Hi Everyone, First of all, I want to say Happy New Year to all of our Maplers! We hope you’re continuing to enjoy the Black Mage update content and are joining the fight to finally take on the Black Mage himself. As we are busy preparing the next updates and planning for 2019, I also want to take this opportunity to reflect a little bit on the past year of MapleStory. 2018 was a big year for MapleStory and for Nexon America as a whole. We held our very own fan event - MapleStory Fest, partnered with various concerts and anime licenses last year, implemented a lot of changes that shifted the fundamental gear and end-game progression, addressed some long-standing issues and continued to apply player-requested quality of life changes, celebrated our 13th Anniversary, introduced the beginning of the conclusion to the Black Mage storyline, and helped two new games in the MapleStory franchise have a successful launch. In a lot of ways MapleStory also saw a lot of growth not just with the game, but with how we as a company interacted with our players. While our commitment has always been focused on our players and communicating with them, we made a concerted effort to improve that throughout the entire year through some organizational changes that our General Manager Jungsoo Lee hinted at in his memo in October. Having said that, we know there are numerous ways for us to improve this communication further, and the response and feedback we’ve seen from you inspires us to continue on this path. Now having come back from the holidays, I know there is still a good deal of topics that players have brought up, so I’d like to briefly discuss some of them today: Recent Bans In my last memo we specifically discussed bans related to runes that we had investigated and in some cases overturned. Since that time we have continued to look more closely at other recent bans that players have reported may be in error. One of these specifically dealt with manipulation of Kanna skills. The criteria for this ban was specifically looking at the skill "Monkey Spirits" and how it was activated and deactivated. There was a specific case in which a player who had legitimately teleported or left the map may have simulated the illicit behavior criteria we were looking for. So in these cases, a small handful of players may have been inadvertently banned under this criteria. We have since alerted our teams to hold off on banning with this criteria while we review it more closely, and we have already investigated and released a number of players who were banned for this reason. We have also put some more focus on reviewing our entire banning process, including other recent ban criteria we’ve introduced, to investigate further and hopefully prevent incidents like these from happening. Skills Causing Crashes Although we attempted to fix issues with some skills such as "Draco Surge" and "Allied Fury" causing crashes, we understand that some players are still experiencing issues with these skills. We are still looking into the cause of these and will provide updates as we have them. Achievements Not Being Triggered In our v200 update, to increase server performance we had temporarily restricted some achievements from being activated. We are planning to remove these restrictions in our upcoming v202 update. Elite Monster and Boss Drops Changes We understand that some players are seeing changes with the item drops from elite monsters and bosses. We are still looking into this internally and will provide updates as we have them. Chief Knight Weapon Box There was an issue in which the Chief Knight Weapon Box did not contain the Cygnus’s Guard weapon originally listed in our web notices. We have temporarily removed this item from sale. If any players wish to have any or all of their boxes refunded due to this issue, please submit a support ticket to our CS team. General Server Instability While we have been constantly addressing issues of increased latency and instability, players reported experiencing higher frequency of these issues over the past couple of weeks. During this time, we’ve been investigating and monitoring the situation more closely, but haven’t been able to isolate a definitive cause. We are continuing to look into the issues and will let you all know if we apply more changes to help alleviate them. As we always mention, we are aware that there may be more issues that players wish to have more information about. Once we have any info to share on those topics, we will continue to communicate them to you all. Lastly, I want to end this message by saying that while 2018 brought about a lot of changes to MapleStory, those changes helped us prepare to support the game even stronger as we move forward and bring more positive change to MapleStory in 2019. Thank you, Dennis “SavageAce” Bernardo Producer – MapleStory View on the Official Site