Well, I had gotten the news a few days ago when I logged on to SimpleMS, the Maple Story private server I’d been playing on for awhile. It came innocuously, and from one of my friends:

“Welcome to the end.”

Turns out that apparently the server had been sent a cease and desist letter, and would therefore be shutting down- and they were holding a large get-together to ‘end it right,’ or something.
Well… That sort of thing usually just depresses me, so I left and talked very angrily about it for awhile, before getting an invite to join a second private server.

This of course is very appealing to me. So I did it, made all my characters again, and plunged in. It didn’t seem like the same thing as SimpleMS, but hey, it was great. Way better than having to play GMS, at least. The super megaphones were a bit more plentiful, good items a bit harder to come by, and the server a lot laggier than the last- but it was still a private server. And therefore far superior to GMS.

So here I am, going to keep playing the new server for quite awhile. Found some new friends in another guild, got Amelia back to her original level, and it’s been great so far.

But to actually create a log of what happened:

-+-+- Here’s the actual blog, guys! -+-+-

I had Amelia at level one or so when I started today. I’d made up my mind, this was going to be a great day for levelling. I went through all the very basic stuff, trained up to 30, kept going, did some quests, got to around 60 or so.

Then I realized.

I’d decided that I was bent on capping Amelia’s DEX at 40. However, this is going to be an incredibly idiotic task without a Maple-type weapon. Oh well, there are four of them I can use, two of them I can probably use forever, and heck I should hunt for them.
After the first hour of hunting around Terrace Hall, my favorite ‘money-making game’ spot in SimpleMS, I’d not even gotten a single maple weapon, aside from a Doom Singer from the teddies that surrounded the cakes. I’d have started to doubt their existence if I hadn’t found an Asura Dagger from a snail earlier.
A couple minutes later, I just decided to buy one. I got a cheap Maple Impaler for only 350k- which is pretty much one-tenth of a pittance on this server- and went to work at Wolf Spiders. I was level 78 at this point, still relying on Power Strike to get the job done, and it was going really nicely.
When I maxed Roar- well, forget about it! Maxed Roar at Wolf Spiders is, as I figured out in SimpleMS, pretty dang incredible- and when I’d hit level 82, Silver announced that she was going to lunch.

She came back to find me at level 101.
Yeah, it’s that incredible.

Well, at that point I went to the FM and bought a Maple Soul Spear- at a ridiculous price which I’m still finding a way not to pay back- and then headed over to Silver, where I demonstrated my Crushing Tactical Nuke status by… well, dealing vaporizing damage to the Stirges she was hunting feathers at.

We accomplished that quest pretty quickly.

After that was done, we decided to fool around for awhile- getting odd NX outfits, her giving me a lecture on Chinese mythology, a leisurely discussion about hell (and people who go too slow in the fast lane), and from there it just got weird. We went over to the construction site, where I proceded to use Sacrifice to kill myself.

Quite a few times, at that.

In the end it was a fun and rewarding day, and I’d probably do it all again given the opportunity. I WOULD, but the new server’s relocating today, SimpleMS is meh, and our server here doesn’t work for me because of its Hamachi dependency.

Pictures! Visual AIDS, really.
(1) The King Lag. This happened when I was mobbing Wolf Spiders, and… well, look for yourself. I’d have expected to be rollbacked or lose some equipment, but thankfully there were no negative consequences (except for Amelia being traumatized) This picture is completely unedited, in case you were wondering.
(2) Epic Levels of Something. Messing around with Silver in the hair salon, with a rather odd NX setup.
(3) Suiciding on Bats. Sacrifice is actually really, really good at killing me.