Nothing takes me back into my childhood more than the soft guitar strumming that opens
Maplestory Mesos's login screen audio. But since I nostalgically reflect upon my bygone youth spent in this virtual idyll, I can't help but remember one particular element of the game--the economy was absolutely fucked. You believed the GFC was poor? Maplestory took it to a whole new level.
Since you progressed, you gained access to better items, which means that you could fight stronger monsters and explore more dangerous regions with even more rewarding item drops.
On paper, the higher level you're on, the greater of Maplestory you can like. Just one catch--only because you're on a certain level, didn't mean that you could manage everything that level gave you access to. In order to create any meaningful progression from the sport, you needed to have an ample supply of this in-game money, known as Mesos.
As a newcomer, your in-game earnings is dependent largely on creature falls and completing quests. Early match, this works perfectly fine, particularly since all of the armour and weapons you need can be bought from NPC stores with costs which never alter (a form of government price control perhaps?) But after you pass a certain stage, the equips you'll need are no longer stocked in NPC shops, and may only be obtained either by massacring swathes of a specific monster hoping these will drop exactly what you want, or by going to the Free Market and hoping someone is selling what you need at a price you can afford. On the other hand, the income that you generate from questing and monster falls is not enough for the absurd prices on the Free Market.
Mesos can be drawn up through sheer dedication. Like any market, Maplestory does benefit those who work difficult. And 'work hard', I mean play the game non-stop for ungodly hours on the stage that the true world and the digital world become one and the same. I had a buddy who made 5 side accounts, got them to par 36 where they would play with a one-off quest which provided an extremely valuable scroll, and then transferred that to their main account. However, as a ten-year-old who could only play with the game on weekends, this really wasn't a choice for me personally.
Another method of earning mesos was using real world money to
buy Maplestory 2 Mesos or "gachapon tickets"--a sort of lottery/gambling system which sometimes gave you incredibly rare and valuable items. While there was an in-game store where you could buy items (mostly cosmetic) using real world money, maybe more alluring was the unofficial black market, in which you can buy mesos straight up. However, compelling my frugal Asian parents to invest actual money on a match was also not an option.
So what does one casual gamer do to be able to make it at the capitalism-on-crack-what-is-social-welfare wasteland of Maplestory?
