How Mesos Worked in Old MapleStory Before Big Bang

The old Maple economy had a shape to it, and once you saw the shape you could not unsee it. Mesos trickled in from monsters and drops, they leaked out through potions and scrolls and the tax man, and the balance between those two flows decided whether your server felt poor or rich. Every server we played on went through the same arc. Scarce, then comfortable, then ridiculous.

If MapleStory Classic follows the pre-Big Bang numbers, that arc will happen again, and understanding it is worth more than any single farming trick.

Where mesos came from

Monsters dropped mesos directly, in amounts that scaled with their level. A Slime dropped a handful, a Ligator dropped a few dozen, a Skelegon at Leafre dropped hundreds at a time. That direct drop was the main faucet for most players, most of the time.

The second source was selling drops to NPCs. Every equip and etc item had a shop sell price, and for a low-level character the NPC value of a bag of Green Mushroom Caps and a couple of dropped Leather Shoes was often more than the raw meso drops. We cover the early version of this in the farming guide for level 1 to 30.

The third source was other players. Selling a scroll, a Work Glove, or a stack of Ilbis to another person did not create mesos, it moved them, but from your point of view it was where the real money was. Merchants who understood that could multiply a small stack into a large one without killing a single monster, which is its own topic in our merchanting post.

Quests also paid, though modestly, and party quests like KPQ and LPQ gave items rather than mesos for the most part.

Where mesos went

This is the half that people forget, and it is the half that kept the old game's economy from exploding for as long as it did. Every one of these took mesos out of the game permanently.

Meso sink	Who paid it	How much it hurt
Potions from NPC shops	Everyone, warriors most	Constant, largest sink for most players
Scrolls from NPCs and Gachapon	Anyone gearing up	Bursty, huge for endgame players
Trade tax	Anyone trading large sums	Small per trade, large across a server
Free Market stall rent	Merchants	Cash shop item, but time-limited
Guild creation and expansion	Guild leaders	One-off, meaningful early
Skill books and 4th job quests	High-level players	Occasional, expensive
Taxi and boat fares	Everyone	Tiny, but never stopped

The trade tax is the one people misremember. For most of the pre-Big Bang years, trading mesos above a threshold between players took a percentage cut, and the percentage rose with the amount. Small trades were free. A trade of many millions lost a noticeable slice. It was there specifically to drain mesos from the top of the economy, and it worked better than anyone gave it credit for.

Free Market stalls were a slightly different case. The Store Permit came from the cash shop, so it was real money, not mesos, but it meant the busiest sellers were paying to sell, and the Free Market itself charged nothing on sales. Our Free Market guide has the details of how the stalls actually worked.

Why mesos were scarce early

On a fresh server nobody has anything. Everyone is level 8 in Henesys, nobody has a Work Glove yet, the faucets are all low-level monsters dropping tiny amounts, and the sinks are proportionally enormous because everyone is buying potions and nobody has a Priest. A level 30 with 100k mesos in week one is doing well. A 60% scroll for Glove Attack, which will be a throwaway item in a year, is a serious purchase.

The effect is that early prices for anything rare are set by scarcity of mesos rather than scarcity of the item. A Work Glove is not rare. Mesos are. So the Glove goes for whatever the richest available buyer can scrape together, which is not much.

It is also when third-party mesos are most expensive and most exposed, since a big early meso injection is exactly the pattern Nexon watches for on a new world; we sell mesos and still say the early weeks are the worst time to buy mesos, for reasons our launch take spells out.

Why mesos got cheap later

Then the server ages. Characters reach 70, 100, 120. The monsters they kill drop hundreds or thousands of mesos each, and a single hour of Skelegons produces more raw currency than a week of Slimes. Priests make potion costs nearly irrelevant for whole parties. Meso Explosion Bandits turn the meso drop itself into a damage source and farm accordingly.

Meanwhile the sinks do not scale with the faucets. Potion prices are fixed. Scroll prices from NPCs are fixed. The trade tax bites, but only on trades, and the biggest earners are not trading, they are farming. So the total meso supply grows every month, and Free Market prices grow with it. That Work Glove that went for 300k in month one goes for 3m in month twelve and 30m at some point after that, and nobody thinks that is strange.

We watched this happen in slow motion on Bera. In 2006 a 10 Attack Work Glove was something you saved for. By 2009 our guild had a channel where people gave them away to new members. Same item, same server, different economy.

What it means for you

Early mesos are worth more than late mesos. That is the whole lesson. Spend the first month's income on things that compound (scrolls for your weapon, a Cleric alt, the right stars for your class) rather than on convenience. Skip the taxi. Walk.

And if you find yourself in month twelve sitting on more mesos than you need, that is when a shop like ours is interested, since people do sell their mesos at the end of a server's life. But that is a long way off. Right now, go sell your Mushroom Caps to the Henesys NPC and feel rich for an afternoon.