Lol. I played maple story and runescape at one paint in my life and I can safely say that both are utter pieces of ****e. I played runescape back in grade 6 to see what all the fuss was about. My ENITRE class would rush downstairs like lemmings at lunch, herd into the library and proceed to develop early onset arthritis. You literally COULD NOT find a computer in the whole goddamn place. I logged on, made a barely distinguishable mess of pixels termed a character and hopped in. Immediately I was surprised by the underwhelmingness of it, no music, no sound (although I've heard that the new version has some and from what I've sampled it's laughably bad) samey animations, limited skill use, boring quests, mindless NPCs, no guild support, magic was a laugh. The entire thing played like a 20 year old calculator game with barely any better graphics. Whether you were mining rocks, cutting trees or fighting enemies, you got the same goddamn animation but with a different tool in your hand (of which there was only one model with different colors) and it was absolutely mind numbing. Within days I had lost any idea of why I was clicking, watching the same crap I've seen a million times, moving and clicking again. Why? To watch a little number go up? Not a single stat, level or piece of equipment was appreciably different than the last and so, there was nothing to gain from playing apart from PVP which sucked hairy balls. No, the game came to life for me when I used it as a social experiment. See, runescape is like "babies first online game" in that 99.78% of it's users were under the age of 12 and were horrifically immature, angry, greedy, jealous and seething with pre-pubescent fury. The game's harsh punishment and slow reward system only aggravated their feverishly deluded psyches up till the point of madness. After a week of playing, I went into my search console, found Jagexs folder, edited my mining and smithing to 99 and made about 3 billion rune platemails and greatswords (sorry, plates and 2hs). I went around town, merrily sprinkling these greenish icons of 3 months of hard gameplay around in towns like Santa clause after snorting too much elf dust and cackled with malicious glee at the squeaky, candy filled foamy mouthed rage that ensued as everyone within 300 miles busted their hairless asses to get to the trail of goodies. When I ran out in my current inventory space, the majority started raging, pleading, begging and bargaining with the ones who picked one up like it was a package of 20 years of their life (which if you wanted to get one yourself, you were probably looking at that much time involved). I went to the bank, got more and soon had a merry procession of lifeless dorks following me all across the countryside a-la pied piper on an especially vindicative day. After half of the people following me perished (whos numbers constituted 9 out of 10 people who passed me on the road) I decided I was done, closed the application and meditated for the next day on how such a crusty, boring and cheap RPG had attracted ANY players, made MONEY off of said players and sucked them into this extra-dimensional world where a tiny number increasing gives you orgasmic pleasure. I tried runescape 2 when it came out and never went back again.
Then I tried maple story. I could honestly say I was entertained for about 3 days. It was at least more exciting than runescape, but after the fourth day of grinding cute blobs of jelly with faces into powder inside an overgrown tree, I realised it was almost just as bad. I stopped playing that too.
Anyone who has played either, ought to go out and find a decent MMO (there are lots of free ones out there) and never look back. Runescape is for children with scarcely enough intelligence to multiply and nowhere near enough social competence to engage in conversation for more than 5 minutes. Anyone who exceeds both these criteria is wasting their time and should head for greener pastures. Maple story is for terminal weaboos and easily excitable 6-year old girls with an incredibly alien concept of fun and a resistance to Chinese water torture approaching that of
a tire. Once again, I would advise someone with none of these traits (excluding that they have a huge wallet and nothing good to buy, in which case they should pimp their character and grief the hell out of everyone) to try something a little less soul crushing. Like a game with the MMO part attached rather than the opposite.