Maple Story Culture?

in the past two days I have immersed myself in alien territory. I have been playing maplestory for about four years. This was my first encounter with the related messaging boards external to the game itself. I honestly expected there to be more about the various role play and teams. I was a bit disappointed in that the closest thing I found was a Guide to proper maplestory behavior and a 154 reply message about basically; noobs say the funniest.

I must say I guffawed at some of these thing noobs have said (or supposedly seeing as some of these tales are made up) but I did not find much that indicated a deeper culture. in reading the etiquette rules I found that they follow the basic principals most games should follow. Stuff like don't prolong fights by cursing back, don’t kill steal, and especially don't over use the term noob. this reminded me somewhat of the Gor community Meadows found in second life in that they have a socially acceptable set of rules. I should hope though that these maple rules would be more intuitive.

coming up relatively sparse on the Basil market site - They facilitate the auctioning of maple items for mesos(maple currency) - I went to the site of the larges guild in the game, Hidden-Street. Hidden-Street is unique amongst guilds as they have in game guilds in nearly every server of the game. I have been using the Hidden-Street site for years because of one of the things they set out to do to aid the maple community.

The Hidden-Street site has two parts; A message board and a database. this database is used my Maplers all over the game it spans all servers and even includes a section for the MapleSEA version of the game which is a little ahead of our Maple Global. the database is populated by members of the guild filling in the names, stats(hp, atk, ect..), and most importantly item drops of the Various monsters in the game. I can hardly believe there was a time when I fought monsters aimlessly looking for items that couldn't even be found on the continent I was on.

The community side of the site is new to me, though its been there since before the database. In my search of the cultural activities of the Hidden-Street, I must say I am not so surprised at what I found. More than any other thing that keeps people playing maplestory(and i have experienced this as well) is Buddies and Guilds. Without other players to talk with and or group with the game can get very boring very fast. friendships forged in the world of maple can hold players to the game very firmly, this applies pretty evenly to players of all ages(though the average mapler is younger than 18years old).

More than anything on these boards though was Spam and other random messages those not in the group would understand, all very familiar to the experiences of Meadows. On solely text based systems it seems the standard still holds, though there are plenty of sections where that kind of behavior is prohibited.

One thing I was surprised I didn’t find on the community sites is the concept of maple children. More and more in the game recently, people have been taking the in game Marriages system a step farther. The basic idea is that when two high level characters marry in game they can together decide to adopt “newb” players to be their “children”. Meadow’s experience with the lady Gunid and her obsession with babies reminded me of these maple adoptions which I have seen on occasion go deeply into role-play where the newb pretends to be around the age where babies first learn to talk. Of all mapler role-playing this is the one that’s most difficult to miss.