Producer Blog - "Play with the GMs" Incident on July 22nd

July 24, 2018  Announcements 



Hi Maplers,

This is LAMBCOOK, another producer working on MapleStory 2, and Priest main. I personally hoped my introduction would happen at a better time but we have something important to announce so I'll be using today's post to explain what happened and what we did.

Over the weekend, we ran a scheduled "Play with the GMs" event where GMs would pop in and give GM buffs to random parties by joining the dungeon's "Find Party" queue. During last Sunday's GM event on the NA WEST server, one of our GMs gave an unintended advantage to a participating party by defeating the boss for them. While we were aware of the incident almost immediately, we needed time to thoroughly investigate how it happened and to discuss preventive measures going forward.

The incident happened when one of our GMs joined a Chaos Raid on the NA WEST server and the GM elected to clear the dungeon for them. In the original plan, the "Play with the GMs" event was never meant for GMs to clear a dungeon for players and we are aware of the implications of this GM's action in rankings, rewards, and even pure bragging rights if this happened in Official Launch. We sincerely apologize for our GM's action. We take this matter very seriously even though it happened in Closed Beta.

As one of the actions to ensure that similar incidents don't happen again, we will no longer aid players in dungeon runs as part of the "Play with the GMs" event. GMs will still be present throughout other events, including the "Monster Invasion" event.

As for the Maplers who participated in Sunday's GM event, we've decided to leave the ranking info and rewards from the dungeon clear as-is since our GM was at fault and all data will be reset after Closed Beta ends. We understand the rewards obtained from clearing Chaos Raids can give an edge to end-game content. If this type of incident was to occur after official launch, swift action would be taken to remove the obtained rewards, to keep it fair on all fronts. But as an isolated incident during a closed beta and with a game-wide reset after Closed Beta 2, we did not want players who benefited from the GM's wrongful action to be put through any inconvenience.

We sincerely apologize for any concern players may have as a result of this incident. Rest assured we are taking the appropriate steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again. Our first and foremost goal is to deliver the highest quality of service and we hope to get there with transparent communication. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

- MapleStory 2 Producer, LAMBCOOK