31/1 - Characters' max level is increased to 250!

All of these posts simply underscore my point that this game has evolved into exactly what Americans want these days: entertainment with instant gratification.

Yeah, training for 12+ hours a day for three months straight is boring at times, but you know what made it not? Talking with friends on Ventrilo/Skype. Watching T.V. or movies while cycling and OHKOing a map. Yeah it would get repetitive, but there's a certain peacefulness in the humdrum of routine.

Welcome to life, kids. Life doesn't give you a job for two hours, upon the completion of which you'll earn thousands of dollars and be able to go on a vacation for a week. Life is all about dedicating enormous amounts of time doing much of the same tasks so you can survive, and if you're smart enough, work hard enough, know who you are and what you love and are ambitious enough to get it, you'll find a career and a life for yourself that, while perhaps boring and repetitive to others, are engaging, interesting, and worthwhile to you.

So in addition to meeting some incredible people I'm beyond glad to still call great friends today, grinding to 200 on MapleStory when it actually took time and effort taught me a few other indispensable life lessons: patience, resolve, and the humble understanding that to accomplish something truly great and impressive in this world, be it on a virtual pedestal or worthy of a Nobel Prize, it takes tremendous amounts of time, effort, and dedication. You can't just call it "boring" and give up after two hours, unless your desired destination is nowhere.

Except I pointed out that I'm perfectly capable of spending hours and even days on end on the things that I like which give me a sense of accomplishment, such as studying the basics of layout making to an extent that I'm pleased with my results and can make sure it doesn't screw up in other browsers. Like I said, it's fine that you and other people consider level 200 to be an achievement worth training for because I do recognize that as an accomplishment even when it's much easier to do nowadays but I'm not going to pretend for one second that I find the path there anything less than boring because I'm used to working for my accomplishments in other ways such as looking up databases, checking source codes and experimenting while Maple Story's formula has always been 'More damage, 2x EXP, cash, time and perhaps friends'.

Also, you acknowledge that it can get boring and not all of us have the privilege of having so many buddies that we can always be training and talking and while that works for you all I need is conversation to basically put a halt to any kind of training I'm going to be doing because I'm far more interested in that. My point is you really can't look at the opinions of others and just generally say that people don't try if they're saying something is boring.