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Review 5/15/2011
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Nexon is a really really bad company. I've been on Maple Story since 2006 and in the top 100 players of one of its biggest servers, and though the game has changed in many ways, the fundamental principles governing it have not. In short, they're out to get as much of your money as possible, making every possible scheme or scam for it, but they also want to do the bare minimum in terms of customer support and service.
Nexon's marketing strategy focuses on the "free" nature of their games. While it is true that it is possible to enjoy Maple Story for "free," in reality the game is something like an addictive drug which can be enjoyed for "free" if you practice moderation in taking it. On Nexon games you'll be a cokehead snorting a tiny amount of powder, and the dealer, (Nexon,) will always be there, winking at you and telling you it's "free" while wagging the bag of powder in front of your nose, and you can have more, for actual money. That's Nexon, in pure, brutal terms.
Maple has tons of deliberately built-in flaws, all of which are corrected through incentives bought for real money. Playing the game is free, but playing for free is slow, tedious, and frustrating. Spend money, and it becomes fun. Spend LOTS of money, and it becomes great. For example, if you die, unless you spent real money, you will lose experience -- this is a very serious issue at higher levels of gameplay. Some classes have low hit points and die easily, there is a procedure called "HP washing" which gives you hit points in exchange for massive amounts of money. There have been items that for balance's sake were untradeable, now they are tradeable one time if you pay money for that one time. Augmenting items to become decent or great realistically costs a fortune because augmentation in this game hinges on chance, and to get something great you need to spend fortunes to counter low success rates, or fortunes to buy other players' great items. I recently spent 50 dollars trying to augment an item -- and ended up with literally nothing in the end. Also, because of the way Nexon does updates, new features make existing gear obsolete. If you are a competitive player, you will spend hundreds of dollars to get a great item, and then a patch comes out, and your item will be worthless. You must therefore watch developments on foreign versions of Maple, and sell your excellent gear before it becomes worthless, so you get your money back at least. Merely preserving your investment in the game becomes a matter of routine conjecture and salesmanship. Yes, the game is technically still free, but in a culture of people spending money and flaunting it, playing for free ain't fun. As you get more and more into the game, playing for free becomes ludicrous, though still technically possible.
The customer service in this game is non-existent. You think I am exaggerating but I am not. Regardless of what happens to you, you're on your own. If someone plants a keylogger on your computer and the hacker steals everything, Nexon will not help. If you're being harassed on the game, good luck to you getting help from Nexon. There was a time when Nexon "dealt" with hacking by releasing locks to prevent your items from being removed from your character; a glitch on Nexon's coders' part caused the ITEM to expire instead of the lock when its duration finished, and none of the people who lost their items -- even items that cost a fortune -- were compensated. I once saw a player go off on a rampage by using megaphones to message the whole server. The player, for literally 40 minutes straight, spouted really filthy and disturbing things, and the children in my guild were really freaked out. About 10 minutes after he finished, I checked if the offending player was online; he was. Even a 40 minute rampage of harassment and hate will not get you banned from Maple Story. However, due to the prolific number of glitches and exploits by players that cheat, all sorts of bad stuff can happen, and you are on your own for all of them. A hacker once destroyed all the major guilds on my server. Instead of restoring them, Nexon sent the guild leaders 10 million meso each -- an arbitrary and useless sum, considering that at the time it cost slightly under 100 million to fully develop a guild. Nexon, according to its own statistics, makes enough to hire staff to deal with these issues. They don't do that because they don't have to; the players are addicted, and most of them will put up with anything. Even if a player loses his character with everything on it, he will often start a new one instead of playing another game, and will probably spend more money on it. To a person on the street, this seems illogical and stupid. To a player that plays Maple, this is normal. We don't expect Nexon to help us, we just "deal with it," and give Nexon money at the same time. If that sounds disagreeable, you might be better off going to a company whose track record is better -- such as Blizzard. Nexon just plain sucks.
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