[EMS] Union Mayhem-Marathon, part 2!

Part of the joke is that, this isn't even everything that I've worked on today...

Ah shit, here we go again. After almost 8 hours of clicking, burning through 150k Spell Traces and four billion mesos, I've done some major upgrades to all of my Union mules that are now Level 150+.

Last year I've done something similar, when I prepared a lot of Sengoku equipment for a couple of Union mules that were at the required level. Another year has passed, and I've been working diligently on my Union and Mori Ranmaru dailies, so a lot more mules have gotten past Level 150, and it was time to empty my Sengoku equipment mule as it started to become difficult to stuff more items in my bag.

Because I use Amaterasu as my main item set, I tend to farm, craft and find a lot of Sengoku gear. With Equipment Traces requiring a large sum of the same item, I've had to stockpile hundreds of each Clan Shard and Sengoku recipe, thousands of Purple Powders and ten thousands of Superior Item Crystals. I practically have an unlimited supply of Sengoku items at my disposal. I only have to tribute (read: forge) these ingredients at the sacred Zipangu shrine (read: Smithing furnace) in Channel 11 Ardentmill, and they'll appear in my inventory almost instantly.

Unfortunately the Sengoku upgrade for all of my mules is just the beginning. Most of these characters used items that were limited to just 5 or 10 Star Force each, and thus the swap to Sengoku is just to raise this limit for future endeavours. At least, for the time being, all of these items have 11 SF each.

Although not every single mule on my account will use full Sengoku, as there are exceptions. My Beast Tamer will run a +Skill Levels build so it'll stick with Dragontail, my Demon Avenger uses a % HP layout, mages will use their corresponding Elemental Staves and my Dark Knight recycles my old Lionheart equipment together with a Lionheart Fuscina to complete the item set.

Anyway, I still have to work on the accessory part on each mule; mainly being rings and pendants. With my daily Akyrum runs I manage to find plenty of Mechanator Pendants with high-tier Additional Options and the occasional Dominator Pendant every few hundred runs, so I'll use those and transfer them with Platinum SoKs gained from the Maplehood Watch event. I'll go do Hard Van Leon/Blackgate and Hieizan on each mule another day...

So, how much did this resource sink reward me? Actually by quite a lot! My raid power has gone up by eight million!

In context of Union's raid power, it essentially is a damage number that determines how fast you earn a single Union coin. Each second, this damage number is applied to a boss exclusive to the Union system. Every time the accumulated damage on this boss passes a sum of 100b, you'll earn one Union coin. So yeah, an increase by eight million is quite high when you think about it.

But what is probably a comparison that's easier to understand: eight million raid power is about what you'll get from a Level 200 character that is equipped out with a decent number of Star Force. A Level 150 character that is equipped with the same amount of Star Force is worth about three million. Having a good balance of Star Force and levels is important - even if you decked out a low level mule with 11 Star Force items, it only starts to hit hard on the raid power once it's close to Level 200. But it still is always a good thing to increase the Star Force on any mule when you can, though!

That said, at least my Level 150+ mules are now well prepared. With the current speed of Union coin farming, I can manage to gain 2~2,5 levels on two mules a week. But this also means that the more I keep working on it, the faster the coin farming will go, due to the Level-SF scaling that is now prepared ahead of time. There's still a decent number of mules on my account left that aren't past Level 150 yet, although that'll be for another day (and thus, part 3).

Anyway, that's it for this blogpost. It's starting to get late, I'm tired and I should go to sleep now. I still have a couple of days left to work in Norway before I'll head back home. I'll see you guys again next post!

[EMS] Level 243!

Here we go again

Thirteen days left in Norway

The grind continues

[EMS] The mysterious ID Card Chair

Hi guys! Today I've decided to write a fun trivia blogpost, since I feel I don't do these often enough. Our subject matter is the mysterious "ID Card" chair, which is a rare but recurring lineup of chairs, only available during certain events.

So, we all know MapleStory has a thing for chairs. Chairs have been evolving in terms of what they can do in the course of Maple's lifespan. Nowadays we have chairs that can be sat with multiple players, chairs that allows you to sit next to your own android, chairs that give certain buffs, chairs that changes the background music. But still, there is something about these "ID Card" chairs that make them unique and valuable.

Currently, at the time of writing, these chairs have only appeared during two events so far. The first was during the Dragon Pop event in late 2017, which was an event I participated in on a daily basis, but I didn't purchase the chair with the given event coins. The ID Card Chair from the Dragon Pop event was designed with a Henesys theme, so the ID Card was green and watermarked with a Henesys motif. I wasn't aware of the hidden mechanic that came with this chair until it was too late, so I had to wait until they would reintroduce it in the future.

Fortunately, the ID Card Chair has returned with the current ongoing anniversary events! This time, the chair is designed with a 14th anniversary theme. It is still available until June, by the way.

So, what does the chair do? It shows the creation date of the character that sits on the chair.

How does the chair show the character's creation date? The first six digits shown on the ID card uses a YY-MM-DD format where the first two digits shows the year, the second two shows the month, and the final two shows the day. That means the number 070930 on my card translates to the 30th of September, 2007.

While this doesn't sound like some major game-breaking mechanic, it is perhaps a more subtle and of personal value to players like myself. In most MMORPG's, there is some way of checking the creation date of your character, or to see how many hours you've been playing the game. However, because MapleStory is already close to one-and-a-half decade old, it came out during a time when those things weren't as common in games as they are today.

Maple doesn't tell you when your character was made, and neither does it tell you your total playtime. As such, your "quest log" has been a standard to many as an indication of how old your character is, but that one stopped being waterproof with the Big Bang update in 2010.

Quest logs have been reset in some versions in the past, and quests from older content (that are no longer accessible) have occasionally been removed to make space for newer ones. As such, it became nearly impossible to prove when you've started Maple, unless you are lucky enough like myself to have online footage and saved screenshots of your journey. And even in my case, I didn't start our Youtube channel until the Summer of 2008, which by then, I already had spent ten months in the game. The first MapleStory videos on our channel weren't even out until the 19th of December in that year, and many of these early videos aren't even available anymore to begin with!

How I managed to know about my creation date of 30 September 2007 was based on my quest log from nine years ago, which I recorded for keepsake. However, I lost this footage long ago, as my computer from that time was so unstable it had to be formatted each year. Either way, people trust my word when I tell them about my character's creation date, but like anyone else, I would have no evidence in case one would ask me for it. But that now has changed, with the ID Card Chair in my possession! Plus, it also gives me some closure in a way that I now have an official confirmation from the game itself about it.

So, now that "mystery" is solved, is there any way I could prove my total playtime in MapleStory? Unfortunately, that by itself can never be truly confirmed. I know that I'm close to 20.000 hours on EMS (if not already), but there's no way I can prove that with some statistics or something. My Steam profile is perhaps a good start for keeping track of my playtime after the 22nd of November 2016.

Either way, I hope that at least my expertise, experience and actions in the game would prove to be sufficient to everyone around me. Stuff like my Arcane Force, my never ending crusade for more Guild Contribution, my quest log with over 4500 quests completed on Rayque despite over two-thousand were removed from it in a lifetime, perhaps a bit of Maple Achievements and the tracking numbers of Boss Slayers and Commerci... In the end, it's really up to you if you want to believe it or not. At least most (old) players from EMS do more or less agree with that I've been around for a while. It's a start, I guess?

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!