AriesMS Transparency - Part 3 (QnA)
It seems like players are afraid to ask questions fearing that they might get banned from the game. Well, I'm here to say that while my forum account remains intact, I'm no longer affiliated with the AriesMS team nor do I have any intentions of providing them any information regarding players.
Nevertheless, we'll proceed.
Q: can i ask abour if u donate to sever, the change of getting nice potential or mchaos things higher? the donor had more advantage?
A: Good question. There's multiple ways to approach this.
While donating (and/or purchasing Aries Points) doesn't give you immunity from the claws of the Terms of Service, nor does it entitle players to act like ignorant pricks, it came with some benefits.
- The first one was already written on Part 2, under 'ICOGs', though it was never officially acknowledged, there were also no logical explanations on how those items existed.
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The second one is account recovery.
For context, account recoveries consists of 3 methods: (1) Website, (2) Staff Assistance. Except, (2) doesn't exist for players without a transactional history with AriesMS. I'll elaborate more on that in a bit.
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Website
In AriesMS, players can recover their account information through the following means:- If you lose your Password: You can recover it with the use of your Username + Email Address
- If you lose your Username: You can recover it by logging in on the website with your Email Address + Password
- NOTE: Replacing the Username with the Email Address was only available approximately 2018 or earlier. Anytime before this feature was implemented, if players forgot their Usernames, they were pretty much fucked.
- If you lose your Email Address: You can half recover it by logging in on the website with your Username + Password and checking the Account Information Panel OR change the Email Address assigned to the account
However, players can only recover their account if they have 2 out of 3 of the information. I've also specifically written this on the Troubleshooting Guide. If players possess less than 2 types of information, they won't be able to recover their account. This is mainly due to the fact that private servers generally don't ask for much information, and with that, there's not much information that servers can request for in order to verify the identity of their users.
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Staff Assistance
For a period of time sometime around 2018~2019, I acted as a proxy between Nova and the players, where he processed manual account recoveries for players who were able to provide additional information on the account required for borderline verification. However, this became far too tedious as time went on, and was discontinued.For security reasons, I will not be disclosing the additional information that we requested for verification.
After the discontinuation of manual account recovery, the only Staff Assistance that we provided to players were account recovery requests from players with transactional history with AriesMS; these requests were relayed to Elyx. If players were able to provide information to confirm a past transaction, we would be able to provide them with a certain number of information types in order for them to recover their account (excluding Passwords).
- NOTE: In case it wasn't obvious enough, Passwords are encrypted and can't be passed around like plaintext.
- Though I do remember there was another server (that I don't remember the name of) storing players' Account Passwords as plaintext. It was relatively hilarious and concerning.
- NOTE: In case it wasn't obvious enough, Passwords are encrypted and can't be passed around like plaintext.
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Definition
Encryption is a way of scrambling data so that only authorized parties can understand the information. In technical terms, it is the process of converting human-readable plaintext to incomprehensible text, also known as ciphertext.
In Aries, in order to compel the Administrators to do something tedious or something out of their way, you would need a relatively good reason to convince them with.
One of those reasons is donating (and/or purchasing Aries Points).
Q: Is GM know Minh Huy? :)
A: That depends on what kind of answer you're expecting from me.
But since my cup of fucks is now empty, I'll give you the attention that you're seeking for.
'Minh Huy' is a Vietnamese player that engages in large-scale Profiting and is one of the major Profiting 'dealers' in cheating forums. He is one that I regret not being able to completely wipe out from the server, and one that tarnished my impression and the reputation of Vietnamese players in the server.
Profiting, depending on the scale of it, can affect the performance of the player economy both directly and indirectly. Tangible currencies and items like Mesos, Aries Points, Cubes, Nodestones, etc are heavily manipulated by these Bad Actors.
Large-scale Profiting refers to Profiting that spirals from various aspects of Hacking and Botting.
A brief gist of their structure is as follows:
- Hacker/Botting Accounts acquire large amounts of materials (e.g. Nodestones, Cubes, Mesos, etc) within a short period of time.
- These accounts are much like the front-line 'Zero' class characters that you see in Arcane River maps teleporting and vacuuming monsters all over the place.
- Or the seemingly skill spamming characters going left right left right in Magatia maps
- Hacker/Botting Accounts then transfer their acquired loot to what I refer to as 'Storage Accounts'. These accounts are in-charge of storing all generated drops from the front-line accounts.
- Using their Holding Accounts, they either start selling the items to players in demand of it, or transfer them to what I refer to as 'Merchant Accounts' where small bulks of items are transferred by batches to sell them in fear of the account being banned.
- The Mesos and Aries Points that they receive from selling these items will then cater to Profiting transactions involving buying mesos and/or Aries Points with real-life currencies on third-party platforms. (NOTE: This is not the same as directly purchasing Aries Points from the server's website)
This player has been mentioned multiple times in my conversations with Elyx when dealing with Profiting cases, and while we've suspended many of his accounts, he remained in the server by evading using loopholes like the lack of VMware blacklisting (as mentioned in Part 1).
From a player's perspective, you might be thinking, why not just ban them? Well, the number of large-scale Profiting accounts I've suspended far exceed the actual number of hours I've invested into the server in my 5~6 years of service, and they keep coming back through the loopholes that the Administrators cannot be fucked to resolve.
Now you understand why VMware is such a big deal.
To put things into perspective with regards to the market, there has been suspended Holding Accounts each storing tens of thousands of cubes, some of them storing 100~300k Aries Points, and more. If you think they can't manipulate the market, maybe this will make you consider otherwise.
Q: did we ever have a chance at an auto cubing type system, or similar coming to the server... ever
A: Not really. While we did have it for certain cube-types, we never considered it as the main option for cubing.
Fortunately, the animation for the Cubing UI can be sped up, but for some reason Nova doesn't want to adjust it.
Q: Do you think AriesMS will stay online/active in the future, or do you think it will shut down eventually?
A: There's no straight answer for this.
MapleStory will always be that one childhood game for most people, and it will always retain a nostalgia to it (similar to Minecraft). There will be a point where players get sick of the game stop for a period of time and go back to the game when they want to experience the nostalgia again.
AriesMS peaked at around 1~2k players, and now barely survives on 100~200 players.
The only possibilities of the server closing down is if the following happens:
- Administrators no longer find it profitable; meaning little to no donations
- One or Both Administrators is/are unable to continue for reasons
- There are no more GMs left to renew content for the server
- Nexon'd
Q: Who the hell is/was Mr. X?
A: Honestly, I have no idea. Administrators claim he's a former staff and didn't confirm more than that.
Though, I have a strong belief, that it's the orange-censor individual I mentioned in Part 2 under Ideal World.
In case players are unaware, "Mr. X" assisted Nova in revamping the website to what it is now, as well as delivering updates like the original Paragon 2.0 Update.
Q: Do you have any suggestion for a private server, or should I just bite the bullet and play GMS to scratch that MapleStory-itch?
A: I haven't kept up with the release of private servers since April 2022, so I'm not the best person to advice you. But you can try Reboot, it's the best option aside from up-to-date private servers and it's become so increasingly popular that I've seen AriesMS players leaving the server for Reboot.
Besides, the other private servers honestly don't interest me at all.
Mainly because:
- P2W zoom zoom progression (even more zoom zoom than AriesMS)
- Wiping the database more than their asses
- Storing player account information in notepad
- Disregard for internet footprint (aka server security)
- Incapable staff and/or anti-cheat systems
Despite my grievances, AriesMS actually has a good foundation of systems, protocols and structure. If only the Administrator(s) weren't such selfish blockheads, we would've been able to achieve so much more. Either way, the player community for MapleStory seems to be dwindling and Nexon is already scraping off the bottom of the bucket.
Honestly, just scout for a new MMO or any upcoming ones.
Q: can i know GM compensation that you receipted?
A: No.
Since there aren't anymore questions, I'll be ending Part 3 and the entire WAAMS series here.
My DMs on the forum are open for anyone who is looking to get an opinion (if my account remains), or add me on Spyro#9074 (my alt Discord) for anything else.
I'm officially retiring from MapleStory.
Cheers to everyone who has helped me one way another, people who are calling this the "dragon manifesto" and the first person that helped me spread the word about WAAMS.
Stay safe, stay frosty.
-Spyro