There has been quite some dissent regarding the latest Maple Memo and it can be seen why. This is a huge change for Reboot players, especially newer players that are trying to get their feet in the water in Reboot. While many players hate the change, I think that it could possibly be a good change. However, what I'm worried about is its implementation into the game. This change was stated to be implemented in order to create a more "balanced" Maple economy and to counter abuse by illicit players.
However, I think that Nexon's priority is all messed up. This change is going to hurt many Reboot players, especially those that are new and cannot reach certain areas of the game on their own. They continue to punish legitimate players by both wrongfully banning them and forcing them to adjust to these new systems. Legitimate players are constantly having to adjust their methods and play-styles in order to adjust to Nexon's attempt at getting rid of these illicit players. What Nexon is not doing, or at least not communicating that they are doing, is trying to improve their banning system. Instead of punishing legitimate players and making them work around these illicit players as well, Nexon needs to improve their anti-cheat system in order to: 1) stop wrongful bans, and 2) lower the amount of illicit players in this game. I read about all of these wrongful bans and, while I don't know if they are 100% innocent, I just feel sorry for those players and I play in fear of being a victim to Nexon's awful anti-cheat system.
Another way that Nexon could improve this situation is to make creating an account more strenuous. If I recall correctly, KMS requires people that want to create an account to verify their identity with their SSN or other government issued identification. This would significantly decrease the amount of illicit players in GMS, and I don't know why Nexon America has not decided to take this approach. Once an illicit players, account is banned, they can't just simply go and make a new account, since they don't have multiple SSN's or government issued identification (at least I would hope not). Currently, those illicit players, once banned, can just simply make a new email, make a new Nexon account, and go right back into abusing the game with illicit programs. Unless they improve the anti-cheat system and the new account making system, these illicit players won't stop.
Making meso-obtaining less efficient doesn't hurt these illicit players very much. The audience that it does hurt is the legitimate players, as they can't just turn on an illicit program and continue to abuse the game. I just think that Nexon needs to re-prioritize their focus and actually listen and take in feedback from their community. I think one of the biggest reasons that players of this game are always so angry at Nexon is because they don't feel as though they are being listened to and that Nexon is just so disconnected from their game and their community.
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but a government id system for a global playerbase is probably more complicated than it sounds
"Look, see this other version of the game that only serves a single country? We should do it like them with our globally-reaching player base. I see no issues here."
I feel like you're conflating a limited-entry type of thing with a single-restriction type of thing.
Here's a link to an imgur that I made showing the player rankings for both. Note that for the KMS rankings, I only included the non-Reboot worlds and for GMS, I included both Reboot, and non-Reboot worlds. KMS still beats out GMS in population by around double. Also towards the end of the GMS players rankings, it's mainly just hackers and bots.
Link: [Removed]
https://pdf.irpocket.com/C3659/drYi/y6kI/LC9S.pdf
I think properly combatting hackers would probably require massive changes to the game engine and the game's system to make them much more difficult to mess with. After all, the game seems to be running on a quite old proprietary engine. Alternatively, if the base combat loop was made significantly more difficult (compensated with higher rewards of course) mobbing might be harder to automatize, though that might be a too radical change to the core gameplay itself.
its not allowed to name and shame
endangeredandlegalspecies on forum or point at them on rankingalso about the last MEMoE they just briefly touched some future
changesand didnt say much about so it opens much more problems then we have nowthings like meso/drop gear/familiars are they going to nerf ... still hangs in air and makes panic
just typical nexonNA with poor communication, dont know why they did mention/talk about this without haveing some final details about the change
is this first unique thing nexonNA is doing themself after a while ? (hard to believe they can do that or something working to come out of it)
or just copy-paste from some other version where we can understand this change better
I agree that handing out sensitive information such as SSN can be quite iffy. Just to address a previous comment, I don't want to complete ride KMS's coat tails and follow their exact methods, as I understand that GMS is its own server and region with a completely different audience. I'm just suggesting that there are some things that KMS does well that could potentially benefit GMS and help to alleviate some of its current issues. KMS allows foreign players to verify their ID with a government issued ID. However, they don't require their photo, address, or signature to be in the picture, so prospective players can simply white them out of the picture. As for foreign minors who don't have a government issued ID, while they can't play on KMS servers, I don't see why GMS's implementation of this wouldn't allow them to use their parents' or guardians' government issued ID in the same manner. I will admit that one issue that I see with this, is that parents/guardians wouldn't feel comfortable sharing their government issued ID for the sake of playing a video game, and to this, I can't seem to see a workaround. It would just have to be up to the family I guess.
It does seem like a lot of work, but this is only a one time thing. Once they have been verified, they can simply go right back to playing the game. As for the hackers, once they make an account and they get banned, their options of creating multiple new accounts to hack on are very very limited. This doesn't just make hacking inefficient for them, it removes the ability to even have an opportunity to hack. Of course, improving the anti-cheat system would also be important, so that legitimate players don't get wrongfully banned and have to go through a strenuous process again to play the game.
Now, if a company like that can't even secure their data, why in the hell would you want NEXON all of companies to have your private information?
If you're going to have any kind of security along those lines, let's not jump to the absolute limit and put data like that on the line.
If Nexon were to do anything, they'd want to start smaller, with stuff like say, phone numbers.
I'm not too keen on how the law works in all the areas that GMS oversees, but I imagine requiring information like that would be illegal in at least one or more of them.
It's easier for Nexon to just accidentally ban a few people and unban them (assuming they aren't lying about the ban) then it is to go through not only legal ramifications, but change the entire registration method and require millions of accounts to be re-verified, a lot of which won't be able to.
If you don't re-verify the accounts, hackers will still be a problem for awhile as these people can easily setup thousands of accounts for backup usage.
You're potentially wronging even more people with this method than the false bans are.
We're running out of numbers anyway and the system is likely to get an overhaul or serious problems will arise.
Even if Nexon were to use something, SSN isn't the best way to doing that. I think it's the base game, Nexon's AI, or something other than account related that needs to changes.
Hackers will always find a way around systems. The thing is, you have to make sure it isn't worth their time.
And if a hacker gets banned, since nexo knows its direction they could take legal actions regarding them or at least make them pay a big penalty fee for it
Additionally, how would Nexon know if the SSN you are using is yours or valid in the first place? I doubt that they would go through the effort needed to integrate with the ID verification systems of all of the countries in the scope of GMS even if they were able to do so.
Identity theft is not a joke, Jim. Millions of families suffer every year!
creditcard is kind of ID aswell, also there is so much more data nexon is collecting aswell that can be used as identity or verify users for a start
Like for example?
creditcard,phone,ip,computer type/system,linked social media accounts... and so much more data they take/got that can makeup for SSN or get close to it
Creditcard is obviously going to be a little bit more sensitive. Phone, IP, Computer Type, Social Media are all handed out like candy these days and come nowhere NEAR the compromising power that giving someone your SSN does.
You can't steal someone's identity based on their name and IP address alone.
creditcard info(name/street adress/phone..)from users should be allredy in nexon hands i guess, so its the other parts
the point is to make it harder then next next ok new acc spam random ign on keyboard hack next next new acc spam random ign on keyboard hack...
thats why hackers go so far and make so much acc and dont care if they get ban or how hard AB finds them
look over 100k bans each week(some even less then a week) and still it feels like no one got ban
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its not 100k players its few players that makes all of em
playerbase hard gets to 10k mark