29-JUN Another reckless decision or the right one?
http://forums.maplestory.nexon.net/discussion/14386/duplicated-item-removal
Leveling another union noob yesterday, I noticed the smega's were exploding with quitting messages and even more grim nexon attacks.
Later in the night, it became more obvious that nexon had deleted hacked/duped items without any warning or any compensation for players.
From the thread, "This decision was made to combat hackers, discourage the usage of exploited equipment, and address an issue with the game's state of balance caused by these items."
Now I think the general basis behind trying to restore some balance and discourage hacked items is great. However, I certainly do not believe that this is not the way to handle it. If you ask me, I would have no way of knowing whether something that's in someone's shop/auction house is hacked/duped or not. For me to spend years to save up enough mesos to buy an item only to have it deleted would be pretty upsetting to me. Whether it was the time spent or real money spent. Using money to buy items have been unpunished for so long that it's almost become a standard in this game. To one day just say "nope" is a pretty low blow, especially if you consider how much some items even sell for in USD.
So I wanted to ask, what do you guys think about how Nexon's handling this?
Moving forward, I'm sure the worlds will become considerably more silent and less trades/purchases happening. Instead of punishing everyone who holds the items, punish the people who are actually creating said items.
20 Comments • Newest first
encourages me to comeback
@wolfexe: Punish the buyers who willingly knew I agree with, punish traders/buyers who bought/traded unknowingly I can't agree with. Take a clean duped Frenzy, there's really no way to tell. They were going for what, $400? That's probably still cheaper than going through Marvel/Philo boxes, but in reality I don't think the average player thinks $400 is a deal for one ingame item. @rachelll brought up the guy that lost an outlaw heart to a trade. Is that really his fault? He lost a legit item in a trade, and no compensation. There's reports of people losing sup gollux and CRA gears too. Gollux was 2013 (dawnveil update) and CRA was even before that. They're finally deleting equipment that could potentially be as old as 4+ years. That's a scary thought, that alone should push people away from FM/auction house without any questions asked.
If nexon is going to be proactive in dupe removals then as @nitsua2789 says, then this blow would be beneficial. If they are looking at this action as "hey guys, praise us we've deleted all dupes" then it's worthless because you know there's that constant fear of buying anything from anyone because one day it could just be gone from your inventory.
Just play on reboot and you will not be affected by this BS.
@zcrimsyn: There's a case of someone having their outlaw heart removed because they traded theirs for another person's because it had the stats they wanted. They just didn't know the other guy's heart was duped because it's actually impossible for a player to tell definitely.
This recent action seriously undermines player's confidence in the market and thus undermining the premise of having a free market
@endurance: How so? Just bc you get punished for breaking the rules? Stop buying hacked gears then and you won't have any issues.
This game will end up dead like OGPlanet La Tale eventually
You need to punish the buyers as well. You say "only punish the ones making the exploited items" but think of it this way, if players weren't buying them there would be no market for them. And on top of that, if I were to exploit items, I would do it on more than one account. At that point, if each exploiter runs it on a bunch of accounts, there's no real way to catch all of them. It's sad that it's needed, but it is needed.
The removal of duped items isnt an issue, and they made the correct decision.
The issue is that they don't do this often enough, so in a server like Scania it becomes nearly impossible to AVOID buying a duped item. They allowed the market to become so heavily saturated with dupes that players basically had 2 options:
-Completely avoid the FM
-Buy a duped item and possibly get rekt for it
If they did this kind of thing every 2 months then nobody would have any problems with it. The problems only arise because the do this thing maybe once every 2 YEARS.
@rachelll: Now that you mention it, I do recall that. The inconsistency at that time was absurd.
I still think it was a good move executed extremely poorly, however it still is on nexon for follow-up. If this is a one time and then forget about it, I'll agree right with you regarding a marketing ploy as history will most likely repeat itself. If they actively delete from this day forward and keep the markets clean, I'll have some faith in their word. Maybe we'll finally start to see flames when they realize no one can actually do hard lucid/current dojo without hacked gear.
@rachelll: Insightful.
When you look at the financial report you linked previously, they are expecting an influx of teens and younger players during the coming Q3 financial period (Summer months, for the people who are unfamiliar); they want to make significant revenue off younger players to avoid hemorrhaging more money and laying off people to save money; I'm sure their team is willing to use those tactics you have stated and more to ensure maximum revenue.
The younger players have less willpower and experience, an immature brain and psychology; so they are more inclined to reckless spending and also believe it is okay to do so.
Hopefully the incoming players will limit their game-play and spending, or would at least become self-aware to avoid an unnecessary life of pain.
OT: I don't really know, the decision keeps going in different directions in my mind. Perhaps it is a neutral decision, one with benefits and detriments.
Nexon made the right decision at the wrong time and for the wrong reason. If they were sincere about restoring the balance of the game and all that stuff they claimed, they would've done it a very long time ago.
There's clearly a Double Miracle Time coming up very soon and it's hard not to notice that doing this(deletion) immediately prior to Miracle Time benefits them in many ways. MT would soften the blow to those who lost their items so they won't quit. It's also worth pointing out that a majority of those who lost their items are willing to spend money in this game as a good portion of these items were bought with real life currency.
Regardless of how you feel about this action, this was another inconsistent move by Nexon:
December cube exploit 2015: Those who bought items/came in contact with items that were exploited were permanently banned.
July cube exploit 2016: Those who bought items/came in contact (including mules of exploiters)were NOT banned. Only those who directly exploited the bug (which was the same as the December one) were banned.
Arcane weapon exploit: Some of those who came in contact with items/bought the items were permanently banned.
Removal of duplicated items: None of those who came in contact with items/bought the items were banned.
All 4 cases violated the same part of the ToS regarding benefiting from hackers/exploiters. The 1st 3 were caused by a game bug being exploited. The 4th one is a blatant duping of item. Either ban everyone who came in contact with duped items/bought duped items or unban those who got banned for the same/lesser offense in the past.
@deeemon: No one will disagree those were annoying, but one has to now tread really carefully beyond this incident.
Items that were tainted were just removed. You have a tyrant that has a star enhancement that was used with a duped no boom. Might as well delete that as well. You sold a piece of NX but the purchase was using botted meso, your item sold and your meso gain deleted.
Oh and btw, no compensation. That's what I'm afraid of.
*Edit* unless they're planning on putting every single p2w item for ingame availability that's not ridiculous endgame. No boom AEE, frenzy, lgr, primes, outlaw, broid, perm pendant, perm hyper tele, etc... If they're able to be obtained through in games means rather than really awful rng boxes then sure. Until then, I suspect in one way or another everyone will be affected in the future whether it be through mesos or items.
If I roll a 30% stat gollux pendant, and want to trade for my stat with equivalent stats, I don't want to have to worry about whether it's going to be deleted in the future while he gets to keep mine because the one he traded me was not legit. I already don't trade except with friends in RL due to lack of trusting others in this game, but it shouldn't have to be like this.
Those item megaphones were pretty damn annoying, dood. Garbage bag Scamians these days. I'd say nexon made the right decision. These players need to stop being so lazy and find their own items for once.
@gakinotsukai: Yea, the current owners will be victims of this fraud. Among these victims there are players who are unaware of and players who are aware of. Hackers and exploiters always win.
@hualicious: That's also a part of my concern too. Dupers dupe and create, those items goes into circulation. Nexon deletes those items pissing the current owner of that item. Duper continues to make more and make money.
Who's really affected by this if you aren't killing off the source.
@andreaverilia: They only removed the items, didn't ban them. Maybe they only banned those who created the duped items. It shouldn't be that many players then who duped in comparasion who bought them.
I just hope nexon proactively deletes daily, if they wait for months to years to delete duped items again, they just aren't learning.
Who knows maybe they will give a ''second'' chance like they did with the old exploit that gave hammers, scrolls and cubes for clicking receive multiple times.
They had to unban everyone because they lost little more than 70% of their population lmao.
I stopped playing there even tho I did get unbanned
I think they did a 50 / 50 thing, good and bad for them that'll eventually be the same for most community later.
The thing is that dupers already earned all that real life currency, Nexon is a bit late on this action.
Hackers with high status pretending to quit after selling fake stuff to people for tons of cash, ha. I kept telling myself anyone with two or more of those is bad news. Feel bad for those who made such transactions.
This is a hard decision. I made a guess right after the game was up, when 'certain' players were unable to login on their main character, that it had something to do with duped items. It only needed a few hours to confirm it when these players were able to login to the game.
Most of these players do know about these kind of stuff. It's exactly the same players who often abuse in the game and of course there are sadly also players who are unaware of and get scammed this way by purchasing a 'deleted' duped item.
I can't say if Nexon made the right decision but I can say this is a good punishment for those who often cheat in this game and still did the transaction, although it's also unfair because it's not a tiny amount of 'cash' that they lost.