Further developments in MapleStory Europe's hacking madness
Last week, we brought you the news that players abusing an exploit had brought MapleStory Europe's in-game economy to its knees. Using a packet-forging exploit, players with the Meso Guard skill were able to trick the server into giving them 2.17 billion mesos. Hundreds of mule accounts were created to house the forged currency, and trillions was poured into the economy via trades and market stalls. Nexon EU's initial response was to trade-ban all characters with over a certain amount of currency, a move that was criticised for catching a great deal of legitimate players and also somehow missing many of the hackers' mule accounts.
Despite concerns that the issue had gotten out of hand, Nexon EU stated that the company opted not to perform a server rollback. "The reason why we didn't perform a rollback on our servers," a Nexon EU representative told us, "was because we detected the exploit too late which may make the players lose even more of their gains if we were to turn everything back." The company's final plan for dealing with the massive influx of mesos has finally been announced, and it's bad news for practically everyone involved. After determining that the damage to the economy had become irreversible, Nexon decided to try to bring balance back to the economy by deleting a large percentage of every single player's mesos.
The forums have been in an uproar about the solution, with players complaining that it harms legitimate players more than the hackers. Legitimate players who have never cheated nor hacked will log in to find up to 90% of their hard-earned cash gone. Hackers will suffer the same percentage deduction, but with trillions stashed away in mule accounts they'll still be a lot better off than they were before the incident. Nexon EU clarified the statement in a later announcement, stating that "the deduction of Mesos will only be applied to users who have logged into the game between January 5th, 2011 and February 9th, 2011 5:00 A.M. (GMT+1)." Accounts that were previously trade-banned will also be receiving 1,000 maple points and an incubator as compensation.
