Watching Webzen Dublin dealing with the Pit of Nightmares (Mythic) exploit has been rather sobering as far as just how much of a disconnect exists between the publisher and development team.
Webzen staff have acknowledged the issue and communicated that a solution is coming.
We are still working on it. We made good progress and we will address this issue and keep you updated as soon as everything is in place. I understand how worry you can be, we are planning on applying different solutions to a variety of problems. That unfortunately takes time. In the meantime it can give you the feeling that nothing is done because you can’t see our progress, but I can assure you that is currently the 1st priority of our team.
In the mean time, they’ve been fighting a futile battle of playing whack-a-mole with the botters and “gold” (Zen) spammers. They have also decided to publish the names of accounts that have been banned in the first wave (what is a tiny drop in the bucket).
http://mulegend.webzen.com/en/News/Notice/recent-operations-against-suspicious-accounts-1430379
The “open beta” moniker would be a convenient excuse to hide behind. The problem is that nothing was ever done with this exploit on the Korean servers (which soft launched back in March). There’s a difference between bandaid fixes like banning the exploiters/removing the ill-gotten gains from an already mangled economy; where Zen is mostly useless when it comes to the trade broker (it’s crazy even if you had money to throw away to actually purchase Redzen to buy higher items off the trade broker right now) versus actually addressing the root cause which is piss poor server side validation and putting too much trust in a game client that can be hacked.
If this exploit hasn’t been addressed on the Korean servers since their much earlier launch, what makes Webzen Dublin (the subsidiary publisher) believe they really aren’t getting much more than lip service from their overlords? It’s not exactly trivial nor cheap to add proper server side data validation. And these kind of exploits are part of the reason why a portion of the population ended up abandoning the game there in 8 short months.
I normally would not post a link/video to the exploit but in this case, I have to make an exception since the global publishing subsidiary is clearly in over their heads (again, this has been known since the Korean soft launch 8 months ago). The issue is exasperated with Windows 7 + Gameguard (where its functionality is compromised). Only proper server side data validation and moving functions off the client onto the game server will properly fix this.
Here is the actual bot in action by someone who is demoing it in order to sell it to others (this is a mirror copy of the original which was removed by the user that posted it).
In the mean time, the honeymoon period is clearly now over just a little over a week since the game soft launched globally (i.e. that was “quick”). The diehards will stick with it but the larger majority of those who have no history with the MU franchise, will end up walking away fairly quickly. Myself, I’ll continue to casually play but besides my initial Frontier Pack purchase, that’s it as far as giving this company anymore money.
