The Evil Dragon DILF Honeypot: The Hard Magnus Bans

The year is 2012, but barely. Korean MMO MapleStory has just released a major content update to its American server, and it is a big one. A new class, new items, and a new endgame dungeon. Players swarm into the new zone, eager to see the new land of space dragon knights. A hundred new dragon knights are made, and as most of the players engage with the new splashy warrior, the endgame raid players are looking towards the castle at the end of the zone, ready to try their hands at getting the newest, most powerful gear available.

They don’t know that they are walking right into a trap, and that the only way out is to lose. And they will. They will lose again and again, and as long as they lose, everything is fine.

This is the story of Hard Magnus, the impossible boss, and the players who were stupid enough to beat it.

Before we begin, however, I want to make a note about sourcing. Despite this event being only about fifteen years ago and during a fairly popular era of the game, primary sources have been surprisingly difficult to find after multiple forum purges and website refactors. I have endeavored to find as many primary sources as possible to help bulk out my memories on this event, but some details are simply lost to time. I would like to shout out the YouTuber Togain, whose detailed update timeline and MapleStory iceberg videos have become a major source for this write up.

What is MapleStory?

MapleStory is a Korean MMO currently produced by Nexon. It was officially released in Korea in 2003, with other servers opening across the world from 2005 (for the North American release, known as GMS) to 2007. MapleStory is best described as a 2D platform-based monster grinding game, and it plays very differently than most Western MMOs like World of Warcraft.

Particularly during this era, MapleStory was far more about leveling up and fighting monsters than the sort of dungeon- and instanced-based content of Western MMOs. While multiplayer and top end raid content did exist, for most players, the game was mostly played by killing enemies over and over again, training on whatever could be feasibly taken down in a few attacks. The level cap has always been extraordinarily high, and particularly during this era, very little content actually approached the cap. The goal was to always have something to grind towards, rather than the Western MMO “level to a cap and do expansion specific raids.” At its best, MapleStory is a game that focuses on simple loops and watching numbers increment in satisfactory ways. At its worst, MapleStory is a Skinner box in pretty sprite art.

Given its nature as a very repetitive game with simple movement and low PC requirements, MapleStory has always been plagued with bots. The game released with a focus on being lightweight and easy to install on even fairly mediocre hardware, and given that it was released in 2003, by 2012 nearly any computer could run the game. Combine the fact that it was easy to run with a few other “quirky” design choices that can create massive resource sinks for even basic equipment (looking at you, scrolling), and there was always a large bot presence across the game, from low level gold farming to high level boss hackers farming drops from endgame content.

The Tempest Approaches

Releasing in late 2012, the Tempest Update was a major release for the GMS server. Like most content, this update was largely a port of content originally developed in Korea over the previous months and years. The Tempest Update would introduce an entire mirror world to the main setting of MapleStory, and I will level with you, this is about when I checked out of even attempting to understand the lore of the game. I was just excited there were dragon people.

One of these really cool dragon people was our main NPC character, Magnus. Magnus is a commander in the army of the Black Mage, MapleStory’s myth arc villain for the majority of its lifespan, before defecting to another powerful evil character. His characterization isn’t exactly complex, and he serves as the villainous commander of the evil troops in the Heliseum region with a penchant for backstabbing so severe that even the other villains got annoyed. His design was striking, a human knight with black dragon horns and wings, and was certainly appreciated by certain segments of the community (and I, frankly, do not blame them).

Magnus served as the final challenge introduced in the newly released zones, and upon release, became the new hardest fight to clear in the game. And for a few short weeks, Magnus served another purpose: Magnus was there to kill bots.

Magnus, like other high-end content before him, can be challenged on multiple difficulty settings: Easy, Normal, and Hard. Each mode offers increasingly useful and powerful rewards, including best-in-slot gear (gear powerful enough that no other item can surpass it, like the best cloak or pendant). Higher difficulties would include more attacks, more aggressive AI, and a ballooning health total that mandated aggressive play to deal enough damage before the timer ticked to zero. While Easy and Normal could drop some interesting stuff, the real prizes were all locked to the Hard mode drop table. Endgame players would hop in, expecting a challenging fight that could give them the new best items in the game. There was, however, a problem: Hard Magnus was completely impossible to beat.

Hard Magnus was unkillable. But he was unkillable in some important and subtle ways. He did not have an arbitrary HP threshold he couldn’t go below, and the developers didn’t pull an Absolute Virtue from Final Fantasy and protect him at all costs. They had math on their side. No party could put out enough damage within the time limit to beat him, even if they were able to survive his onslaught. No player would be able to do it for months, in fact, as until the next patch upped the damage cap, there was no possible way that the players would be able to kill him.

Exactly as planned.

I Want to Smash Hard Magnus

As Tempest released to GMS, there were a lot of events, most of them tied to the new zone in one way or another. Endgame players had their eyes on the Magnus raids, and on that shiny, shiny new gear. And it seemed that Nexon was giving them the green light to attempt it. In fact, they had their own name for the early Magnus rewards: the Smashing Magnus Event. For the first month after release, the first team that could defeat Magnus on Hard Mode in each server would receive a unique and special title: The One Who Spearheaded Magnus [sic] Defeat, an extremely powerful stat boost that would be proudly shown to all players you happened to walk by. Eagerly, players rushed in to try and take him down, and one by one, every fair player was completely obliterated.

That isn’t to say that Magnus wasn’t killed. By using various cheats, several cheating players were able to kill him, only to receive a message that read “Congratulations for defeating Magnus! Your victory has been recorded.” as the boss rained down his drops for the party to pick up. Efficient cheaters were able to get his defeat down to about three minutes in relatively short order, and the drop rates for his rare gear were fairly generous. As the items trickled out into circulation, players awaited the announcement of which team had killed Hard Magnus first.

They received a very different communication from the developers.

The Trap Snaps Shut

On January 4th, a few weeks after the patch, an announcement was made through the official website:

“On January 3, 2013, we have permanently banned numerous players hacking the hard mode of the game boss, Magnus, as well as their party members. We will continue to crack down on abusers to ensure we maintain a fun and fair playing field for all [players].”

The ban wave had been pretty brutal. After waiting long enough that they’d catch more than just a few hackers, Nexon had banned a swathe of everyone that was connected to the account. This meant it was not only the actual attacking characters, but also all of the item mules (accounts dedicated to offloading the resources and trading them while the hacker farmed the boss before the exploit was patched) and even players who were not using illicit cheats themselves but were running the fight with people who were (as the exploits were obvious and there is no matchmaker, these people were probably paying for the chance to score drops if they weren’t in on the scheme).

While I can’t find any direct posts or discussions about this due to link rot and how fragmented the playerbase was, I do remember that the net was even broader than reported. Players who purchased the drops which had been trickling into the market had a good chance of being banned as well as part of the sting operation outright, instead of just getting the items removed. While many were buying the items with real world cash off-client (against ToS), this definitely caught people who were merely clueless and spending their in-game currency. Some commentators (notably, Togain, whose research has been immensely helpful), noted that this downstream damage was avoidable by just removing the drops from the impossible boss, but given that would likely have meant that the trap only worked on a fraction of the number of bots it caught as there would have been no reason to run at that particular brick wall, a more sensible solution is likely just having removed the items instead of banning for anyone removed from the raid by a certain number of steps. Either way, Nexon didn’t take it, but the actual number of innocent bans appears to be pretty low as most players who were high enough level to equip the gear were pretty suspicious of the sources already.

Consequences

The response from the playerbase tended to be pretty positive. Hacking bosses had gotten prevalent enough that it was satisfying to see them kicked down a peg. There were some downstream effects, like the banned players starting new accounts and making some of the farming spots unusable for like a week via bot floods that the tools did not stop well, but the event has largely gone down in fandom lore as a time the developers let people happily turn themselves in for the chance at a title that was never actually in the files to begin with.

Many high-level players clowned on the hackers pretty heavily. The fact that Hard Magnus was impossible to kill was subtle to the uneducated player, but to someone who, for instance, watched KMS content guides about content months in advance, the fact that this boss would be impossible for weeks was stone obvious. Any serious raid group was still working on Dark Empress Cygnus, the previous hardest boss, and would wait until the damage cap rework to even attempt Hard Magnus.

It was about this time that I drifted away from MapleStory. I had never gotten to the endgame content, and I was playing more and better games, now. But for a brief winter, I watched blatant cheaters feed themselves into a wood chipper. And truly, what more could you ask for?

Edit: fixed a link and corrected a typo.