MapleStory server going down makes it into the news

On Friday, I was rather surprised when I went to the back pages of the Straits Times and saw a report on Maplestory servers going down due to a hard disc failure, resulting in the loss of "XP" and the in-game gold gained by the players.

Obviously, my first reaction was to laugh at the poor suckers who may have realised that the 2 hours could be better spent (playing other games) other than to grind at MapleStory. How they don't get bored, is beyond me. In fact, MMORPGs is getting boring, after the bubble burst around 2 years ago. FPS is the in-thing again, at least the good ones with an actual storyline or something which has a special feature about it (Open endedness is one of the big plus in games these days).

My second reaction was amusement at how it actually got a fairly big mention on the newspaper, even though it was on the back. You don't see DOTA getting mentioned when a new patch (which takes it even further downhill every time). Why the sudden mention? There's plenty of things in Singapore to talk about, especially in the wake of the Dragonboat accident, or the doggie incident. Moreover, that spot could have been sold to some company to advertise their products, such a critical thing now that we are heading into the Christmas period. Even though MapleStory is popular in Singapore, to see it getting mentioned is amusing and ridiculous.

Then again, I never really bothered when ST comes to games. Who knew that Blizzard created DOTA?

LoooL