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Maple Story EU is a free-of-charge (with pay-to-play elements), 2D, side-scrolling massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by the South Korean company Wizet. Several versions of the game are available for specific countries or regions, and each is published by various companies such as Wizet and Nexon. Although playing the game is free, character appearances and gameplay enhancements can be purchased from the "Cash Shop" using real money. MapleStory has a combined total of well over 100 million subscriber/user accounts in all of its versions. MapleStory North America (Global), for players mainly in North America and outside of East Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe, has over 10 million players.
MapleStory has been released in various countries around the world.
MapleStory Korea was the first version to be released; therefore, it currently has the most features compared to the rest. The other versions are at different stages of development and most are not as advanced in content as MapleStory Korea's. With this advantage comes the problem of players (mainly from the North America (Global) version, but some from others) trying to play KoreaMS. These players are often referred to as "immigrants" by a majority of the Korean MapleStory players. These "immigrants" are the reason why a Korean Resident registration number is required to play. IP blocking is used in some of the other versions of the game, mostly for the same reason. Some attempt to bypass this by using Proxies, which spoof IP addresses to make it seem like a player is playing from a different country - however in Europe MapleStory a GameGuard proxy check has been implemented. This is also because Nexon has licenced MapleStory all around the world, to different licencees, and must respect their interests by making players play their localized version.
Though some versions share the same world names, they are different and independent of each other. They are defined by their language used, publisher, server location and specialized worlds.
