TwilightHime

Fuhreak wrote: »

There are tools that can do that, yes. Just look on github. Really people, it's not nearly as air tight as you think.
The number of banned accounts thing would be what really kills it. You run into the problem of every phone number under the sun being blocked from Nexon accounts though.

Remember that Korean MMOs are backed by real world data as well (KSSN) and they still have hackers.
It might slow them down, but it certainly won't stop them.
https://leagueofbetting.com/north-korea-hacks-south-korean-mmo-to-fund-nuclear-weapons-program/

Can you link a github example that you have seen that would be an effective bypass against SMS verification, for farm bots?
Having every phone number under the sun being blocked is not really a problem.

The goal is precisely to slow them down, not to stop hacking completely. I think you have a very different goal in mind.

PeachCrisps wrote: »

It's unlikely as you can use services that provide SMS verification without the need for a cellphone. They provide a web interface and numbers for anyone to use to get around SMS verification. You can also use Google Voice for a free number to use for SMS verification.

The most it may do is cause the botters to add another step to their account creation tools, but once that's done they can make accounts just as fast as they do now.

StarryKnight wrote: »

It would have little to no effect. Nothing is stopping someone from botting even after using SMS verification, and buying a 20 dollar track/burner phone is just a 5 minute walk to walmart away, not to mention just leads to hackers cloning phones, running fake sms software, etc. Just makes hackers have to put in 1-2 minutes of additional work prior to hacking.

I'm thinking there is a limit to the number of numbers you can get a hold of. Anyone can create millions of emails off their own email server or even gmail, but can someone do the same thing with phone numbers?

I have used online SMS services, but I had to go through hoops just to get more than one. And since many of them were shared, it would be useless if it was already used. There were paid services that would give you your own phone number, but I don't know if creating my own number was an option.

But let's say they could get as many numbers as they wanted as long as they paid for it. If a hacker has to spend $20 per character or even $1 per character, that might be a huge cost that would make it less cost-effective to run thousands of bots.

I haven't used google voice before, but it looks like you need a google account and a US phone number to actually get a google voice number. A hacker that's planning to create thousands of phone numbers would probably be dealt with by google themselves, which means less work for nexon.

Many services these days require you to sign up with both an email and a phone number, where you'll be sent a verification text. If account creation required a player to have a valid phone number, would that cut down the number of bots that hackers can create?

GM's and GM team is needed big time to help cut those ilegal trades that land in "legal chars"
therefore hacking will become harder and less wanted (a better step for less hackers)

It would be rather difficult to distinguish "legit mains" that are being funded from hacked accounts. I'd say 90% of the crafting material and emob/eboss drops are obtained through hacks. When a major patch comes out, the market for these items becomes pretty dry pretty quickly and supply never keeps up until hackers figure out how to get past the new security.

That means anyone could be flagged as one of these "mains" if they tried to trace item or cash flow.
Sure you might have the stupid ones that just move all their mesos and items to one or two characters directly because they're stupid, but one would hope nexon can figure that out.

WONDERGUY wrote: »

if nexon makes that dream Ai that learns how to catch hacker/rule breaker
rule breaks/hackers makes same kind of "ai" to learn fast how to avoid such flags

so it will be endless AI war loop that catch so many wrongly each time it gets "updated"

Well, that's how auto-ban systems work: you report a hack, GM looks at what's going on, and decides whether they need to add a new rule to their system. Then when they decide it's time to do a sweep, every account that gets caught gets wiped and then bera is no longer always full for a few days.

GM's manually looking at each case is no different from having a system run the same checks.

70-140k ~ bans of such accounts each week in a 5k~ playerbase
they dont care about the ban when they allready transfer the goods to "legit char" they are just burner accounts or whatever they name it
sure it cleans good chunk of "hackers" but more like only on paper
just like the operation was successful, but the patient died
falsely strikeing legit players so often in allready small player base its not just margin of error that just we can go with it

Well, it's either that or you have 140k characters hacking everywhere. I mean, sure it would be ideal if no legit players were flagged (not everyone that claims to be legit is necessarily legit either), but there isn't really much room for compromise here.

Having a GM manually go through each character doesn't guarantee that the number of false positives will decrease either. In fact I'd say the number of false positives would only increase because humans get sloppy after checking 30000 characters that are doing the same things and if they happen to get lazy on the 30001st character and it's yours, it's the same result.

An important question to consider is whether the issues we experience in GMS is universal across all maplestory servers. Does KMS have the issue. Does TMS have the issue. What about MSEA?

If the other servers are in better shape, then it's something GMS team needs to figure out.