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MapleStory: MapleStory Hacked in Europe
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
For non-MapleStory players who may not know, the game's European servers were hacked recently, something that Nexon has been working to solve since it happened. In The Free Zone this week, Richard Aihoshi discusses the time line of the hacking and Nexon's response. Check it out and then leave a comment or two below.
For anyone who may not know what happened, the short version is two of the classes in the game have a skill called Meso Guard that they can employ to lose money instead of health when hit. Someone figured out it was possible to hack the data so as to tell the servers that a character took negative damage, the result of which was a currency gain instead of a loss. What's more, the amount could be as much as 2.1 billion per blow. So, as you can undoubtedly imagine, a lot of players (I haven't seen any credible numbers in this regard) took advantage, thereby shattering the game economy.
Read more of Richard Aihoshi's The Free Zone: MapleStory Hacked in Europe.
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Comments
Woah, what? That's weird xD
i find the title a bit confusing, hacking maplestory would mean something different then exploiting a bug, but that is personal.
beyond that it sounds like the plat (form of currency) dupe exploit for asheron's call back in the day. it took some time to become public and ended up in some rollbacks, but certainly not everything was caught.
apperently not much was learned from it, it is probably easier to not invest in ways of detecting stuff like this and when it happens try to handle it without too much negative effect. whatever you do you will always get some angry people.
This happened once in Ragnarok Online, too. Instead of damage, someone just opened up a shop and sold things for a "negative price", giving you money instead of taking it.
This seriously sucks for us Maple EU players, prices has inflated like 300%, and afterwards, NEXON took a certain percantage of the money of all players.
I was luck to lose only 10 mil, some playes lost more than 4 bil.
Don't know what's surprising about this event, this is Nexon we're talking about. This isn't an isolated event, and Nexon's way of handling this kind of thing happens in three stages 1) See no evil, hear no evil, 2) silent treatment, and finally 3) handle it in a matter best described with the words "collateral damage".
Had some similar incidents recently in Vindictus - the issues were being complained about on the official Forum within mere hours, but it took DAYS for an official response. 90% of the trouble could have been halted with a simple "emergency maintenance shutdown" (had plenty of those during OB) that temporarily disabled the item in question. But nothing was done until much later, when things were handled with carpet banning. And while it's likely many of the protesters weren't as innocent as they claim, there were definitely a few innocents caught in the crossfire.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
Even if it was reported on day one. It would have had to flow through channels, first thing first customer service.
So the first problem with an item duplication bug is that customer service needs to first open it, AND view it as legitiment. Even if a few dozen people report the bug chances are the first rep is unlikely to do anything about a new bug, so in order for a new bug to actually "flow up" the SAME rep needs to recieve the same bug(and based on how people describe bugs the same bug will rarely sound like the same bug) several times OR on a whim the CSM correlated the bug with co workers. So that essentially takes a long while.
Then the CSM needs to report that to the programmers(well get it out of their department first). the first thing the programmers are going to need to do in figure out the the CSM is saying, THEN they're going to have to get over their disbelief that such a thing as an item duplication bug occured(especially this late in the game). Deplicate, debug, duplicate with broader implications, debug and then fix.
However since this is an MMO we're talking about(closer to bussiness archritecture) part of the fix is also tracking down transaction history if possible, Then designers-department heads-owners need to go head to head to figure out what's going to happen.
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Mabinogi has had a few item duplication bugs as well and the funny thing is that it took them several months to even imagine that they exisisted. On the bright side the bug required packages so they were limited to a select few that were alread rich.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Misuse of the word hacked here. Should have said exploited, Hacked means they got into the server and had control, all this episode is some one exploiting a game mechanic. NIce way to destroy the economy.
[Mod Edit]
Misuse of the word hacked:
Hacking is the act of programming. Cracked would be more appropriate if they actually broke into the server/software.
Archlinux ftw
and these hack in mapls story are all too frequent unfortunately.
GM there are non-existant either ....
in the 4 months i played 12+ hours a day , i didnt even see one GM
when u get hacked in MS , no restoration of items , and when this type hack happens , they do next to nothing to restore any type of balance to economy , and do not remove the hacked currencies from people who exploited hacks.
so many in the MS community think its a specific GM , leaking db info to ahckers with sole intent of splitting profit with them when they sell sold to 3rd pt sites .....
nice going nexon ....
AND WHAT RLY SCARES ME is ...................
i been playing Atlantica online for past 2 yrs since day 1 of its first Cb , and only recently the company was taken over by Nexon.
so far they havnt messed with how things r done , but what if this kind of Maple Story hack/corruption is going to spread to the community of Atlantica online now ?
it wouldnt surprise me.
although the GM's in AO , are actually decent people , who care about what happens , unlike most GM's in other games , so i will stick with AO till it rly hits the crapper , lol
How many games have published guidelines over how they intend to respond to a catastrophic exploit? It would seem to be an important part of a disaster checklist for any live database.
( does the server really trust the client to tell it the outcome of an action? Leaving aside this particular bug, that would seem to be a design that is wide open to exploits ... I would have assumed that rule #1 of MMO design would be "nothing the client says can be trusted" )
Not to be a pest but , this is going on all Nexon Maplestory games in USA too. Feb 9th, 2010 I got hacked 900M mesos from the storage. I wrote a ticket to Nexon and they closed it without telling me what they will do. I investigatged further and the same day, people were picking up mesos and they were not registering on their account. We had several roll backs for meso exploit with the last one in January.
Nexon is not too quick on trying to find solution to the problem of hacking. Hackers are plaguing the game, everywhere you turn there is a hacker.
Sorry to say that for a mmorg game, that rakes lots of money from the gamer , I do not see them doing there outmost to give back mesos to their players and get efficient software to curb this hacking plague all over their survers.
It's rule #1 of all software design. Sanity checks ftw.
Looks like a children game.
My gaming blog
This is what you get for playing a Free to Play game. Honestly. The only game that actually hold well done game play and development that is free to play is league of legends. Do no fool yourself. All free to play mmorpgs are second rate and trashy. You pay for what you get.
and before you say i'm jaded from playing P2P games, I want you to know I work for a F2P company and I am a GM for a F2P game. I see all the shit that goes on.
Can't people just play?
yes people can just play. But when people want to get ahead, they will find whatever means to do so. Also, there is a community of fucktards who hover around the hacker forums for free to play games. These fucktards will pounce on any uber hack for whatever free to play game has just been released. You will see a surge of newly created accounts that are being reported for hacking when a new hack is released.
I wouldn't say it's misuse. Hacked does not mean they got into the server or had all control. It could mean they reverse engineered the encryption, and made a program that changed some packets and caused something to happen that does not normally happen (negative damage).
There are two common meanings of the word hacked, those that complain about one of its uses are ususally pointlessly nitpicking. Besides, I wouldn't be suprised if some programming was involved here.
http://xkcd.com/327/
Why anyone would play that kiddies game, let alone go to trouble of hacking it is totally beyond me lol
money is only a concept. Anything can be used for money and as long as people agree with it, it becomes real. Every major economist and government understands this very well. While changing one currency to another swaps its value, there are many ways to take care of problems when currencies and skill sets are hacked.
Money has almost no monetary value and this is proven when it takes so much to get so little.
Example: If it costs 100,000,000 to buy a sword as an in-game price set by most players. Your money has almost no value...If the same sword costs 1 million, the value of each piece of currency makes itself be worth 100x more, then we question the relation on acquisition.
This means as long as all bases remain the same....the value itself can be set and controlled prior to a game actually launching. Some games I know have monetary systems of value but most have the base currency worth so little that people have to use in-game items as a seperate currency.
So this was a stupid hack altogether since ultimately in the grand scheme of things it hurts the hackers (and the players) a lot more in the long run than ever before.
Nexon has the worst customer service I have ever seen. I have submitted very important bugs, glitches, and tickets for other things of moderate importance (verifying hacker names among others) and they disregard everything and anything. The community is probably 90% comprised of 9~16 year-olds so I'm sure they just make the assumption that 90% of their forum isn't worth looking at. Now our economy is fucked, we're all a little more poor, and Nexon basically admitted to doing close to nothing to fix the inflation. Dammit when can I play Guild Wars 2 T_T
Game is awful....
Nexon is the Worst Company i ever have seen. they do not care about the players that play the game.
and they never seem to resolve any bugs or anything that happends in the game.
and ye a F2P game is easy to hack but still. one game i know called League of Legends dont have any hacks at all and that game is F2p