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Why doesn't nexon investigate FM shops?
There's shops filled with nothing but cheap legendaries and elite drops. Maybe you guys should consider looking into their trade history and banning this obvious cash point for hackers?
Kill their cash and their bots won't matter.
Comments
There are a lot of fm shops so reporting them helps the GMs out a lot!
There are more than 8 FM rooms per server, and each room can host around (just guessing here) 20 shops. Conservatively (8 rooms occupied) that's around a thousand shops open at any given time.
Assuming the owner doesn't pack up and vanish or sell their wares before they're discovered.
Regardless, it's best to simply report a user in-game or via a ticket. Scanning shop-to-shop is a terribly inefficient method of search and it's better for GMs to have a target, and memeing on the forum isn't the proper way to get hackers banned.
The owner doesn't vanish. These shops are there continuously. They have no fear of GMs or anyone.
Regardless, you're right that this sort of thing shouldn't be done by patrolling GMs. It should be done by back-end data-miners and programmers.
It really shouldn't be that hard to program something that looks through all these 1000 shops and flags those that have tall ever-replenishing stacks of elite boss drops, or for that matter those that sell arrows for exorbitant prices, or any other suspicious activity.
Of course the hackers will eventually realize what's giving them away and change some of their habits, and the detection scripts would have to be adapted accordingly. But it would still be both cheaper and more effective than having GMs walk around and look at shops one by one. Or try to get through heaps of reports, way more than they can possibly follow up on.
(Anecdotally, at one point the owner of "that fm site" offered Nexon help finding meso-farmer shops, because his bots, in scanning FM, found them easily. I don't think anything came of it, but it's just one more example of a mechanism that's far more efficient than manually-patrolling GMs. Obviously, Nexon wouldn't need to run bots that pretend to be clients; they can just look at FM data from the back end.)
Also, with the new Auction House, back-end detection of suspicious activity becomes essential.
I can go into AH and see 10 stacks of CSS posted at the same time and for the same price, and conclude it's probably a botter who posted them. But I don't have an IGN to report.
It should be really trivial to scan AH listings for such things.
In fact, why wait until the items are posted to AH or FM? From the back-end, one can see character inventories and storage. Accounts holding ridiculous amounts of certain items, and especially accounts that are continuously "gifted" these items from a veritable army of other accounts, need to be banned before they get a chance to even open up shop.
Reports were submitted of course. The problem is we can report all day but if it's not something they're willing to take action on.... What options do we have left other than raising the issue where it might be heard.
This thread will probably be ignored like all threads on the massive hacking problem though.
Don't worry I have passed it along.
Takes me about 30+ mins to check all shops in Luna, adding other servers in will take several hours, along with all the other things GMs need to do.
You are saving the GM so much time if you report the shop directly.
And I will remind that I have and will continue to report.
Takes me about 5 minute to check all shops in Mybckn in which i see these "suspicious" shops everyday and there wares are never ending.
We've been sweeping up those with hacked hyper stats or skills from the rankings on the dojo frequently along with those with an unnatural number of extremely rare items such as the Frenzy Totem.
Thank you for responding to the thread, though it's a bit odd that you respond to the one comment that's off-topic to the thread itself.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "We've been sweeping up [cheaters] from the rankings on the dojo".
Do you only find them if they run Dojo? Why can't you sweep the entire player database for these signs of cheating?
After "sweeping", do you ban them? Do you remove/reset the hacked stats/skills/items from them? Or just take them off Dojo rankings?
Also, I hope you're aware that "an unnatural number of extremely rare items such as the Frenzy Totem" can be "1", if the Totem can't be traced back to direct winning or a valid transaction.
And finally, to get back to the original topic of this thread, what about an unnatural number of not-so-rare items, like Clean Slate Scrolls and Epic Potential Scrolls?
As stated many times in the past, I cannot allocate my time into sweeping the entire player data base for cheaters. However, as Okhura has already stated within this thread, the feedback and the concerns from the community in regards to suspicious FM shops has been delivered to our Production, Support, and Development teams.
At the end of the day, reporting hackers to myself is no different from reporting them to the Customer Support team. I won't ignore any reports of hackers sent to myself, but do know that I forward these reports to our Customer Support team who has the tools to administer proper actions against these hackers.
The community team is here to help all of our other teams see the bigger picture of what's going on within our community. This includes hackers and issues Maplers face in-game. We're not the proper channel to handle each of the hackers case by case.
Edit: also thank you for the responses. They are actually quite reassuring.
I am will to be patient and see what comes of this. We had a long stretch where it appeared the GMs did not care but lately has been slightly better. Players botting to 250 have been getting removed, blaze wizard bots never stopped being targetted I imagine (there's just so many).
Next is to stop players and gold farmers from selling their illegitimate plunder in the fm!
These shops have been around for months already and in MOST cases they are controlled by the exact same person with the exact same IGN for all of those months, It has gotten to the point where they now utilize Npc shops and even accept offers on some if not all of there wares.
They are so brazen that they are starting to use Fm 2-6 spots. Basically laughing in the face of Nexon.
Thank you for elaborating. It is good to hear that those cheaters are perma-banned.
I would still feel more comfortable knowing that the hacked skills or items were removed from those characters, as well. We've been burned a few too many times by hackers getting unbanned (through "Nth chance" or otherwise) and getting back in-game with all their ill-gotten gains intact.
Specifically to the bit I just quoted: when I said "Why can't you sweep the database" I did not mean you personally, but rather Nexon as a whole.
As I posted upthread, I believe a lot more can be done by having people (with the appropriate skills and job description) write queries or scripts to find cheaters through the player database, than can reasonably be accomplished by GMs or yourself doing the legwork and manually checking on players who'd been reported or randomly encountered.
Bringing up concerns as such and discussing them is a start in this constant battle against hackers.
You may want your team to consider looking into players appearing offline. This system may have been added with good intentions but it is used by players as an attempt to hide. It makes it very difficult for example for other players to find them to record them hacking/botting to report.