Maplestory Islanders - What Are They & What's The Challenge?

Maplestory is a 2D, side scrolling Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). Bored players sometimes choose to be islanders, or "permanent newbies".

At the beginning of the game, each character has no class or job type.
Normal players can select a range of classes including bowman, magician, warrior, thief and more.
However a few people choose not to select a class and continue to level their characters without the aid of skills given to people who have a class.
These people often choose not to leave the starting area, which, normally, is left behind by players who are over level ten.
The starting area is tiny and made up of only a handful of 'maps' and only two small towns, meaning that there is very little to do there.
Once a character leaves maple island, they cannot return.
Players who choose a class job and journey on have access to dozens of towns and hundreds of maps.

The people who stay behind are called 'Maplestory Islanders' or, within maplestory, just 'Islanders.'

Why Do People Create Islanders?

Often people who have grown bored with levelling a normal character create an islander. An islander is a big challenge because all the beasts used to gain exp and level up, only have good exp for people level ten and under. The higher an islander's level, the more beasts must be killed to gain another level.

By the time an islander reaches 25 or 30, they may have to kill several thousand beasts to gain one level, which can take 5 or more hours of game play.

An Example of Where Islanders DON'T w...

How Have Islanders Changed?

Originally, maple island was made up of a lot more maps. In recent patches, these maps have been cut down to a minimum and some are accessed only by quests.

Originally, islanders could only clothe themselves in items dropped by the beasts they killed on the island, but this has also changed, with the introduction of a trade system that allows all users, including islanders, to buy outfits with NX cash.

An Islander

What Are The Challenges That Face Islanders?

Islanders are much more difficult to level for a range of reasons. Here are the main ones:

All beasts are set to give reasonable exp for up to level ten and no higher. This means levelling above level ten on the island gets more and more difficult.
An islander can only purchase items that are labelled for all classes - they cannot wear items made for specific classes such as warrior or pirate.
Islanders cannot participate in many events that have job or other requirements.
Most of the other players who you'll meet will be new to the game as well as low level.

Good Points About Being An Islander

Obviously there must be some reason why so many people choose to create an islander. Here's a few of them!

Small, tight knit community. All the islanders on the server know each other.
Feeling of achievement when you reach levels that wouldn't be a big deal on the mainland.
The feeling of a challenge - you don't have quests, party quests or NPCs to help you level.

Updated: 09/02/2012, wrylilt

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Digby_Adams on 09/03/2012

Thank you for explaining all of this. This whole world is very confusing for me. I guess just prefer the local coffee shop and figuring out how to deal with tourist traffic. But I did enjoy your explanantion.

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