This is yet another post about hackers.

However, unlike the majority of the posts that come before it this is a post written by a major computer geek with heavy programming, internet and database background who’s been analyzing the way that the game is run. I’m also a hacker, not in the terms of using a program someone else wrote to do things but writing my own software to modify values inside a running program or game. I do it for the challenge of it and sometimes to provide features for games that the developers neglected to put in (a.k.a. a save feature). I’m all for people cheating on games when there’s nothing besides personal enjoyment involved as they are just ruining the experience of having real game playing skills. I strongly dislike it when people cheat on community games where other people than themselves are involved, like MMORPG games.

I’ve been playing Maple Story for about three our four months now and I’ve played on great connections and on slow connections. The slow connections have let me see under the hood of the Maple Story program by seeing what still works and doesn’t work when the system doesn’t get any response from this server.

The majority of the hacks rely on one simple thing to make life easier for the hackers: The Maple Story server doesn’t have verification that things are OK to be doing. Therefore because the MS server can’t know the exact location of the monsters on your screen at every moment it relies on the game to determine how damage has been done. However, the deaths of monsters is something that is handled on the MS server so when your connection lags a high level could deal out over 100k of damage to a snail without it dying. That damage will all be sent through and tallied up when the connection resumes. This reliance on the game means that by making sure that the game never detects a collision with between your character and a monster you end up with a god mode hack, or by making it so that all collisions respond with a “monster-missed” message you have the miss hack.

Now based on the way the MS system works there’s almost no real way to stop these hacks from being available. The one thing that you could do would be to store all of the user and monster data on the remote server and doing all of the processing there. This would remove the ability of people to not get hit but only at a lot of extra cost for the MS server, making each server able to support less people and greatly increasing the lag for players. Any one who had played the original Quake online (before Quakeworld came out) could see how poorly this worked.

So the god mode hacks and miss hacks are two hacks that would take such a radical redesign that they would end up making the game even more unplayable than it would be to just put up with the hacks. But what’s the real problem with these two hacks? Sure it’s a little annoying to watch a character take no damage while you are getting pounded but besides that annoyance this is only minorly helping them out. The real problem comes from when they combine the no damage hacks with vacuum hacking and possibly botting too.

Even though the vacuum hacks are the major problem I am going to skip them for a bit and instead talk about jump/teleport hacking. Jump/teleport hacking is once again based on the fact that the MS server relies on the game to determine where the character is at all times. This means that by changing the in game variables for the character position you can either smoothly slide up and around on the screen (fly hack) or leap quickly to a particular location on the screen and possibly stay stuck there (teleport hack).

This again is an annoyance for people who play fairly as others use these abilities to zoom quickly across maps, fly up corridors that would take time to do (Ludi PQ is a big place for this) or just plain taunt other by flying around and dropping good items in locations that no can who is not hacking can get to. Just like the no damage hacks, the jump hacks are mainly a giant annoyance because people use them in combination with the vacuum hacks and botting to allow themselves to level at an enormous rate and also gather up a higher amount of mesos and rare items.

Mainly this involves setting a vacuum hack to vacuum the monsters to a particular location on the map, whether that be outside of the normal boundaries of the map or just up really high. Both locations are places where you can not manage to see the hacker anywhere except on the mini map so you can not get their name or right-click them in order to report them to the GM’s.

Unlike the God Mode hacks this hack can be stymied by some small additions to the MS server map database. All you have to do is determine an outside boundary for each map (i.e. the lowest/highest point you can legally go) and when a character manages to travel beyond that boundary and stay there for a decent period of time (Jumps, Teleports and Hermit/Chief Bandit double jumps would have the character be in and out too fast) and their character and account gets flagged as a potential hacker account. Then the GM’s can have a list of all the people with this potential hacker flag on and quickly jump to that location to see if there is true hacking going on and ban that account.

The beauty of this system is that regular people who happened to end up outside of the boundaries by accident will be checked out and determined not to be hacking and have the flag removed. Due to the delay between the flag being set and the hacker being banned it would also be harder for a hacker to determine what they did that caused the GM’s to be alerted.

The downfalls of this system are that a hack could be developed to pick up another player and shove them outside of the maps boundaries and hold them there until a GM comes to ban them. I did watch a player claim he was going to vacuum hack the players in Free Market rather than monsters and me and other players nearby did start to slide towards him so I know this is possible.

Although I haven’t seen a teleport hack to do something like this, it is completely possible to create a teleport hack to quickly jump across the maps between the channel change point and the boss monsters. This would allow one character to quickly check all twenty channels for a spawned Mushmom or Jr Balrog and provide them with a major advantage.

So far we’ve hit two major hacking areas in Maple Story both of which are more of minor annoyances unless used in combination with the third one, Vacuum Hacking. Vacuum hacking uses some part of the game code to move the monsters around on the map, preferably moving them all into one location and holding them there so a player can just wail away at them without having to spend time chasing them all over the map. When combining this with botting and a god mode hack a player can consistently be killing massive numbers of enemies and levelling far faster than any non-hacking player ever could.

I read in a post earlier today that vac hacking is caused by the fourth job classes that supposedly contain abilities that allow monsters to be pulled in and while I think it is completely wrong it did bring up an interesting point. The monster movements in the game seem to be directed by the server, as they do stop moving when you lose your connection, so why can a player moving the monster on their own personal game end up getting reflected though the server to all the other machines? The only thing I can think of is knockback damage that needs to be accuratly reflected on the other peoples game, yet even this fails when looked at closely.

This hack can also be used to attack a player with monsters by forcing them onto that players location and I’ve seen people in safe spots while AFK get knocked out of the safe spot by these flying monsters. I spend a crazy five minutes trying to save a party member from being killed while he was AFK in a situation like this.

On the unfortunate side, like the no damage hacks in order to detect that the monsters are flying around or stuck in one spot would take a larger amount of processing time that is better spent allowing people to play the game.

However, this hack has the fantastic side that people really primarily don’t abuse it to kill off other people with the monsters but instead use it to gain massive amounts of exp. That same massive amount of exp gain that is so frustrating for those of us who are legally grinding their way up in level leaves the hackers wide open to a quick and easy way to determine who is hacking and who is not. The best part of this is that it uses things that are all already in the MS server code, I.E. the experience table and the ranking system.

All it takes is a simple check when the rankings are calculated to determine how much expereince a player has gained between ranking changes and when that value is larger than should be possible for the players level they recieve a hacking flag. Once again, this flag would only allow the Game Masters to have a list of people who were suspected of hacking so they can go to their location when they are online and catch them in the act.

The only way for a character to get around this system would be to moderate their experience gains to fall within the boundaries of what can be gained in that much time and to do so would completely defeat the purpose of using vacuum hacking to gain experience.

The biggest problems with these methods is that they are only to help the GM’s quickly and easily track down people who are using the most common hacks so they can be banned. Because the GM’s would still be completely responsible for verifying that someone deserves to be banned for hacking if Wizet determines that it’s not really that important to enforce the rules and regulations of the game to prevent hacking then these ideas are completely useless.

The only solution for the problem if this situation is true is for Maple Story players across the servers that frequently spend NX Cash to let Wizet know that they will keep on playing (and using up that expensive bandwith/server time) yet will not spend any more NX cash until they feel like things are under control again.

So could Wizet spot the major part of the hacking with some changes and perhaps some additional employees who help go over the hacking logs that are created? Yes, but only time will tell if they will.