there're many community activities like FF14 ,like mini games ,housing and custom stuff ,you can even insert midi files and play music with in-game instruments. tried on both CN and KR server and get to lv60(soul binder is pretty cool) ,saw a lot of potential but man ,there's only KR server left now.
The 2 years the game lasted was the best. I really enjoyed that game. The hours spent building your house and spending time walking around it afterwards.
psa for anyone who really misses this game like i do btw: there’s a private server called maplestars 2, i heard there’s some weird controversy surrounding it, but i’ve looked all over the place and can’t figure out what’s bad about it, i’ve played it and it’s the exact same maplestory 2 experience
i hate nexon so much for not giving this game any other chance. it felt like they dropped the new leaf update and then shut the game down. if they would’ve kept going with the fixes and maybe did some sort of relaunch, the game may have been in a good state but nope :’)
I played it during the pandemic and I loved it, the housing system especially. However the fact that you could actually run out of things to do in an MMORPG made it terrible. Grinding was inconsequential and dungeons had limited runs. The only reason I could enjoy it was that I had time to kill so I would just spend time alone customizing my house in various ways, but even that got old cause a lot of the features for housing was blocked by a paywall and there was no point paying for it when there was barely anybody around anyway.
This was such a sad story. the game was great in everything that WASN'T getting stronger. chilling with friends, exploring, metting randoms and playing music. great times.
the fun thing about kms2 right now is that the state of the game has completely stalled events have been rerunning on a loop, new cosmetics/surprise style boxes and monthly maintenance has STOPPED, and anniversary events have been SKIPPED 2 years in a row it can end its service at any time now
what killed it for me is that the raids dropped the best gear but you would get kicked if you didn't already have it. Alternatively, there is no practice so you will get kicked on your first 10 attempts when you are learning the boss. There was also no way to progress after the few dungeon attempts were completed other than collecting water bottles.
there a private server of maplestory 2, its based of korea content with translations to english and some game time has been reduced to prevent to do boring things.
A lot of my friends growing up play hours on end of GMS and as time went by and we all got older, we drifted apart for quite some time. THEN BOOM MS2 CAME OUT AND WE ALL CLICKED BACK TOGETHER AND STEAMED ROLLED THROUGH PROGRESSION. That was probably the most fun I had in forever. I believed after 3 months of playing MS2 we all were getting bored and most of us leveled all the classes to level 50. I remember you would get exp from just playing your instrument overnight and thats I got most of my classes to level 40+. As much as i miss MS2, it shouldve launch with the latest update or at least be a few updates behind bc hardcore players just went to end game within a matter of days. I still miss flying around on my balloon or trying to knock my friends off the platform.
The thing is, this game was dead on arrival mostly because the korean version was already at a dying state. The game in life support, they stopped developing dungeons, raids, bosses, everything in KMS, I went to play it with friends after the Global closure and it was pretty bad, yeah it had "some" people whaling but there was nothing to whale since most of the thing had 1-2 years without changes so most people were done with their stuff, they haven't update their news channel in months and they just use reskinned events for the same shop and not even new cosmetics, since they keep rotation the old ones. The west version was alive and had a community but the game had no future so they just said fk it, which I don't blame them because it would be dead by now anyway.
it was sad that the gm needed to use cheat in order to defeat a chaos boss in a livestream showcasing the new patch, and not knowing what they were doing in the first place too. nexon always being nexon, never using players feedbacks, and that how it ended even though i still loved the game, and hope they bring it back someday, or at least a decent private server.
One of the most aggravating things that i hated was these 3 things 1.- Professional players intentionally omitted or gave out the WRONG information to the community, telling them to max on Damage or telling that ''gems'' or whatever that extra enhancement was completely pointless, by the time the Chaos Raids got introduced, those people who did play KMS2 got a STRONG hold on the market , they had bought every jewel and optimized everything while everyone else had to remake their weapon again since they were told the wrong thing by the same players , and shut doors to everyone else, which was the dumbest thing ever. 2.- The cash shop was EMPTY, holy balls, the beta test was so fun and i was in the cash shop myself there were like 5-6 outfits and 3 weapons per job, which was f un to mix and match , it was a pretty decent amount to begin but when the game got released, i think there was only 1 outfit and 1 weapon in the cash shop, for the rest of the lifespan of that game, everything else got pushed to RNG lootboxes and holy shit 3.- The cap on upgrading, 10 runs a day for only 30 a week?! What the fuck is Nexon thinking, and this is something that's gonna be repeated in maplestory 1 as we speak with the Sol Erda cap for New Age, but holy shit do they DON'T LEARN their lesson that capping progression in this way is just a sure way to kill the playerbase.
I honestly loved the game, mostly for its community driven attributes. The progression definitely killed my desire to come back though. It was too linear and boring. I was hoping progression wouldve been like early ms1, a huge world with lots of maps, hidden streets, secret quests and items that pushed you to explore. But like you said it was just a nothing burger with a side of air fries, after level 20ish i just started logging in to goof around and socialize. The game had a lot of potential but it fell very short
level 20? That takes like an hour to get to... Progression was definitely a a shame, because the game absolutely had a huge world with lots of maps, hidden streets. You just spent zero time on those parts of the game and instead the game just became an alpha for lost ark.
Maplestory 2 looked like any other 3D MMORPG and that was the problem. Maplestory always had a great aesthetic to it that made it look like ann official MMORPG, unlike the other ones like La Tale that always looked like a game that would eventually die out.
Preach... this was one of those games that got a lot right but then fumbled on some of the most stupidest thing. Sad. They really could have extended the mini games to reward endgame tokens to keep the engagement. The RNG itself was fine maybe a little too much, but what drove the nail is the requirement of it in content. Some of those DPS checks were absurd vs player skill & gear level.
I miss MS2 :( So many great ideas but like you say, they compressed lot of the content and people squished every minute of it. I actually loved the rng, was fun to make dungeons with my guild and made it pretty significant when something good dropped. Can only wish with a MS2.5/3 where Nexon keeps the mechanics but gets a little more patient with the progression (Like in vanilla MS1 just choosing your class was a whole experience) and also drops the cubic style of the maps lol I got used to it but never liked that much
You missed one key part that snowballed into the whole gearing and content cadence mess. They LISTENED to community feedback about early game progression. Leveling to 50 was sped up by just getting there doing only Main story quests. They effectively cut out over 2000 side quests worth of content for a leveling player and dungeons under level 50 would effectively be run up to 4-5 times to get past their level range instead of being re-run dozens of times. Because of that, they lost precious months of time in order to cater to babies that want to raid end game dungeons on week 1. The community played a large part in killing MS2, we shouldn't deny that.
I agree! A bunch of side quest content was scrapped which made the game super linear and just flat out boring. I wasn't necessarily complaining about the time it took to get to level 50, but everything after that. I felt like the community just never gave enough time for the developers to work their magic, but sadly that's just how players are. Thanks for your input! 😀
@@BananaWaffle That was a change made in the korean server before coming to global. We never experienced the original leveling experience... No need to lie about it.
I miss maplestory 2 if only they would’ve sat down and try to actually make the game functional instead of calling it quits so quick ugh is so frustrating cause ms2 had so much going for it, they could’ve made monster farming a way of leveling like ms1, dg boss should’ve function like ms1 that way the game would’ve appealed to its audience like let us farm mobs to level let us do bosses for certain gear pieces
I dont think it was the RNG that killed the game. the game had a market where if you grind enough you can just buy the gear you wanted. The RNG aspect is way worse in MS 1, especially in the reboot server, where it can take years to get a boss drop only to boom the item and never see it again. The game just lacked content for average to hardcore player who want to progress their characters outside of limited weekly dungeons.
it was not the fault of RNG, it was dis toxic top 200, that gatekeept people, when i play i was around rank 30 bezerker. i grinded fk hard. the gatekeept people without a +10 weapon in party find. the problem was the get the weapon to +10 you needed to clear that raid that fire lizard thing. and then every 2-3 days the rize the bar to +11 +12+13 +14 and the people that got gatekept just stopt playing. and yeah in the end only 100-200 people left in a emty game, with there selfish behavior left alone with endgame content and it just died slowly. and game shutdown weeks later sad story
rng was definitely one of the reasons why the game shut down but even worse, the god awful time it took to complete dailies.. it honestly makes ms1 dailies look normal i played ms2 til the content after blackshard nexus, and man, the dailies only get worse. to me the other problem, is that the classes were pretty underwhelming. the game had potential for sure, but im not sure why they made the classes the way they were if ms1 is known for making cool and unique classes. plus new leaf was for sure way too late, if they only brought it sooner maybe it wouldnt be dead and would atleast have 500-1k concurrent players
It die due to the dg mechanics being changed where it went from unlimited to only 10 dg also the game was too linear it felt like a chore with nothing more to do afterwards I was on the end game side of things and after doing my daily and my dg count I would just find treva cause literally there was nothing else to do.they should’ve shaped it like ms1 where you do certain dg for certain Pieces once at day after you beat it, give us more levels and introduce mobs farming which was one of the fun things about maplestory in the first place,the content was too easy & just not that intriguing
You didnt mention the meso dupe/glitch that left a select few players with billions and billions of mesos which killed the market. Then Nexon stated they wernt going to punish players, thats a big reason why a lot of people quit.
Late reply, but i can offer another perspective of the problem at endgame. The fact that rng was terrible is because you needed multiple copies of the same gear in order to gamble it and upgrade it. Endgame gear progression consisted of weekly raid runs that were done in one day (less than 30 minutes), with no guaranteed loot for your class, and no guaranteed chance of success to progress even further. That was the game. 30 minutes weekly raid log to try and fail your weapon enhance. Come back for next week to do the same. In WoW you just run a dungeon a few times, the item drops and that's it, you're done with it.
I honestly hated all that community driven stuff in MS2. Im sure a lot of the people who abandoned it before it got shut down hated it too. To me MS2 was just a waste of time when I could be playing actual MS. Numbers dont lie either. going from 100 thousand to 1000 players is evidence the game didnt have much staying power here in the west. I imagine the game would have done better with people who DID NOT play MS1 as they'd have more time to play it. As mentioned before I would rather work on my decade old MS account than to be distracted with another RNG filled nightmare.
I played this game in 2018 when I was 8, now 14 I look back and wish I could've gotten farther in the game and been more apart of the community. Every now and then I get bored and wish I had a rpg game that could even come close to maple story but most rpg games now are just the same dogshit
Never played the game, but then again if what you say is true then why we have games like pirate101 still running ? nah i think what killed the game was the negativity of the community, and the need to destroyed, this is the reason many korean games do not like bringing it to the states cause we are just toxic simple as that , yes I said it. The games thrive over seas why? answer that question and you will get the point. When people forget that a game is to have fun and relax and enjoy it and become a competition of I have to have the best gear and you suck if you do not game over.
While the RNG was bad, it wasn't what killed the game. It was the gatekeeping and the pro players selling runs that was the death of the game. Even if you managed to get your gear set up, you were still not able to run those chaos dungeons or w.e. People realized this and dropped it. The game was dead by the time that air update came out, so even by then it was already too late.
I was aware of players selling runs and that the gear score system was terrible at assessing if you were even able to damage the boss lol, but yeah, gatekeeping was insane in the game, any level of higher progression was almost impossible without someone to help you out.
A lot of the details were glanced over, but the video gives a very quick summary!
I'm really sad this game didn't go that far in the West. I remember having a lot of fun with it! Especially the custom outfits...
Everything was honestly perfect except well, the game...
@@BananaWaffle For reall!! I started playing MS again recently so that's probably why I got recommended your video! Excited to see more :)
there're many community activities like FF14 ,like mini games ,housing and custom stuff ,you can even insert midi files and play music with in-game instruments.
tried on both CN and KR server and get to lv60(soul binder is pretty cool) ,saw a lot of potential but man ,there's only KR server left now.
The 2 years the game lasted was the best. I really enjoyed that game. The hours spent building your house and spending time walking around it afterwards.
That original outfit mechanic actually sounds so sick
most hype part
psa for anyone who really misses this game like i do btw: there’s a private server called maplestars 2, i heard there’s some weird controversy surrounding it, but i’ve looked all over the place and can’t figure out what’s bad about it, i’ve played it and it’s the exact same maplestory 2 experience
The controversy is that the client also installs a cryptominer on your system
@@illusion1472 OOF
@@illusion1472 oh damn really??
@@dom-nx9ik apparently yeah, cant personally confirm cuz I never used
@@illusion1472 😭😭 i already downloaded it what do i do
*I freaking loved this game. For one thing there's NO CUBES!*
Cubes absolutely ruined MS1 for me. It became pay to win.
Ah, the dreaded cubing system. DMT was always a nightmare
i hate nexon so much for not giving this game any other chance. it felt like they dropped the new leaf update and then shut the game down. if they would’ve kept going with the fixes and maybe did some sort of relaunch, the game may have been in a good state but nope :’)
I just sat in Tria all day playing 'Terra' or 'Balamb Garden' on piano.
Thanks for this video, I definitely miss this game. I feel like a barely got to do anything before it was gone
I played it during the pandemic and I loved it, the housing system especially. However the fact that you could actually run out of things to do in an MMORPG made it terrible. Grinding was inconsequential and dungeons had limited runs. The only reason I could enjoy it was that I had time to kill so I would just spend time alone customizing my house in various ways, but even that got old cause a lot of the features for housing was blocked by a paywall and there was no point paying for it when there was barely anybody around anyway.
This was such a sad story. the game was great in everything that WASN'T getting stronger. chilling with friends, exploring, metting randoms and playing music. great times.
the fun thing about kms2 right now is that the state of the game has completely stalled
events have been rerunning on a loop, new cosmetics/surprise style boxes and monthly maintenance has STOPPED, and anniversary events have been SKIPPED 2 years in a row
it can end its service at any time now
I didnt know that! It was very difficult for me to find anything on the state of KMS2. Thanks for sharing!
what killed it for me is that the raids dropped the best gear but you would get kicked if you didn't already have it. Alternatively, there is no practice so you will get kicked on your first 10 attempts when you are learning the boss. There was also no way to progress after the few dungeon attempts were completed other than collecting water bottles.
theres a private server. i couldn't get the dl to work tho T_T
there a private server of maplestory 2, its based of korea content with translations to english and some game time has been reduced to prevent to do boring things.
You have sauce of private server?
@@greenchilistudioz4537 google maplestars2 and find the ending with to, not with com (putting the full instructions did got deleted)
from 100k to 1k players jesus christ, that's like bad, esp for an MMO thats supposed to have a an always active & high count playerbase
A lot of my friends growing up play hours on end of GMS and as time went by and we all got older, we drifted apart for quite some time. THEN BOOM MS2 CAME OUT AND WE ALL CLICKED BACK TOGETHER AND STEAMED ROLLED THROUGH PROGRESSION. That was probably the most fun I had in forever. I believed after 3 months of playing MS2 we all were getting bored and most of us leveled all the classes to level 50. I remember you would get exp from just playing your instrument overnight and thats I got most of my classes to level 40+. As much as i miss MS2, it shouldve launch with the latest update or at least be a few updates behind bc hardcore players just went to end game within a matter of days. I still miss flying around on my balloon or trying to knock my friends off the platform.
i miss ms2
The thing is, this game was dead on arrival mostly because the korean version was already at a dying state. The game in life support, they stopped developing dungeons, raids, bosses, everything in KMS, I went to play it with friends after the Global closure and it was pretty bad, yeah it had "some" people whaling but there was nothing to whale since most of the thing had 1-2 years without changes so most people were done with their stuff, they haven't update their news channel in months and they just use reskinned events for the same shop and not even new cosmetics, since they keep rotation the old ones.
The west version was alive and had a community but the game had no future so they just said fk it, which I don't blame them because it would be dead by now anyway.
I miss this game.... so many memories made back in 2018.
it was sad that the gm needed to use cheat in order to defeat a chaos boss in a livestream showcasing the new patch, and not knowing what they were doing in the first place too.
nexon always being nexon, never using players feedbacks, and that how it ended
even though i still loved the game, and hope they bring it back someday, or at least a decent private server.
One of the most aggravating things that i hated was these 3 things
1.- Professional players intentionally omitted or gave out the WRONG information to the community, telling them to max on Damage or telling that ''gems'' or whatever that extra enhancement was completely pointless, by the time the Chaos Raids got introduced, those people who did play KMS2 got a STRONG hold on the market , they had bought every jewel and optimized everything while everyone else had to remake their weapon again since they were told the wrong thing by the same players , and shut doors to everyone else, which was the dumbest thing ever.
2.- The cash shop was EMPTY, holy balls, the beta test was so fun and i was in the cash shop myself there were like 5-6 outfits and 3 weapons per job, which was f un to mix and match , it was a pretty decent amount to begin but when the game got released, i think there was only 1 outfit and 1 weapon in the cash shop, for the rest of the lifespan of that game, everything else got pushed to RNG lootboxes and holy shit
3.- The cap on upgrading, 10 runs a day for only 30 a week?! What the fuck is Nexon thinking, and this is something that's gonna be repeated in maplestory 1 as we speak with the Sol Erda cap for New Age, but holy shit do they DON'T LEARN their lesson that capping progression in this way is just a sure way to kill the playerbase.
did u hear about wonderers eternal world? i recommend checking it out!!
I honestly loved the game, mostly for its community driven attributes. The progression definitely killed my desire to come back though. It was too linear and boring. I was hoping progression wouldve been like early ms1, a huge world with lots of maps, hidden streets, secret quests and items that pushed you to explore. But like you said it was just a nothing burger with a side of air fries, after level 20ish i just started logging in to goof around and socialize. The game had a lot of potential but it fell very short
Sadly so, I genuinely thought that ms2 was "the one" but it's just so sad they couldn't nail down the most basic rpg design.
level 20? That takes like an hour to get to... Progression was definitely a a shame, because the game absolutely had a huge world with lots of maps, hidden streets. You just spent zero time on those parts of the game and instead the game just became an alpha for lost ark.
Maplestory 2 looked like any other 3D MMORPG and that was the problem. Maplestory always had a great aesthetic to it that made it look like ann official MMORPG, unlike the other ones like La Tale that always looked like a game that would eventually die out.
Nexon: literally makes impossible for gacha to have a "winner" option cause its not in the RNG system...
players: its ok, lets keep playing!
Long Live Striker class
If they were to rerelease it on console I'd immediately be grabbing it.
All I'm getting out of this is that maplestory 2 players didn't know how to read
How is it any different from first one, rng is nuts in these games
i still feel like we SHOULD get a GMS2 Reboot, same as you i wish to play music again.
The progression issue was too fundamental. Unfortunate updates couldnt have fixed it. But it did a lot of things right (like social features).
Preach... this was one of those games that got a lot right but then fumbled on some of the most stupidest thing. Sad. They really could have extended the mini games to reward endgame tokens to keep the engagement. The RNG itself was fine maybe a little too much, but what drove the nail is the requirement of it in content. Some of those DPS checks were absurd vs player skill & gear level.
was that the intro to sweet child o mine on piano at 1:57
i cannot confirm nor deny
I miss MS2 :( So many great ideas but like you say, they compressed lot of the content and people squished every minute of it. I actually loved the rng, was fun to make dungeons with my guild and made it pretty significant when something good dropped. Can only wish with a MS2.5/3 where Nexon keeps the mechanics but gets a little more patient with the progression (Like in vanilla MS1 just choosing your class was a whole experience) and also drops the cubic style of the maps lol I got used to it but never liked that much
symphony represent
Arlong!! Its been so long!
I will never forgive them for fumbling maplestory 2.
They better not fumble the first descendant or im going to swear off Nexon as a company.
You missed one key part that snowballed into the whole gearing and content cadence mess. They LISTENED to community feedback about early game progression. Leveling to 50 was sped up by just getting there doing only Main story quests. They effectively cut out over 2000 side quests worth of content for a leveling player and dungeons under level 50 would effectively be run up to 4-5 times to get past their level range instead of being re-run dozens of times. Because of that, they lost precious months of time in order to cater to babies that want to raid end game dungeons on week 1. The community played a large part in killing MS2, we shouldn't deny that.
I agree! A bunch of side quest content was scrapped which made the game super linear and just flat out boring. I wasn't necessarily complaining about the time it took to get to level 50, but everything after that. I felt like the community just never gave enough time for the developers to work their magic, but sadly that's just how players are. Thanks for your input!
😀
@@BananaWaffle That was a change made in the korean server before coming to global. We never experienced the original leveling experience... No need to lie about it.
Even though I have preferred the 2d sidescrolling ones in MapleStory and it’s a shame that they have decided to shut down MapleStory 2….
I miss maplestory 2 if only they would’ve sat down and try to actually make the game functional instead of calling it quits so quick ugh is so frustrating cause ms2 had so much going for it, they could’ve made monster farming a way of leveling like ms1, dg boss should’ve function like ms1 that way the game would’ve appealed to its audience like let us farm mobs to level let us do bosses for certain gear pieces
I miss this game so much , kartrider isn't ms2 but the game is broken with the match
I've seen kartrider before! However I wasn't really interested in racing honestly.
I dont think it was the RNG that killed the game. the game had a market where if you grind enough you can just buy the gear you wanted. The RNG aspect is way worse in MS 1, especially in the reboot server, where it can take years to get a boss drop only to boom the item and never see it again. The game just lacked content for average to hardcore player who want to progress their characters outside of limited weekly dungeons.
it was not the fault of RNG, it was dis toxic top 200, that gatekeept people, when i play i was around rank 30 bezerker. i grinded fk hard. the gatekeept people without a +10 weapon in party find. the problem was the get the weapon to +10 you needed to clear that raid that fire lizard thing. and then every 2-3 days the rize the bar to +11 +12+13 +14 and the people that got gatekept just stopt playing. and yeah in the end only 100-200 people left in a emty game, with there selfish behavior left alone with endgame content and it just died slowly. and game shutdown weeks later sad story
rng was definitely one of the reasons why the game shut down
but even worse, the god awful time it took to complete dailies.. it honestly makes ms1 dailies look normal
i played ms2 til the content after blackshard nexus, and man, the dailies only get worse.
to me the other problem, is that the classes were pretty underwhelming.
the game had potential for sure, but im not sure why they made the classes the way they were if ms1 is known for making cool and unique classes. plus new leaf was for sure way too late, if they only brought it sooner maybe it wouldnt be dead and would atleast have 500-1k concurrent players
I really that game... very that the team was to much greedy. And more sad that the game just die because of it.
It die due to the dg mechanics being changed where it went from unlimited to only 10 dg also the game was too linear it felt like a chore with nothing more to do afterwards I was on the end game side of things and after doing my daily and my dg count I would just find treva cause literally there was nothing else to do.they should’ve shaped it like ms1 where you do certain dg for certain Pieces once at day after you beat it, give us more levels and introduce mobs farming which was one of the fun things about maplestory in the first place,the content was too easy & just not that intriguing
rip onyx crystals
me buying onyx crystals off the market
You didnt mention the meso dupe/glitch that left a select few players with billions and billions of mesos which killed the market. Then Nexon stated they wernt going to punish players, thats a big reason why a lot of people quit.
I was not familiar with such a thing! That definitely is a major factor
Isn't grinding the same dungeon hundreds of times a day/week what an MMO is, look at Classic WoW or even retail WoW.
Late reply, but i can offer another perspective of the problem at endgame.
The fact that rng was terrible is because you needed multiple copies of the same gear in order to gamble it and upgrade it.
Endgame gear progression consisted of weekly raid runs that were done in one day (less than 30 minutes), with no guaranteed loot for your class, and no guaranteed chance of success to progress even further.
That was the game. 30 minutes weekly raid log to try and fail your weapon enhance. Come back for next week to do the same.
In WoW you just run a dungeon a few times, the item drops and that's it, you're done with it.
I honestly hated all that community driven stuff in MS2. Im sure a lot of the people who abandoned it before it got shut down hated it too. To me MS2 was just a waste of time when I could be playing actual MS. Numbers dont lie either. going from 100 thousand to 1000 players is evidence the game didnt have much staying power here in the west. I imagine the game would have done better with people who DID NOT play MS1 as they'd have more time to play it. As mentioned before I would rather work on my decade old MS account than to be distracted with another RNG filled nightmare.
Ms2 died cause dungeons were unlimited then they limited to 10 a day...we all quit after 3 months
I played this game in 2018 when I was 8, now 14 I look back and wish I could've gotten farther in the game and been more apart of the community. Every now and then I get bored and wish I had a rpg game that could even come close to maple story but most rpg games now are just the same dogshit
Never played the game, but then again if what you say is true then why we have games like pirate101 still running ? nah i think what killed the game was the negativity of the community, and the need to destroyed, this is the reason many korean games do not like bringing it to the states cause we are just toxic simple as that , yes I said it. The games thrive over seas why? answer that question and you will get the point. When people forget that a game is to have fun and relax and enjoy it and become a competition of I have to have the best gear and you suck if you do not game over.
While the RNG was bad, it wasn't what killed the game. It was the gatekeeping and the pro players selling runs that was the death of the game. Even if you managed to get your gear set up, you were still not able to run those chaos dungeons or w.e. People realized this and dropped it. The game was dead by the time that air update came out, so even by then it was already too late.
I was aware of players selling runs and that the gear score system was terrible at assessing if you were even able to damage the boss lol, but yeah, gatekeeping was insane in the game, any level of higher progression was almost impossible without someone to help you out.
i miss ms2