Participating in the Nexon PEAK Post Challenge

For me, one of the most important kinds of fun in games is “making something that’s truly your own”

Out of all those kinds of fun, housing content is something I’ve loved for a really long time.

I think I actually got into it for the first time not through games, but through decorating mini-homepages like Edumoa and Cyworld.

After that, I properly fell into labor-heavy home decorating games through Come to My Home, then went through Animal Crossing: New Horizons DLC (Happy Home Paradise), and eventually ended up all the way at MapleStory’s Maple Home.

Honestly, in real life... owning a home just keeps getting harder, but in games, at least, I can still have one room decorated exactly the way I want...ㅠ

I think that’s the exact kind of vicarious satisfaction house decorating in games gives you.

What I especially liked about Maple Home is that it doesn’t just stop at decorating your house—there are also furniture items you can get from limited quests, so there’s also that fun of collecting.

So in this post, I want to briefly talk about how I somehow ended up getting interested in Maple Home, and what makes it fun to have a home of your own inside the game.

1. I guess it all started with studying..?

In the beginning, everything started with studying.

(Left) Cyworld / (Right) Edumoa

Anyone around my age probably remembers this..

A loooong, long time ago~ there was an online learning platform called Edumoa.

But for most of us, studying was kind of the side content,

and we were way more focused on decorating our avatars and mini-homepages ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

So in the end, thanks to Edumoa and Cyworld, with bgm, fonts, backgrounds, furniture, avatars, and all that,

I got an early education in the fun of decorating a space of my own.

That said, with Edumoa, you couldn’t keep using it after graduating 6th grade,

so once everyone became middle schoolers, they naturally moved over to Cyworld.

After getting that early training in elementary and middle school, I...

2. Discovering the joy of labor and the fun of arranging furniture

In the summer of 20NN... I came across a certain game.

The one singer “IU” was in ads for.

Even the name was incredibly straightforward:

Come to My Home

Just like the title says, the more labor I put in and the more I developed my home through that labor,

the more kinds of furniture I could make, and the more room I had to place things,

so there was a real thrill in decorating that gradually expanding space.

But as time went on, the labor just got more and more intense,

and eventually I burned out and quit My Home...

Then later, on November 5, 2021, I got into the ACNH DLC,

and that was when I really started to appreciate things like concept-based housing

and placing furniture to match a specific mood. ㅋㅋㅋ

If you’re good at putting up partition walls, 80% of house decorating is basically done.

But this one had an ending too,

and once I finished it, there wasn’t much left to do. Right around then, the thing that caught my eye was...

3. Finally, MapleStory (Maple Home)

Maple Home was originally a MapleStory house-decorating feature added in the August 7, 2019 patch,

but in Korean MapleStory, it was a situation where players here couldn’t enjoy that content.

Seriously, why..!!!

Then, after I’d finished the ACNH DLC and was looking around for what to play next,

what suddenly came my way was

the release of My Home content in Korean MapleStory.

If I had to sum up what I liked about Maple Home, I’d break it down into five main points.

No.	What’s Great About Maple Home
1	Decorating content with no stat-pressure
Unlike Monster Life from back in the day, this content isn’t directly tied to your in-game stats, so you can enjoy it without feeling pressured. Because of that, it feels less like a progression tool and more like pure self-satisfaction content where you decorate entirely to your own taste.
2	Free furniture and terrain placement
Since you can place furniture and terrain however you want, even the exact same pieces can create a totally different atmosphere depending on the player, and that’s a huge plus. For me, that’s the biggest appeal of housing content.
3	You can visit other users’ homes
I also liked that it doesn’t just end with decorating on your own—you can visit other users’ homes too. Thankfully, Maya’s house and Rina’s house on channel NN aren’t meetup spots anymore..
4	Making achievement rewards visible
The old achievement system leaned more toward personal satisfaction, but with Maple Home, “furniture” items are given as achievement rewards, and having those rewards visibly represented naturally makes you want to collect them.
5	A structure where decorating and collecting naturally go together
Since there’s furniture you can get from limited quests or achievement rewards, you get to enjoy not just placing items, but collecting furniture too. I really liked how naturally the housing and collecting elements connect like that.

As someone who’d once said I hoped the My Home content from overseas MapleStory

would someday make its way to Korean MapleStory too, I couldn’t help being happy about this update.

So for my own home, I decorated it with an East Asian style using furniture I got during Len’s release.

Getting furniture as rewards from limited quests definitely made my collector instincts burn even hotter.

That said, there are still a few disappointing points.

No.	What Feels Lacking in Maple Home
1	The range of what you can decorate is small.
Problem	It still feels a bit lacking in environmental settings like weather, background music, and moving outside the house. Because of that, even if you decorate your home, there’s a limit to how much you can really change the overall atmosphere of the space itself, and the range of individuality each user can express can feel somewhat limited too.
Possible solution	I think it would be nice if features were added that let you set things like weather, time of day, and bgm. Or if events offered specific skins like “Rainy Mansion” or “Star-Shower Mansion,” so space concepts could become more varied, I think the emotional charm of the housing content would really come alive.
2	Lack of reasons to visit due to missing convenience features
Problem	Inside Maple Home, you still can’t directly use major features like Maple Auction or the Cash Shop, and there’s no preset function either, which makes it hard to save or swap between decorated spaces. In the end, even if you decorate your home beautifully, it ends up feeling less like a space you’ll visit often in practice, and more like a space you set up once and check in on occasionally.
Possible solution	I think it would be nice if at least some basic convenience features could be used inside Maple Home too, like Auction, Cash Shop, storage, or mailbox. And if players could save decorated layouts through presets or concept-based save functions, I think people would get to enjoy changing up their homes more often depending on events or just their mood.
3	Not enough fun in sharing and interacting with other users
Problem	One important part of housing content is ultimately “the fun of showing off the space I decorated,” but right now, you can’t visit Maple Homes from users in other worlds, and communication features like guestbooks are lacking too. So even if you decorate beautifully, the range of people you can show it to is limited, and naturally, that can weaken users’ motivation to stick with it over time.
Possible solution	I think it would be nice if users could visit other people’s Maple Homes without world restrictions, and if features like guestbooks, likes, recommended homes, or browsing popular homes were added. Especially if there were a system where well-decorated homes get spotlighted, I think users would more easily feel that “I want to decorate mine too” motivation. Also, showing the furniture used in popular homes could become a good way to spark other users’ desire to collect too.

So even though there are still some disappointing points, I still think Maple Home is a pretty charming piece of content

because it gives you a space inside MapleStory where you can ease up for a bit and leave your own taste behind.

In Maple, where the main appeal is making your character stronger,

Maple Home is that little space where you can relax for a moment and leave your own style behind!

.. at least for me, I liked that it felt less burdensome than that old Monster Life

I hope Maple Home keeps getting more varied furniture and more social features going forward,

so it can grow into a space users actually want to visit often.

Anyway, I’ll wrap up this post here.

I’ll be back next time with another story (๑>؂•̀๑)