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Suggestion re: hackers and appear offline.
I just wanted to drop this suggestion here even though it will get ignored.
The appear offline function is in rampant use by both botting and hacking players because they know it makes it difficult for legit players who wish to report them to track them down.
Therefore there are two options to solve this problem.
1. Create a way for the "24/7 GM patrols" to be able to see which players are currently appearing offline and investigate them. You'll quickly find they're almost all up to no good.
2. Option two: remove this feature. Add a separate functionality (example: expand the blacklist) to deal with harassment. Prevent blacklisted people from being able to /find you or something.
Comments
In most cases hackers will always move towards the next best thing while legitimate players truly suffer.
More active and effective GM Patrol is simply the best way. There simply isn't enough effort to distinguish any effective banning with so many different botters and cheaters going rampant in any map in-game. Many players have claimed to report massive amounts of hackers yet nothing has been done.
Not only that, but their age-old hacks keep getting updated on the fly. It's time to permanently patch their tools out of existence. Nexon needs to stop doing band-aid solutions that can be undone within days if not hours.
Comon seriously? This happens in literally every MMO with kids who dream of having a "gamer gf". It's a sad dream/wish but it is what it is and it wont change. Girls if they are in fact girls should be able to deal with it easily. It's more or less just annoying. If someone is pestering me I can easily ignore them. Why can't the same be done here?
If I'm in offline mode and I don't want to be found, you're not gonna find me. Period. Cheaters are not the only ones who use the offline mode option and to assume so makes me wonder who you're trying to stalk and can't get to. Why do you care about offline mode anyways? Does it affect your gameplay in any way? Because I'm pretty sure most hackers don't give a flying fluff if you /find them or not. Or if you report them. If they get banned I'm sure it's no sweat off their back to make another bot.
It seems that many people want the ability to turn off chat and I have nothing against that but blocking /find is unacceptable. It's protecting too many cheaters. I would suggest removing that part specifically or reducing it's effectiveness somewhat.
For example: when you /find someone in appear offline mode it should give you their channel only and nothing more.
Im not against nor am I for your proposition, but why? Do you really think this will have any sort of impact against hackers/botters? If your answer is yes, then I'm afraid it's all for naught. The problem we have is not being able to report them, it's GMs not banning them. Trust me, I have reported the same hacker on 5 characters 7x in a week straight! Guess what? Still wasn't banned. So I just went a long with my maple life. If you suggest this and Nexon implements it without considering the impact it might have(which they probably will), then the only people who will be affected are legit players.
If you found out about someone cheating in another way - like through buddy chat or PM you can take screenshots and send a report through the website too. But if you encountered a cheater that way that means that they were not appearing offline anyways?
Unless you suspect someone of cheating but have no proof, and decide to follow them around for a bit to see if your suspicions are true. At that point appearing offline can certainly be pesky if you can't tail someone - on the other hand, stalking characters on suspicion of cheating can also get annoying for that person, especially if they aren't actually breaking any rules. Cheaters can hide in other ways that go beyond "appear offline" - and those breaking the rules on their main accounts will go to such lengths to make sure they are not seen by anyone. Botters in regular maps who are just using appear offline are likely to be reported by players who stumble upon their maps.
Whether they actually get banned once reported is a different issue.
This assumes that GMs don't already have tools to bypass the offline filter.
2. Option two: remove this feature. Add a separate functionality (example: expand the blacklist) to deal with harassment. Prevent blacklisted people from being able to /find you or something.
No.
Then appear offline is not needed.
They don't have to change anything about appear offline if they just do their job and look into players gaining high exp per day.
I'm kind of a shy person, I don't like interacting with even my buddylist sometimes, so I go "offline" as to not be bothered by them. I did it all the time, not because I was a cheater or anything silly like that.
Here's where it really helped me though:
I had a dedicated stalker, he stalked me on basically everything and he found me on Maple. He had a glitch where he was able to account-buddy me even though I didn't have him as an account-buddy, so he was able to find ALL my characters. Even if I blacklisted one of his characters, he just got on another one and came after me. What did I do? I went offline. He couldn't find me anymore. Done and over with.
Personally, I don't think removing the function helps anyone. GMs must have ways to bypass it, and even if you report these guys will Nexon necessarily listen? They have a history of not banning people even after multiple reports, so it won't help anyone. But hey, what do I know? I haven't played the game in months.
I didn't stay in the same spot. So yes, it did save me. Besides, I had my whispers turned off.
You do realize how many maps there are right? You can literally move one map and then they won't know where the heck you are. Sure it won't prevent you from verbal harassment via chat, but they simply won't be able to find said person and kill-steal due to thousands of maps and multiple channels.
The only people who can ever achieve such a feat besides by luck are again, hackers. Removing said option only hinders legitimate players. The Blacklist can only do so much because all you need to do to bypass that feature is login to another character and /find said person. The offline function makes sure you can't find said person.
In-game reporting is working just fine for me. What, exactly, is wrong with it? How was it not working?
Actually I am going to find you. It's really easy and i'm surprised people still don't understand how. So no point saying I wont when I have been able to find every single player in this game regardless of if they are offline or not. It just takes a bit longer if they are offline which is why I'm complaining because this function isn't good for the game.
I care because mostly all hackers and botters use this function. As I said in my previous post. It slows down the whole process of finding the player and recording evidence. So it is a problem. Hackers and botters do affect my game play. They fact they exist and are earning 50b+ per week off nodestones alone completely ignoring what they earn off elite boss drops affects me and all players greatly. It affects the market and it's downright unfair. Also they do care. Why do they care? Most of these people doing this actually care about their "reputation" even though they're a hacker or botter. They want to be seen as legit when they are in fact botting trash.
Make anouther character to bot? Sure, but you're thinking of gold farmers not players who hack and bot. There's a big difference. A player isn't going to start over especially if they have spent some of their own money on the character (which most of these guys have) and end up losing it all instantly. It can be farmed up again sure but there's loads of events that don't end up coming back. One example is the Sword art online event.
We're talking about players who hack and bot and climb ranks rapidly due to hacking. It took under 2 months to hit 250 for 1 hacker which isn't really normal even for hardcore. So we are going to know about them because we are going to see their massive spikes in exp and check what's up. 9 times out of 10 they are a hacker or botter. Even if there are no spikes, if you've been around on a server long enough you know who can and can't train for long periods of time. In other words you know who's hardcore and who isn't and you can check the ranks to see who's high rank and gaining exp. I've found on my server almost all the people that struggled to grind for one 2x event ended up resorting to hacking or botting. Not everyone but this has been the case for most.