On returning after a long absence

Been back a few months now, was gone for about 8-9 years. Had to do with work (taking on a second job). My fault, big mistake, you never catch up here. So I have one foot in each camp - I am an old player, that started back in 2007, and have some older rares I can sell - and I am a new player, deluged by a huge amount of new items and seeing loads of retired items I will likely never get.

In some ways a lot has changed, in other ways, nothing has. There are more shops, like Face Dye, Perfumes and Potato Chips - and many shops have a lot more items, such as all the new colors in hair dye and contacts, and a whole slew of eyebrow tints. Some are already retired.

But the structure is the same, there are quests, missions, goals, and Marada goals. There are no new flash games, and I just read something indicating they will be eliminated at some point. This is sad, not only because I enjoy them, but because they primarily help the destitute newbies that join this game. The max score from games used to be 1500, it is now 750 - again, mostly hurting new people - 1500 at each of 30 games is 45k, which is not very meaningful to established players. (I really doubt that anyone plays all 40 every day)

I'm not sure I will ever be able to do all missions. I tried doing level 1 of 5 different missions so far, and they asked for expensive retired items. I figured if they wanted something that cost that much at level 1, later levels would be worse. Don't have a bank account to support that yet.

Troll at level 5 (where I'm at) seems doable, idk about later levels, so many retired instruments I won't be able to get many of - hurdy gurdy, festive tuba violin cymbals and bells, christmas drums, spooky drum set, faun flute, electric violin, snow guitar, kazoo, snare drum, holy harp, holiday horn and jingle bells.

People have to be able to do missions to do goals and marada goals. It is 29 steps from level 1 to level 30. If you have a 90% / 95% chance of passing a given level, you have a 4.7% / 22.5% chance of finishing the mission. With the amount of retired items, even 95% will be very lucky. If you have to spend 10-100 mil MP on each failure, it gets cost prohibitive.

I hope the people just starting here do ok. They have to get so much inventory just to be able to do simple quests without buying everything from player shops. How are they going to get all the needed retired stuff, particularly when there isn't any more because it's all been used up.

Nonetheless, it's good to be back. I see a lot of familiar names, and there are also a lot that I don't see, I guess life happens.

I finally did a Drew quest, it was needed for some goal. Very frustrating - once I had the clothes but don't have the right color - I might have been able to do it if I could have found out which egg I needed.

It's fun doing the trick-or-treating, so many new clothes to see, and so many very creative people ^_^
Microwave is fun too!