Pirates Are Closer Than You Think

I can just see the “welcome to last week” comments now.

I admit, when I first saw Pirates in kMS, I thought it would take years for it to reach gMS. I was wrong.

Someone at the Nexon Forum posted an image of the back of the October edition of GamePro showing an ad for playing as a pirate in the “latest expansion” of MapleStory.

Current speculation is that Pirates would be coming in November, so along with the subtle hints Nexon’s been leaving with its pirate speak, I think pirates by the end of the year will be a safe bet to say.

Now… as far as I go… I remember saying to myself that Pirates would be an interesting time to come back.  Will I hold up to that?  Who knows?

When Words Mean Nothing

UPDATE: In-game, a world mourns.

This is an odd post, and it’s definitely not like me to be posting something personal on a gaming blog, and it really pains me to write about this at the moment.

Tonight, I learned that one fairly close friend of mine from my MapleStory days, Israel Troy Ruyle a.k.a. “turkishmonky” of Bera, died late last week (Aug. 28) at the age of 18.

I do not know the cause or the events leading up to it, but for a death at so young I can only think about what happened, and I don’t want to come to that assumption.  At this point I’ve decided that I am not asking for details.  However, already on the heels of the deaths of two of my relatives (a step-great grandfather and a step-grandmother) I am finding that this is fairly devastating.

What had made his friendship unique to me in a MapleStory standpoint is that, for a hardened and strict legit player, he was one of the only a small number of ex-hacker friends that I had. (Though I had at least two others before him.)  What makes this the hardest for me, is that for all the time we shared together and when our personalities clashed, I feel horrible that I was never made up for this.

My heartfelt sypmathies go out to the Ruyle family, and all of Isreal’s in-game friends, though mainly that is for two people, both of Bera; Staci a.k.a. Staci8o8/stacix3, and Desiree a.k.a. “Dezalicious” (or whatever character she uses now) who is not just a very close friend of mine, but was quite possibly even closer of a friend to him.  I’m just sitting here and looking at her AIM away and it breaks my heart to see this happen. This shouldn’t happen. It does, but it shouldn’t.

Peace be with you, Izzy.

For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ, who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1-4 NIV)

Bigfoot Glitch Mass Ban… Or Was It?

Even in my indefinite hiatus from the game I had to seize the moment.

First of all, let me say that Nexon’s mass ban record had never been perfect; It has been far from perfect.  Nothing can be less farther from the truth than today.

This goes back to the days back in early 2007. Joe W. had made himself known in the general community as the head of the customer service department, hackers were rampant, Maplenoobs was a roaring success, and every server check and patch contained lots and lots of bans.  Every week, they would take a look at logs of possible hacking attempts, figure out which ones were positive and add them to a list that would be processed during the next SC to ban those accounts for 30 days and also take them off the rankings forever.  Many SC nights were spent to ensure that characters were still on the ranking following the SC. (Being a part of Maplenoobs meant that I was constantly searching for hackers, meaning I had to be very careful to make sure I was quick to get in, report, grab a screenshot, and leave so that I wasn’t mistakenly caught.)

However, it was not a perfect system.  False positives were found on occasion, and every once in a while you’d hear a story about how someone was wrongfully banned. (Although we’ve had threads like this made on Sleepywood, which unfortunately for them Joe stepped in and proved them wrong with video proof, which would summarily make them the laughing stock of the whole forum and eventually permabanned for being a hacker and a complete idiot.  You can still find these videos on his YouTube channel.)

Fast forward to September 2nd, 2008.

At around 4:00 PM, Nexon started handing out temporary bans between 3 and 30 days long to over 1200 people who were suspected of exploiting the Bigfoot glitch. (As I haven’t played the game in months, I don’t know what the exact glitch is.)  However, they might not have been as accurate as they thought.  Suddenly, topics at the Nexon Forums, Sleepywood, and MapleTowers were made by people that were banned, yet they never even touched Bigfoot.

Now, with some of the supposed “false” hacking log bans I could understand.  Maybe out of those that killed Bigfoot a bunch of times since its insertion in the last patch, but how can accounts where no characters fought Bigfoot at all be included with this?

I guess some mysteries were left unsolved.

(As a side note: The bans that were handed out for this purpose were filed under the “misconduct” reason, meaning that a permanent ranking ban will likely not happen for these accounts.  However they will no longer be able to change names or worlds.)