Notice Clarity about recent bug abuse

Hello all. Happy May Day! I hope that everybody enjoyed this past month’s anniversary events. Unfortunately, I’ve been traveling a lot over the past few weeks and was unable to partake in the festivities. However, I greatly appreciate the efforts of the staff to put it together in my absence and make it run as efficiently as possible. Likewise, I especially want to thank any players who have been with us since we first opened last year. Your support is greatly appreciated, and I want to thank you for sticking with us despite the fewer updates relative to this time last year. My work schedule has been rather hectic, and I am equally disappointed that I haven’t been able to do as much as I would have liked. Lots of stuff is still planned, but there simply hasn't been the time to work on them. I know there are a lot of options and things you could spend time on as opposed to MapleLegends, and the fact that you do choose to spend some of your time here does mean a lot. While the events were going on, I spent a couple weeks overseas in China and Australia, and had a blast. Sydney is gorgeous, and I would definitely recommend anybody who hasn’t been there before, to visit Australia sometime in their lifetime– it’s definitely one of the top places I’ve ever been too.

Anyways, I just wanted to touch on a subject that I know many players have had questions about. As some may know, in mid-March, a decision was made to reduce the severity of a ban for 4 players whom were originally banned in mid-January for the abuse of a Horntail-related bug. The bug involved a teleport mechanism which inadvertently allowed the skipping of the Horntail “Dragon Elixir” Pre-Quest, which saved a relatively large amount of time on the completion of the Horntail kill. The original decision made at the time by the majority of the staff was to provide account bans to these 4 players under the premise that they knowingly used the bug multiple times to make abnormally quick Horntail runs, and hence Horntail kills, after being told that they could only use it the first time that they found the bug and reported it. Because of the strength of the items obtainable from Horntail, it was believed that this was the right decision at the time, and I am sure that many still might believe that it is the right decision.

However, after an extensive appeals process, a decision was made to reduce this ban from an account ban to what essentially amounted to a 2 month temporary ban, with an encompassing rollback. There were many reasons why this decision was made, and I just wanted to go over a few of the facts we considered to help contextualize the situation:

1. The bug/glitch abuse rule in the Terms of Service has an unspecified punishment. While the default punishment listed is an account ban, in reality, the decision is up to the discretion of the staff and can be lowered or raised based on the situation. In this case, we tried to look at how we handled past cases of bug abuse in relatively similar contexts.
2. Because there was an effort made by the players to initially report the bug to the staff at the moment that they found the bug, in order to properly find a case that could be used as a precedent, we looked at past incidents when players initially reported bugs before also abusing them. In these past situations (albeit they did not impact as many players as this situation did, and the items obtained were not as powerful), each of the players either had their ban reduced (to either a temporary ban or a full unban) with a rollback to pre-abuse status, or they were not banned at all and only had the rollback applied.
3. Because it is important to differentiate between them, another case we looked at involved players who abused bugs without making any effort to report them to the staff and instead purposefully attempted to hide them from the staff so that the players could continue to gain an advantage from them. In each of these cases, the players either ended up with account bans or permanent IP bans.
4. In order to justify different levels of bug abuse punishments, I believed it was important to have a consistent benchmark which could be used to denote how we handle future cases. Thus, the decision was made to set the benchmark based on the state of whether players reported the bug(s). I believe that having a level of consistency when handling bans generates trust and prevents rumors of bias towards or against certain players from forming.
5. Now you might wonder why I am keen on using this benchmark. In a typical situation, a bug of this magnitude that is reported to a staff member would be and honestly should have been fixed within 24 hours. In fact, it was fixed in less than 1 hour of me hearing about bug. One failure from an administrative perspective that resulted in us being in the situation was a communication failure which made me unaware of the bug for 11 days.
6. Ultimately, I am of the belief that there is another benefit to treating players who report bugs versus those who do not report bugs, differently. As has been the case in the past, by not reporting a bug, players who abuse a bug can cause catastrophic damage to the server which may continue for months on end and have very long-lasting impacts. However, by reporting a bug, and making the staff aware of it, it makes it not only far less likely that the bug will cause a long-term impact, but it will also reduce the amount of work that the staff will ultimately have to do to correct or reverse the effects of the abuse.
7. If there is no discrepancy in punishment set between players who report bugs versus players who do not report bugs, I am of the belief that it will encourage players to avoid reporting bugs and to keep bugs hidden for as long as they can, out of fear of the punishment. While it is obviously preferred that everybody report bugs without needing an incentive to do so, I know that not everything thinks/behaves like that and in situations like this, I believe it is in the best interest of the server to be more lenient on the bug/glitch abuse rule towards players who report bugs, because ultimately I think that is more likely to prevent a situation in which a bug is abused for multiple months and we are forced to perform a rollback that could cause bystander players to lose a lot of progress.
8. Finally, I also take some blame for the oversight from the coding perspective. As a programmer, it is crucial to pressure test everything to ensure that there are no flaws before rolling a feature out, and unfortunately I failed to do that in this situation. This is another administrative failure on our part.

In conclusion, I want to make sure that everybody understands that we are not suggesting that the players who were unbanned are 100% not a fault. They do share part of the blame, and they have also personally agreed and shared that belief with the staff already. Our decision simply reflects the fact that we believed the abuse in question was not worthy of an account ban, but rather a lengthy temporary ban, which consistently matches how we handled prior bans that occurred in a similar context. We also believe that the decision is one that, although may not be popular with everybody, will ultimately be more beneficial for the server in the long run.

If you have any additional questions or comments, I am happy to answer them in a private message. Thank you.