I see a lot of people on these forums seeing the changes to the game and saying it's dying or dead. They're not wrong, but there's a lot more to it than that.
I love MapleStory. I've been playing for 8 years now, and over those 8 years, I've seen the game change. MapleStory is no longer the MapleStory we knew from before Big Bang. It was more traditional in the sense that the community was built around leveling, bossing, and exploring together. The meat of the game was in the earlier levels. It took 4 days to do what now takes 4 hours. Having 50m made you the richest one around. There were no gear sets, there was no endgame; the game never really ended. You PQ'd and quested, and leveled slowly. However, in 2010, the game's focus diverged extremely.
In December of 2010, the game went down for almost an entire day to update to the infamous Big Bang patch. With this update came many changes, such as a decreased XP curve, increased stat and damage scaling, but most damaging was the increased pay-to-win aspect. While the game had previously had pay-to-win aspects (such as Gachapon exclusive gear that was some of the best you could get), you weren't forced to spend hundreds of dollars to get anywhere. You could farm up that 20m to get that +7 PAC. Now, however, pieces of gear are going for hundreds of dollars by themselves. With this change in focus, a lot of players quit the game, decimating the community.
The p2w was the main factor in the destruction of the community. The constant flow of content meant that new gear was constantly coming out, so the people who spent hundreds to thousands to get their gear to a respectable place kept getting screwed. There was no free way to cube, so the players who spent real money on their gear just ended up leaving the game. Entire guilds went offline. Maps were empty. The FM was barren, there weren't even any bots for a while. It looked like, after the biggest update to-date, the game had committed suicide.
Yet here we are now, 7 years later, saying the same thing. This time, for different reasons. The game is riddled with bugs. It's almost impossible to get onto the game at this point, between the crowding of the Reboot server and the constant crashing. MapleStory has stopped working, please go **** yourself. I'm glad that Nexon has finally decided they should listen to their playerbase, but that doesn't mean you make it impossible to play the game. The focus on the lategame (200+) is a bit of a slog. First they make 250 our goal while making it almost impossible to get to 200, then when they finally give the 200+ players somewhere to go, it's the most drab place in the entire Mapleverse. Not to mention there's so little to do post-200. Do dailies for Arcane Symbols or whatever, so your daily bosses for GP, which they changed it to 1 entry a day for reg instead of 2, and you can only do Chaos bosses once a week. Then you AFK or spend money on cubes to get that sick 2m~2m range. Except there's no range cap anymore.
Will the game die? No, I don't think so. There are some people who feel as if they have invested too much, or there will be people who enjoy not spending anything at all and the gratification of doing it themselves. Even if the official servers do end up going down at some point, I can almost guarantee that plenty of servers will pop up.
