[Director’s Note] Response to Abnormal Boss Clears and Bot Abuse

Dear Maplers,

We are sharing an important update regarding a serious incident that has recently come to our attention. Today, just before the weekly boss reward settlement, we identified seven characters that defeated Lotus and Damien—top-tier bosses that cannot be cleared under those character's strength. These characters collected the boss rewards, converted them into NXPC, and subsequently bridged them out of the Henesys L1.

Upon analyzing their equipment and combat data, we confirmed that clearing these bosses was physically impossible with their specs, and unauthorized third-party software (hacks) was used. These accounts, as well as the associated “banker” wallets that exchanged items with them for free, have been found in violation of our Terms of Use and have been permanently banned.

Moreover, this incident is not isolated to just a few characters. We suspect similar abnormal behaviors may exist in other weekly and daily bosses beyond Lotus and Damien. We have therefore launched a full-scale investigation. Beyond just banning violators, we are implementing a multi-layered detection system that analyzes factors such as level, equipment, clear time, and combat patterns to ensure that under-spec characters cannot attempt or benefit from such behavior in the future.

We do not take this issue lightly. For MapleStory Universe team, this is not a short-term concern — it is our top-priority operational challenge. MapleStory has faced similar threats in Web2 games for over 20 years. Each time, strong and sustained responses have enabled us to maintain and grow our services over the long term.

We anticipated these risks in MapleStory Universe, and even before this incident, we had been enforcing anti-cheat measures that lead to more than 10,000 account sanctions per day. However, as MapleStory Universe has grown faster and attracted more attention than expected, the scale and speed of such threats have escalated—demanding stronger and more comprehensive action.

Going forward, we are mobilizing all of our people, data analysis capabilities, and technical expertise to structurally eliminate botter and hack abuse. We acknowledge that this effort may result in temporary inconvenience or restrictions for some legitimate players, and we are preparing a parallel user care process to minimize any negative impact.

We are also taking the ongoing bot activity in normal fields with utmost seriousness. Thousands of accounts are being automatically and manually sanctioned daily, and botters are continually evolving their evasion methods. We are actively tracking and responding to these developments.

The core issue lies in the structure of Web3: since wallet creation is virtually costless, there is no meaningful risk in retrying after being sanctioned. This makes it possible for bad actors to exploit the system repeatedly without consequence.

To address this, we are designing a system that imposes a structural cost to such attempts. While the system will be minimal friction to normal users, it will discourage repeated trial-and-error behavior by bot and hack operators. This mechanism is under rapid development, and we will share more details as we finalize its rollout.

In parallel, we are improving the efficiency of our manual patrol enforcement system, which handles hundreds to thousands of cases daily. We are enhancing our detection-to-action pipeline to make real-time enforcement faster and more effective.

We will share our technical findings and roadmap for mid-to-long-term countermeasures once they are ready to be released in a structured manner.

Lastly, we sincerely apologize for the concern and inconvenience this incident may have caused. The MapleStory Universe team remains fully committed to delivering a game environment where all Maplers can play with fairness and trust.

Thank you.