Maple story is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, aimed at kids. It's stylised in chibi, 2d graphics running across a screen like in Mario. Filled with amazingly cute and interesting locations, levels, monsters and characters. Individual characters can be customised with different weapons and armor and accessories just to make them look cool.
The game is free to play. But you can pay to get special items and special points so whether you pay to play does not effect the game play, only the aesthetic appeal of your own character... A very interesting fact i found about this game's influence in the country it's originated from, is that in Korean society there are an large amount of parents buying these money cards as birthday presents for their kids. So instead of receiving real money to buy the physical things, there is a growing market of receiving virtual money in games.
Hosted on a number of servers, you can chose your character with a specific role, helping your friends with specific specialties assigned to each role pretty much like World of Warcraft, minus the fighting against teams or killing other players. This encourages more teamworks and less hatred within players.
The other hatred can be generated towards to the hackers. The major factor that makes this free game not as fun is that hackers can been seen everywhere. You can report hackers, however not many hackers actually get caught.
Personally I find this game pretty boring if I don't have any friends on the same server, that would team up and help complete quests and missions. Because the game is very repetitive, it's dumb numbing exercise of leveling up via just hitting the buttons every second or so. and you will get really angry at the hackers that has programed their own character to either stay in one spot and repetitively hit monsters automatically, or had their characters to automatically collects items within the whole play area. These hackers and maple story's management of these problems are the main big factor to my decision to throw in the towel and move on to another game.