Poll: Nexon, and dealing with exploits.

[RichardThompson]

Basically, on Monday a money, known as meso, duplicating exploit was released to the public by a hacker, who believed that what a group of hackers were doing (using the exploit and selling the mesos) was wrong. He found and released this, so huge torrents of disposable income flooded the Maplestory economy. And I don't just mean in game items; There's a Cash for Items trading system, so these exploiters were buying items from the market and selling them for the in-game cash credit.
Not only this, but the exploited mesos spread fast. Hackers dropped mesos in the free market, a huge area designed for selling items to other characters accessible from all over the Maplestory world. This ment that even the most insignifigant player could end up with 10 exploited mesos, and could potentially face a ban.
The last time something like this occured, Nexon Hellbanned (block people from trading/dropping), and Rolled back the servers.

Dear Maplers,

As many of you know by now, there was an exploitable bug in MapleStory that resulted in large sums of mesos generated and introduced into the Maple World economy. After much internal debate, we have made the difficult decision to restore all MapleStory servers to 3PM Pacific (6PM Eastern), Monday, November 8. This drastic measure ensures that the exploit does not have lasting negative impact on all of our players by raising the cost of items beyond what most players can afford to pay for them. We know that players are disappointed to lose the efforts they?ve put into the game during the last day, and we will do our best to ease the change by offering various compensation and 2x events. Compensation and event details will be presented within the next 24 hours.

In the meantime, we will also take action against any exploiters who used this malicious exploit. Any NX spent during the impacted time will be refunded through Maple Points and Cash items after the restore point will be extended by 48 hours.

The game will reopen with the rollback in effect at 10:00 AM Pacific (1:00 PM Eastern) on Wednesday November 10. We greatly apologize to our players and ultimately, we feel this is the best resolution to ensure the long term health of MapleStory.

*EDIT: the second option should read "No, they could have specifically targeted the hackers and undo any trades/transactions they have made"

 

[Layz92]

From which party's perspective? If you mean the Company then I would say a more selective approach would have been better. If you mean the hacker that released it, I would have done it. Maybe it is my not so weak anarchic side but I would love to temporarily ruin an economy.

 

[RichardThompson]

From which party's perspective? If you mean the Company then I would say a more selective approach would have been better. If you mean the hacker that released it, I would have done it. Maybe it is my not so weak anarchic side but I would love to temporarily ruin an economy.

I ment from the companies point of view, as it seems to me that they did take the only course of action available to make it fair on everyone, but at the same time generates a huge deal of controversy, as characters who train and level up will be rolled back to their level prior it.
The guy who released this genuinely knew what he was letting the game in for when he did this. Actually made an announcment saying "I just accidentally all of Maplestory" a couple of minutes after he made the exploit public. He didn't seem particularly pleased with himself either, because he knew that the actual exploiters he was out to get would probably go through unscathed, and he'd be the one to get banned.