After about six years and plenty of teamwork, I finally managed to achieve this landslide of a milestone. This was by no means an easy task - as there are not enough Mu Gong Souls in the EMS economy to begin with. Everything that has to go right, had to go right, and it was not something I could do alone. And well, apparently it did go right this time.
I assume that most people who (will) read this particular blogpost are either new to this whole process or aren't particularly aware of the ins and outs in what happened here. So, I'll do a quick run-through on it.
Mu Gong Soul is basically one of the most difficult souls to get in EMS. Not many players own one. It's one of those resources that has always been hard-to-obtain, and it's only gotten worse as time passed.
- First introduced to EMS in 2014, you had to do daily Mu Lung Dojo runs and be lucky to find any shards. That Mu Lung Dojo didn't last long, as shortly after it was replaced with the Ranked Dojo we know today.
- Then, EMS had a short lived Cash Shop box called "Effie Boxes", which gave us the tradeable Mu Gong Souls at a decent-to-low rate. These souls were difficult to get your hands on because of the limited supply, let alone expensive in the Free Market. These were retired with the migration of 2016, and because the migration purged about 90% of the characters, a bunch of the already-limited supply got cut and only few remained.
- There were several Murgoth events that could give you a chance for Mu Gong shards, but the last one was in 2017. Getting the shards on the other hand, was another problem by itself.
- The Soul Extractor is probably not worth the time or money. Sure, it might be your best shot at obtaining shards, but you sure as hell are going to need to do a lot of them.
Let alone if you want to get a Level 2... it may no longer be possible. Chances are that there are no longer enough tradeable souls left in the game to complete a full page. And that's why it took me six years to begin with: it is not easy to find any player who still owns one, let alone is willing to part with it.
I also should mention that the Level 2 collection for Mu Gong was introduced here after Effie Boxes retired, which was also after they replaced Mu Lung Dojo. So when the original Soul Collector didn't include Mu Gong in 2013 (KMS), I had to carefully plan years ahead of time, assuming that Nexon would add Mu Gong later.
Thus,
- If the community didn't buy such a mass of Effie Boxes back then,
- If the community didn't find every single Mu Gong Soul variant from these boxes,
- If the community didn't migrate to maintain this small supply with the exact ones I still needed,
- If my friends didn't help me out with searching for them in those years,
- If my friends didn't help me out with the Murgoth events back then,
Then I would certainly have not been able to complete it. It could've easily not gone this direction because certain Mu Gong Soul prefixes are less common than others. Heck, I couldn't even finish this collection through Effie Boxes alone. I've had to use both tradeable "Effie Box Mu Gong Souls" and Mu Gong shards obtained through the Murgoth events.
How did I get my hands on the last Mu Gong soul, the "Hearty" prefix? The solution to that was a long shot: I had to get the word out. With the most recent Maple Relay event, we got a free Super Megaphone on a daily basis. So,
I used that to get public awareness. Y'know, it was worth trying as I could only potentially gain from it.
And it paid off.
Because of the recent upgrades to the security of EMS and the continuous efforts of Nexon, a lot of botters have been banned and thus mesos have become valuable again. As a result, players are hungry for cash... and that was the perfect opportunity to strike. I suppose that's how I managed to convince someone in the game to list that Hearty Mu Gong Soul in the Auction House. The same event as
last time:
right place, right moment.
All of that excessive effort, just to maximize the duration by 10 seconds. But somewhere, I wouldn't want to have it any other way. If you're a frequent reader on my blog, you should know by now that I'm kinda used to this. Did I tell you that the Soul Collector is character bound, so that I can only have the +1 effect on Rayque?
Now, let's see how long it'll take another player in EMS to reach Level 2 on Mu Gong as well. I'll be waiting.
That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!
