The Reality of our "Content"

The right is the ideal game; the left is the reality. The sad part of all of this is that I'm pretty sure everything is GMS exclusive in its own way. I'm pretty sure no other version has Rotting Skeleton / Scarecrow / Twisted Jester chimney rooms and Alien Base Corridors full of Cogs with them all giving stupid amounts of experience and no other version still has party play LHC and SH.

I'm pretty sure all of you have notice but I really have to visually present you the absurdity GMS has taken into diluting content.

The reality is that, for the most part, content exists and it has existed for the longest time. I'm not sure the gravity of it all is known by the average mapler but there is content in this game but the way things are now, the game promotes only a few areas.

The problem is that this isn't a GMS only circumstance. Even in KMS and JMS the situation is the same, although to a lesser extent. 1-120 is still "ignore all actual content, grind X." The place where GMS diverges from the other versions is at 120, and pre-120 it's simply how fast you get to 120.

At 120 and above you actually look into doing bosses and quests, but prior to that it's the same in every version. The only difference is WHAT you train on, and how fast you actually get to that diversion point.

Honestly, though, the "Ignore content" problem has existed way before these game-breaking monsters showed up. How many people remember actually doing half the quests? I remember doing some of them once, and when I spent hours doing it and got nothing comparable to my time in rewards, I never did it again. For example, Arwen's Shoe, or Blackbull's whatever that was at Lv.30 (I forget what it was, kill Curse Eyes[Or was that the Shoe and the BB thing was Boars? I don't remember anymore] to get it). The amount of monsters you needed to kill, and the reward you received for doing it gave you nothing to compare it and concluding that it was worth your time. Now that these quests are possible to do in a short amount of time...the rewards are still terrible. Some of them give like 1k EXP for it...whoopie! Guess what, you could have made 10k in the time it took you to travel back and forth between the NPCs.

Prior to 120, even in other versions, you ignore all content. You grind X, Y, or Z until you reach the point where you move on to the next monster. Sure, you kill different types...but when was the last time ANYONE, in ANY VERSION, has gone to Showa? Or Jipang? Himes? Eos Tower? Helios Tower? KFT? Omega Sector? Once everyone found out how to properly grind no one went to these places anymore...and even when you did you didn't do it for story or quests, you did it for fast EXP. When people DID go to these areas, it was simply because they thought it was the best EXP. People used to go to Trojans...but it wasn't for the Ludi Questline, it wasn't for any reason other than they gave the most EXP, just like it is now.

I was saying 120 before, but honestly, this doesn't really change until 140. ToT forces you to do the questline, so in versions without the broken LHC, you did the questline to get further. I'm not sure how many people would actually do the questline if they could simply skip to Oblivion 4. Before the recent revamp of Tot (Not sure if that's in GMS yet), the ToT questlines gave you nothing. Now they at least give useful exp (like 3m a quest), but before then they gave you 300k or less, which is absolutely nothing to a 140-165 character, so why would you do those if you didn't have to?

Honestly, MS suffers from an extreme case of "time wastage". They added a nice amount of content prior to the Future, but none of it is actually worth your time. At least the Future's questline actually gives you rewards that are useful, and ToT does now, but everything before that simply does not. You spend hours doing something, or even just 30 minutes, and the reward is 99% of the time 50% or more less than what you would have gotten if you simply grinded. That's the true issue. There's no reason to do the quests. The rewards are, to put it simply, shiit. They are simply shiit.

Now I completely agree that GMS has the worst of all the problems with these stupidly unbalanced mobs, but this isn't an issue that's just in GMS...it's all of MS. They give you no incentive to pay attention to anything in the game except flashy skills and large numbers.