Hi all,

I know it’s a been a couple weeks since our last memo, but we were hard at work trying to test as much as we could for the v202 Black Mage: New Beginnings game update these past few weeks. Despite all that, we still encountered a lot of issues, so I’d like to address some of those today and touch upon some of the topics we’re still looking into.

The first issue I’d like to briefly touch upon was the Google sign-in issue that many users experienced over the past weekend. This affected a portion of players across all Nexon games who used their Google account to sign into the Nexon Launcher. To help alleviate this issue for those affected players, we made some changes to our account system to provide them with an alternate path to log in. You can read more about that change here. However, I also want to mention that yesterday we applied an overall fix to the original login issue with Google. So those affected players should now be able to login using their Google account in addition to their email address.

Next, I’d like to discuss the issues we encountered during our game update patch on Wednesday. With this patch, we attempted to apply an overall update to our authentication systems. This update would have been invisible to players, but would allow us to move to a more modern authentication system. However, when testing this system in the live environment, we encountered several issues with our implementation on Steam. Rather than attempt to fix those issues and risk a longer maintenance time, we made the decision to roll back the changes so we can attempt that update in a future maintenance. We will do more rigorous testing to ensure the application of this update goes more smoothly.

The second issue we encountered on Wednesday was concerning the PIC system. Certain players with letters in their PIC were not able to enter their PIC correctly, and even for players with only numbers in their PIC, there was still a chance that their PIC would not be entered correctly. This occurred due to the differences between our PIC system and other services' secondary password systems, which caused an unintended change to be applied. We eventually fixed these issues through a minor patch early morning on Thursday, Jan 24 and will improve our processes to check for these kinds of changes more closely in the future.

If you still are experiencing any of these issues, we encourage you to please contact our Customer Support.

It goes without saying that we always do our best to ensure issues like these are discovered and prevented from disrupting your gameplay, but there are cases where the live environment can function differently than our test environment and so it may be difficult for us to foresee these issues. We apologize for the inconvenience caused by these extended and unscheduled maintenances and the issues that occurred following them.

In addition, we are still looking into a few more issues after the game update. Some of the more critical ones are listed below:

Maple Guide containing untranslated text

Chocophile Medal disappearing from Medal Collection

World Map containing untranslated text

Captcha when entering character names containing untranslated characters

Players experiencing a blank white screen when trying to launch MapleStory

I would also like to provide an update regarding some investigations regarding ban appeals that have been made.

In the past few weeks we received a number of reports from Jett and Beast Tamer players that they had been banned by simply using certain skills. Upon investigation, we did discover that using certain Beast Tamer and Jett skills were causing a detection by our team as illicit behavior. We have since removed the criteria for this detection and released those players who had previously sent in tickets regarding this issue.

In addition to this, there was an issue that occurred on Tuesday, Jan 22 in which some Maple Relay boxes could be used to gain items without the box being consumed. We placed a temporary ban on the majority of players who had abused this issue maliciously, and plan on placing more severe actions on those players.

As I mentioned in the past, we’re continuing to look into ban appeal cases regularly and will update the community when we have more to share.

Looking forward, I hope to provide more positive news with these memos, although I know the community is concerned with how we’re dealing with issues. We hope you are all enjoying the new update release, and we hope to share more soon about our upcoming plans for MapleStory.

Thank you,

Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo

Producer - MapleStory