Monstrous update with a hell lot of UI changes, new maps, skills, bosses, skill changes and blah. And of course not to forget the annual anniversary stuff along with asiasoft's 2009 event at suntec city. 0.72's patch was 199MB, and 0.73's was around 44MB totalling up to 243MB. Sooner or later, Kevin's laptop will not be able to play Maple anymore as it has a pathetic capacity of... 18GB. The game itself already takes up 1.3GB.

It's times like these when I had to patch my desktop and laptops that I really find the need for a external hard disk. Currently I'm using my Ipod 20GB but just storing my files from NM3216 and NM2208 has eaten up much of it's space.

Ah well, back to the updates.

- buggy maple candle+cake quest which eats up my etc slot. really irritating when I train.

- mulung dojo was really fun but impossible to complete without a party. Even if you had a party of 6 to go in, you may still lose

- they reduced the total amt of exp needed to level(less of a grind now), and the scrolling of the horntail's pendant is redoable apparently, so great news for those who got hacked and had their pendant's thrown out, you get +15 to all stats finally! Looks like asiasoft is really starting to listen to the complaints of the forummers. Very late, but better now than never. Hopefully other things will improve over time. Being such a commercialised company, feedback's really important. I'm sure they learnt after the spate of hacking and DC cases which domintated the GD for like months.

- xbows finally got better improvements. snipe CD reduced to 5 seconds compared to 15, pierce change from 3 secs to 1 and they reduced min shooting range. Kevin says he pratically discarded his strafe for pierce during training. And when it comes to bossing, he's so gonna own the NLs and BMs. Oh I probably foresee bandwagoners coming into the xbow population a few months down the road. First it was BMs (who had SOA), then heros (with brandish), and now XBMs maybe.

comments on the maple event

- the maplestory event at suntec was ok. I guess I was pretty lucky - everytime I went to redeem the free in-game item, there was virtually nobody in the queue in contrast to all my guildmates complaining they queued for an hour. Pretty odd eh?

- the special 10X coupon that you get when you purchase 60k A-cash sucked for me. Firstly they didnt let us prepare our stuff beforehand (and didn't say anything about this either), and secondly while playing halfway, my keyboard got jammed and in the end, they merely compensated 2.5mins. Only gained 1+% which i thought was seriously a waste of time given that I queued close to an hour for it. So I gave away my 2nd ticket to a poor boy who lost his and went home.

- you would've thought that it would be an awesome event like they described in the website with loads of fun stuff going about. but the really awesome stuff for me would be only the free H2O drinks and in-game items, the throwing of the lupin cape coupons which I never took (was queueing for the darn 10X). oddly enough, half of the entire exhibition was filled with what you would see in a typical IT fair: TVs, cameras, recorders, all sorts of electronic stuff and it was hilarious that while the emcees on the stage were trying to do entertain the people below the stage those sellers were still using their microphones and shouting out the highest bid for the TVs they were selling + freebies they offered.

- maple auction: held too late and i was too tired to stay on. the next day my mum handed me the newspaper reviewing the event and there it stated:

"A director of a construction company, who wanted to be known only as Mr Yeo, 39, placed the highest bid of $6,950 to win a Dragon Purple Sleeve, a MapleStory in-game weapon, for his 13-year-old son. ‘Any parent would do the same for their son as long as it’s within their ability,‘ he said."

OH. MY. GOD. Fucking $6,950 for a virtual, single, solitary piece of frigging equipment!!!!! What's even more shocking that the man actually bidded for his 13 year old son. 13 YEAR OLD. How old only? Only sec1, fresh from primary school!!!!!!! Wtf, seriously for a parent to listen to the whims of his kid(who probably doesn't even know the worthiness to do so) to get that item, I'm speechless. This is crazy. This is SO NOT A RECESSION. I'm very sure NOT any parent would go out of their way and splurge so much even if it's within their ability. Awesome irony in this article. They talk about responsible gaming but featured wanton spending. Dear 13 year old son, you had better continue to play Maplestory for the next 10 years to make it worth it's price.

I know I spent quite a bit on this game too, maybe $1-2k? But that was over a period of 4 years and I find it reasonable. But him who spent 7k in a matter of mins is just > me.



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