Notice Last year skipped, now another: End of 2024!

Reminder: These are written purely by myself, which is why its in 1st person "I" vs "we" at places

It's the end of 2024 and here we are again. Last year, I have skipped my end of the year thread because I was about 95% of it inactive. Now, while I have not been that much in-game beyond handling some cases and problems, I was much more involved again with the behind the scene stuff and discussions. Still not as much as back in the day, but more than 2023 for sure.

This year was quite an interesting year when it comes to development, roadblocks, concerns, and pushing through.

Achievements

What already is a personal achievement for myself is that this year marked the 10th year Anniversary of when the development of this started. August of 2014, being not as satisfied with the current servers, and none of them were as interested in having a pure-authentic Old School experience. The closest one having donor perks and rather questionable things going on with proof provided of such. I left the last server we were on with a developer and started building what eventually became this server, MapleLegends.

I have said it many times before, but what MapleLegends started with, and what it is now, is very different. However, what MapleLegends did become is definitely what I would prefer now over what it was in 2015. There's some core things I definitely do not want or would have changed now (as in when ML started), but I think I went over them many times before, and those actually reading between my lines or vents I pushed randomly through the forums at times are aware of them.

Anyway, I do not want to go too deep into this stuff again, and the 10th Anniversary still has to happen for the actual release! Which is April 1st, 2015. What a long joke...

When it comes to the year itself we have made numerous breakthroughs when it comes to development. For one, we now have full freedom with custom UI windows. Many servers usually take the "IMGUI" workaround which is essentially adding a window that doesn't look very similar to the base game and sometimes makes you think you are using hacks. While this is miles and miles easier, it just looks wrong. Of course this is subjective though; some just don't care about details like these. But yes, this is why if you played on multiple other servers that got "modules" in-game they all have this familiar blue style. It's all the very same method, Imgui.

When it comes to us we did it the fully-authentic in-client way which makes the windows not look "out of place" and fully authentic. If you played "MG2" aka "RSVP" they did it in a similar authentic way. The very first full usage of this custom UI is the custom PQ teleport window, and we have plans for more, and more complicated things and features. Stay tuned for that! We're quite excited for this one.

This year we've also allowed users to fully make use of the rewards by taking an alternative to washing, the HP challenges. We are happy users now have a second way on getting started on the server, while still giving the users that want to fully commit to the "authentic" way their option as well. We can blame nobody more than the original developers why this exists to begin with, and that it likely was balanced around it. If it wasn't, than pre-bb was just a very poorly balanced game, which honestly would not be wrong either...

Speaking of a poorly balanced game, we are also still working on more balance changes, and that is another great example what MapleLegends from 2015 differ from present MapleLegends; back then it was 1:1 with no changes beyond a few QOL additions. Of course there's a few out there that want the full authentic non-changed game, but I think most are convinced at this point that this game is not very well balanced, and would have probably had more issues than it has now. Balancing is a difficult task in any game, and with us just being a small group of people doing it as a hobby, all we can do is our best.

Something you may have noticed is that we launched the Christmas Event in time. A Christmas miracle! I do not want to promise anything, but we try our best to have them on schedule in the future too. The reason why we can't promise it is simply because anything that can happen that throw us away again, like the DDoS attacks earlier this year

Setbacks...

Speaking of DDoS attacks, a small setback this year were a couple DDoS attacks through the summer. Now for those that are around here already for a long time are familiar we face those every other year, and it actually have been a while until now. We get them quite often, but 99% of them gets filtered and goes completely invisible for the end-user. This year a different more unfamiliar method was used, which was directly targeted towards specific server configurations.

First of all, I want to remind another time that DDoS attacks are nothing but flooding a server so genuine traffic can no longer reach a server, thus knocks the server offline or gets very slow. User data was completely unaffected and would never be affected with a DDoS attack.

Secondly, unlike attacks in the past, this attacker was very visible and shameless on their attacks, and demanded money from multiple servers for attacks to stop. They did this in a very visible way by spamming discord servers constantly.

I have originally told that I would write a full timeline here, but I change my plans a bit. As of this month, he's still been trying to attack the server a bunch of times, and also attacked other servers. Basically, he's still around full force and I do not wish to give him too much attention.

Though, I will still post here the demands, since I find them entertaining.

The demands / taunts
https://i.imgur.com/uw8JOol.png #1
https://i.imgur.com/gNXfMy5.png #2
https://i.imgur.com/WQGV3hI.png #3
https://i.imgur.com/fpV1XYL.png #4
https://i.imgur.com/nPtZvkv.png #5
https://i.imgur.com/3jAEOpq.png #6
https://i.imgur.com/pHdGIdz.png #7

And it went on and on like this. I think you get the point by now. There's numerous more in other discord servers, public spaces, and so on where similar demands were done.

There's some lessons that were learned, and some help we've received. Huge thanks to all assistance, especially "Kevin" who helped a lot when it came to this specific problem, and the shortcomings of our current server. Something we should have done much quicker is taking external action, because we were waiting a lot for the host, and the host just didn't do their job well at all. Not pleased unfortunately. Kevin also ended up helping a few different servers that were under attack in the same way, such as YunaMS among others.

The more important thing is that we have overcome it as I promised that we would, and we will again if such thing happens again. Thank you for the continuous support during the time.

MapleStory Worlds also happened this year, and before it was released, people hyped themselves up to the extreme. Unfortunately, it also did lead to people harassing us, intentionally violate major rules so they get permanently banned, and more. Honestly, it was quite nasty. The reason they did it was that they were that convinced once World is out, they will never touch an unofficial server again, and were also convinced that once World is out, unofficial servers will be gone.

Well, worlds is out and I am writing this right now with about the exact same user count as before, so...

I had my personal predictions already, but since I have this, obviously any place where I left my personal predictions would be met with "bias" and "cope". However, its now been a bit, and about the exact same things I predicted would happen, have happened. If anything, World caused us to have an increase of new users joining than before. There's still Worlds releasing to the rest of the World in January, but unless there's an Old School alternative from Artale that is actually good, I doubt much changes. And even if that comes, there will be other challenges that we actually can overcome in a setting where we have more freedom (ex: botters).

Ultimately this isn't meant to be a competition to Worlds or anything, it's for people to experience the Old School client from 2008. Something that even Worlds does not offer, and won't ever offer. As long there's no official alternative, people aren't going anywhere. It really isn't rocket science.

Concerns

As some are aware, there's a bigger push lately for services providing an unofficial way to re-experience a specific game to no longer exist. For now due to numerous reasons I am not too concerned. I do not want to make this section long, but I do want to say I do my very best to have this exist for as long I can, and as long everyone within the team is fine with doing so.

WE have done this with a team as a hobby, and it will always remain a hobby. The fact WE make thousands of players happy, making new friends, distract them from darker periods of their life, and most importantly preserve a period of time that can no longer be played in any shape or form otherwise, we are motivated to keep going.

If there's ever a time this changes, I will properly communicate that and set up plans. Until then, as I said year after year, things will go on.

Thank you

There's probably more to be said, but I am going to be honest; I am not very inspired in writing right now. I am sorry about that.

As with every year we want to thank all of you for being around, for making the community as great it is, overcoming the challenges, being patient, and just being awesome.

Once again April 1st of 2025 is when the server will be released for 10 years. I still can't believe myself how much 10 years feels, and how it feels just a little ago when this all started.

To compare it, pre-bb was from 2005 until 2010 (5 years)
v0.62, the version we are based of was released on November of 2008 (2 years)

This was NEVER meant to last as long as it did, but it is, and we are still kicking. It's extremely far from flawless, but it still around, and that's what is important.

And as always, we have not being able to be here if it wasn't for our staff team. Thanks to additional developer help as well we have been able to focus with multiple things at once. Yao has been working hard when it comes to development of in-game content, and future in-game content, which allowed Pasta to work on more client work such as the PQ Teleport and the custom UI window breakthrough in general. This additional help is what we needed for a really long time, so all the work Yao have done so far is greatly appreciated. Of course this goes for all the other staff members old and new as well.

Thank you for another wonderful year, and see you in 2025.

You are all Legends!