MG2 is shutting down

A message from Diamondo25

Dear MG2 players,

This last two years, we have tried to provide you a genuine but also polished experience of the game, with alterations such as being able to chat in all languages, being able to send messages that will auto-translate (communicator) for improving to chat with other people, and of course polishing the game in minor ways.

The game was our big project, and to show what the game can offer players, even if the game was made in 2005. We were able to backport features from newer versions, such as Guilds, as well as made custom features that, in my opinion, looked very genuine, as if the original creators of the game would’ve made it.

For me, personally, the last year was very hard. In 2021 I was laid off from my job, but kept paying for the server out-of-pocket until now. There were of course other IRL developments that were expensive and took a lot of time, and I have reached a point where I have to get my focus back on getting a job and doing the job, instead of the game and everything around that. I am honestly no longer incentivized to support the game, as it drains my energy and my money. The DDoS attack of December took a lot of me, as well as hurt me. Why would you continuously attack an actual Free-to-Play game that is made for the players? There’s literally no gain in doing that. However, because of this my sleep schedule was fucked, and I caught a fever as well as covid not long after, missing x-mas with my family.

There have also been other attacks towards me, such as impersonation and sending email to my employer (this is not the reason I lost my job), as a sort of blackmail campaign. These are things that give stress, and I usually dealt with it by sucking it up, and almost forgot that these things happened in these 2 years.

It really hurts me to make this decision, but I simply have to. It takes too much time and energy, but I get no pleasure from it anymore. Especially when there are bad actors in the games community, I do not feel this server will be able to keep up without intervention. For example, I banned 1 person for 2 days straight last week. This person kept creating accounts to hack on. I don’t even know why I kept bothering to ban his accounts… On the other hand, reading the feedback through our website and Reddit about what MG2 means to people, really makes the decision tougher.

There have been great times, but also bad times. I am very grateful for the team that I work with, and I feel bad for putting friends in really tough decisions as well as the stresses that came with these decisions. This is not something you want to put your friends (Perrito, popcorn, mailbox2, Vados, Fromage, Chika) through.

We will shut down the service 29 January 2023 at 00:00 UTC, and run a last event on Saturday 28 January 2023.

I hope you can all find a new server to play on.

Thank you all for the good times,
Diamondo25

A message from Vados

I’m not a lady of sentimental letters. It’s been a ride for all of us. I’ve had fun as a player and a GM. Some of you were awesome, some not so much. Enjoy what the future brings.

A message from Chika

Hey all! Chika here.

It has been a very interesting past 2 years. We originally launched mg2 as RSVP, a more or less shitpost server with the aim to encourage RevivalStory to hurry up with their launch. We quickly decided to change the name, and kind of slowly slid into taking it seriously after it inexplicably took off. The truth is, we never originally intended to host a serious server, but here we were.

Things started off being really exciting and pleasant. We decided to take the chance to try out all kinds of unorthodox ideas the team (aka our long time friend group) have joked about in the past. What if we made a server that accepted no donations? What if we made a server with only one channel? What if nobody knew who we were? And most importantly, what if we could host a successful server with high quality content without accepting any donations, or running any kind of advertisements? We wanted to make a statement that it was possible to provide a quality experience without asking your players to shovel boatloads of money into your pockets.

As time went by, however. The excitement wore off, and things were no longer pleasant. The really laid back and positive community we started off with, started to slowly get replaced by more and more toxic players. At the time, we foolishly banked on another one of our unorthodox ideas "what if we didn't get involved with the community at all, and let them moderate themselves?". While it kind of worked for the first two months, it quickly backfired when the opposite result we had hoped for had happened. The toxic players had banded together to try and take control of the server.

We tried to remedy this, but by the time it happened, the damage was done and it was too late. It was no longer possible to properly moderate the server without insane backlash or controvertial decisions.

It all culminated with two guilds who attempted to effectively racketeer the entire community, and ostracized anyone who didn't play along. From KSing and exclusion from bossing, to straight up doxxing and irl harassement. We did eventually make the decision "we are stopping this, whether it kills the server or not", and effectively took care of the situation. However, the energy it took to do this, and the fallout that occured from this, completely sucked away the enthusiasm and passion we had for the server from that point on.

Honestly, I detested running mg2 for the past year or so. It provided absolutely no joy, and instead pretty much only provided stress. There were definitely some great people who played the server. I met some of the nicest people I've ever known from running mg2. Many of which did their best to support us and cheer us on during our times of stress. It wouldn't have been possible without you guys. You all know who you are.

There was a lot we achieved with mg2. Ultimately, we achieved our goal of providing a succesful quality server, without accepting a single penny from any player whatsoever, and never putting out a single ad at all. While I overall had a negative experience running this server, I am still extremely proud of everything we achieved. I want to give shoutouts to all my friends who I worked on mg2 with:

Diamondo25:

Has an insanely deep understanding of both hardware and software. The speed at which this man can solve a technical problem is absolutely unmatched.

Perrito:

When it comes to replicating Wizet's original art style and design, there isn't any competition. The dedication towards authenticity, and the speed at which he would crank out content was absolutely terrifying. Absolutely well done.

Mailbox2:

While he left the team early on, his unparalleled leadership and management skills were key in getting us up off the ground when we first started. He helped shaped our goal, and ultimately our identity.

popcorn:

The amount of work he poured into client dev early on shined until the very end. We honestly rode out the results of his contributions until the very end. Thanks for all the hard work.

Fromage:

Absolutely terrifying knowledge of the inner workings of the client. He can crap out what you would think is a months worth of work, in mere hours. Literal wizard. Uncanny ability to think outside the box.

Vados:

Eyes like a literal hawk. Nothing gets past her. She'll somehow spot the most mundane bots that no one else would have noticed. Very close friend of mine, and helped me through a lot of stress and depression over the past two years.

Every player who has ever said positive things to us: You all have no idea how much it helped. We wouldn't have lasted this long without you guys. Thank you so much for supporting us. We're deeply sorry that we have to let you guys down!

Anyways, this has gone on long enough. It's finally time for mg2's well deserved rest, as well as mine and the rest of the staff. We hope you had a good time.

A message from Perrito

Hey all, Perrito here. As you might have guessed by the title, this is the final GM blog. MG2 is ending service on January 29th 2023. I know this news comes somewhat abruptly and I’m sorry to any players who only recently became acquainted with our server. In short, it’s been almost two and a half years since we launched MG2; what was once a monument to our passion for the game has, in the last year, felt more and more like an obligation. With motivations low and our next server payment coming up, we all agreed it would be best to call it quits. I’ve asked all of our staff members to contribute their final thoughts on the project so buckle in. Also: sorry for any redundancy. I haven’t gotten a chance to read the messages from my partners yet!

During my time on MG2, I was responsible for content preparation and scheduling, event planning, maintaining game data, and writing NPC scripts. I also conceptualized many of our custom features, wrote newsletters and created the official Discord server. Needless to say I had a lot on my plate… but more on that later. From the start, MG2 was a passion project built on the remains of its predecessor. We took everything we learned from MG1 and cut out anything that didn’t work. Our decision to use codenames, limit contact between players and staff, and include minimal information on our website was very deliberate. After all, there was no online counter or IRC group for the official game back in 2005. Staying low-key and refusing to take donations was also done to prevent any legal trouble.

Researching old versions for this project was a lot of fun. There were so many nuances that had never been faithfully emulated and we were one of the first to see a lot of it in action after 15 years. We did our best to provide an accurate depiction of what the game was like in 2005 while keeping it fresh for veteran players. Working with an early version like this was a double-edged sword, though. Its simplicity made it easy to work with, but that meant any features from later versions would need to be implemented from scratch. I’m proud of what our team was able to accomplish; guilds, monster book, a polished HD resolution. With that said, I probably won’t be working with a client this old ever again.

To me, MapleStory has always centered on self-expression and socialization. Its RPG elements always felt like a secondary feature. Even back in the day it seemed the majority of players played casually. It wasn’t so unrealistic for Maple to be someone’s primary online messenger in 2005. This is one of many reasons we chose to keep the server single-channel and information about the server inside the game itself. And the updates I put the most love into hardly ever catered to the hardcore players. In retrospect, the people who were playing “solo-story” or “iron man” usually yelled the loudest; the crowd that silently enjoyed the experience was often overlooked when the game was spread by word of mouth. To be clear, I didn’t outright ignore important gameplay elements like balancing, but I felt making a game that’s fun for people to play together took precedent. It’s a shame the “Game Guide” and “Communicator” were such late additions; they were real testaments to how “global” the game can be. Meeting folks from different countries and seeing the positive feedback in multiple languages was the biggest highlight of working on MG2.

In a vacuum, working on this project was everything I had hoped for: a faithful recreation of the old game that we could experiment on and take in any direction we chose. But things weren’t always simple. A combination of internal pressures like player expectation, misconduct, harassment, staff disagreements (of which there were very few), managing a Discord server; and external pressures like working sunrise to sunset through a pandemic, moving, and losing loved ones all weighed down on me. One of my biggest regrets is my lack of involvement in moderation. I may have had one of the most time-consuming roles on this project, but it didn’t compare to the stress of moderating players. Diamondo, Chika and Vados all took a lot of undeserved heat for their decisions. I’m not sure if I could have changed the outcome, but I could have at least given them more support as a team member and as a friend.

Creating an “official Discord server” was also a huge regret of mine. At the start there was an unofficial server hosted by one of our players but it would eventually become completely overrun with spam. It was a mix of poor timing and a lack of communication/moderation on the part of its owner and it was terrible PR to the users who thought that it WAS the official Discord server. It was my decision to create an official server, but I ended up being the least responsible for its upkeep. Again, Chika deserves a lot of credit for her hard work. The third job community can be a LOT to handle.

Despite our decision to shut down, we did have quite a bit of upcoming content in mid-development. Orbis PQ was about 95% done, we had completely reworked Internet Café elimination mode so you would gain points on monster kill rather than from picking up a computer mouse. Chairs were in the mix somewhere. Behind the scenes we were even testing a new café mode where you’d earn points from clearing out monsters on each stage, kind of like a boss rush PQ.

Anyway, while I feel like there’s a lot left to talk about but I should really wrap this up (they have already posted the shutdown announcement before this was finished, haha). If you know where to find me, feel free to ask me anything. I’m open to talking about the project as a lot of its special features likely won’t be found in another server. I appreciate all of you players and hope that you had a great two years. Cheers! <3

P.S. Thank you Reddit for providing good laughs from time to time. I don’t actually use Reddit but I was often sent screenshots of different MG2 discussions from friends and players, good and bad; I’m not really sure what goes on there. One thing I am sure of, though, is that I’m the one who made your icon! Glad to see after 6 years people like it so much.

P.S.S. Congratulations to Jinjo for winning the Halloween event!

Now please enjoy some out of context concept stuff from the project:

Costs

One of the factors that we ran the server, was due to it being much lower cost that people think. However, note that our team was more on volunteer basis, and not paid positions.
We have been running the service since 2020-10-03, so that is about 27 months of uptime.
The costs that have been made running the server is as follows (excluding tooling eg JetBrains license):

Item	Cost and interval	Total cost	Notes
Dedicated server	~500 EUR per 6 months	~2250 EUR	Hosted at WorldStream Specs: Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX1330 M3 CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1270v6 (4c8t) @ 4.2GHz Memory: 32GB ECC DDR4 RAM Storage: 1x 1TB PCI-E SSD single Traffic: 100TB OS: CentOS 8.x Uplink: 1Gbit/s - 100TB Guaranteed speed: 1Gbit/s up & 1Gbit/s down Worldstream DDoS Shield: 40 Gbit/s DDoS protection
Domain name	11 EUR per year	25 EUR
Additional DDoS protection	5 EUR per month	15 EUR	Only used it about 3 months, after Novembers attacks.
Eazfuscator license	482 USD in 2020 108 USD in 2022 for renewal	~561 EUR	This is used to protect our binaries from deobfuscation. A bug in the obfuscator required us to update to the latest version, which required a renewal.
Mailchimp for marketing e-mails	38 USD for 4 months 42 USD for 8 months 48 USD for 4 months	~646 EUR	Mailchimp had 2 pricing changes while we used it, and we actually didn't use it that much.
Total	~129 EUR per month ~1554 EUR per year	~3496 EUR for 27 months.

Max active players per month

This columns for active and offline player shops start at September 2021, as we figured that with the introduction of the offline Player Shops, more people would be "online" but not actually playing. From day 1 we already had a marker on players when they were AFK, which means that the player did not chat nor moved for 2 minutes.
We tried to not fool ourselves with deceptive data, such as "logged in players". Heck, even the official game, when they still distributed this information, got their internal player counts wrong, and showed negative online players ;).

Date	Max amount of active players (avg)	Max amount of offline player shops (avg)	Max online count (including active, AFK, shops)
2020-11	-		70
2020-12	-		155
2021-01	-		116
2021-02	-		75
2021-03	-		60
2021-04	-		38
2021-05	-		83
2021-06	-		96
2021-07	-		89
2021-08	-		107
2021-09	27 (12.437)	58 (48.477)	103
2021-10	36 (13.642)	71 (56.722)	113
2021-11	30 (9.532)	73 (63.389)	102
2021-12	29 (8.265)	65 (49.878)	91
2022-01	34 (12.627)	61 (43.739)	101
2022-02	65 (22.813)	91 (71.336)	145
2022-03	70 (22.418)	137 (112.655)	190
2022-04	45 (15.683)	138 (126.114)	185
2022-05	35 (11.403)	139 (129.027)	175
2022-06	40 (12.754)	138 (129.14)	178
2022-07	58 (22.891)	141 (79.08)	173
2022-08	66 (27.054)	115 (92.039)	183
2022-09	100 (46.351)	163 (132.732)	269
2022-10	115 (49.007)	213 (161.538)	343
2022-11	114 (44.629)	221 (184.934)	331
2022-12	114 (52.381)	238 (209.312)	366

Killed mobs

This data will include GM mob kills, but assume it being a really low percentage from the numbers shown.
The introduction of this metric was at November 2020, hence the limited amount of datapoints.

Date	Mobs killed
2020-11	567,690
2020-12	26,110,610
2021-01	23,545,036
2021-02	13,205,372
2021-03	10,051,162
2021-04	4,350,612
2021-05	6,978,549
2021-06	8,940,030
2021-07	7,198,551
2021-08	7,300,712
2021-09	6,756,176
2021-10	9,112,712
2021-11	5,348,214
2021-12	5,166,165
2022-01	7,464,676
2022-02	10,917,826
2022-03	13,147,388
2022-04	9,682,646
2022-05	6,390,122
2022-06	7,238,929
2022-07	13,193,773
2022-08	15,916,029
2022-09	24,429,140
2022-10	28,610,618
2022-11	26,319,669
2022-12	30,554,012

Mesos looted

This includes all kinds of meso loot actions.

Date	Mesos looted
2021-12	1,887,785,462
2021-01	2,370,825,837
2021-02	1,563,764,977
2021-03	1,317,906,632
2021-04	536,793,122
2021-05	1,008,584,905
2021-06	1,316,639,346
2021-07	1,171,347,435
2021-08	1,019,532,695
2021-09	1,185,212,211
2021-10	1,416,200,641
2021-11	873,952,012
2021-12	981,859,718
2022-01	1,543,216,827
2022-02	1,449,815,060
2022-03	2,177,067,431
2022-04	1,481,069,111
2022-05	1,150,084,153
2022-06	1,014,711,954
2022-07	1,853,684,399
2022-08	2,423,289,790
2022-09	3,223,562,940
2022-10	3,907,336,867
2022-11	3,676,613,120
2022-12	5,433,457,959

Characters reaching level milestones

This table shows the amount of characters that reached a milestone, per month, per 10 levels.

Date	lvl 10	lvl 20	lvl 30	lvl 40	lvl 50	lvl 60	lvl 70	lvl 80	lvl 90	lvl 100	lvl 110	lvl 120	lvl 130	lvl 140
2020-11	25	6	4	2	2
2020-12	859	395	178	90	45	32	21	9	4	1
2021-01	463	278	183	101	43	25	15	18	6	2
2021-02	178	110	62	35	30	20	14	9	5	2
2021-03	131	69	41	23	17	19	10	7	11	6	1
2021-04	91	49	35	16	6	2	6	4	3	5
2021-05	124	57	34	17	11	5	4	7	2	3	2	1
2021-06	122	70	49	28	15	12	5	6	6	2	3	1
2021-07	101	39	34	22	16	8	7	4	4	6	1	2
2021-08	109	62	48	35	21	8	6	5	2	2	3
2021-09	82	43	32	17	15	5	5	5	6	1	3	2
2021-10	114	62	34	24	13	18	9	7	12	5	3	4
2021-11	85	34	19	17	7	9	9	4	4	4	1	1	1
2021-12	75	39	25	18	11	5	5	3	3	5	3	1	1
2022-01	132	67	41	24	14	14	13	7	7	9	3	3	1
2022-02	313	154	96	64	37	19	10	11	6	4	3		1
2022-03	262	141	109	70	41	28	20	10	10	5	4	1		1
2022-04	143	82	55	36	33	18	14	6	6	2	1	2
2022-05	114	48	36	18	10	12	8	7	6	4	5	3		1
2022-06	171	88	58	31	14	6	10	5	2	4	5	2	2
2022-07	289	170	120	69	37	19	13	11	7	4	1	2
2022-08	256	150	101	79	49	27	20	15	7	5	4	3
2022-09	576	328	205	110	65	33	30	23	20	10	6	5
2022-10	502	295	197	131	82	46	27	20	13	15	6	2	6
2022-11	481	250	180	119	71	44	33	26	15	8	5	1	1
2022-12	597	346	221	163	98	65	41	29	25	21	15	7	3	3