In no particular order -
1. GMs are Not Developers
A GM is generally an entry-level employee who sits at a desk all day doing shifts of one of two things: patrolling in game to deal with suspicious activity, and responding to tickets by searching an online knowledge base for what the approved resolution for the nearest possible match is, and closing the tickets with that answer. Most of their answers are copy pasted because they have no ability to do much else. A good chunk of their answers are wrong because they don't understand what your issue is and/or don't have a knowledge article to address it in the way they tried looking for it or the way you phrased it. A GM has no control over the actual game code or the hardware. See #4.
2. Community Representatives Have No Power
(Examples: CM's & Forum Moderators) They're effectively desk clerks in charge of the company newsletters. In many cases they're not even truly comparable to what you think of as a GM. They writes up Notices to say what they've been told to say. They collect user feedback and pass it on to superiors who may or may not care. They have little authority to enact change. It's not their fault, that's what their job is. They're still limited by what they can get the people in power to do and how well listened to they are by those people.
3. Wizet is part of Nexon. It never went away. 4, 5
Quote
Daniel Chin (NXNeutral)
Q) How did Nexon America begin and what exactly is Wizet’s relationship to Nexon? What is Wizet’s current status?
A) Nexon America is Nexon Corporation’s North American publishing and game service arm. We started with the localization of MapleStory for North America, and have grown to support multiple game launches in North America. Wizet is the developer of MapleStory and also a subsidiary of Nexon Corporation. The Wizet team continues to develop and add content to MapleStory around the world.
Q) How did Nexon America begin and what exactly is Wizet’s relationship to Nexon? What is Wizet’s current status?
A) Nexon America is Nexon Corporation’s North American publishing and game service arm. We started with the localization of MapleStory for North America, and have grown to support multiple game launches in North America. Wizet is the developer of MapleStory and also a subsidiary of Nexon Corporation. The Wizet team continues to develop and add content to MapleStory around the world.
Quote
We
were Wizet and NX Games until we finally became Nexon America. It’s
funny how people talk about how different things were during the early
days when Wizet was around, but Nexon America has always been pretty
much the same people doing the same things under a new logo. When the
site changes to BlockParty.com, we’ll probably hear about how much
people miss Nexon America.
4. All Nexon Development occurs in Seoul, Korea1
Every little thing has to be designed in Korea and then sent over to local developers who do nothing more than apply it and see if it works. If it fails, is buggy, or creates a giant disaster of an expoit, Korea has to be notified, given as much information as possible, and then the local teams sits on their asses and waits for Korea to come up with an answer, receives the "answer", test it again, and see if it works. If it doesn't work the whole thing starts over again.
5.New Content and Events Are Planned Months In Advance1
Because of #4 everything has to be planned out on a massive calendar of what's intended to come up and what has to be done when in order for each next step to occur. It's no coincidence that a shiny new item will come out as gach only until you bleed for it, then be easily available in six months. They didn't decide on a whim that it was so loved everyone should have one; they planned from the beginning to get as much money for it up front before letting it go public. They're a business; that's what they do. They do not release content as surprises or on a whim, and most especially do not release fundamentally new things as compensation.
6. Nexon Corporate Headquarters is Tokyo, Japan2,3
We don't know why, either, but for some reason they decided to move there for operational purposes. This may be due to them having picked Tokyo's stock market as the best place to release their IPO, or it may have been for tax reasons, or any other number of possibilities.
7. Asiasoft vs Nexon.
Asiasoft is a game publisher company who earned the rights to host MapleStory in the South-east Asia region, they do not create contents for our server. NexonKR are the ones planning & creating stuff for us (Including our Enchanted Forest). Refer to #4 again.
8. Client vs Server
The portion of the game that runs on your PC is the client. Your client connects to the game, which is the server. In a normal client/server relationship your client is a passive recipient of events from your server. You send what you attempt to do, the server parses it and reacts accordingly, then sends the results to your client to update.
Nexon games have a serious flaw in that they allow the client to dictate to the server what is happening, instead of the client telling the server what it would like to have happen and the server making the judgment as to whether it's a rational request. This why Nexon games are so exploitable.
9. Server Check vs Update
A server check is when the servers are taken down for routine maintenance. Windows updates, defragging, database cleanup, server moves, name changes. They generally occur once a week. During server check unreleased content that was added in previous updates may be activated or deactivated in the form of special events and cash shop content.
An update is when the game receives a new version, the WZ files get updated. An update generally includes a server check in it, but a server check does not necessarily mean an update. Content added in an update may not be available in game for weeks, or even months. It can just sit in the game data dormant until it's activated by a later server check.
Both server checks and updates are also known as "Maintenances".
10. Junk Scrolling Isn't Real
You can not manipulate the odds of a scroll succeeding by "using up" your fails.
It might sound reasonable, but that's not how a computer program works.
Every time you scroll it generates a number between 1 and 100. It doesn't look at what your past results are and say "oh, you deserve a success now". Your roll of the die is occurring at the same time as hundreds of thousands of other players so it's entirely possible that out of several hundred thousand players all rolling the odds simultaneously you may fail a 90% chance, repeatedly, because 90% of the other people didn't. For detailed math see Wikipedia's explanation of the Gambler's Fallacy.
11. "Glitch" vs "Hack"
A glitch is a naturally occurring error in the game. This can be due to a misconfiguration of the client or the server. A glitch can be positive or negative. An example positive glitch would be bigfoot having been poisonable originally. This was a mistake that meant he could be killed quite easily for large amounts of experience. A negative glitch example would be when phantom forest first came out and was missing a ladder. Anyone who entered the map would crash and be unable to get back in. Exploiting a positive glitch is a form of abuse. It doesn't matter that it's Nexon's fault it's doable. It's your responsibility to know better than to do it.
A hack is when someone uses a third party tool to modify the way the game works. This can be editing a WZ file to change how it behaves, using a packet editor to send commands to the server that the client itself would not normally send, injecting a dll into the client to rewrite how it behaves or any number of similar things. Regardless of why they're done, they're all against the terms of service and they're all wrong.
It could be argued that there's a third version; Modding. Modding is when you use a tool to edit the physical appearance of the game, not the actual gameplay. Some example usages of this would be changing the dictionary to make it clearer which items are which by name, or editing the sprites on certain mobs/objects to make them stand out more from each other, or changing your character's appearance. Or making meteor rain flaming sheep from the sky. The results of honest modding are only visible on your own machine, and while mostly considered "legit", is still a form of hacking and against the TOS.
12. If it's too good to be true, you should not trust it.
Nexon has said this repeatedly. If you do something they consider abuse it doesn't matter who got away with it, it doesn't matter who else did it. If they think you should be punished for it and are certain you did it, you'll pay the price and depending on how moody they are at the time the severity can vary wildly. Pay attention, use your head, and be prepared to defend anything you do. "I didn't know it was wrong" is seldom a valid excuse.
13. "It's just a game".
While true, the point of a game is to have fun. People who go out of their way to ruin the fun of a game for other people as their own way of having fun are known as griefers. They're a miserable excuse of a player who should really find a different hobby.
References:
Spoiler
P.s. Full credits to Eos from Southperry.net, I claim no credits other than some minor edits.
