Hi all,

I’d like to address some of the recent topics that have been brought up by our community following last week’s v190 Nova: Liberation of Cadena update.

Recently, there has been a large concern in the community about players being falsely banned when playing the game normally. This concern has been exacerbated this past week with several players submitting ban appeal tickets and posting on social media about their bans. First of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that we are aware our banning policies and methods may have caused legitimate players to be unjustly banned in the past. For those players who are inadvertently banned, we do our best to correct the situation as quickly as we can.

As some of you may know, we update our detections and methods constantly to adapt to the various ways players are exploiting, hacking, or using third-party programs while playing MapleStory. Following any banning policy or method changes, we closely monitor and investigate ban appeal tickets to look for any bans that may have been made in error. This has been the case with the recent increase in discussions and ban appeals we saw starting last week. We have looked at the data, the type of activity being monitored, and have discussed the nature of these bans with multiple internal groups over the past few days. After our analysis, we have determined that the recent bans were indeed the correct course of action. These bans were the result of the previously mentioned ongoing improvements that we instill in our methods to detect various activities that violate our Terms of Service. If anyone still feels strongly that they are being banned unjustly, we encourage you to send in a support ticket with as much information as possible so that we can continue to look into your case more closely.

We would also like to address the concerns about recent issue fixes and bossing changes we made, that reduced the amount of options players previously had to obtain mesos. We are fully aware that Reboot players are particularly upset that this change happened suddenly and without consideration of how it affects the player behavior in Reboot world and we apologize that these changes were not communicated well to our players. Initially, our intent with fixing these issues and making changes to the boss rewards was to improve the overall balance and health of the game, by discouraging botters and farmers from further abusing the economy. However, we understand that more work is needed to ensure that the impact to legitimate players is less severe. We have seen the constructive discussions the players have been having regarding this and have also been discussing these issues and concerns with our internal teams. In the short term we are considering ways to provide more mesos to content rewards to help alleviate this transition. In the long term, we are considering additional meaningful changes we can introduce to the game as a whole to help provide more ways for players to obtain mesos. While we understand that swift action is often desired - and sometimes that is very much possible - some issues require a more thorough discussion and plan before we begin to roll out significant changes. Please understand that we will continually discuss and improve this situation until we get reach a place our teams and our players are happy with.

Lastly, we know that overall there were several other issues and unannounced changes introduced with the v190 update that has negatively impacted your experience.  For these issues, we are planning to address them as quickly as we can starting with this week’s maintenance and continuing with our upcoming v191 Nova: Winter Bard update next week. The full list of fixes for these maintenances will be announced as we confirm them, but please check back to get the latest updates regarding these issues.

We regret that these topics have overshadowed the other meaningful content we added, changes we introduced, and rewarding events we have lined up for our Nova update. We hope that you continue to enjoy the rest of the content and improvements to MapleStory as they are released, and continue to provide us meaningful feedback about the upcoming updates as they are introduced.

Thanks,

Dennis "Savage Ace" Bernardo
Producer - MapleStory