[v0.98] Massive Duping Caused Game To Go Offline

About Duping

I got back home at the beginning of nighttime 6/5/2011 and just to hear my alliance talking about channels crashing and lots of duping going on. So I went to search what was up in the hacking communities. Turns out a duping method was released to public and I know I got to take advantage of this.

Duping is another word for duplicating. In MapleStory, it is the duplication of game items.

Duping involves the crashing of a channel of a server. There are many methods to crashing a channel and v0.98 brings another unique method to hackers. It manipulates the green letter invitation that takes you into a mini battle between the Cake and Pie factions. These invitations happen at :15 and :45 of every hour and the 30-minute gap between each duping session seems like a rush to me. The timing must be exact or else you would miss it and wait a long time.

How It Works

A hacker would use a tool that would send many requests to the server. In this case, a packet editor was use to send a certain packet. The server would overload and thus making the channel crash for an amount of time. Similar to a DDoS attack on a website. During that amount of time, the channel that your characters crashed in would be rolled back a few minutes. Meaning, the last known data of your character file, everything that happened that last few minutes would be booted back up. And the latter part after that few minutes doesn't exist in your file. The screen would show that you didn't do anything even though you did. With this information and functions given to you, planning a dupe session can come up to one's mind.

So you're curious of steps? Well most likely Nexon will get this crashing method fixed so here goes. People claimed they know other methods but this was the one I used.

1.     Since I didn't know who to trust to help me dupe, I used 3 computers. One is the crasher, the merchant, and the buyer. 

2.     The crasher would be in town, waiting for the green letter invitation to happen so it can proceed to crash when the time comes. The buyer and merchant would figure out which items to be duped. These guys would be doing their transactions in Free Market.

3.     The merchant opens on his/her store with the items placed at a price that can be instantly bought and convenient for the buyer. 

4.     The buyer buys the stuff, let say for 1 meso each, and then bank those items in storage to protect its data from being rolled back. 

5.     Steps 3 and 4 can be repeated for as much as you want. Actually, only a specific amount of time. I will explain why.

6.     When the hour is :15 or :45, the crasher will receive the invitation, and he/she will go into the waiting room before the battle. 

7.     Crasher will now send a packet while still in the waiting room. Just a couple sends of this packet will allow your game client to freeze, and then close on you. This packet looks very identical to a Quest packet but I didn't bother looking into it.

8.     Log back in the same world you were in. The buyer should still have the bought items and the merchant would still have the items that he/she sold. Congratulations, you've gained PROFIT!

Keep in mind that the key to duping is the rollback of a channel. Channel rollback only rolls back a 3-5 minutes. So if you do steps 3 and 4 while the invitation is not even close to coming up, you're just wasting your time.

Legit Players Riding On Hackers

Nowadays, who doesn't have connections with the crooks? Even they're asking when's the next channel hit so they can benefit from this. What's wrong with this is that you're not even loyal to the game anymore and your integrity is now shit for doing this. But oh well, we're all humans. The legits would take advantage of the hackers during the process of duping by buying the items that merchants put up for 1 meso each. Then they run off. NINJA'D! If not careful, you could lose a lot of money and you would rage if that was a godly item like a 26 ATT SCG (Stormcaster Gloves) sold for 1 meso. But if you got the timing correctly, you can save yourself from rage-quitting the game. All you have to do is have someone crash the channel that you sold/bought the items you were in and both the noob that ran off with your item and you would get the same item. See what I did there? Win-win situation.

That night my awareness was high because all these pros running in and out of the FM rooms just to see who slipped for a chance of profiting themselves. So far, none of my items were stolen.

Nexon's Response

After the 9:45 PM PST session was done, Nexon decided to disable the invitations so that no duping can happen. We all thought this was the end, until the morning 6/6/2011, the invitations opened again and everyone was duping. At 10:45 AM PST, duping happened again and this time Bera was not responding to my request to go in it. All other channels worked though. The game shut down around 11 AM and Nexon addresses the issue. For more information, click here.