Games

I believe it to be a bygone era of games. Because there are quite a lot of pitfalls with this style, both socially and techically.

Social:
Just like with social platforms, we have become acutely aware that locking people to a server (this has some benefits like creating an identity, making it hard/long to levelup so that you dont just leave the server... etc) was not the best idea.
Because it has the fundamental flaw of not being designed for the masses of the internet. If there is a threshold to enter something, people will use it against you.
Because games are not real life where we exist 24/7, they are virtual worlds and is accessible from wherever whenever, people come into games with any kind of emotions. Be it frustration or pure bliss, you can never control this, whereas in the real world, if you see someone wobbling through the street in the middle of the night, you've got a ton of options on how you want to handle the situation.

In a game, what choice do you have? a few, but you have the greatest escape hatch ever: to logout/go offline.
This is why in modern MMO-ish games, what do they do? Either phasing like WoW or random instance in a Town (and only towns, the rest of the game is for you or the party you're in) like in Path of Exile/Destiny.
Because the developers want to leave it to chance (since the probability of a bad interaction is highly unlikely and the idea scales on the technical side) and if it still happens? Just logout and log back in, boom, a different shard/instance.

But what is the cost? The guy you just encountered in the game has less persistence than a creature/enemy in games.

Okay, sorry, i dont want to make a whole blogpost about this, but i enjoy talking about it.

I've played MapleStory on and off for about 15 years now. I do miss when the leveling curve was so ridiculously high there was a lot more enjoyment in a type of "open world" way where you'd set your own goals in the game and that's how you spent your time.

I have lovely memories of my maple "boyfriend" at the time taking me to Florina Beach. Us desperately trying not to die because we weren't going to survive touching the jumping crabs. We ended up pulling our chairs out on a platform, and he'd aggro some crabs so they'd keep jumping up at us. It was pretty romantic, to be honest.

Then there's the ship to Orbis, the free market, the hidden paths along Lith Harbour, the slime tree, heneseys hunting ground, the sleepywood hot springs, the showa town sauna (which was notoriously hard to return from, given the level of the area, but the TOWELS). All places I remember very, very fondly.

It wasn't the way the game was meant to be played, but it's those moments that stick with you. That was in the time when MapleStory was considered more a glorified chat client.

I can still name and place most of the original BGMs, and I still keep up with the latest music (look up studio Necord on YT, they even do versions of songs in different styles!) and it's a fun Easter egg when creators use them in their videos.

I still remember the very kind people who took me along with them, even though I couldn't really type or communicate digitally at that age, and was basically a melee magician. Wish it was easier to keep in touch with them back in the 2000s.

Maplestory is more functionally a game today than it used to be, but that's also why I feel like it's lost its magic.

As I've grown up, the repetition of the grind and dailies ate into my dwindling amount of free time. With ADHD, dailies sometimes feels akin to torture you endure to get a shiny new damage skin or event cash item, and I was stuck in that event cycle loop for a while before I quit again around last year.

I still love MapleStory. The new music they're still putting out (while occasionally a miss) is still really good, and I enjoy that. But I don't think I'll ever grind to 250 and beyond (I was mostly leveling up with level potions before I quit the last time) because it's just not me.

I sort of mourn that, my loss of patience. I've become picky with the games I play, less patient to pick up and learn games that may not suit my stylistic preference.

I've tried some MMOs, a bit of Guild Wars 2, some Archeage 2, Eden Eternal, Eve Online (ok Eve is kinda cool but I'm not smart enough for this game) but I think I'm no longer an MMORPG person :(

I don't have the time to invest in them anymore, and I now prefer singleplayer indie games (because I have no friends, lol).

I also avoid gacha MMORPGs like the plague (Yes, ironic considering MapleStory is often cited as the first gacha game, but to my credit I still have never spent a cent on it), so I've never touched Genshin and games in that vein and risk developing a gacha addiction. A gaming dependency is enough for me.

I know my comment wasn't fully answering what you asked, but thank you (if you've read this far) for letting me indulge in my very fond, even formative memories of MapleStory.