Hi Everyone,

First of all, I’m glad to see the feedback - both positive and negative - regarding our last two memos. We do hope you all continue to let us know what you like and don’t like so that we can improve further.

In today’s memo, I’d like to update you all on a few things we’ve been doing regarding illicit activity in the game and address some of the concerns and issues the community has raised recently.

A few weeks ago we mentioned that we would provide an update regarding Malaysia. Well, this might be a little anti-climactic, but there actually is no update regarding Malaysia. I know there was some speculation that we would remove these maps, but we currently don’t have any immediate plans to do so. As we mentioned with other topics, if we do decide to revisit this area, we’ll be sure to let you all know in advance.

Next, I’d like to expand upon a topic I discussed briefly in my previous message; the subject of botters and hackers. Since the memo last week, we’ve continued our efforts to look into and combat this activity. For security reasons, I can’t provide specific details of what exactly we are doing, but I can say that we are constantly improving our methods, upgrading our tools, and having discussions daily about additional steps we can take. I mentioned last week that we know a large majority of illicit activity is being done by Kanna characters, so we did start to put a heavier focus on finding these illicit players using Kanna. But we’ve also started to expand that focus to find all types of illicit activity, as we know it isn’t just limited to that job. Since the last memo, we’ve taken action on about 15,000 more accounts and as part of our constant improvement in transparency, we will also resume publishing names of banned characters in our forums again. You can begin seeing this in place this week.

Now with these increased efforts to find illicit accounts, we know that one of the topics the community is concerned about is legitimate accounts getting banned. As many of our staff have mentioned in the past, we take these claims seriously and investigate any ban appeals we receive as much as we can and using as much data that we have available. We’ve also made some improvements in our processes investigating these claims to resolve each case as accurately and as quickly as we can. However, what we have found recently is that a large majority of the accounts that have appealed their ban did actually engage in illicit activity. These bans have of course been upheld, but this increase in appeals does affect our ability to resolve legitimate issues and tickets as quickly as we’d like to.

On the other hand, we do see that a small number of the accounts that have appealed their ban recently have been released due to insufficient evidence. When this happens, we do make sure that we reevaluate why this particular player was banned and use that information to improve our methods. Our end goal is to make sure we remove as many of the illicit players in the game as possible so that our legitimate players can enjoy the game freely.

As I close out this memo, I’d just like to say how excited everyone here is to start rolling out our Black Mage updates next week on November 14th. As many of you know, there is a lot of content coming up in these updates and we’ve done a lot to prepare and make sure your experience during this winter is as fun and as smooth as possible. In fact, some of our developers from Korea will be onsite with us here in the Nexon America offices as we finalize and launch the first part of the Black Mage updates. Their presence here will allow us to work together more closely to launch the update and respond quickly to any issues that may arise.

For future memos, do let us know what you’d like us to touch upon and we’ll do our best to provide more information on these topics that are important to you.

Thanks,

Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo

Producer - MapleStory