A discussion on the state of hacking within Royals

I see, that's what I had figured. I'd like to hear what the admin are thinking as well.

 

It is possible that they were on maps where people didn't go but it seems like the amount of hackers have increased since new source and the reason for that might be that they don't have any counter systems in place for these issues at this stage is what I mean. The auto cc and dc programs wont work if a GM is in "hide" even if they're standing right next to the hacker.

You don't really need a GM or admin to respond since most people who played for a while knows how it works and you can also go back and read old ban appeals.
An account with illegitimately attained funds will be permanently banned along with the other accounts that they can connect to this person by checking logs of trades/drops/usernames/ip/mac-adress and so on, this has happened many times before. There is no need to confiscate items since all accounts that are traced back to hackers/botters/rwters will be permanently banned hence all their items will be permanently locked away.

 

I'll clarify what I can though my post may be a bit sporadic as I'm summarizing what I've read.
We have a layered ban system that makes it rather difficult for hackers to return. That has recently been implemented (the past couple updates), whereas before it was easier (for the first few months of new source). It's more complex even than Old Source's ban system was, which should help.

We have a system that does alert us to suspicious activity and we have easily banned probably >100 hackers in a decent amount of time recently.

I'd venture to say most of the hackers I run into are just bored people looking to see how far they can get away with it. I've come out of hide and talked to some before banning (after I had already collected the evidence I needed). Lately, the majority of hackers are in one of three places (excluding maple island): Cornians, Skeles, or Deep Ludi (such as spirit vikings). Some of them literally just f3 at me and say "You're too good". I've had some who think they were being smart as hell by hacking as a level 30 beginner at Bigfoot. Or some who steadily increase their damage within plausible but not possible ranges with their equips.

If we suspect someone is making OP gear with illicit funds, GMs pass along their suspicions and any info or evidence we gather to an admin for further investigation. As Hampa said, when someone gets banned for illegit funds, all of their accounts get banned. And when an account is banned, that account can never be accessed again unless they are unbanned.

You never have to worry about posting a screenshot with potentially personal information. A "full screenshot" only means a full screenshot of the MapleRoyals window, not your entire desktop. You can use the windows snipping tool if you wish, or you can take it into paint/gimp/whatever to crop out only the Mapleroyals window. There are also alternatives like Grabilla, Puush, Gyazo, etc that will screencap the area you select and automatically upload it to their server for you.

If you're ever concerned about posting a report publically for your own safety or literally any other reason, you're more than welcome to PM a staff member with it and ask for the report to remain private. We respect anonymity and have no issues handling them.

Without a ~gm or Alert GM system in game it's more troublesome to report hackers, but you can always look for one on a shoutbox or try to whisper the GM character in the meantime.

The players - you guys - tend to be really good at reporting suspicious people to us as well. We can't have eyes on the game 24/7, even with 5 of us spread across different timezones. Sometimes we just want to sit back and play our legits too.
Autoban used to suck at catching hackers to be fair. It caught a lot of legit people, and it failed to catch many hackers. We're improving on that. But with everything else, things take time.

Sometimes these smaller updates you see might have only one or two things publically shown, but there could be a handful of things done backend that help assist GMs in moderating the game, too.

 

The only hackers that are worrisome are the ones that find rollback/dupe exploits and start selling valuable items in bulks as RWT.
People that do RWT eventually get banned (at least players who buy items, banning sellers for good is hard).

"Hackers" that use monster vacs are a joke, if you're worried they will pass farmed items onto another account they will still get caught.
There are logs for item drops/transactions. With these logs GMs can easily link hackers back to their "legit" accounts.

I think the GMs do a good job at keeping the end-game player base clean and free from cheaters.

If you wish to anonymously report someone who has committed a major offence regarding the ToS you can also send a private message to a staff member. I've done so in the past and they've treated those cases very discretely.

 

I notice most of the hackers have very simple outfit on their characters. Not much NX, having one of the 3 character creation hairs and wearing default equipment.

Is it fair to say we need to be alert about "hacker" if we meet some of them with simple outfit in higher levels map?

 

To keep it short:

1) We will be re-introducing ~gm in the future, or even maybe a separate command purely for reporting. Currently, we have logs in-game to inform us who's a potential hacker, then we will look into it promptly.
2) We have recently improved our ban system which will significantly lower their chance of even returning.
3) You can report to us via forum PM if you wish to stay anonymous.

 

a little off topic but quick q about this. while ~gm is down, how can we tell which GM's are online / available to whisper to? does it always correspond to whoever is online on the forums? since any gm we whisper regardless if theyre online or not will always have "unable to find (ign)" immediately following it (i think that's what it says). will there be a command that shows staff online?

 

That's interesting Sila. If this does happen its great. I don't wish to pry but would it be possible to elaborate the process you guys use to determine whether funds are obtained illicitly or not? A lot of people mention that admins comb through the logs but they never really go into detail.
What type of logs do admins have on hand?
Are logs categorized in terms of trades, chats, exp gain, item gain over a certain amount of time?
How meticulous is the information collected?
Clearing that up would help us understand the process you guys follow.

Yes and I've just done so. However, I did not know that we could PM admins individual hacking reports since they've got a bit of a workload already. That type of of information should be publicized so every players especially ones that just join the community should know their options for reporting hackers. Passing information word of mouth often results in misinformation and unnecessary repetition of the same information over and over again.

Alright so I know you guys are volunteering and we all appreciate the work you guys put towards moderating and enforcing. Once again I reiterate that this thread is not an attack on the administrative team but more of an inquiry as to the process behind finding and punishing hackers. That being said having 5 admins spread out through all the timezones dealing with rewarps, refunds, QnAs, forum work, shoutbox moderation, etc. It seems like an impossible task.
Moreover like you said admins themselves also like to enjoy the game from time to time.

It begs to question that with an overworked, voluntary, and understaffed administrative team how many hackers fall through the cracks?

 

On the contrary I'd actually argue that vac hackers who consistently farm mesos and items are a force to be reckoned with.
Given the servers 2x drop rate of items and mesos any player who grinds on a certain map for hours on end is going to end up with a significant amount of mesos. It's possible to make money just off of farming mesos as seen with the popularity of the gobies map in the previous source. 100m/hr was a plausible figure to make at those maps.
Now imagine being able to vacuum every single mob onto a single spot and kill multiples of them within a single instance. Moreover you loot every single drop since they all fall on the same place. Do this for hours on end, days even. NPC all 96 item slots every 40 minutes, probably less. Do this for multiple days on end.
How many billions do you think they'd make?
Of course its not just the one hacker either, there are more all producing mesos at an enormous rate. I'd argue that once they reach meso cap they probably pour it into the economy, buying up white scrolls and any means of transferring the asset into something more manageable.

 

Online on the forums doesn't mean online in game, and vice versa, so your best bet is to just try to whisper any of us unfortunately. I'm hoping to have ~gm back soon though. It will not tell you "unable to find" when we're online, currently.

@Dawg I dont think that we're supposed to disclose in detail how we go about handling things, because giving more information allows the hackers and exploiters to thus find more ways to circumvent us.
Hacking isnt a new issue with the new source, we've always had them. And we've always taken care of them. I firmly believe that hackers and rule breakers will always get caught in the end, one way or another. Whether they mess up just one too many times and by chance one of us notices, or someone reports it. Even players who push the boundaries of believable or not like FrozenYogo did, or others who I can't even remember their ign anymore. Hackers always get caught. It might not be immediate, but it does happen. And when it does, all of their accounts get banned.

The bigger issue was always dupe exploits, not necessarily hackers. The only times I've seen the economy suffer from illegit people was when we had a dupe exploit we were unaware of, and meso sellers were rampant. That, heavy vote abuse/the NX glitch we had in old source right before new source went live, and the cilbi dupe were the biggest ones I can remember. But with our efforts and with time, prices re-stabilized again. AP resets returned to 9-10m, cilbi prices started to return to normal, chaos/ws stabilized.

We have logs of many things but it isnt my place to disclose what we do or don't have.

I understand the concern, and I wont' dismiss it as a non-issue. But it's not as detrimental to the server as you might think.
Also, while there may only be 5 GMs/interns combined, we are all very familiar with the game and the tiny little intricacies.
We know what suspicious behavior looks like, and how to investigate it. The longer you're a GM, I'd say the easier you start to notice patterns in things as well. I know what looks like normal lag versus fast attack or mob vac. I know what's plausible and what isn't. These are things we just learn from experience, and some players (like Hampa) have been around long enough to also see how things work.

I don't think that we're going to refrain from ever hiring more GMs, we're all aware that 5 GMs/interns and 7 admins aren't enough to consistently police the server. But slow and steady is the best way to do it, so that our new interns can adjust and people can be thoroughly vetted before they're considered. Just my personal opinion and my observation, this isn't necessarily official word. It's just what I've observed and what I understand of the situation.

I do agree with making it publically known that a person can contact a GM to report anonymously. I've thought about rewriting the "new player's guide to mapleroyals" with updated information, but have held off until more things are fixed/I have more time. Maybe it's worth re-considering now, and that can be added in.

 

I understand how disclosing how you operate would expose a lot of the inner workings and the security apparatus you guys utilize. I'll digress from questioning you about your inner workings for the sake of security.
I also do appreciate the work your putting forth towards addressing the issues with hacking especially with the implementation of a better auto-ban system.
However is there any progress being made in addressing the issues of reporting active hacking in game?
For instance if

is possible, would it be possible to implement a feature where right clicking then reporting a hacker would automatically send an in-game screenshot to go along with the report?

I realize that players could abuse the function and flood the server with pictures but it can be actively repressed with ahrsh punishments.

Thanks for the speedy and detailed response.

 

That's something we can bring up with Kevin when he gets to implementing the auto ban/auto-screenshot function. I do know that the 'alert gm' used to capture the chat logs of the time period surrounding the incident.

 

My main character got no nx items at all, just a pet and the "country rabbit hat" (because I like it for an unexplained reason) since I waste all my nx on gachapon. I will probably continue to do so until I will have like 300-400b in total.

Nice to know that I will be looked upon as a "hacker" when I will start bossing. :/

 

I've seen hackers with full NX and even donor items.
I've seen hackers with nothing but beginner gear.
Doesn't really make a difference!

 

I didn't really read ALL of those giant texts, just wanted to add two doubts here:

1. My brother plays (rarelly) at his house, and some weekends he plays at my house, would that count as sharing?
Because the ban appeals usually shows that Account X was at IP Y and Z at close times, doesn't really means it's a sharing case.

2. What happens when someone just quit gaming and give away his stuff?
It would happen that someone just got gifted by a friend / guild mate with some nice stuff that they couldn't afford.
(Actually I've seen this happen not far ago in my guild)
Would that happen to become a "RWT" ban?

 

1. As long as your and your brother aren't playing on 1 account you can both be on the same IP for different accounts.

 

You can change your MAC Address on the spot if you actually wanted to. It isn't hard, I've done it for a friend to get him around his parent's internet restrictions based around his MAC

 

No one should become more alert of anyone simply based on what they're wearing.
I particularly wear little to no NX equips, and enjoy the classic preset hairs & faces. I'd find it a bit ridiculous if that fact made me a suspect of hacking. o.o

 

I didn't wear nx till lvl 150.... then a buddy bought me nx cloths cause he said I looked bad f3.