A Bit About Me

I'm going to talk a bit about how I came to be here, beginning with my beginnings in MapleStory. One day, in middle school, on my way to the bus stop, I was talking with a friend, who mentioned an awesome new game that was currently in beta testing. He was saying how a mutual neighbor of ours was playing it and that it looked pretty awesome. When I first heard the name, MapleStory, I busted out laughing. How could any game with such a ridiculous name be any fun at all? Well, as fate would have it, upon returning home from school, I promptly went to my computer and typed up "MapleGlobal.com," the site my friend provided me with. Once again, seeing the cheesy, cartoony characters, I thought that this game would be a total pushover. However, since it looked so innocent, my overbearing, hyper-religious parents saw no harm in it and allowed me to download it (Just to give you a little perspective, my parents wouldn't allow me to play Pokémon because they thought it was based on drugs, and Yu-Gi-Oh was witchcraft, and Guild Wars had necromancy, so it was of the devil, etc).

So anyways, I started to play MapleStory and soon found myself completely addicted. The funny thing is, I've never gotten past level 50. My first character, DawnMage, was a F/P mage that got to about level 38. I lost the account info, and I also found out that I had completely screwed up the stat tree (Hey, I never claimed to be pro, I just liked the game). Anyways, I started a few other characters, all winding up hacked/lost/screwed up somewhere around level 45. My most successful character, LiteralLight, is a level 50 Ice/Lightning Wizard that I have wasted almost two years of my life on (Yes, you heard right, two years). As you might imagine, I eventually began to grow frustrated that I could not achieve the high levels that other players were reaching. I then attempted to turn to hacking. Unfortunately for me, my dad is a complete freak about his anti-virus and firewall programs, and they always blocked whatever hacks I attempted to use. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Nexon is spending god-knows-what on GameGuard, which failz, when common, free antivirus programs are much more effective!!!). After a while, whispers were spreading that server emulators were in development. I began surfing sites like XtremeTop100, combing through all the spammy forums, attempting to find the source of these whispers. As it turns out, these rumors were completely unfounded at the time, and all the "Private Servers" in development were silly kids trying to code a whole server via GameMaker programs. Frustrated and weary, I decided to quit MapleStory.

It just so turns out that MapleStory is more addictive than heroin, because though I did my best to ignore it, there was always that nagging burr in the back of my mind. Eventually, I could no longer stand it, and I returned to MapleStory. I looked on XtremeTop100 again, to see a new website in the number 1 spot, with literally thousands of votes. This piqued my interest, and I clicked on it. It turns out it was just a forum, but that forum is what launched me into the private server community. It was MapleGeek, and I'm sure some of you may have heard of it. It was the third-largest private server community, and it didn't even actually have a server at the time. I signed up and hung out with the other members of the community under the forum handle "LiteralLight." Reading through the forum, I discovered that a private server had been developed and was working. Unfortunately, OdinMS was not opened to the public at the time, and I could only read about it and watch the videos players posted. I then learned about LocalMS, and how they would open registrations at random times. It became my obsession, I would always check the sign-up page, up to twice every hour. I was in high school at this time, a Sophomore. My seventh period class was Journalism, and we had access to computers. It was in this class, one day, that I happened to check in on LocalMS's sign-up page and saw that some 400 accounts were available. I quickly registered four of my own. The bus ride home that day felt like an eternity, I couldn't WAIT to play!

When I got home, I immediately rushed to the computer, started my LocalMS client, and entered my login info. I don't know if you guys remember how servers used to have login queues, but back in the days of Odin and LocalMS, the servers used to be so packed that they had to put a limit on how many could be allowed on at one time. LocalMS could handle 500 at a time, and usually had a waiting list of about 100 people or so. Anyways, I had to wait literally an hour to log in that first time. I created a new character, LiteralLight, and got right down to work. It was a 1000x server, so of course I was extremely high level in no time at all. However, third job had yet to be coded at the time, and Fourth Job wasn't even out in Global yet. I remember when third-job was first released. Everyone rushed to El Nath, literally hundreds of people were sitting in the town spamming their shiny new third-job skills, and a few noobs were wandering around asking "Where do I get 3rd job?" We couldn't blame them, of course, because some classes, such as Clerics and Spearmen, had to go to Mohammed (El Nath's Storage NPC in Global) to get 3rd Job. I, myself, had experienced a little confusion when, as a level 90 cleric, I went to the magician's third job instructor in the chief's residence and he told me I did not meet the requirements for advancement!

Anyways, since Odin was being stingy with its server files, another source was released. TitanMS was a lot crappier, but now anyone could make their own server. MapleGeek finally started their Alpha testing and, since I was one of the most active members (With over 800 posts), I got the privilege of testing. The rates were REALLY low, I think it was like 3x or 4x or something like that, but it was extremely fun to know that I was one of the first people to play MapleGeek. In fact, I was the first non-GM character to log into MapleGeek's Alpha Testing. I went in a different direction as an alpha tester. Until MapleGeek, I had always played a Magician. This time, however, I played a bandit. I've still got a video of me pwning Mushmom over and over!

Anyways, Alpha was great, but the MapleGeek community soon fell apart. Locolijo, the owner of the site, was both paranoid and a pathalogical liar. He kept telling the community he was personally coding stuff for MapleGeek, but everything he 'coded' had already been released on RageZone by other people. Anyways, I ended up banned from MapleGeek for reasons I still do not know. Through RageZone, I found a new server, BetrayalMS, run by someone I'd known from LocalMS as DeadLine009. I signed up to be a GM and got the position, simply because my application was the only one that had any grammatical structure (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Grammar is a wonderful tool!). It was here that I first used the IGN of iRawk. I picked it because at the time I had really liked the "Mo-Rawk" hairstyle, and I also believed that I really did "rock" (and I do!). After some time on BetrayalMS, I learned that DeadLine009 was just like Locolijo in the fact that he stole releases from RageZone and took credit for everything he put into the game.

After leaving BetrayalMS (With two months of GM Experience under my belt), I caught up with a friend from the Global MapleStory, xTackux a.k.a. Alex. He owned his own private server, AirMS, which I played for quite a while. It was using Krytical's repacks, which back then had some MAJOR errors. Characters would get bugged for seemingly no reason, and, once bugged, were lost forever. I had become one of the best, highest level characters on the server, when my character got bugged. I asked Alex to let me fight Silver Slimes to regain my levels, as he had always done for other players in my predicament. Instead, he promoted me to the position of Game Master. It was as a Game Master on AirMS that I had some of my most enjoyable experiences as a private server player. I became good friends with a fellow GM, Xandrack a.k.a. Chris, who has been one of my closest friends, or as close as two people separated by thousands of miles who have never met in person can be, as well as SirPainsAlot. AirMS eventually shut down, however, due to technical issues and the owner's loss of interest in the project. I eventually slipped away from MapleStory yet again.

Many months later, I returned to RageZone, looking for a new community to join. I chose a server called MapleWorld, where I soon became a prominent player yet again, under the IGN of "Shedo." Here, I met more great friends. Alek, a.k.a. Facebook, was similar to Chris in so many ways, and Justin, a thirteen-year-old kid who eventually started his own server when MapleWorld went down. He invited me to become a GM on "OurStory," and I accepted. Eventually, he, Alek, and I were all co-Admins. We gathered about 50 active players, though there were typically no more than 2~10 on at any one point in the day. We had a great time, hosting daily events and such. I was a master at Hide-N-Seek. Even though I would give hints that were blatantly obvious, it would take people quite a long time to find me. For instance, I once hid in the Zoo in Aquarium. One of the clues I gave was this: "I'm standing next to an NPC that shares its name with a famous band." Can you guess the answer? It was Muse, the fish-lady-thing! Nobody got the reference though… Anyways, I gained a few new friends here as well: Kalani and Anna, two young teenagers who lived in Hawaii. Kalani and I hung out in the GM room all the time, even though he wasn't a GM at the time.

Eventually, Alek and I convinced Justin to promote Kalani to GM. At the time, I had thought it a great idea. Kalani was with us all the time anyways, so I figured he may as well be able to do what we do. It turns out, I was wrong. The power went to his head, and in no time at all he became like a completely different person. He pushed both myself and Anna away, and it came to the point that I had to quit OurStory, because I felt there was no way we could co-exist on the same server. That ended my time as a serious private server player, and I haven't really been involved in one since. I tried going back to Global, but, being used to much higher rates, could no longer find even the smallest inkling of will to train. I tried hacking, but have already gotten banned twice. My frustrations have led me to pretty much give up on MapleStory, perhaps this time for good. I don't know what I'm going to do with all of my free time from now on, but I'll hopefully think of something :]