This is my first time writing a pretty serious suggestion on feedback page, so I am kind of worried about the responses that I will get out of this post... I hope everyone can have a healthy, respectful discussion instead of petty accusations to each other. It has been 8 months since I started playing Royals, and as I get more involved in the game, I can see that hackers and vote abusers are some of the most serious issues that harm Royals in the long run, along with RWT, ban evasions, and other server longevity issues. For the purpose of this thread, I would like to focus on the issue of hacker/abusers rather than RWT or other server longevity issues. Autoban is not out yet (not 100% reliable at least), and there are limits to what GMs can do on their own by patrols and/or going through records. In the situation where autoban is still SoonTM, I think the GMs should gather as much cooperation from the users for reports. I would like to suggest providing a small incentive for reporting a real hacker to GM on forum. I have seen many, many smegas in game looking for GM to report for hackers, but very few of them actually make a step forward to make an actual report on forums, just like below. If writing an actual report is promoted by giving small gifts, I believe less hackers will be left uncaught. Again, GMs cannot patrol around the whole maple world 24/7, but with incentives we may actually have 24/7 surveillance. As for the type of incentive given, I was thinking a small amount of nx (100 or 250nx), but we can discuss more about proper bounty. Random box or small number of gacha tickets sound fun too! pros and cons: PROs 1. More hackers caught on site 2. Decrease in GM workload - patrolling around random places in game or following hackers around. 3. Eventual decrease in overall number of hackers CONs, with possible solutions 1. Multiple reports on one hacker leading to arguments - This can be resolved by giving out prize for the first reporter only. 2. Abusing report to sabotage legit player - Afaik, GMs and admins do go through records carefully before confirming a player as hacker, so I think sabotaging won't work. Just don't give out bounty until the report is verified and confirmed. Please do share your thoughts! Thank you.
I have floated this idea in my head for quite a while, but I am most certainly against it. In some round-about way, this voluntarily (in contrast to say, items injected into the economy by hackers) legitimizes some sort of gain from hackers, and in essence makes them "part of the game". In the same way that players are not allowed to leech exp and loot from vacced mobs (i.e. gain from the byproduct of hackers), I do not believe incentives to catch hackers should be implemented. The nature of the incentive is irrelevant (NX, pure cosmetic, meso, etc.) This is a less likely scenario, but it is entirely plausible that one can abuse this type of incentive program. For example, I can set up bots myself and catch them for a reward. Now if the incentive is not that great then this is a far fetched scenario, but nonetheless it's something to consider. Furthermore I'd like to add that it wouldn't really take away from the workload of staff. After hunting hackers for quite a bit now, it is extremely rare to be able to catch them hacking on video (I record the entire time I am hunting), and what happens 99% of the time is you simply report the hacker ign you obtain from mapowner, and a staff member needs to take the time to verify it themselves (I believe they record it themselves.) Even spawning on top of a hacker as a player is not quick enough to catch them on video. I've only, at best, been able to capture like 3 frames of a hacker. While I think the idea certainly sounds cool, I think it's best if, similar to how staff do not receive compensation for their volunteer work, players should not receive incentives for helping enforce the rules. If you want my total corporate bull shit answer, the incentive is to make the game a better place *smiles*.
I find this particular paragraph well-written and it just makes a lot of sense. I'm of the opinion that players shouldn't have to hunt down hackers and produce evidence of them. We should move away from this process instead of rewarding it. Something a u t o b a n soonTM
1. I think the current state of the server is serious enough to start considering additional methods, apart from miraculous autoban, to counter hackers even if players gain additional benefits from their presence. 2. Abusing this system is absurd and not applicable. If you are a legit player, you are jeopardizing your entire career in the server for a tiny reward. For the actual hacker, the amount of income a single character makes in 1 hour with hacks easily surpasses the amount one would earn from reporting 50~100 self made characters. 3. This requires an actual staff's contribution for verification but from what I have seen, finding the IGNs of the hackers already covers 50% of the work. Documentation of the scene is something we mostly entrust in the hands of Staff but imagine the simplicity of warping to a known IGN vs patrolling 20 channels of popular maps. Many of the veteran players are well acquainted with the trace of hackers. It's not even necessary to record them in action as long as there's reasonable evidence with their IGNs imprinted in the mapownership. We always held off new ideas to counter cheaters and look where we are. I'm sure there was some improvement with the autoban development but the smart hackers are still controlling the economy of the server. It's about time we accept the harsh reality and introduce new ideas instead of waiting for the Autoban.
similar suggest was done in the past https://royals.ms/forum/threads/rewards-for-reporting-hackers-rwters.143512/ also hackers-abusers are encouraged by RWT'rs and RWT'rs are big time "protected" in royals community use of multiclients to race with hackers for "fair rates" while autoban arive dosn't help either
As far as I know, the topic in regards to hackers/abusers is one of the main repetitive issues that Royals is experiencing; however, it is frightened to see there has not been such progress to catch these malicious players in years. With that said, I personally think we need to move on and seek new ideas/solutions rather than waiting on autoban to be released. There were too many hackers out there currently in this server that I caught at least five hackers on my eyes in the same map/different channels while hunting for the monster card, and anyone can agree on how tiring reporting every single hacker can be. I understand this is completely voluntary work, and I truly appreciate to the players/staffs who have been doing such great job on it, but again, this cannot become an habit of "see hackers and go on forum to report". I believe that taking small steps can initiate greater impact, and it is our time to start looking for a new system unless autoban is released.
I totally agree with the first half, and entirely disagree with gaining additional benefits from hackers. This will not solve the hacker problem, and I am willing to bet it wouldn't significantly improve it either. Make the incentive too small, and how many players are really going to hunt hackers (aside from incentivizing chance encounter reports). Make the incentive too big, and well you open room to abuse. I seriously do not see a sweet spot here. I refer to the first paragraph in my original response. I'm not going to argue numbers here, as I do not know what the exact numbers are. I will say that your premise "If you are a legit player" confuses me, as my worry lies with illegitimate players. Many players have been banned for risking measly benefits. Further, see where I say the scenario is far fetched. I do agree, it's likely not to happen, but it was a point I wanted to bring up. Covering 50% of the work is a very generous assumption. I highly doubt staff require patrolling all 20 channels, as it is very feasible to implement commands that check a given map for presence in all channels, among other convenient tools (not having such a command is asinine). I would say yes, there are still benefits of players reporting IGNs and it does make it slightly more convenient, but not to the degree you are making it out to be.* At the end of the day, the need for staff to verify is a bottleneck in this process. *After writing this, I do not mean to give the implication that I have any perspective from the side of staff in this matter, so I could be spewing nonsense. I don't understand what you mean here. The way I read this, it is entirely false. The only purpose of mapownership in this scenario is to identify the IGN of a hacker in a map. Any evidence that will lead to the ban of a hacker must have the hacker's character clearly hacking on screen with the IGN visible, among other things. I don't know about you, but I certainly do not have the ability to screenshot 1-3 out of 60 frames in a second without recording. All told, this kind of stuff is nothing new in the MMO scene. An autoban is an absolute necessity simply to start. In my opinion, any sort of manual leg work that comes beforehand is meaningless in the grand scheme of eliminating or at the very least severely reducing the issue. I agree, we need new ideas, but an incentive program, for me, is just not one of them. Thank you for taking the time to respond to me, as it has given me things to think about. As I have nothing further to add to this discussion (my personal stance is firm here), I will not reply in this thread (as I feel I may echo the same ideas), but I'm always happy to discuss in PMs if that's your jam (and maybe something good will come of it.)
I appreciate the reply and although you mentioned that you won't be replying further, I'll still reply to the points for the sake of this thread and for others who may be interested in the discussed topic. 1. The purpose of this thread is to find that sweet spot. 2. As stated, it's a waste of time on the illegitimate players' ends to abuse this system. 3. If staff had such a tool to check every channel of a given map, I doubt we'd have so many unhappy ex-GMs among us. I'd happily wait for the critic slap from Staff in the hope they prove me wrong but I'm pretty confident that there's no such tool. All my latest hacker reports (been a while since I've been inactive) comprise of a single screenshot showing a portion of the map with vacuumed drops + mapowner or just a chat log showing multiple mapowner lines with /find (ign) trace logs. I simply wrote in 1~2 sentence why I'm reporting that particular IGN for hacking. For e.g, only changing channels when I enter their ch, running to cashshop, dcing upon entry, disappearance with vacced drops. These simple reports contained enough detail to delegate the hackers to GMs. Staff will warp to them for the recording but this delegation should already reduce their workload to a significant degree. If the hacker locating part of the ban process was that easy on GMs' side, they would have told us not to bother reporting from our end for it makes no real difference.
Rewarding players for hunting hackers can lead to burnout and won't solve the bigger issue, Lack of auto ban and workload distribution within the staff. The responsibility of countering hackers should never fall on the players and tools such as auto-ban that are absolutely necessary. Every alternative solution I have seen so far involved the time of our developer or community effort and I don't want to sound as if I'm discouraging player suggestion on this topic but I feel like nothing would be as effective as an anti-cheat system despite all of our collective ideas. I know it's not as cool as getting a chaos scroll for busting a few hackers but I would like to thank everyone who takes their time to report odd behavior, We see and appreciate you
one loop hole: hacker can collaborate with non hackers to keep getting banned to reap the benefits 1. hacker create account 2. report hacker 3. non hacker reaps benefit 4. profit 5. repeat 6. ???
I absolutely agree with every point in this reply but is that anti-cheat actually coming before it's too late? I waited 4 + years only to hear the same reply but from different Staff member every time .
Hackers can already produce and pass more stuff to non-hackers if they are willing and don't get caught... why would they waste their time by going through this tedious process.
I think we need to accept that hackers will always be part of the game and honestly, every MMO is constantly fighting this. It's always a push and pull between hackers and game developers on evasion and detection (from my perspective at least). Adding the players into the equation can help to tip the fight in favor of GM's and that's what I believe. There's nothing better to motivate players if there are incentives as doing it for "the love of the game" will only get you so far and will mostly get players as seen in the screenshot above. I feel adding incentives may add behavior changes to the community as well... The incentives I would be interested in wouldn't be monetary of value however. I feel something along the lines of special untradeable NX is better as a reward. Pretty sure there's a ban hammer NX cover of some sort out there haha. If there is anything I know Maplers love, it's being able to flex their achievements
Our love for the server automatically makes us hold MapleRoyals to the highest of standards and it's easy to forget that this isn't big cooperation that does this for monetary gain. MapleRoyals is a passion project and over the 8 years of its run has seen its fair share of incidents that lead to the administration distrusts and unhealthy work distribution. The best thing we can do as a community is to understand what got us in this position and encourage our admins to communicate and discuss healthier ways to share their workload. It's worth mentioning that we have many tricks up our sleeves to counter hackers that don't necessarily involve auto-ban! Until the day they won't be needed, we will continue to do our best. Team human auto-ban, Fighting!
Here's a short story. A friend of mine LOVED to adventure the mapleroyals world and catch hackers. He made hundreds, if not at least a thousand reports on hackers, bots, RWTers, etc. Eventually, he became geared and was a pretty strong night lord. He quickly realized that all his effort was wasted and the actual game is dry and repetitive. So then for about 6 months he stopped playing. He only voted, sold mass fames, or anything he can do to make mesos while not actively playing. Then one day he said fuck it and sold all his mesos/gears for cash money. Moral of the story: No matter how much effort or time you put into royals, the current state of the game allows people to succumb to the meta of RWT and Vote2win mechanics. Gms don't have incentives other then their compassion. Players don't have incentives other than their helpfulness. But on the other side, those abusers of the ToC have real world cash incentives to continue their activities. It literally pays their bills. Maybe there should be incentives/reward to players/Gms. But the problem of hackers, botters, RWT, vote abuse is just near impossible to defeat with the games design and manpower.
