Thursday, September 1, 2005

Kerning City Party Quest Competitiveness & The First Botting

Summer/Fall 2005
Kerning City Party Quest Competitiveness & The First Botting
Ever since I played GMS in the summer of 2005, the K.P.Q. (Kerning Party Quest) had been out ever since. The game was v0.09. Since the PQ was a quick way to train your levels from 21 to 31, it was crowded and only 1 party per channel can participate at a time. Party leaders had to be awake and aware of tracking the party members' progress that were inside the PQ and as soon as they come out, he/she will spam their clicks onto Lakelis to beat the rest of the queuers. The leader wouldn't want to fail the rest of his/her party, so he/she would have to do his/her best to get themselves in. If failed, the party would wasted their time and have to wait again.

I don't remember seeing any hacking activities at this time, but the first kind of botting called auto-clicking was used. It's a handy tool that can click instantaneously per second. To effectively use this, Party Leaders, you would stack the dialog box of Lakelis such that when you auto-click the 'Next' button, it would also click on Lakelis thus opening her dialog boxes many times until you get inside the PQ. Now doesn't that relieve your fingers?

When recruiting party members, you would want to invite the stronger players and the experienced. But if you're experienced and level 21, you could use the auto-clicker to your advantage. Smacked in the middle of Kerning City is the recruiting center for the PQ and if you had played in my time, you'd see messages like, "J>PQ I HAVE TRACK AND AUTOCLICKER @@@ @@@". A lot of people wanted to take advantage of these players with benefits so they would be a priority.

Saturday, January 1, 2005

The Origin of Hacking Maplestory

Preface
It's hard to tell for anyone to know when the first hacks of Maplestory was first created and released into the community. Some probably made and kept the hacks for their own gains before letting it go public.

No less than a year after the opening of Maplestory, hacks were available. The earliest date I've found for hacks was February 2006 for version 0.18. Cheat Engine was the primary tool into getting the hacks to work in Maplestory. From the topic starter, instructions to prepare the hack was much more tedious than today's hacks.

The Bypass
In today's games, there are such defense mechanisms that checks for any third party programs aka hacks before starting your game up. If detected, the game will not open and shows a dialog box saying you have hacks turned on and you cannot start the game until you close them. In Maplestory, speaking of the past, had GameGuard as a hack defense. What hackers did was to bypass the defense so you can access your hacks throughout the gameplay. This is one of the very important steps to hacking as well as the first thing you do before you load your hacks!

Cheat Engine
Cheat Engine software held its popularity to hack the game as well as many other games. It utilizes the game's memories (hexademicals) and allows you to change them to affect your gameplay advantageously and ease.
Such alternations allow your
Maple character to be:
-in godmode
-speed attack
-teleport side to side
-anti-breathing
-unlimited attack
-vacuuming monsters to a specific point so you can attack at one spot
-tubi/fast looting
-and much more!

Rolling Character Stats
Before Maplestory was v0.6x*, everyone who makes a new character may roll a dice to get specific stats to start off the journey of the game. Maplestory fanatics/experts made guides that specifically tell you to roll your stats to specific numbers to match a specific character class.

For example: If you want to make a magician, an expert guide would tell you to roll a set of stats of:
STR: 4
DEX: 4
INT: 9
LUK: 6

The numbers would add up to 25 and only 25. So the best roll for magiciains would be:
STR: 4
DEX: 4
INT: 13
LUK: 4
====>Insert picture<=========
For the eager people, I'm sure trying to roll a 13 on a stat requires you to sit your ass and be very entertained for many hours. That's why many people just leave only 4's on the stats that were irrelevant for a certain class and concentrate on the ones that matter.

Rolling such stats was very time-consuming, unfair method from Nexon, and sometimes piss people off if they had been rolling the stats for so long that momentum of their fingers just made them roll passed the set of stats they needed.

Not to fear though, CE was your best friend back then, and can help you get perfect stats in moments! On December 27, 2005, MPC forum showed how you can tap into the memory and choose a 13 for one stat and the rest will automatically turn 4.

MPC Forums - The place where it really started?
From the Google search engine, the earliest postings of the hacks were all here in MPC. But I really doubt this is so. It could be possible that some only shared their hacks among a group of people in a private website. Since digging up dirt from 6 years ago can be tedious, these websites most likely extincted already. But please correct me if I'm wrong if you're a MS hack fanatic reading this. Also, information gets leeched off by other forums too.