Hello, I would like to propose a possible permanent solution to the lag and deflation that plagues our servers.
First, an explanation of the issue for any players who may not be fully informed. You may have noticed there was no lag for the last couple of weeks, and that now it has returned. There are thousands of meso botters farming maps within the servers, and up until recently the public botting program was incompatible with the latest update. The reason these botters produce so much lag isn't only because of their sheer numbers, but because each one is using base damage and equips and relying on hundreds of lines per second to defeat monsters, looting hundreds of meso bags in seconds, thus overloading the servers. (IP) Banning them isn't a realistic solution because of the success they have experienced and their resourcefulness; they will simply change their IP and create more bots. These botters then sell these mesos to players through websites and smegas, and every day they are bringing more and more mesos into the servers. The value of mesos in scania is currently $2 for 1b, or over 1:400 for NX. There are simply too many mesos, and the problem is only getting worse.
The best solution in my mind is simply to remove their "food source", much like you would to prevent ant infestation. More specifically, prevent monsters over level 50(?) from dropping mesos, or prevent meso drops from monsters altogether.
My thoughts:
-Beginners can rely on potions dropped by monsters and selling ETC drops to make their start.
-Even if this did not fully stop botters from farming elites, it would still reduce lag due to the reduction in data for no mesos looted. It would also gradually restore the value of mesos and cause botters to rely purely on elites for the meso they sell.
-This would not hurt legitimate players at all. We generally don't generate our own mesos from regular mobs, but rather by selling the potions and items that bosses drop.
-This solution could not be applied to Reboot, but as botters slowly reduce in all the servers, Reboot should also experience a reduction in lag. Additionally they do not have an issue with deflation because their meso has no sellable or tradable value.
- The economy is in ruins and Scania is especially bad. Some of the best items easily sell for 100b+ mesos, which is frustrating when 10b mesos is the cap. We tried increasing the meso cap from 2.14b to 10b, but that combined with meso botting only caused meso to deflate even more rapidly. 10b is worth less now than 2.14b was worth before the change.
-This would be a welcome change for players with slower computers or multiple pets looting, because hundreds of meso bags on the ground produce client and computer based lag (frame rate loss), as opposed to server lag produced by overpopulation (a.k.a botters). Frame rate loss combined with server lag, disconnects, and x2 events truly becomes overwhelmingly laggy for legitimate players trying to enjoy the game.
-Convert the potential line of "Mesos Obtained +20%" to either drop rate or potion/healing skill effectiveness. (This change should not be applied to Reboot)
TLDR: Remove meso drops from regular monsters.
This one small change has the potential to not only reduce the strain on the servers, but also help restore the value of mesos over time, instead of the current path of continued deflation and server lag.
Credit to Mandy of Scania for this idea.
Comments
Bots can NPC potion and equipment drops, too. And they can hack the bosses easily. In the past, when boss drops were worth it, they did so, a lot. I still remember watching an endless stream of generic-gear Kaisers marching into Cygnus Garden.
Yes, they won't be able to bot as many meso per hour as they do now, but they also won't need to. The price of meso will rise from $2 per billion to $2 per million, and they'll still sell because some people would still rather pay than grind.
The only way to remove botters' "food source" would be to make legitimate players' primary meso source something that can't be botted.
(As an aside, all in-game meso-sinks would have to be very heavily cut. People would not be able to afford the current prices of star enhancement or arcane upgrades if raw meso drops go away. New players would even be hard-put to buy mastery books)
Thank you for your insight! I hadn't considered the implications it would have on the star enhancement system.
Sadly, anything can be botted. My end goal is ultimately to reduce the lag, i fully understand and agree that stopping botting outright is unattainable. The fact that this idea helps with deflation is just a wonderful side effect. Sure, botters will always find a way. However, I find the current standard botting method is creating so much lag and deflation that it is killing the game for legitimate players. I too remember the days of cygnus botters, but I think it is safe to say that those methods were less harmful to the player-base than the current method. I doubt 90% of those botters farming cygnus armors were people using botting on MapleStory as a substitution for a primary means of income. More likely they were trying to get flush with mesos so they could improve their range on their main. They weren't all non-players advertising 20 times a day that they were selling mesos and providing links to their websites. In fact, I find the current conditions to be far worse than anything i have experienced since the servers first opened.
My hope is to inconvenience hackers. Consider how much more difficult it would surely be to write a code that autonomously farms various bosses all day long, with no gear or prep-work or drop rate. Or, more realistically, simultaneously NPCs potions and armors with limited inventory space while also botting the monsters that drop them, in order to keep a small base size inventory from filling in minutes. The reason the botters are so out of hand is because of how convenient and effortless the current standard practice is. You can ban one of the dozens of characters they are botting on, and they can have a new one up and running again in less time than it took to ban them.
As noted, even if this didn't discourage a single botter from farming, no meso bags being picked up would result in at least marginally less lag, and would instantly stop deflation. I feel the pros outweigh the cons, even in a worst case-scenario outcome.
Also, please consider how long it would be before it became viable for hackers to generate their meso income primarily from NPCing potions and equipment. Meso would have to go up in value ten fold before it would be worth the mesos they could generate per minute, and with the current overflow of mesos, i am confident that this could easily take a year or more. On our current course and in consideration of the lag and the number of friends I have watched quit, I am skeptical that this game will even survive another year. I know I personally won't be playing it by then if nothing changes.
There's a reason bosses used to only be available on a few channels. And a reason why channels 14-16 (CRA channels) lag much harder than other channels, especially during 2x. Boss fights put a strain on the server.
You have to remember that the botters aren't doing this for fun. For most of them, the so-called "Chinese gold farmers", this is their business. Their job. Their way of making real-world money. They will go to whatever trouble is necessary to make it continue to produce income. I mean, when Reboot came out, Nexon (and we) thought it would be bot-free, because it has no trading. But the gold farmers found a method to make $$ in Reboot as well, and they are botting away even there.
They work around all the methods Nexon comes up with to "incovenience" them - and meanwhile the legitimate users remain truly inconvenienced, or worse, with no workaround. Just look at the upcoming removal of direct launch.
The lag due to meso bag looting could be mitigated by having meso be earned like exp, as soon as you kill the mob.
But I don't really think it's a cause of server lag. It's a big cause of client lag, due to the stupid way the game checks whether your loot matches your active quests, but that's a whole different issue.
Say it did force them into farming bosses all day long instead for improved profit margins, how would that work? Killing those bosses is much more difficult than killing mobs, their current garbage gear won't cut it anymore. What would they be farming? Souls, cubes, mesos, potions, and random gear to npc? This simply wouldn't be a viable option with the current meso rate. Nexon has already discouraged this practice by making most boss armor drops worth 1 meso. I do not think this is where they will turn. I am quite sure they will just continue doing what they are right now, but only earning elite drops instead of raw meso. During the meso rate adjustment period, would they not lose a lot of money?
Earlier, you pointed out that I am here to tell you that myself and many others are already doing this. The process of finding gear to improve upon (sweetwater, gollux, etc) and then give potential and use boss cubes to rank up to ideal potential lines to sell for profit is much too complicated to be done automatically by a botting program. There are too many steps involved and too much data to interpret. I concede that these are not "raw" mesos that are being generated in game, but it is a primary source of income that a botter cannot replicate. The growing problem is that this legitimate but complicated method of producing income is further undermined every day that botters are allowed to loot raw mesos and further deflate its value. The profitability of creating and selling these items continues to drop, and the existing mesos we have saved through our diligent grinding of bosses continues to deflate further and further.
Regardless of whether or not removing meso drops would be enough to cause botters to shift to some different method, I think we can agree that something needs to be done. The lag over the last 6 or so months has been more destructive to the games playability than any previous methods that community has had to tolerate.
That being said, removal of raw meso drops may be a good place to start. I know that if I could simply disable meso bag drops while training, I would. They create more client based lag than they are worth when you are trying to efficiently earn EXP.
It is an idea that seems to be win/win. The only real immediate negative impact it would have would be towards the botters.
Say that this idea were implemented, and the result was that the meso rate did finally inevitably adjust to reasonable levels after several months, but it did nothing to stop the botters from farming elites and they carried right along doing the same exact thing (I understand this is the most likely outcome). I would still call that a win! It inconveniences legitimate players less than the removal of direct launch. It would be nice if something were to be done about the steady meso inflation. Within 6 months it will be $1 per 1b, and nexon will eventually either have to remove raw meso drops or increase the meso cap to 100b... Their meso-sinks like star force enhancement, arcane levels, and fees/taxes are just a band-aid to this issue that have failed to solve deflation. This would permanently fix that issue.
Perhaps they fear it would remove some of the character from the game? For a new player, looting stacks of dollar bills or sacks of money feels good and is aesthetically pleasing, "loot" is much of MapleStory's initial appeal, even if today those few meso sacks they are picking up are next to worthless. This concern would make sense to me.
Still feel the pros outweigh the cons. Stabilizing the value of the in-game currency would improve the experience for legitimate players.
Do you think that the removal of direct launch is going to reduce the number of Chinese gold farmers, even temporarily?
How is a new player supposed to be able to get to the point where they're able to get Gollux or Sweetwater items, and significant amounts of boss-dropped cubes to enhance them with, if they can't even make enough meso while training to buy mastery books? And are forced to sell any spell traces, clean slates and epic pot scrolls they do get, to established players who happen to have stacks of billions of meso from back before meso drops were removed, for an ever-decreasing price?
I understand that you are saying, "I don't need meso bag drops, they lag my client and I make more meso by killing major bosses and selling their (enhanced) drops", but not everyone is like you. Just this last patch we saw people asking, "How am I supposed to play without NLC potions?" when the subway to NLC disappeared. New and/or less informed players would be in deep deep trouble if they couldn't loot meso.
Maybe that is a solution. Make the game practically unplayable solo, for a new player. Force them into guilds that will gift them potions and mastery books, guide them how to sell elite boss drops, and carry them through major bosses. But we have to think very very carefully whether this is the way we want things done.
Conversely, if you remove meso drops and also sharply reduce people's existing meso stockpiles, then the market adjustment to lower prices will be swift and botters' income will continue uninterrupted.
By comparison, something like requiring phone verification to create a new account, is a simpler solution to the bot issue, with very little effect on legit players.
If removing mesos was implemented - perhaps the equivalent of mesos that would have been gained from mobs should be added to the quest lines in the surrounding areas / levels. It would provide better rewards for doing quests and it would be a tedious task for hackers to complete and turn in quests - wasting more of their precious botting time & forcing them to rely on selling items - also a time waster. New players on the other hand, would most likely be questing so this wouldn't hurt them.
Nexon should definitely be considering alternate systems for reducing botting because the current system of banning them one by one is not working. Not only that but there are no real repercussions for players who buy from the meso selling sites (again, the banning system is too slow to keep up with the amount of people). As long as there are customers, botters will continue to infest the servers.
Nexon is making Maplestory less accessible by the day, by constantly increasing its minimal hardware requirements.
I doubt there are many people in GMS' service region who have a computer and internet, and don't have access to any kind of telephone.
GMail, for example, is willing to make voice calls to give you your code. So you don't need a smartphone. A landline will do as well.
Also, since GMS does not limit the number of accounts per user, everyone in the household can use the same phone number for verification.
Difference is that if one account using the phone number gets caught and banned, the number itself is banned. All accounts registered with it will get banned too, and no more accounts can use it in the future.
This is similar to what KMS has, btw.
How would you change the number? Once you've verified the account, that's the account's phone number, forever.
It's not like the email, where Nexon wants you to update it so they can send you spam.
They're not supposed to send you anything to your phone after the initial verification.
(Unless we're talking about using phone verification as account-theft protection, but that's a whole different story)
I suppose you could, but not after your old phone got banned.
Bots NPC drops at town shops all the time. They teleport so it's even easier for them than it is for a new player to walk back and forth. Their inventory space is no more limited than a new player's.
don't they usually have a huge amount of drops still laying at their feet? They probably can't pick up every item
Edit: And the inventory space can be quickly expanded by doing events and getting reward points, something botters don't do
Combined with teleportation hacks, they can easily warp between maps from training ground, to town shop, and back literally within seconds.
It's about 10 to 20 times faster than an average player if you compare between 2 large maps alone. It's amazing how age old hacks aren't patched to this day, and only band-aid fixes such as removing Gamelauncher.
Hackers have appeared again within a day or two.