Maple Advisory Council

[XTOTHEL]

not necesarily, while yes, being a stealth character would remove the communication part, it would also make you, let's say "blend more" of course, it would be best to have a char for PR and another (which could be your main and whatnot) for simply walking around and snuffing stuff.

I think the proposal does state that these council characters can go invisible, wouldn't that be adequate for that? I think the idea is to have this council character separate from your main, then again many players have multiple characters and I assume a select council member would for sure have multiple characters.

[ShinkuDragon]

I think the proposal does state that these council characters can go invisible, wouldn't that be adequate for that? I think the idea is to have this council character separate from your main, then again many players have multiple characters and I assume a select council member would for sure have multiple characters.

well, not necesarily for example, say on my main, i know people who know hackers, going "invisible" on them wouldn't really give me any information, befriending them as much as possible though, might yield something else, same for people who have guilds that don't mind hacking, it's a lot easier to know who's in that guild by joining it than asking nexon for all the members and tracking them every day to see if they're on.

granted, these are most probably not available to everyone, but the fact that it's plausible for someone to fall in these (or other) scenarios makes it worth being a -secret- GM or whatever these would be called. and you could still have a publicly known char that talks to people and whatnot, on which you login if you see a smega that needs you or something of the sort.

[Chew]

It's a good idea but
Why would they want something to differ them from other players? If a hacker see something weird in the player such as the GM hat obviously, the gm title or the medal he will immediately change channel. Why don't they stay as a regular player with no other marks? I've encountered a lots of hackers and they never change channel if they see me they just keep doing it and I bet if they see something as "Maple Council Member or whatever that is they will certainly change channel ASAP so they are just making their own job more difficult. That's how I see it.

[Cere]

It's a good idea but
Why would they want something to differ them from other players? If a hacker see something weird in the player such as the GM hat obviously, the gm title or the medal he will immediately change channel. Why don't they stay as a regular player with no other marks? I've encountered a lots of hackers and they never change channel if they see me they just keep doing it and I bet if they see something as "Maple Council Member or whatever that is they will certainly change channel ASAP so they are just making their own job more difficult. That's how I see it.

If it's something you can turn on and off I don't see what the problem is. Especially since like 90% of the hackers I've seen were botting -- no active intelligence monitoring the situation.

[XTOTHEL]

It's a good idea but
Why would they want something to differ them from other players? If a hacker see something weird in the player such as the GM hat obviously, the gm title or the medal he will immediately change channel. Why don't they stay as a regular player with no other marks? I've encountered a lots of hackers and they never change channel if they see me they just keep doing it and I bet if they see something as "Maple Council Member or whatever that is they will certainly change channel ASAP so they are just making their own job more difficult. That's how I see it.

-They can choose to be invisible or not
-Current GM effects are only there if you have the hat, so a player could choose to take it off
-Being known would be part of the communicating with the community, I recall the old leaf brigade folks didn't talk much...

[Chilly]

not necesarily, while yes, being a stealth character would remove the communication part, it would also make you, let's say "blend more" of course, it would be best to have a char for PR and another (which could be your main and whatnot) for simply walking around and snuffing stuff.

I think this is a great idea, both the quote and the thread topic. I would be very reticent to committing my main for this type of mission because I've kept a low-profile for such a long time, specifically to not draw unwanted attention. And the community very much needs a liaison that has more impact than a once-every-two-weeks-and-holiday appearance. But this liaison shouldn't be constantly visible, it might hinder clandestine operations where information might actively being shared regarding hacks and such e.g. I've caught such conversations in the FM. Thus, that invisible idea or a completely different character are good solutions.

I've long advocated that raiding guilds with obvious hackers and tracking items, etc. is a good idea. That interview with a former GM, whether reputable or not, reinforced the notion that I had that NX-heavy players aren't touched regardless of how they hack. Afterall, Loveless items and Tyrant items shouldn't exist in some servers, yet they persist. The same characters from the same guilds constantly S.Mega them out. Where is the action?

Another example, I know that the supply of ABR Recipes, MMB and Crystals among others is well appreciated by the community, but it is easy to identify the hacker stores and if you are waiting for a specific store refresh an /find at the right time will give you their location and their trading partners i.e. hack mules (v. store mules). I've done this multiple numbers of times. Have I contributed to the problem? Yes. Do I want to help fix it. Even more, yes.

[Tyler]

It's a good idea but
Why would they want something to differ them from other players? If a hacker see something weird in the player such as the GM hat obviously, the gm title or the medal he will immediately change channel. Why don't they stay as a regular player with no other marks? I've encountered a lots of hackers and they never change channel if they see me they just keep doing it and I bet if they see something as "Maple Council Member or whatever that is they will certainly change channel ASAP so they are just making their own job more difficult. That's how I see it.

They'll be able to hide from players similar to GMs, to avoid any players from seeing. While it is an option for Council members to be hidden or not, it'll be up to them to make the appropriate decision before entering a map.

For the most part though, this won't be an issue.

[iamflip]

This is all well-sounding and good. And being that it's community-driven with little resources that Nexon has to devote to making the idea work, it probably might be a lot more responsive and active. I'm very much interested to see how this goes.

[Leaves]

While I can see that there's been a lot of time and effort spent on this idea & that it has very good intentions, I must unfortunately say that it sounds just about identical to the MWLB. The only differences I spot here are some improvements in the reporting system, as well as very minor changes to the program operations.

In truth, the main reason that the MWLB didn't work is that Nexon's corporate culture isn't suited towards these types of programs. The problem begins with the fact that customer support and in-game patrolling are low priority areas for the company. They are not willing to invest resources into those areas because they do not see results. In other words, they believe that the $$$ lies elsewhere - whether they're right or wrong is totally irrelevant, as you won't be changing their minds.

The advisory council idea (as proposed now) does not actually have the power to do anything, but rather to forward information to Nexon employees. This achieves nothing, simply because Nexon already has more information about hackers, botters, meso sellers, and glitches than it can actually handle. As we all know, Nexon simply chooses not to act upon that info, or act upon it in a manner that is unsatisfactory with respect to timeliness and quality. Thus, having more info does not improve the final outcome.

A potential positive that I see here which didn't exist with the MWLB program is that there could be more direct community interaction if the program participants were allowed to publicly speak to players (whether in-game or otherwise). Unfortunately, I don't see Nexon allowing this -- they didn't do it with the MWLB for certain internal views that haven't changed or evolved as far as I know.

Good luck.

[MorbidMagus]

I would be willing to devote my time to this if it actually went through. Nexon needs to make an effort too though, or else it would end up like MWLB.

[fwaggle]

-Being known would be part of the communicating with the community, I recall the old leaf brigade folks didn't talk much...

IIRC the worst part about the MWLB thing was that you couldn't be in it on the same world you played in. I get that it's supposed to reduce impropriety, but I don't think it works and I think it's counter-effective.

If I were even selected for something like this, why would I give a hoot to clean up a world I don't play in? I don't love the game that much. I think this new system would have better results if people were invested in cleaning up the world(s) they played in.

[Stereo]

When a player reports a malicious player (or any reports at all), it is instantly added to a queue, the order of newest to oldest being in question. They are then read, reviewed, and then finally an employee (GM) acts upon the report and sees if there is still a problem. Sadly, by this time minutes, hours, or even days can pass.

With this program, all reports by Council instantly bypass this queue and are read with importance by Nexon's appointed staff. As abuse of the program is possible, all reports would still be looked into, although they would be handled exponentially quicker then normal reports.

I'm not clear on why these improvements can't just be done in their backend. They have a whole database of reports they could mine through to figure out what's effective - which players are reliable, which messages a GM is likely to be able to take action on, whether multiple tickets in a cluster tend to indicate hacking, etc. When a new report is sent, it should be checked for these signals, and the GM can review those most likely to result in a ban first.

Also, if a player does prove reliable, they should be allowed more than one report a day automatically. Players who catch hackers reporting more = win-win.

To kick things off, I'd probably start by randomly selecting 'fresh' reports and checking those out, instead of doing the queue in order. If a fresh report is valid, deal with it and improve the predictive ability of future reports. If a fresh report is wrong, it's more certain the player is reporting badly.

[Eos]

In order to follow your recommedations @Stereo; they'd have to actually read through every single ticket first just to find the people who are reliable in the first place, plus keep a whole lot of metadata regarding tickets that they just don't have time for. You forget they're not even using their own ticketing system, they're basically renting one from another company, so what they can do with it is rather limited and they clearly don't have ticket system development resources to spend time adding features to it to support changes like that.

This council, like the one before it, is a 'poor mans way' of doing the same thing; vetting who is reliable through an external process and giving them a higher priority queue.

The only way an additional random selection of fresh reports works is if you have an entire extra team doing that while all the original people continue working on tickets in order because otherwise your backlog gets to the point you can't ever catch up, like the last time they gave up and wiped everything. The obvious problem there is that means more headcount which means more money. You could try the logic that 'the same number of items are still being worked because the same number of people are still working tickets' but that is somewhat over simplified because the average age of each ticket increases in proportion to the number of resources allocated to the head as opposed to the tail.

[Stereo]

In order to follow your recommedations @Stereo; they'd have to actually read through every single ticket first just to find the people who are reliable in the first place, plus keep a whole lot of metadata regarding tickets that they just don't have time for. You forget they're not even using their own ticketing system, they're basically renting one from another company, so what they can do with it is rather limited and they clearly don't have ticket system development resources to spend time adding features to it to support changes like that.

I'm talking more about the ingame report button wrt. the random quick responses (since you have to actually click a hacker who's present in the map, unlike the support ticket system where there's no guarantee it's fresh), but investments in making support easier really do pay off, since smaller staff can handle larger numbers of players.

I don't know what's going on on their end, but I've never seen anything happening to hackers after I reported them ingame so I have to assume it's queued up so long it's never clear when something happens.

[Eos]

I'm talking more about the ingame report button wrt. the random quick responses (since you have to actually click a hacker who's present in the map, unlike the support ticket system where there's no guarantee it's fresh), but investments in making support easier really do pay off, since smaller staff can handle larger numbers of players.

I don't know what's going on on their end, but I've never seen anything happening to hackers after I reported them ingame so I have to assume it's queued up so long it's never clear when something happens.

Ah. I had written into my last MUD a feature where any time a report issued (player or system originated since both levels of monitoring were in place) all members of the security team got an alert and an option to immediately transport to the scene auto-invis. It'd probably be overwhelming in GMS though. You'd think they'd at least have a dialogue of reports with a goto on them based on the person being reported and the people reported most and still online bubbling to the top of the list.

I daresay if they opened up to some community development Maple would have some amazing features pretty quick

[Stereo]

Ah. I had written into my last MUD a feature where any time a report issued (player or system originated since both levels of monitoring were in place) all members of the security team got an alert and an option to immediately transport to the scene auto-invis. It'd probably be overwhelming in GMS though.

I imagine it could be set up to be pretty straightforward for the GMs - one button to go to the next report - no point letting them choose which one - just find someone who's online & active and warp to them, start recording, and if they choose to ban, save video automatically with the case number.

The volume's definitely gotta be large, I was on the GM side of things on one of OdinMS's larger private servers and there were dozens of reports a day just from however many hundred people used that. Of course, that lumped in the automatic hack detection system, since it didn't have HackShield, it was just the server logging invalid stuff.

On the other hand, private servers have the dubious advantage of the GMs working much more closely with the database; I could sql query anything I wanted out of the reports, cross-referenced to the list of online users for example, and do things that GMS probably has to wait 2 weeks for a response from Korea for. Minor patches like NPC dialog, which Nexon ignores week in and week out, didn't even require server checks.

[Tyler]

I imagine it could be set up to be pretty straightforward for the GMs - one button to go to the next report - no point letting them choose which one - just find someone who's online & active and warp to them, start recording, and if they choose to ban, save video automatically with the case number.

The volume's definitely gotta be large, I was on the GM side of things on one of OdinMS's larger private servers and there were dozens of reports a day just from however many hundred people used that. Of course, that lumped in the automatic hack detection system, since it didn't have HackShield, it was just the server logging invalid stuff.

On the other hand, private servers have the dubious advantage of the GMs working much more closely with the database; I could sql query anything I wanted out of the reports, cross-referenced to the list of online users for example, and do things that GMS probably has to wait 2 weeks for a response from Korea for. Minor patches like NPC dialog, which Nexon ignores week in and week out, didn't even require server checks.

The way that MapleStory is developed (and how the servers/databases are run at Nexon America is sadly very different from private server development and has it's own challenges. As I'm a developer, I've played around with multiple private server scripts and seen how they run and am aware of the ability to resolve NPC issues simply by editting a file. While there's been changes internally at Nexon in regard to topics like that, much is more complex then expected.

In regards to the reporting system, it's mainly an issue of the time and resources. Nexon has to pay it's staff to look over and handle every single report and that comes at a price. By allowing community involvement, not only does it allow for more of an instant resolution, but would save Nexon America money and resources in the long run, which could be directed at other areas such as improving the game, technical issues, and so on. :)

[KhainiWest]

Edit: Sorry, I missed the detail of the selection. Disregard

[Tyler]

There has been a new revision, Revision 2.2.

The supporters page has been completely redesigned and more emphasis is given to communitys, fansites, and individuals.

In addition, the support page has been streamlined into the rest of the council site to allow it to display and load faster.

+ Internal changes have taken place within the database.
+ Fansites and communities now have their own section.
+ Maplers are now numbered instead of merely a list.

Various:
+ A couple grammar mistakes have been resolved.
+ Some information has been rewritten to be clearer.

Thanks for the continued support and to Southperry for creating a thread to allow their community to discuss the project.

[FoolsLove]

+ Fansites and communities now have their own section.

I'm not sure if you just haven't gotten to it yet or not, but none of the links to the sites under groups/communities/sites and important people actually work.

Anyway, it's a rather interesting project. Would love to see it work out, I know from experience that helping GMs/Nexon ban people is no easy feat.