Who knew "Maplers" were so friendly?
It would appear that the people, who play the MMO, Maplestory, are very generous when it comes to the holidays. More than 2 million dollars worth of "in-game" items were gifted to other players. Players can buy in-game items with real money and then turn around and give that as a gift to another player. In fact, Mike Crouch, PR director at Nexon America stated that "there were 853,000 of these types of transactions this year…showing that our players really are generous with each other and the items they purchase in our cash-shops."
Crouch also said "Looking deeper we found the most popular items was the four-hour double EXP coupon followed by the Platinum Scissors of Karma, which allow players to trade un-tradeable items. Players use NX, which is what dollars are called when used to purchase items in-game, to purchase items. NX can be obtained by the use of a Karma Koin game cards (available in denominations of $5, $10 and $25 and can be found in 75,000 retail stores in all of Nexon America’s service regions) or via PayPal by using a credit card."
The question then becomes "why are the players so giving during the holiday season?" Linda Tsoi, Community Manager for Maplestory, feels that "a lot of gifting happens because Maplers consider their in-game friends like real life friends so it is often they may gift something because their friend doesn’t have NX because s/he can’t afford or has no means of buying it.” In other words, the Maplestory players treat their in game friends just like they would their real life friends. If they would give their real life friends presents, why wouldn't they give their Maplestory friends presents?
