Yesterday after all my lessons when I reached home, I tried logging in to Maple Story to have my dose of online gaming for the weekend when I was unceremoniously kicked out of the game seconds after I logged in. I could not logged back in for an entire thirty minutes and I thought it must be some silly bug at work again, interrupting my session of fun and relaxation from my hard day of work. When I finally got back in again, it was back to a game of angry megaphones (broadcast messages written by players) and a horror story of the 3rd rollback in the history of Maple Story (SEA server). A rollback is the resetting of the entire game back into another time, resulting in the loss of experience gained by players, any amount of mesos (currency used in gameplay) and equipment looted from monsters, traded from players or gained from quests.
It was quite an eye-opener for me because I had never seen such angry messages written and I could easily understand such a violent reaction from the players. The rollback occurred on a Sunday night where many players are at home playing Maple Story (mapling) and it jsut so coincided with the first Sunday night of the March school holidays and probably hundreds of players stayed up in front of their computers for hours to try to advance their characters in the game. To many's utter horror and dismay, hours of gameplay disappeared witht the rollback (which I calculated to be around 12 hours because I was fortunately spared with no personal losses on my end when I logged out of the game then).
Protests and angry megaphone messages went on for at least an hour, citing terrific losses of milions of experience points, mesos, really expensive and rare equipment traded in the free market (a trading area for players in the entire server) as well as the emotional setback for many players who had devoted hours on the Sunday itself. Many had threatened to quit the game entirely if they were not compensated for their losses. The gamemasters remained quiet throughout the entire night, replying to none of the messages even till now.
I am now writing this blog as there is an on-going server check on MapleSEA right now. Perhaps something might be done to help those poor players who really devoted themselves to the game or perhaps there may be another fourth rollback, which would most certainly mean the explosion of fury from these players. Such is the intensity of emotions from the online gaming world, and there is no underestimation that these players treated their online gaming lives as seriously as their real-life ones. I will most probably sit back and watch the development unfold with quiet interest because it is one of those rarer moments in the history of online gaming in Singapore that I would be able observe the behaviour of players who are fighting fiercely for their rights to recover part of their alternative lives in the virtual world.
Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
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