Quote (XilDarkz @ Apr 14 2012 05:13am)
Maplestory is a 'freemium' game. The only real way to get money is to spend money--anything else is far, far inferior. You can make 7mil off a GFA 60% and spend an hour doing that or buy a bil off a meso website for $20. If your time is worth $8 an hour, you'd get fifty-seven times more mesos buying them rather than farming them in that way.
This only evens out when you are in the 0.00001% of Maplestory that runs the economy, bosses, or uses an amassed wealth to make more money. Or get lucky. You can potentially get 9% all stat earrings crafted with minimal effort, but winning the lottery IRL is more likely.
EDIT: This happens for two reasons: one, there is an exchange rate/rough equivalence of mesos to NX, NX to $$$, and mesos to $$$ in the community, and two, high intermediate prevalence of botting, duping, and general hacking. The people I know who have actually profited from playing Maplestory generally either duped or run twenty bots simultaneously and rake in the mesos. A lot of NX is injected into the economy of Maplestory (you see top-level players trading around items for 150k NX regularly) and stays there, further perpetuated by the distinction of NX Credit and NX Prepaid--NX dumps, aka Cash Shop stuff that doesn't benefit you economically like untradable NX equips or pets, are bought with NX Credit and the NX Prepaid circulates between players. You must be lucky, spend money or hack to make money in Maplestory.
Luck varies in definition. It also means being prepared to take opportunities and avoid bad ones. For example, a popular duped set of scrolls was made untradable in a patch. For some, this was roughly hundreds of dollars lost. On the flip side, sometimes an item becomes immediately highly sought after and the price skyrockets (see: Pig Heads in a July 4th event five-six years ago went from 5k to 1.5mil, which might not seem like much, but then you realize at this time, everyone has a few million at most in wealth instead of the billions now.
Is there a way to come out ahead? Yes, play for fun. Now that my BaM is 170+, I will work on other characters. There is no possible way for me to accumulate enough wealth to improve my BaM's gear or buy the remaining expensive skill books in a reasonable amount of time, so an ultimate adventurer it is!
well said, pretty much sums up any mmo game
This post was edited by Boilermakers on Apr 15 2012 10:43am