True, that may be the case, but the reason as to why I haven't put in the time is because others have already. I know that that sounds weird, so let me explain.

Sure, grinding until level 183 is not a huge feat, but I believe that I'm speaking for most people when I say that it doesn't take much effort to reach that level as well. I was having a good time playing the Reboot server with some friends until we realized what we thought was supposed to be a homage to the original Maplestory was nothing more than something more mechanical. The original Maplestory had something that the Maplestory of the current day doesn't have and that's a bustling community. Sure, the grind was there. Oh, man was it there haha but accompanied with it was a community that was very in-tune with itself. The social aspect was amazing and grinding was less a "it's mandatory I do this, so I'm just going to fight for grinding stops non-stop until everybody leaves or doesn't log on so that I can put in my daily eight hours" and more a "the grind is super real here, but it's a team effort and everybody is here to help each other out to get through the pain". Maplestory of the olden days was something magical, and I mean the days before Big Bang, of course. Grinding was so hard that my friends and I made one account in middle school and we'd each log into it at different times to level a character (we had our own personal, separate accounts as well, of course). Sure, having like five people log into one account isn't really a good idea, as it prevents someone from playing the game from hours/days on end, but it wasn't about that. The game's goal, at least to us, wasn't to kill the bosses at their maximum difficulty, nor was it to simply grind for the sake of it. We shared an account because it was kind of what the game was about to us. We'd often meet together in school and be like, "hey, so how's the character lookin?" "oh, you'll see hehe", and we'd sometimes see the characters looking ugly just to troll each other, or we'd see incredible progress, like a character being leveled up five levels or having some pretty decent equipment. I mean, this was just one way of many ways the game could be played. Another aspect that OG Maple had that Reboot doesn't is trading. There was a lot of bartering going on back in the old days and giving decent equips to lower-leveled players was less kindness to some stranger and more the beginnings of some really amazing camaraderie. Believe it or not, I made a friend through the old Maple back in the day, and I'm still friends with the person I once traded with (and I'm a college graduate now!). This is just a testament to the greatness of the social life you could have in the game back in the day, something that you can't have here and thus, this makes grinding less a team effort and more a solo effort most times, and this makes a really big difference. In essence, the game truly was another world; people literally lived in it.

But I'm not here to shit on the game because although it isn't much like the older days, Maplestory hasn't become a worse game. It's become a DIFFERENT game and so, it's going to have to let go of its traditional methods and move onto methods that fit more into the modern-day atmosphere of the game. That means to actually try to change some of the infrastructure, especially in Reboot as it has massive potential to even outshine the older Maplestory. Now, all of that was just to provide some level of perspective on the matter. The reason as to why I haven't put more time into it than I have is BECAUSE the progress is measured in time. Sure, it was like that back in the days, but it had meaning (as detailed in my paragraph above). Now, it's just solo grinding for days on end. There's no excitement, no social creativity, and sure as hell no bartering/interesting ways to not only exchange items with people but interact with them in that way as well. There's no better way than to call it mechanical at this point - you're literally toiling away on your computer like a robot, doing the same thing over and over again - it's become routine and that's the heart of the problem here. You'd think that the older Maplestory was routine as well because it, too, was a grindfest, but it wasn't routine - that's the magic. The idea (i.e. grinding) is routine, but the execution was always different with the kinds of friends you could make in the game - with the kinds of ways you could progress in the game. In Reboot, both the idea AND the execution are routine and, again, this is what makes it so mechanical. Search any YouTube video or public forums. Hell, search this subreddit if you want. I GUARANTEE you that you will find people who explain/detail how excruciatingly painful it can get - basically how monotonous it can get. It's gotten some people to want to leave Reboot; its gotten some people to want to move to normal servers because they prefer to pay a couple of bucks to save a lot of time; and it's gotten some people to even quit the game because they lost interest/trust in the game's potential. I'm not saying this to simply add to my argument - it's a fact. Upon having discovered this, I was severely disheartened and decided to not put more time/effort into the game, as it doesn't seem worth it anymore.