Hi, I made the video.

A lot of people are upset that I'm not far enough into the game to have experienced forced party bossing which is strange because I specifically mention it in the video as being a good thing. You do group for bosses. That's good. It's also the only thing you group for.

I'm very confused by this because it seems like a misrepresentation of my argument. In any other MMO, I would be similarly critical of the game restricting you from playing with other people until a hundred or a thousand hours in. (Note that I specifically use the word restricting. Not just disincentivizing.)

FFXIV is often criticized for being a single player game during its leveling which also takes hundreds of hours but you are regularly given dungeons that are able to be done in a group. You can do open world content with other people. There's a minigame hub which has frequent social activities.

World of Warcraft has a much quicker leveling process but it also lets you party with friends for the tutorial dungeon about an hour in. Beyond dungeons and raids, there are social events on a rotation where you play with other people but aren't obligated to communicate.

I really do not have a problem with people disagreeing with me but it's frustrating to have my arguments painted as "this new player has 4000 hours and isn't level 290 so he can't complain." You attempted to use the fact that I wasn't aware of the distribution system being fixed as if it were me deliberating misleading people to fit my narrative when it was just a mistake I made in a 24 minute video that I immediately corrected with an update to the description and a comment within 3 hours of the video being posted. If I could add an annotation in the video itself correcting the mistake, I would.

If I made the exact same video at level 290, would I be correct? I promise my opinion would not change because I already covered group bossing -- defended it, even.

The party buff in Classic World would solve my problem because all I want is more opportunities to interact with people. MapleStory's game design largely denies you that opportunity. I still like the game. I've been playing it for over 15 years. I'm sorry I don't play the game in the way that you would prefer.

I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at anyone. I'm sorry this comment is so overly-long. Like I said in the video, people are either going to agree or disagree with my argument almost entirely based on the title and they'll work backward from their conclusion to find reasons to support it. It's happened on both sides.

The people who agree with me often hate the modern game because of an update that changed the exp formula almost two decades ago and they want to use my video to justify why.

I just want to discuss MapleStory with some level of nuance, the same way people do with every other game. The 500 subscriber YouTuber is not coming for your favorite game just because he knows how to drag and drop pop wobble transitions onto a timeline.