Practicum #6

I embarked on another set of quests, once again nothing terribly different or exciting. I did obtain an "evolving ring", a new item that gains new stats and gets stronger with each day you login. You have to play for at least one hour each day that you are logged in for it to level up, though. This is an incentive for players to keep coming back during this special event. I know a lot of sites try to pull members in with promises of exciting new items and features, and Maple Story wants its players to know that their item can't reach its full potential unless they come back for 17 subsequent days for one hour each day. That's quite a big achievement for someone who only plays casually, and so it is definitely trying to get people who are normally casual players to come back for more.

One thing that I noticed about the interactions between players is that most of the time it doesn't even seem like real humans are using this site. The way people talk to each other doesn't quite seem real...there's something rather uncanny about it. The conversations they hold are barely coherent, and they almost seem to be talking in another language. Many people try to buy or sell certain items or buy "fame" (I'm still not quite sure what it is, but it appears to be a sort of popularity contest) and so they spam the chat box with the item/service they're looking for/selling and for how much. It gets really annoying when you're passing through a city area where people are piled up just chatting. The game starts to lag because the chat log is filled with continuous spam and I just don't understand how anyone could find it interesting or entertaining.

I also kept getting pissed off when trying to finish a quest where I had to kill over 300 of a certain type of monster, and other characters would come in and start killing the monsters I was working on beating. You have to kill the monster yourself for it to count, and so it started getting really annoying to have to compete with other players to get your monster count up. I just wanted to finish the quest as quick as possible and move on to the next one. In this instance the multiplayer aspect not only provides nothing to the gameplay, but actually makes it worse.