Well then, it seems that it's been 5000 days since my character was created. Usually I tend to only write each year on the 30th of September to commemorate my character's birthday. But since five-thousand is such a ridiculous number, I thought it would make for a nice blogpost that also doubles as an informative one.
Two years ago I've written about the elusive ID Card Chair, which is an item that shows your character's creation date. A new item that utilizes this variable came out last December: the "[BTS] Our Time With MapleStory" hat.
Originally designed with the intent to display the time you've spent in-game, it was changed to display the amount of days since your character creation's instead. This is probably done because it's unlikely that anyone's true in-game playtime has been recorded by Nexon themselves, given the nature of the game's engine and its age. However, since they've already implemented the usage of one's creation date for the ID Card Chair, it probably wasn't a difficult task to write a formula that calculates the amount of days that have been passed. That, and I can't imagine how much this hat would strain the server if it had to continuously update a clock for each player owning this hat.
Anyway, as you can probably expect from any community, the existence of this hat became a sausage fest where everyone starts to compete for whoever has the highest number above their head. However, having a high "score" on this hat means little if the player themselves has hardly spent an appropriate amount of days that's in line with the character's creation date. It'd be no different from having an Europe Bandana lying around on an abandoned alt. Sure, it's a fun novelty to own any of those. But in context it wouldn't hold much gravitas, if that makes any sense.
I understand that to many foreign veterans and hardcores a "mere" 5000 wouldn't mean much. But to those who aren't aware and need a refresher: EMS officially released on the 12th of April, 2007 (beta started in late 2006). There aren't that many characters left that have the age over a five thousand days because of the migration. Keep in mind that 2,7 of the 3 million characters didn't migrate, so they were all purged. Gone, deleted. I'm only aware of less than twenty characters that are older than Rayque and have successfully migrated. However, I do believe that it's very likely that there is about one-hundred characters left with an age of 5000+ days (FYI: I'm being generous and optimistic there).
But here's the catch: have any of them experienced almost every single day in-game? As in, have they played almost 5000 days daily on that same character? If you are a frequent reader of my blog or know of my reputation, then I don't need to further explain that one. While I'm not one of those fortunate enough to have experienced EMS beta, and by no means am I among the "the highest level", "the strongest" or the "most loyal and experienced" in EMS, I do know that I've been playing on my Hero daily since EMS 0.30, starting my journey 5000 days ago. Without a break.
Whether if that means or should mean something is entirely up to you, but I can't deny that I find myself often longing for recognition. While I play Maple because of my love for the game regardless what others think, I do have my moments where I can't help but feel that my long-term dedication for it has been rather unrewarding. Unfortunately EMS isn't really the type of game where pouring over 22.000 hours in the course of almost 14 years would get you anywhere in either community recognition or in-game progress. As it stands, it seems I'm destined to remain a myth.
But y'know? Perhaps that is what suits me best.
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