Important information for all players

After yesterday's events, all I could do is tell you, the players that are basically the only reason this server is doing any good, how awful things are being handled this server.

One of the reasons white scrolls and chaos scrolls prices inflated so much is because of an exploit none of you were even aware of.
Hackers could easily generate billions of mesos in matters of seconds, without any effort. These hackers procceeded to buy out valueable scrolls and items from FM, while selling the rest to buyers for USD.
Once the admins became aware of this, the reaction of the man who OWNS this server, Matt, was to just turn a blind eye, and basically disrespect all the time and effort people put into make their items legit.
The guy that you all basically pay when you donate to this server.
The guy that doesn't even know how to code, and doesn't play the server.
The same guy that shuts down good feedback from players who have a lot of experience for this server trying to make things better for "Nostalgia" reasons. (Among some more staff members that I won't mention)

My friend, who's been in the maplestory community for years now, one of the better coders I've ever met, and probably one of the best if not the best developer in the maplestory community decided to take a look.
30 minutes later, he found this game breaking exploit and PMed one of the admins what they need to change in the source code to fix it.

About an hour after my friend basically who saved the economy, who could've basically paid off student loans that he has by abusing that exploit and selling mapleroyals goods for USD, gets banned for wearing beginner female gear;
Something that doesn't even effect the server whatsoever.

Out of all the staff, there was only ONE person who even tried to find a fix for this game breaking exploit. TimK.
The guy who goes on every single day to monitor the activity on royals so you all can enjoy a legit experience.
He doesn't even get rewarded for any of it. It's not like Matt shares the donations with other admins. It all goes to him.
When the meso generating exploit was discovered by staff, it was only Tim who stayed up until his 9 AM getting the information from my friend on how the exploit worked.
Tim gave the information to Kevin who patched it in an emergency server check.
And the worst part? Matt knew about these tens of billions of duped mesos, and he didn’t sacrifice his sleep nor his time on what would’ve absolutely broken the Royals economy.(Including most of the other admins).
The guy you’re giving your money to doesn’t care about you or the game at all.

This is not a first time, nor will it be the last an event like this happens.
The market to buy scrolls and meso on royals for USD is still up and running, and there are other exploits out there that the staff knowingly ignores.

This thread is probably going to be removed for a made up excuse, but I feel like you all should know what kind of server you're investing time into, and who are the people you donate to. (or person, in this case).

So the only thing I can ask you, the community, is to keep people informed about this matter and not let the admins get away with it.

 

"Rumors"? The hackers were literally spawning mesos in front of your admins.
The reason it was "resolved" was literally the work of my friend and Tim.
But I guess you're too busy buying new cars with the donation money than actually pay attention.

I can go into more details about how the exploit was done.

I'm sure XX XX 07 28 CE XX XX is familiar to you now.
This was the information my friend got to look into the matter and fix it for you.
Everything I say can be backed up. I don't know why you're even denying it.

 

Unconfirmed information starts out as a rumor doesn't it? Don't act like Matt is telling you it's a rumor. He is just telling you the story of how things went from our side. Take a chill pill dude.

Also, how many levels of abstraction did it take you to come to the conclusion that mr. bossman is just an evil guy in a suit that wants to take your money? Oh right, none; it's one of the oldest stories in the book.

The way you are describing the situation is like none of us cared about this exploit other than your friends and TimK, which from my point of view is an unaccaptably shallow way of looking at a single scenario where the right people just took responsibility to get a problem resolved. The staff doesn't consist of one person for a reason. Just because Matt and most of us played no part in getting this exploit fixed, doesn't give you the merit to call out anyone else for not being good enough to run this server. As that is basically what you're implying here.

It's disgusting. This thread is disgusting.

 

I was already done reading after this, because this is the biggest bull I've read today.
I started my investigation 8:30pm last night, and after about 45 minutes I involved the rest of Staff when I found results.
After that I continued to investigate further and further with Tim to see what was exactly happening with this exploit and how to fix it.
I did fall asleep at 5am because I had stuff to attend in the morning, sorry for that.
But to just disregard all of my effort and work is really disrespectful and I'm honestly offended that you have even dared to say these words.
Good to know my work is being appreciated by the community, thanks.

 

feels good to know that the exploit is gone after all.

edit:
I guess there will be plenty of work for admins to come, uncovering who has been exploiting, buying or selling mesos.

 

This is just a personal opinion, i think that at least a post should be made by the Staff to clear things on this duping. Since it definitely did affect the current game currency. There was no clear transparency in handling this case and many of us are still not aware of what happened. Hopefully the staff can shed some proper light and probably clear any misinformation rather than continue flaming/arguing with other maplers. Just a thought.

 

Hey, its just my personal opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own.

 

Ya, and Matt just trying to explain & clarify you last thought...no one blaming your thought ....

 

I just gotta ask, is there seriously people buying mesos and shit for real money (and alot of money since student loans often aren't that small) on a maplestory private server? Makes no sense too me at all.

 

I can say with utmost certainty
yes.

 

It was a full-blown meso generation method, not a dupe. Perhaps there were rumor beforehand about elicit 'meso duplication'; but, I wouldn't know myself since I only see the circus from the outside. The only reason your investigation was promptly concluded was because one of your admins guilt tripped the shit out of me and I felt bad for him. If he weren't working under you as an admin, I would have definitely not said a word. Though, this exploit sort of confirms that your source code is most likely OdinMS-based since the exploit itself seemed to be of a legacy Odin variety and patched in most updated source out there. So much for your 'from scratch custom source.'

I can potentially give you that you may not have known certain information at the given time; but, given still that it took a third party to come in and figure out one of your problems shows high incompetence. We can live in a word of 'what-ifs' all day long; but, I don't know for sure how successful your investigation would have been. Then again, it is not like this exploit is exactly hard to find considering a quick google search yields a video showing exactly it.

I'm not going to necessarily point a finger at you per-say; but, if what you are saying is true, I believe you do deserve a certain degree of appreciation in the matter. I can't say how much you contributed to the investigation since I have no information about that. The spirit of this thread is more-so to demonstrate ignorance and incompetence in resolving a simple matter in a timely manner.

---

Greetings everyone,

On this incident, I was contacted at 10:04 PM CST yesterday about an exploit that caused meso to be generated into the game.

I was given a packet with missing bytes: XX XX 07 28 CE XX XX as information from TimK that he supposedly got from an abuser taunting him. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out what it was. In v83, not many things have modal handlers that are related to meso. Obviously then, this had to be a storage/use item/cash exploit. After narrowing it down, I found a handler for v83 that had exactly the information I wanted in form of the storage handler. I went in-game and tested a few variations out and was able to generate meso: 3E 00 07 28 CE FF 8F ended up being the final packet I used to generate about 1.8 billion meso at a time. We can dissect this to mean that:

[3E 00] -> storage handler
[07] -> mode for storing/withdrawing meso
[28 CE FF 8F] -> meso amount (when you overflow, bad things happen)

I'll be clear I only had about 100k in my inventory prior to this; and, I was able to generate about 7 billion meso with minimal effort. The only effort-filled part of it was dumping it somewhere.

I ended up caving to TimK as he was unable to fall asleep over how badly this was impacting all of his players. I had a bit of fun; but, it wasn't anything incredibly damaging from me personally. I can only imagine how long this exploit has been working for... I ended up giving him the full packet exploit I personally used at 11:40 PM CST yesterday; and, it was patched. My decision to give TimK the solution was solely out of respect of him and our friendship. I received no monetary reward even though gold farmers definitely made loads of money off this; and, I was sure Matt would have definitely not paid me a cent to expose the solution. I also strongly dislike Matt when derived from my experience with him on RageZone and from what I've heard about him from some of his players. You players are lucky to have TimK as an admin...

I wished to use time stamps in this matter to demonstrate at least a certain window in which the exploit was usable by me and I can produce conversation logs between me and TimK validating these times. This was more to show that closing the investigation of this issue given how much information TimK had at the time shouldn't have taken more than it did if someone in your staff was competent at all in handling packet exploits - especially your developer(s).

Regarding my ban, equipping female items yields no benefits since I cannot gain stats from them - it is purely aesthetic. It is about the only equipped item check that is not handled here; but, it is handled by the client. I suspect the wrong slot equipping exploit fix (which was what I was testing for) on this server is also due to me publicly releasing a fix for it on RageZone; but, who knows?

I hope my response has provided you some transparency in the matter; but, I doubt much more will be given.

Regards,
Zygon

 

It is not an understatement to say that this exploit was probably the biggest scandal in Royals history. More than any RWTer, this exploit pumped tens of billions of meso into the economy and inflated WS and chaos, among other items, more than they already have been. In my limited observations, WS have gone to 420m to 450m each, chaos from 500m to 550m each. Because of this exploit.

The only people who sacrificed their own time for the sake of the server was Tim, Dimitri, and Kevin. Those three people in staff saved this server, and only because of FreeSybe.

Dimitri for finding out what was going on.

Kevin for taking the fix FreeSybe found and patching the exploit.

Tim for being the sole and only reason this exploit was stopped in the first place.

The only reason this exploit was fixed was because Tim went out of his way to contact probably the greatest MapleStory private server dev out there. Kevin was unable to find out how the exploit was being done. So Tim, after spending hours chasing leads and interrogating a third duper, getting clues on how the exploit was performed, finally reached out for outside help.

FreeSybe figured out the exploit and refused to tell Tim how he did it. Because he just hates Matt that much.

Do you know how much Tim cares about this game? Spending hours and hours trying to get this fixed the day he learned about it, willing and offering to pay out of his own pocket to FreeSybe for how it could be fixed. Because the exploit was that major. And FreeSybe refused, because again, he just hates Matt that much. And Tim still refused to go to sleep. Unable to. Because he couldn't just leave the game knowing people were using this exploit.

It makes me sad that most people will never know how deeply Tim cares about this game, how much he sincerely enjoys helping people, and keeping the game clean from people who cheat, most famously by banning RWTers.

It makes me sad that the server owner doesn't care about the game. It's obvious from how many well constructed and well articulated feedback threads from the community will not be implemented for the sake of arbitrary nostalgia.. With all the donation money he gets, I would think it would be automatic to immediately commission a fix from another dev on RageZone after knowing about this exploit. But he did not. Instead, he did nothing. Leaving Dimitri and Tim to investigate and Kevin to try figuring out how to fix it.

The entire reason this was stopped was because of Tim. The server owner turned a blind eye to this, but Tim was the one who stopped it.

This game breaking exploit was fixed as quickly as it was was because of friendship.

There's a Discord group that Wolf made a long time ago. With me, Tim, FreeSybe, and others.

Wolf, if it wasn't for your memeing and the friends you've introduced us to from other private servers, this would've never been fixed.

So to the Tovarish Discord, all of you really are tovarishes.

Thank you, FreeSybe, for helping the server you hate most in the end. I'm sorry for guilt tripping you. I only begged you for your help because I couldn't just sit back and do nothing while Tim suffered. I'm truly, truly grateful.

And for nothing else, thank you Matt, for this game that I had the fortune to meet such a wonderful, kind, caring, and loving person on.

But most of all, thank you leawe. For being you.

 

this economy is already a mess without packet editors, nuff said

 

I feel the need to respond to this thread for two reasons; one, because I feel as though the work everyone does to make MapleRoyals function is being devalued, and two, because there is a lot of misinformation in this thread originating from sources other than MapleRoyals Staff. Whether you choose to believe the information above or the information I am providing is your own choice. I'd like to believe that I am a fairly transparent person, though. So, here goes.

There was a claim in the original post of this thread that Matt turned a blind eye to an exploit on this server. That is an absolute baseless claim. There has never been a case where any member of staff turns away from a pressing issue when they can contribute to the situation at hand, and this one is no exception. This exploit was first unearthed by Dimitri while doing some research into a player, off of suspicion by a member of the community. He came forward to me, and I confirmed that it was suspicious, told him to ban the player and investigate further. As Dimitri found more, he brought Tim and Kevin into the fold to assist him, as Tim has more extensive experience doing this type of investigation, and Kevin is of course our developer with extensive experience with our very much not Odin-source based code. Together, they found a way to extract information on the situation and had the problem resolved within 12 hours of it being discovered, including the time it took to rule out other, simpler issues like RWT or a quitting friend donating large sums of money to a new player. I think that's pretty bloody impressive, I don't know about you all. Tim went to outside sources for help as the issue progressed and we were concerned about time - that's what you do when you have a problem you're having trouble with. You look for a way to solve it, no matter what. If that means calling in help from friends, as every member of staff has done before in varying levels of importance (from assistance with translation to helping solve exploits) then so be it. If any money were to be exchanged to anyone in compensation for assistance, I can wholeheartedly guarantee that the money would come from MapleRoyals donation funds and nowhere else.

Next, I will maintain a strong resentment for naming any one person the sole reason for fixing this issue. There were at least three members of staff deeply involved with fixing this, and without any of them responding in the manner they did, this issue would have absolutely not been solved when it was. No one person is solely responsible for this fix, no matter how you try to construe it. Without Dimitri, this exploit would not have come to light as quickly as it did. Without Tim, a fix would have taken much longer to find. Without Kevin, implementing said fix would have taken much longer to do. In all three cases, removing that one person would have grossly exacerbated the problem, but because everyone did their jobs correctly, we came out with a result as quickly as we could.

This exploit has, without a doubt, created a very huge problem in our economy, which we are actively looking at and discussing methods to fix. There is an ongoing thread which we have been monitoring for thoughts from the community and we are always brainstorming ideas as we think of them. This exploit is put to bed, and as an administrator here, I'm deeply thankful to Dimitri, Tim, Kevin, Zygon and everyone else who may have had even the slightest impact in this result. Now we move on to the next; repairing the damage, because putting out a fire does not mean the house is still standing.

The truth is, each and every member of staff, from the top of the tree all the way down, puts in countless hours to make this server work. Nobody does this for gratitude, nobody does this to hear people congratulate them. We do this because we want to do this. Everyone has their role, everyone has the things that they are good at, and we all come together to make a solid product that has been serving players for four years.

 

Can we get a 3 day rollback? I kinda failed a lot of chaos scroll during that time

 

Damn.. all I'm seeing is a complete lack of respect for the server. Every issue is their fault. Nothing is fixed fast enough. They can be completely transparent and honest and people either completely ignore it or claim it's some crazy conspiracy. Old dupes, new-source, new dupe, whatever it is it's a constant shit storm on the people providing a service, namely the running of a server that costs the players nothing to play.

Just. Jeeze it's the new-source release all over again.

Thank you OP for once again reminding me that I need to log off the forum sometimes and just get lost playing the game. I'm going to go sit in Ellinia pig beach, listen to the background music and chat with guildies.

Spoiler: inb4

brown-nosing the staff again

 

I don't wanna take a lot of credits, but that member was me, so basically without me this wouldve continued a lot longer.

Spoiler

i'm being sarcastic, i want all the credits

 

There's a lot of finger pointing going on in this thread and I have a question not related to the blame game.

What is the fix?

Chaos scroll inflation: 45%
White scroll inflation 25%

Pretty serious numbers that have an all encompassing effect on the economy of the server. These scrolls effect the very gear you equip on your cute little avatars.

Also, for anyone invested in this discussion, take a look at this thread:
Lido's ban appeal