Stop Lurking you… lurkers.

As per usual, I'm no good at coming up with titles.

Now, to break the streak of me not blogging (but that streak has been broken already), let us explore what has been going on with NEXON and the pathetic excuse for management of a what-used-to-be-awesome 2d platformer shall we?

2010 has to have been the worst possible year for MapleStory players. We've seen about 4 different mass scale exploits, and that's not counting all the minor private exploits that were somewhat kept under control. I've participated in all of them, but that's because I didn't have a choice – Kevin always nagged me about it after I told him. I'm going to talk about 5 this time.

The Chaos of … the Chaos Scroll
Anyway, so we should begin in the month of March. This was when packet editors hit MapleStory like the flood hitting Master Chief's helmet (oh you see wut I di- oh screw it). There was this event called the "perfect pitch" event, and basically, for every level you gained (usually 1 per level), you got a set number of golden musical notes that can then be traded in for prizes at a shop. The best possible prize was the wolf bandana, a hat that puts your standard zakum helmet to shame, and the second best, at a whopping 70 perfect pitches, a chaos scroll.

Now for those of you who don't know, a chaos scroll was probably the second rarest, and best scroll at the time, after the white scroll. Each scroll was worth a whopping 150 million at the time. Now, towards the last few days of the event, news of an exploit leaked out across the hacking community – some people were somehow opening thousands of those lame chicken eggs for prizes (these cost 5 pitches). Now, the only way to do that is either 1) keep opening the same egg over and over, or 2) buy lots and lots of eggs for little to no pitches. Soon enough, I realized that this could be applied to the higher leveled prizes – and so did other people.

In the chaos that ensued (the general public not aware of this yet), I contacted several key people that was also aware of this. I was somehow able to get in on it. I found the packet through some simple testing, and generated 16,000 chaos scrolls, although the limit was 32513 (2^15-255), but I didn't realize it at the time. Because it was three people participating, I decided to divide the shares into 3, taking the larger share (not by much though, I took like 8k).

And so, being one of the first to generate such a large amount (proud to say that for the first time, since it was really the right place and the right time), I proceeded to wreck Windia's economy, pumping out scrolls for 30 million each, and 1k each in the MTS. I ended up with 2.3 million NX cash from selling stacks of 100 to meso farmers. However, soon enough, the gig was up. People realized that the exploit was in full scale, and BasilMarket exploded. I was kind of foolish, thinking that I could just log off and get away with it. So I passed a few stacks to Kevin, and 150k nx to whoever was still playing MapleStory and in the VuTales MSN chatroom, Lith, Cynthia, Aaron, Wayne, and a bit to Ganzicus.

The next day, all of the accounts that I transferred scrolls to were banned (no surprise there). However, what was disappointing was that people who sent out the scrolls via Duey were able to keep them. A rollback (restoring the database, like what happened in MMOTMS/VuMS loads of times) did not occur at this time, since the problem was still easy to isolate and contain.

The Generous Donation Box… and the Foolish old Chief
We fast forward a few months… into July.

A "small" meso exploit was contained rapidly – people were inserting negative values into the Donation Box NPCs, and the NPCs spat the mesos back. Mass chaos. Mesos were isolated, all exploiters were banned, people with exploited mesos lost all their mesos. Rage.

Two weeks later, another meso related exploit, but it concerned a specific NPC in Leafre, the chief Tatomo (or whatever its name was). The NPC function had the ability to donate a certain ETC item. Same concept as the donation box, the NPC would spit back the items. So what proceeded to happen was a bot was made to generate these ETC items, then promptly sell them to the Pet food shop nearby, generating mesos.

This bot was distributed by word, and soon enough, everyone that had access to the forums was using it. I had it only 2 hours before it was released to the mass public. Shame.

NEXON, with no way of detecting these mesos, decided on a drastic measure – roll their servers back 48 hours, before mass exposure of the bot to the public.

NEXON, after a 30 hour maintenance, failed to patch the exploit.

They failed.. after a 30 hour maintenance.. to patch the original exploit.

NEXON, failed.

People continued to use the bot for 4 hours before NEXON realized their mistake, another emergency maintenance of 5 hours, finally patches the exploit.

… Sad isn't it?

But wait, it gets worse.

The Happyville Incident
Fast forward to September, Dimensional Door glitch allows you to teleport to event maps.. even when the event was over. This was discovered a long time ago, but hasn't been put to use yet. Happyville contained these special maps that allowed you to decorate a tree by dropping your stuff – but it wouldn't be fun if someone picked up your stuff right? Heh.

Well, apparently, when you dropped something, the data that your item is in your inventory is still there, thanks to the map's properties. So people began to wonder – what happened if you used scrolls on it, and it failed and exploded the item? If the item's on the ground, it can't explode.. can it?

That's exactly right!

And so we come to the enhancement hack. NEXON released these enhancement scrolls, scrolls that worked only on equipment with 0 slots. These scrolls improved the items with each successful scroll, and each successful scroll made the equipment more powerful. However, it had a high risk – getting 8 scrolls to work was probably impossible, each time you used one, the success rate decreases. 10% failure, 20% failure.. all the way to 80% failure, and then it'll constantly be 80% failure after that.

But let's assume the item never broke – what would happen then?

That's right, unlimited enhancements.

Soon enough, godlike items were made from this. I found out about this glitch after someone on the forums contacted me about it with information. Using his info, I managed to deduce how it worked. I made a small guide, and gave it out to some friends. It was leaked 30 minutes later in the public forums. Word for word. I hate people.

All in all, nothing much came out of it. I made Arly 3 godly equips, and that was that. All my characters were banned at the time/my funds were locked. No rollback, no deletion, no bans. The hack wasn't widespread enough – most people bought the FM out of enhancement scrolls.

There was an alternative to the hack, and that was using clean slate scrolls, dark scrolls, etc. There was also a small meso exploit as well, if you open the anniversary boxes over and over again without actually consuming the box, you get loads of leaves, and you can NPC them to generate mesos. This method wasn't too effective, maybe only 100 million/20 hours of botting.

What do NEXON and Wal-Mart have in common? That's right! Rollbacks.

We fast-forward to about 3 days ago. NEXON recently allowed people to log onto multiple characters on the same account at the same time. Obviously, this wasn't intentional, and the exploits that came out of it, of course, weren't intentional.

The major one, well, the basics behind it was that if two people accessed the same shared storage, one character had first dibs, and the other character accessed an "empty storage." Which means that the data is nonexistant. So if we forced anything to happen, then it would happen. No checks, no boundaries.

So the most clever thing to do would be? You guessed it, withdraw mesos that were non-existant.

I found out about this after I saw a random thread in the forums. I had quit MapleStory at this time again, but the exploit just called out to me. Modifying the packet to get 1 meso, I made it generate 2.1 billion mesos – and by now, loads of people were also doing it. The economy was flooded again, and every FM room was bought out of its stock.

So, NEXON, had to rollback again.

Another 48 hours of rollback.

Another 30 hours of consecutive maintenance.

Another failure.

Why?

Yeah, they forgot to patch it again.

5 hours later, they patch it. And rollback.

Yeah, that's right, two in a row.

And you wonder why NEXON's consumer satisfaction is like a 40%.

So they ban everyone that spent a margin of Nexon Cash during this time, and the people that withdrew money from nowhere. And they also ban a good amount of people with 200 million mesos and more on their accounts, which is like basically 50% of the MapleStory community. Rage everywhere.

I can imagine the NEXON offices right now.

I can't tell if I pity them, or I just really, really dislike how they run the games they publish, here in global. Interview after interview, they talk about how they want to make an impact overseas, but are they really trying? The gap between global's quality and Korea's quality isn't a matter of gameplay, but rather a matter of sheer dedication to their customers and care for the game.

Sure, hackers are the root cause, but hey, there will always be hackers – it's how you deal with the exploits.

NEXON.

All I can say is,