I jumped a few levels up to 35 (mainly because I kept dying) during my trainings in Amoria killing those Sakura Cellions for a decent penny (seriously, the drop smile inducing wads of cash). Of course training them for any length of time is just begging to get your kills stolen and requested that you change channels... And that has just happened way too much there. I don't mind, the game isn't fun if I just power level, so try to sit down and socialize with the other players a bit when I cool down and regenerate. One thing that became apparent while I was there, was that you don't spawn in town when you die, and having not died there before I just now learned this. Hence the reason why it took so long to level--I kept dying over and over until I'd lose about 70% of the Exp bar. And that certainly did suck.
Days later I was still there trying to make up my level to where I was when I'd lost it all, when I saw the most insulting thing ever--two guys waiting on ladders below me until the coast was clear to rake my drops. I came right out and said "not cool..." and they just didn't care. I'm not sure if they're just new to the game, and they don't know any better, or they just don't care. I've seen this happen a lot by accident, but this is the first time I've seen it happen his deliberate though. I feel that proper etiquette should be held to teach them what what is acceptable, and what will make players absolutely hate them.
Which reminds me of the first time I noticed my Fame stat, I had always assumed it to be a prestige system so other characters would know how trustworthy you were, however, it just seems to be a popularity contest anymore... Someone with 100+ fame isn't going to be any more respectable than some guy who was spammed down to -30 fame because some guy's guild thought it'd be funny. Fame is only good for a couple things that I can think of that will actually affect players in the game, and that's equipment or quests--neither of which have I actually encountered yet. The sad thing is though, people will sit around, or run around, selling, buying, or asking for fame. It's completely sad. It just makes me wish Maple Story had RP servers, so people wouldn't focus on the "popularity contest" of the game. There needs to be a better system in the Maple community so that it can't be abused, and thusly proven meaningless.
I recently started on the Christmas quests that have just recently opened up. The new holiday quests seem just a tad broken. The one everyone is making a fuss over is about redeeming the presents that Maple Claws had lost. These presents are harder to drop than the Halloween candies, which means a lot of people are in the free market pawning them for more money than Grubber is willing to pay... The popular strategy is still to stalk slime tree and get a few hundred low level presents to redeem as a level 10-20 for whatever is going to make more money on the free market (either a Maplemas tree (spear) or a Versalmas cactus (polearm). I haven't had much luck finding presents, so I don't think I'll be selling any of the holiday items this year... The Hanukkah quest seems promising, but the altar pieces aren't dropping any better than the presents, and they only come from dark axe stumps--not something I can train on--it is repeatable every 24 hours, and I hear that you get a decent rare potion that you can sell to higher levels for wads of mesos at your choosing. The fake bosses are also back, but I've only been able to fight a few Slime Kings and a Balrog, but the cakes are certainly nice. There is a giant snowman that drops packages of items when you kill him running around, but I haven't seen him yet, but hopefully I'll nab some more cakes before it's all done at the very least.
Went to the Haunted Mansion, and found out that it isn't a place for a level 30 warrior, so I
Aqua Road Radio just recently had a shindig that I was present at, I'm second from the left on their new banner. It was quite fun, and only had a few people trying to spoil it by spamming racist comments or wanting to buy or sell stuff. Shravan and Warez are pretty nice too, totally down to earth despite coming off as authority figures with their podcast. :P
That's it for now, I've got to down another air bubble before I start choking on sea water again... *glug glug*
