YMMV / MapleStory 2

• Abridged Arena Array: Once you hit level 50 and start doing Normal Adventure Dungeons to get your Epic weapon, be prepared for pretty much every single dungeon to be Tronix Bunker if you don't change the search settings, and long wait times if you do. The dungeon consists of pulling a few switches to open doors through a straight corridor with easily-ignored enemies, and there are batteries that can be thrown to take out most of the minibosses' HP, making it the fastest Normal Adventure Dungeon with Epic weapon drops.
• Alt Itis: Having multiple characters is common due to the ease of leveling up (Epic quests can get you to level 50 in 4.5 hours if you're fast enough) and Adventure Dungeon limits being separate for each character, meaning better chances of getting an Epic weapon (and, if you have multiple classes, an Epic weapon you can actually use).
• Demonic Spiders: Lobster Corsairs in the hard adventure dungeons are infamous for their ability to tear players to shreds in a matter of seconds. They can also take a lot of punishment before going down, and they're always found in large groups that will swarm you if given the slightest opportunity. Adding to their fearsome reputation is that the ones in story dungeons aren't nearly as dangerous, so players going into their first hard adventure dungeon are often taken by surprise at how vicious these beasties are.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Joddy quickly became a fan favorite for his adorable design and for how hard he tries despite how dense and cowardly he is. Naturally, fans were heartbroken when he sacrifices himself at the end of the Siege of Tria.
  • Einos is generally given a bit more attention than other storyline characters by fans, mostly pertaining to the appearance of Pathos and what he does during the main questline (including introducing the concept of Innocents).
• Ho Yay: The player's avatar reacts to everything in the same way regardless of gender. For example, a male can cuddle with a Blake or Mason Body Pillow, a female can swoon over the Rebecca Love Tornado, and it's possible for a male to flat out tell Blake that they love him or a female to comment on Mint being so pretty.
• Just Here for Godzilla: There's a decently sized group of players who never played/stopped playing the original Maplestory a long time ago that got into the game just because of the customization options and house building.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Thief class is by far the most loathed class in MapleStory 2. Simply put, the class's main flaw is the overall low damage output compared to the other classes available. Even with some useful skills available such as the Quickstep and the ability to inflict poison, veteran players still commonly recommend other classes just because Thieves are outclassed by other classes by power alone.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "New mail has arrived!" ^Explanation During the launch event, players would receive Maple Coins every 20 minutes 3 times per day. Whenever this happened, an announcer would cheerfully announce this every time a new map loaded until the coins were claimed, leading to a few memes about how annoying the voice can get. The next patch limited the voice to playing only once every 5 minutes.
  • "Hang from a rope" ^Explanation One exploration goal in Ellinia and potential daily mission requires you to find a rope, start climbing it, and stay there for one minute. Needless to say, some players have found an alternate meaning to the wording and post cropped screenshots of the goal's progress tracker when unfavorable things happen to them, such as poor luck with Random Drops or being unable to play due to server maintenance.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Like its predecessor, many people choose to skip the story aspect of the main questline and prefer to simply mash through dialogue to get the EXP provided. However, seeing as how many unskippable cutscenes there are, it isn't hard to find someone who eventually got hooked on the story or some bits of it.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The dungeon limits. You can do 10 Adventure Dungeons per day, and 30 per week, meaning if you consistently reach the daily cap, you'll have to spend 4 days without doing any dungeons. You can keep doing dungeons after hitting the cap, but you won't get any items, which is the main reward. Once you hit level 50, you'll need an Epic weapon to qualify for Hard Adventure Dungeons, which have a very low drop rate in the level 50 Normal Adventure Dungeons. If you don't get your weapon in 30 tries, you'll have to wait until next week for another chance to move onward unless you have some alts. Not even the announcement that, starting November 8th 2018, you'd be able to reset the weekly cap once a week per account was enough to fully appease complainers. Related is the fact that if you do have some runs left, you must use one up if you complete the dungeon, so if you want to help a friend with some lower-level dungeons, you must either grind out your 10 dungeons for the day or waste some runs.
  • When building a house, there is no way to place multiple blocks at once, and the act of placing blocks causes a brief lag spike, which makes creating floors and walls painfully slow. If you expand to 25 x 25 x 15, don't even think about actually using all of that space unless you have the patience of a saint.
  • Most of MC Kay's minigames let you return to the main game immediately once you are eliminated... except Spring Beach, for some reason, which forces you to wait until the game ends before you can leave. There isn't even anything physically blocking you; the only reason you can't reach the exit portal is an Invisible Wall that disappears once the game ends.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer:
  • House decorating, life skills, instruments, fishing, generating original content... it's hard to find something you won't be preoccupied with over the actual RPG gameplay. It doesn't help that these give experience points, meaning that indulging in them for long periods is basically a faster alternative to grinding.
  • On a lesser note, trophies. There's a lot of them and they're easy to obtain. You can easily get sidetracked just to finish that next tier of the trophy, and it doesn't help that certain ones unlock dyes, attribute points, and skill points.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Go to just about any site dedicated to the first Maplestory and you're bound to find people complaining about the state of the game at the moment, how unfair the pay-to-win model is, how negligent the mods are when it comes to banning bots and hackers, etc. Maplestory 2, on the other hand, had over a million accounts registered in its first few weeks alone, even attracting people who loathed the original MS.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The "Ludibrium Escape" minigame. If you played MapleStory, you may remember the notorious "jump quests". Ludibrium Escape is a jump quest minigame with a strict time limit and potential lag from all the players running at the same time. Have fun with that.
  • Trophies that require the player to catch a prize fish, as it relies heavily on the RNG both for catching a specific fish and having said fish having the very small chance of being a prized one. What's worse is that these trophies commonly involve the rarer fish in the Exceptional and Epic categories, so catching these fish in the first place is already going to take a while. There's a very real chance that you can invest a lot of hours fishing in a specific spot and still not catch a specific prize fish. Arguably the worst example of this type of Trophy is "Hook, Line, and Pyromander!", which takes the above problems and makes you do it in the Fire Dragon Hard Dungeon. You need to have the appropriate Gear Score, have the Master Angler rank, have to weaken the Pyrros Fard so you get to the second phase of the fight where you can even fish, and it's recommended that you do it all solo to get the maximum amount of time desired.
• Win Back the Crowd: MapleStory 2 has seen solid success among fans of the original MapleStory who have become disillusioned with the original game as the result of Nexon's increasingly player-unfriendly approach to the once-beloved title.