I really do not like free-to-play games. I don’t know that I’d go as far as to say that I hate them, but I certainly hold a lot of animosity toward them. Not blind rage, mind you. I’ve no interest in being yet another furtburgler who decries them as some kind of gaming Satan, but I wouldn’t invite them over for dinner either.
As it stands, I’ve played a fair number of free-to-play titles. Hell, not all them were even bad. One of them was though. It was so bad in fact, that it’s painted my perception of the business model for over a decade now. That said, today we’re talking about MapleStory.
Good lord – you can’t be serious? MapleStory? Really?
Yes, really.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I used to play MapleStory. It was my go-to title back in college. It had two major positives: being free, and having a lot content. This made MapleStory an extremely attractive title to spend my downtime with because I was a broke college student. Little did I know, MapleStory would feature one of the most egregious monetization models I’d ever encounter in a game, and would forever colour my opinions on free-to-play titles.
Before I can truly delve into how gonzo MapleStory’s monetization was, I need to first go over how upgrades functioned. Players had to use an item called an enhancement scroll to upgrade their equipment in MapleStory. These had a percentage chance to work, and would greatly increase the base stats on whatever they were applied to. If they failed however, there was a flat 50% chance for the scroll to destroy whatever you used it on.
That’s correct. The equipment you spent hours grinding for would disappear to the whims of a coin flip.
Any reasonable person looking at this system would never engage with it. Hell, when you consider the human tendency toward loss aversion, it makes gambling with your precious equipment seem like even more of a farce. Why would you ever wager an item that only has a 10% drop rate from a boss that takes 10 people 40 minutes to defeat? You wouldn’t. That’d be insane.
Unfortunately, upgrading your equipment wasn’t optional. Every enemy is a damage sponge outside of the starting zones, and it only gets worse the further into the game you get. By the late-game, a character without upgraded gear would do so little damage that they couldn’t meaningfully engage with any of MapleStory’s content. You either risked enhancement scrolls, or you stopped playing.
It’s here that we see the first piece of MapleStory’s disgusting monetization: you could buy insurance. As if to answer a problem of their own creation, the development team implemented a cash shop item called a protection scroll. Players could apply this item before using an enhancement scroll to negate the 50% boom chance. All it cost you was a couple dollars for peace of mind that your equipment wouldn’t explode. Yay.
The messed up part of this whole system was that the protection wore off immediately. It didn’t matter if your enhancement was a success, or a failure – you still had to apply a fresh protection scroll, lest you risk your precious equipment going up in smoke.
As it stands, selling literal insurance to players wasn’t even the worst of MapleStory’s crimes. Yes – there was something even worse: the potential system.
I’m going to try to keep this light because, even as a veteran MapleStory player, I thought this was confusing. The short version is that players could infuse items with bonus stats known as potential. It had your standard RPG rarity system where the higher tiers had larger boosts. The best bonuses were percentage based, so the idea was that you’d stack as many of them as possible to increase your primary damage dealing stat. This let you hit like a truck, and helped with the tremendous power creep in MapleStory’s late-game.
So how exactly was potential the worse of 2 evils here? Well, all potential bonuses were assigned randomly, and you had to purchase a cash shop item to change them. Yep – gambling. MapleStory was one of the OGs when it came to implementing loot boxes. There was also a cash shop item with a chance to increase your item’s potential rarity tier, and another that let you lock in specific bonuses while you rerolled others.
I’d like to sit here, and tell you that I wasn’t stupid enough to pay for any of this. I’d like to. But I can’t. Across the few years I spent playing the game I spent about 300 dollars, which is the price of 3 full priced games here in Canada. It feels like so much more though because of how scummy all of this garbalingus was.
The truly sad thing is that none of the endgame content was even worth engaging with. You spend that money, only to find that enemies were still braindead punching bags, and most bosses recycled the same handful of mechanics. The only difference was the amount of damage you did. As a result, I eventually got bored, and left. I took with me a newly found dislike of free-to-play titles, and largely resent the time I wasted on MapleStory.
That’s a bit of a sour note to end on, but I’d like to hear from you. Where do you sit on free-to-play titles? Have you played a game that is more abusive than MapleStory? Perhaps Genshin Impact? Let me know. Would love to hear your stories.
Frostilyte Writes 
OH MY GOODNESS. Maplestory is still the soul-sucking thing it was. I still receive updates on it and it gets more soul-sucking every day. I’ve played an absolute ton of free to play games, so I’ve learned what is good and what isn’t. So many of them suck the soul out of you. I feel like Genshin Impact is actually pretty lenient even with its gacha system. Gameplay, story, and lore are all enjoyable without paying anything. And it’s quality story as well. I think it’s one of the best free to play games I’ve played.
Path of Exile is a darn good one as well. Guild Wars 2 is now free and is also really good. The problem is the percentage of bad free to play games is SO IMMENSE. So if a random player was just going around looking at free to play games, the sad truth is they’ll likely run into the ones that suck your soul out. It’s gotten a lot better, but even just on the splash page of Steam’s Autumn sale for free games, at least 11/24 are, as far as I know, do not respect your time. In the 2000s it was like, 90% of the games.
With the industry now it’s better to just grab the giveaway games and play those. Or take advantage of all the sales to get something you want for cheap.
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You’re absolutely right. Like – I know this was written almost entirely as a hit piece against the model, but there are a few F2P games I’ve played where the model didn’t cause my soul to leave my body. But as you said, there are so many examples of the model where it is trying to wring players dry, so most players are going to have a lopsided experience with it – not unlike my own.
Big true. Even if a lot of the giveaway games are several years old, it still provides a great avenue to pick up some titles that you might have otherwise missed. And it’s hard to beat a 0 dollar price tag on a game that otherwise has no strings attached.
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Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
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I don’t have any examples as seared into my brain as you do with MapleStory, but yeah… The early days of F2P more generally *really* turned me off the model for a long time.
Even today, I give new (to me) F2P titles a fair bit of side-eye still. But things like Path of Exile and Warframe have certainly done a fair amount to show me F2P *can* be done well, so it isn’t the instant denial of even consideration of a game for me like it once upon a time was.
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I feel like I’m increasingly transitioning over to that “sideways glance” stage, but I’m not there yet. Obviously.
At least more and more games with 0 upfront cost are just relying on cosmetics, which I know ruffles some feathers still, but is a lot less evil than…all of this.
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I have played a bunch of F2P games that were uninstalled within 15mins of loading into the game for the first time because they weren’t really free. On the other side of the coin, games like Hearthstone or mobas like Dota do the F2P model exceptionally well.
I think the F2P model works when they items you can purchase are only cosmetic items and don’t effect gameplay. Once you start offering players the ability to pay for gameplay advantages it goes in the bin.
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Big true
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That’s some dogshit. I’ve never played Maple Story, but it sounds like one of the most obviously exploitative monetization systems I’ve heard of.
My only real “free to play” experience was with Azur Lane, which actually wasn’t too bad on that score by gacha game standards. It was entirely possible to do all right without spending a cent and it was fairly generous with the items needed for rolling new characters — the monetization largely came in with the paid skins, many of which were pretty damn skimpy. Sex sells, doesn’t it.
Azur Lane eventually got boring for me anyway, and I have absolutely no interest in any other such games. Not even NieR Reincarnation, which I was interested in because I’ve enjoyed my time with the series otherwise, but hell if it didn’t turn out to be another gacha. I’ll just have to wait for the next legitimate game in that series if we get one.
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