Webzen implemented some temporary measures while instituting a ban wave of accounts suspected of suspicious activity.
One of the temporary measures was utilizing reCAPTCHA on the launcher.
CAPTCHA’s generally don’t work because of this. reCAPTCHA is a bit better but does nothing to address the actual human part of the bot army (where these organizations hire people to enter in CAPTCHA or in the case of reCAPTCHA, click the correct tiles if prompted).
In game, some players occasionally receive another form of CAPTCHA where they have to click the correct answer for what was displayed. That system was already in place before the most recent maintenance that added the above to the launcher.
The irony of this in-game system is that it does nothing to address the bots that were auto farming and exploiting the game. As shown in the video of a chinese made bot that is being sold, the character is literally always on the move except when dealing with NPC’s, stowing items into storage or selling junk. The in-game CAPTCHA is hitting legitimate players who may have been AFK or doing something to trigger it (I’ve yet to experience that one myself).
Part of the banwave has also hit legitimate players (many have been having their accounts unlocked as Webzen deals with support tickets as well as utilizing a post in their forums to manually check the accounts of players who post their information in it).
Additionally as part of Friday’s emergency maintenance, they have disabled 1-to-1 trading as well as being able to send mail messages. The objective of that is to prevent the moving of both items and currency while they try to weed out the accounts of the exploiters/botters.
Trion Worlds instituted a somewhat draconian but easily circumventable way to try and deal with this at the launch of Devilian; you needed a validated account (one that had spent real money with Trion for any of their products) in order to be able to use announce chat, sending in-game mail, and instituting a trade with another player. That still did not stop the gold spammers though (which are large organizations that tend to use stolen credit card information; account validation was just an expense charged to those stolen credit cards).
Thus the temporary disabling of player trading and mail messaging is just that, only temporary. Which is why I mentioned the proper way to deal with it is by addressing the actual exploit itself where the bots can teleport hack immediately to the boss in certain dungeons, quickly kill the boss due to client side hacking, and thus flood the market with items (some that are sold for unbound Redzen which the exploiters than sell to players at lower prices than Webzen) and Zen; all of this trashing the game economy in the process.
Again, none of this has been fixed on the Korean servers and they have been online for 8 months now. This is why I am cynical this will actually ever be addressed properly for the global version because it would require removing functions handled client side over to the server AND also adding server side validation. As I mentioned before, the grass is not necessarily greener on the other side of the hill.
