If you look at it objectively as a video game, aside from the addiction tactics involved in the core gameplay loop, it’s really not a very well designed game. Early on it’s not so bad, you thwack snails with a stick, pick up the meagre items they drop and slowly start to gain strength as you level up. The gameplay problems become more apparent at the higher levels, this is at the point where you start to fight bosses, what other MMO’s would consider raids, I suppose. The first issue is that there’s no limit on how often you can use HP potions, meaning (with a few exceptions) the only way to die is if you forget to use a potion after taking damage, this means there is little to no challenge here and can’t die unless you really go out of your way to do so. Most deaths I witnessed (or was involved in) were caused by the player being so bored they were having trouble staying awake and missed a potion or started walking into something dangerous. The second issue is with the skills, for the most part I was playing as a bowman and it wasn’t anything more complex than using my strongest single-target attack constantly against one enemy, or using my strongest AOE (area of effect) attack on a group of enemies, reapplying a few buffs every few minutes as needed. In some cases, my index finger would get sore from holding down the attack button for 40 solid minutes. Which brings me nicely into the third issue, most bosses are mechanically stale and function as little more than damage sponges. As mentioned, sometimes all I am doing is standing there holding the attack button for a long time, the boss damages me sure, but that’s not a huge threat if I can instantly fully heal any time I like at the push of a button. Very few bosses do more than attack, there’s few special mechanics and even when there are, there’s often no real penalty for failing them. You want the EXP and loot from these bosses, but that also means committing an hour or two to your party and being very bored, assuming you can find a party at all because there is no matchmaking system for group play and party class composition is important, the game doesn’t allow you to switch classes on the fly. The fourth issue is the gear progression, in that it’s basically non-existent due to how badly they botched the stats and damage calculations. The prime example here would be mage gear, most of it requires a certain amount of stats on LUK to equip, but it actually works out better if you don’t put any stats into LUK at all and just go all out on putting it into INT. This basically renders the entire catalogue of mage gear completely pointless, all the wasted design work that went into drawing every animation frame for these equipment pieces… Rather, you would just equip generic gear that has no stat requirements and then upgrade them with INT scrolls. It’s a mostly similar story with gear in other classes, too. The amount of stats that upgrade scrolls can add to every gear piece makes the majority of it utterly redundant.

A lot of that was probably gibberish to anyone unfamiliar with the game… It may well have been gibberish even if you ARE familiar with the game, but the short answer is just this game is objectively mid. It’s hamstrung by its early core design decisions that prevent them making the epic late-game encounters and raids they so clearly wanted to do, turning what should be a test of skill into a test of attrition. And yet I kept playing, every day without fail for six entire months, because the allure of having a chance to score something expensive and powerful kept me going back to these boss fights, and the community I’d grown to appreciate, in particular the guild I joined early on and stayed with exclusively, kept me hanging around even after I’d gotten tired of the game itself. I do so hope they don’t mind that I come and go without contributing much, sometimes I do feel like a bit of a freeloader! I’ll still log in every now and then and pester them on Discord to stay in their good graces. But yeah, this private server is, when all is said and done, an “oldschool” server which means it’s stuck at a specific version, a game frozen in time with not many options when it comes to adding new content. That, combined with seeing most of what the game had to offer and finding myself doing it over and over, starting to get into playing multiple characters at once to cheese the system, min-max optimisation, just ended up burning me out when it was becoming more of a chore than anything else.

If I had taken the plunge on the official game years ago, I would probably have been made destitute. It is even more clear to me now than it was before that I simply cannot play these sorts of games when there is money involved, I just completely lack the willpower to resist dumping copious coin on gambling. I still don’t regret the time I spent exploring the MapleStory world, though. Making new friends was an unexpected but not unwelcome bonus!

Remember, if you’re stuck playing the same game every day, take a step back and ask yourself if you’re actually having fun, or if you’re playing because you don’t want to feel like your time and money would be wasted if you stopped.