Masteria Preview?

And how exactly does maple need a story to be fun? Maplestory pre-big bang never had a story in any sense of the word and I found it to be many times more fun than the maple of now that DOES have some form of half-assed piece of crap story.

Actually a lot of the basic information about the Black Mage and his story existed prior to Big Bang. It's just that most people didn't do quests and thus never read the quest dialog in which you were told about it. Throw in the fact that it was hard to connect the dots since you were told only bits and pieces in between all the filler quest noise and thus few people actually knew the story and few too would have know about it if Isaac hadn't posted that thread.