Maplestory. The little 2D mushroom game that forces you to grind and level for hours on end just for the fun of it. Who here still remembers that game? I sure do because I'm still playing it till this day.. I think it was around 13 or 14 years old that I started playing this game because this was also when I first got in contact with a PC. I've been hearing about this game from when I was 11 years old and believe me I've been dying to play it because a lot of my classmates did. But the world isn't so easy as to let you do what you want so I had to wait till I get to secondary school to start my journey but it was unfortunate because at this time, I've lost contact to most of my primary friends and they've already moved on from this game. Which was a shame because this game focuses a lot on being able to socialize with your friends and guilds.
So I started playing MaplestorySea by myself and surprisingly I got really into it. Because other than Maplestory, I only had Battlerealms and warcraft3 on my PC and honestly those two were one of the best games that I've ever played even though I was really bad in both of them haha. I got hooked to it and would play this game for hours on end. I even spent a lot of money to buy the currency in the game (@cash) I think I spent like a total of RM500 during those days. I vaguely remembered that I played it for 2 years before stopping right after the big bang update. That was when the population in the game started to dwindle down really fast mostly because the people that were playing the game started to grow up and gave up on it, and also because the content from it was reducing.
My maximum level at that time was around 80
I actually never really quit the game. The funny thing was, after like a year or two from quitting the game, my drum instructor, yeah I was learning to play the drums a while back and although I got good at it, I kinda stopped playing it. Anyways, he's this really chill guy that would sit on his desk to play games while he thought me how to play the drums, two people can't really sit in front of the drumset together now, right? So I would take a peek at what games he was playing because well I'm a gamer and I can't really resist that when I was young. You wouldn't believe the feelings that I had when he was playing Maplestory on his laptop but the funny thing is, he was levelling way too fast like all the way from level1~level200 in a minute so I was really curious and asked him about it. He told me that this was a private server and the server name was called AncientStory, it's hard for me to forget about that. That was when I was first exposed to the world of Private Servers.
To be honest, AncientStory was one of the more mainstream servers that boasts some of the more typical rates e.g. 1000x exp, 2000x Mesos and 500x drop. These servers were commonly called high rate servers and they typically included rebirths because it wouldn't really make sense if you could level to level 200 in like a minute and just to quit the game right? There would be no progression. The goal of this game, like any RPG games, is to grind and get better gear, kill bosses and then get the most amount of damage as you can while you dress your character up to your hearts' content. So if you get to the max level in like 10 minutes, there's really no point in playing the game. At first, high rated private servers might be really fun for you but they gradually get boring and at the end, you'll just quit playing it. Just like I did with this server. But this was just the start.
After quitting my first ever private server, I got interested in them and started searching for more private servers to play in, surprisingly there were a lot of them on the internet and it can be easy to find. I got hooked into another server called AuraSea which was a private server for the MaplestorySea that I was playing from the start. That just means that more South East Asian players will be playing and mostly these are players from SG or MY. I actually don't have many memories of playing this server other than fishing all the time.
Since then, I started playing in this server and I really enjoyed my time there but one thing that all private servers have in common is that they have a risk of being shut down because of legal reasons. If the owners of these servers are really bad at hiding his tracks or fked up really badly, the server would get a lawsuit and ultimately cause the server to shut down. It has been this way for a long time now, I switched from AuraSea to ExtaliaMS and in between, I switched to multiple servers just for fun but Extalia struck out as the one that was superior to the others. However, good things don't last long and in around 1-2 years, the server got shut down too.
But you guys know that wouldn't stop me from playing new servers, and that led me to AriesMS currently. I can't really deny that I'm addicted to the game, there's something about the characters and the allure of being able to hit millions and billions of damage just sucks me into it. I mean, I can quit if I need to because after all this time, I'm still playing alone by myself. Sometimes there's no motivation to play but sometimes, after watching a few youtube videos, you're just forced to re-install the game and before you know it, you're suckered back into Maplestory.
Thanks for reading!
