AKradian

There is no scheduled maintenance, but the login servers are having problems.
As of right now, two of our three login servers are down. You need to get lucky to connect to the right one, and then you can get in the game. All you can do is keep trying.
Nexon has been notified of the issue.

You can't.
The pet box is an instanced drop, which means each person in the party could get one, but nobody can see the other person's box.

Thank you for the video.

Nexon's response is:

"It's on our backlog, but we have no plans yet on when it will come back.
Again, the intent is to bring it back. But there are things on our backlog that are higher priority."

I agree on multiple points, and have posted so in the past.

Players should not have to follow a dozen different social media just to know what is going on with the game and community. Notices about the game need to be on the main website. Notices regarding community events or CM absences should be on the forums. We shouldn't have to look for DMT hints on streams, bug workarounds on Discord, or event notices on facebook.

Players also need the CM to communicate with them. VFMs forwarding issues is just as effective as the CM doing so, but VFMs have less of an ability to present Nexon's take on various issues or give answers other than “Nexon told us this will be fixed in tomorrow's patch” (and even that is often not allowed). The lack of a response on, for example, the /find issue, leads to the natural conclusion that Nexon implemented that without thinking about it too much. It was just part of the package delivered from KMS.

Arwoo has never been very active on the forums or reddit, but as far as I can remember no CM was ever active enough for my liking. I wish the CM would post on every thread, or at least every important topic.

However.

You, of all people, should know how busy a Maplestory CM is. Like pretty much everyone else at Nexon. And now that they've let go some of their workforce in a restructuring, I'm sure you can imagine how overworked the remaining employees are.

So, yes, Arwoo is using the VFMs to take on all the parts of his job that they can do, to enable him to focus on the parts that require being internal at Nexon. Unfortunately that means the community has to make do with VFM responses on issues – but I assure you and everyone else that these responses, when we post them, are as authoritative as those Arwoo would post.

Look on the bright side: At least it's still Arwoo's face – and hairflip! - on the official streams. So we all can rest assured that we haven't been abandoned.

The January 4th KMS patch implemented this change.

Orangemushroom's Blog wrote:

The Pendant of the Spirit will now retain your equipped time if you log out and reconnect to the game.

• Your equipped time will be retained for the day. At midnight, the time will be reset.
• If your Pendant of the Spirit is unequipped or it expires, your equipped time will be reset.
• This will apply only to your equipped Pendant of the Spirit, not other Pendants.

Source: https://orangemushroom.net/2018/01/04/kms-ver-1-2-289-maplestory-ark-ark-the-boy-who-became-a-monster/

Going by the usual update schedule, we should expect to see this in GMS this summer.