MapleStory: The Art Of Smuggling - Exploit Retrospective

maple story it's an 18yearold game 20 years if you're in Korea over that amount of time maple story has changed a lot to say the least for a game that's pushing two decades it's not that surprising that there would be a lot of different metas throughout its history one such meta had dominated the game for quite some time party quests party quests were very popular amongst the community appearing near the beginning of the game shortly after release and being a popular strategy in The Meta up until at least 2015 party quests consisted of getting a group of people together doing some type of quest or objective and then getting ex or reward at the end of it this spanned a wide range of levels which meant that it could encapsulate pretty much the entire player base at the time when you have that many people trying to use the same meta strategy every everybody's going to try to get an edge wherever they can find it now maple story hasn't really had a reputation of being bug free or glitchless or hacker free or good so it's no surprise that a meta which lasted around a decade would have its fair share of exploits within it you guys already know what time it is Kick Back crank your bgm to the Max and bust out your track lists because today we'll taking a closer look at one of these exploits which appeared during one of the most dominant meta Maple stories ever seen this is the art of [Music] [Applause] smuggling when you think about about the term smuggling usually you think of drugs or something illegal and this is very much of the same nature in real life someone will usually take something from where it is cheap and they'll smuggle it into somewhere where they can sell it for a higher price or at least something similar to that in maple story the goal is to take something that's useful and smuggle it so that you can use it in a way that it wasn't intended to be used the idea of smuggling in real life makes quite a bit of sense I mean you just take something that somebody else is trying to get and you hide it from them so how does this work in a game like maple story when it's just code interacting with itself I mean it's not like you can really hide stuff in general your goal with smuggling is to get an item out of one of these party quests the NPC's objective is to make sure that you don't take one of those items out of this party Quest so all you really have to do is make make this NPC think that you don't have one of those items but how is that really possible let's do a quick step-by-step breakdown of how players would accomplish this well firstly you need to get an item that you want to have outside of the PQ and then you get to a point where you've reached the last NPC the one that's going to take your item away from you when you try to leave players would most often drop an item on the ground this is because the NPC only checked your inventory it didn't really care what was on the ground in the map that you were in you'd pull up the NPC dialogue just before you were about to be removed from that map and then you would disconnect your internet connection in modern day maple story this would normally just disconnect you as soon as you've lost internet but back then the game didn't really operate that way it would try to reestablish the connection and this is intuitive because you wouldn't want players always crashing back to the desktop or the login screen just because they had a decent blip in internet connection normally it seems much better to reestablish connection for those players to let them keep playing well the slight oversight in this is that players could input actions during that time that the internet was disconnected it would take all of these inputs from the client that the player was on and once the internet connection reestablished it would send all of those inputs over to the server at the exact same time the byproduct of this is that the code in the NPC dialogue which was trying to run to clear your inventory and move you back to the map that you were supposed to go to wouldn't happen at the right time so as a result players would get through the NPC dialogue and then they'd be able to pick up the items on the ground just before they were moved back to the map now you may be thinking to yourself great I've got a bunch of useless party Quest Etc items in my inventory that don't do anything outside of the PQ why the heck would I want this well the thing is this wasn't accounted for by the devs when pqs were made so you could reenter the PQ with those illegal items this means that players can start breaking the functionality of these party quests and an enormous amount of value now comes out of smuggling and you better believe players are going to start trying to figure out which pqs will have the most benefit from this after this became public smuggling started to run rampant people would use this in caring PQ for skipping stage one Hennessy's PQ for crazy exp Ludy PQ for obtaining girlfriends apparently and uh orbis PQ for skipping stage one and this is not to be confused with glitch PQ which is similar but not exactly the same as smuggling but we'll get back to that in just a second I kind of glanced over these examples so let's go through them a little bit more in depth to truly give you an idea of how broken this strategy was let's start with Hennessy's PQ it's the lowest level so it kind of makes sense and it's also really simple to understand so I think it's a good spot to start you would have to run one of the pqs just like normal to do this you'd collect seeds of various colors place them down around the map in their allocated spots and then afterwards a moon bunny would spawn up this Moon bunny would continuously pump out rice cakes one after the other until whenever you saw fit but it was kind of pointless to collect a ton of these rice cakes because you really only needed 10 you didn't get extra exp for collecting more of them and of course the rest of them were removed from your inventory after you would leave so you might already see where this is going you just simply collect as many of these rice cakes as you wanted to from the Moon bunny smuggle out all the rest of them that you didn't use to clear from that PQ and then you could keep going back in clearing stage one and immediately clearing stage two as many times as you wanted not only that but these rice cakes were tradable so you could put them into your storage which Hennessy's PQ entrance was conveniently positioned there all right the next examples are where we start to get to see some of the more abstract applications of smuggling let's take a look at what is debatably the most iconic party quest in all of maple story King PQ is one of the most well-known in all of the game but it might not be entirely clear right away how smuggling could be applied let's give a quick overview of what caring PQ is stage one you need a total of three passes that's one from each person that's not the leader because you're going in with a party of four to get those passes each member will need to collect a certain number of coupons based on a question that the NPC gives you after trading in all three passes you can move on to stage two stage two is a simple position-based puzzle there are four ropes that you can hang on you have three players hang on top of them and you'll rotate around those ropes until you find the correct combination that will open the portal stage three is very similar to stage two Instead This Time It's Five platforms instead of four ropes and the platforms that you stand on are dictated based on the number of cats on that platform you'll rotate on those platforms until you find the correct combination and then you get to move on to stage four stage four is again very similar to the previous two but this time instead it's six barrels uh same concept though the final stage is much more straightforward you simply kill all of the enemies on the map including King Slime being the boss at the bottom and then you take all of the passes that are dropped and bring them back up to the NPC at the top there are exactly 10 passes which are supposed to drop and if you don't have all 10 of those passes you're not allowed to Clear the Stage or the rest of the PQ to get your rewards this means that if somebody's holding passes and disconnects or if there's a bug and the mobs didn't drop the passes you are basically screwed Smugglers however had a key advantage in this situation you see the passes that were dropped on the final stage are actually the exact same item as the passes that are needed to clear stage one normally this would be no big deal because players could never actually use those passes on stage one because when they'd leave the party Quest they would simply be removed from their inventory for our Smugglers however if they happen to be in a situation where they only had nine passes and they couldn't clear the final stage they instead now had an opportunity to smuggle out nine passes considering three are only needed to clear stage one you now had three complete skips of the first stage which is arguably the most tedious and boring stage of the entire party Quest I'm sure you can already see how this would be not only good for rewards but also very good exp rates as well but we can't really talk about good exp rates from a party Quest without talking about orbis PQ you see to enter orbis PQ you had to be between level 51 and 70 which might not seem like that much these days considering the levels we're able to get to but back then that took a lot of time to get to this means that it contained most of the more skilled demographic of the game and you better believe they were going to be privy to all sorts of Tricks such as smuggling to say people used smuggling style strats in orbis PQ would be an understatement these players broke the [ __ ] out of that thing now orbis pq's quite a bit more convoluted than the other ones that we covered so I'm not going to go step by step and cover everything about this just know that there are about seven stages in there and your goal is to collect a bunch of pieces of a statue of the Goddess you collect all of them put them on the Statue and eventually you get to fight Papa pixie where you take this little piece of grass and you bring it back to the NPC for your reward and bonus stage those seven stages had a lot of the similar mechanics of the previous party Quest we already saw so naturally stage one is boring as hell with you just collecting 20 Cloud pieces that you need to trade in so that you can continue on to the rest of the party Quest players figured out kind of a neat trick to speed up the party Quest as a whole though they' collect all 20 clouds and then they just leave the party Quest and smuggle those 20 out what happened from here is pretty genius on the next entrance they would immediately clear with those 20 clouds however you could could go to the next stage but you weren't required to this meant that players could work on stage two While others collected more clouds from stage one stage two would get completed around the same time that those players would bring those 20 clouds back which meant from then on out you could continue to do both stage one and stage two at the same time which saved a lot of time you may remember from earlier I mentioned something called glitch PQ abbreviated as just glitch players would use this glitch style of orbis PQ to do some crazy things I mentioned that glitch wasn't exactly smuggling but it operates on the same fundamental mechanic you see there was a mechanic introduced that allowed players to pass the leader of their party to somebody else this makes perfect sense there's plenty of instances where you would want to be able to pass your party leader to somebody else rather than having to remake the whole party or if somebody disconnects you'd have to just leave and come back at any rate players found a way to abuse this and that was glitch PQ take for example stage two also known as Lobby players would find the disc that they needed to find and put it on the alar but rather than just clearing and continuing like normal the leader of the party would get this past the leader functionality prepped on somebody else they'd then use the same strategy of disconnecting your internet like smuggling had and right afterwards they would click okay to pass the party leader and spam click the NPC this did two things it passed the party leader to somebody else and it technically cleared the stage but as long as they didn't click next it wouldn't finalize everything and because there were six people in the party this meant that you could pass the leader four additional times accounting for a total of six possible clears of that stage now this is pretty busted but it doesn't stop there this was also possible on stage three also known as sealed room players would follow through with a simple platform puzzle like you would see in King PQ once you figured out the correct combination though you could just glitch again and get six times the EXP on the next stage and if you thought that was going to be the end of it I've got news for you you see the statue of the Goddess was in a centralized location which meant that you didn't even have to go into the stages in sequential order that's right glitch was also possible on one more stage stage six also known as storage see storage was extra interesting because it was a combination of both our traditional smuggle that we were looking at earlier and the glitch that's been shown off in orbis PQ due to the way the PQ was set up when clearing stage 6 you wouldn't lose the piece that was required to Clear the Stage this meant that you could gather up six statue of the Goddess pieces that are required to clear stage six that way once you entered stage six you could just immediately glitch it again rinse and repeat for some disgusting exp rates with this even some old school players estimating you could go from 52 to 71 in Just 2 days and uh if you played back then you know this is nasty fast now realistically most parties weren't operating like a well-oiled machine like this you'd have all sorts of variant of combinations of people just going straight to Stage six or rushing stage two really just whatever the party felt like doing maple story is a lot more about being casual and chatting with people back then anyways so people weren't super hardcore into optimizing their exp rates aside from orbis though smuggling started to bleed into a ton of other aspects of the game I'm sure a lot of these went undocumented but I'll give you a couple examples of other ways that people would use smuggling people would use it in zakum PQ that's right you forgot zakum had a PQ didn't you that [ __ ] was terrible man anyways this one really wasn't that useful for zakum PQ basically if you were about to run out of time you could smuggle out your keys so that you could finish it a bit early on the next run people did use it in Ludy PQ but it was aot less useful of applications and was mostly for if people wanted to do shorter variations of the PQ or just wanted to skip the boss fight um ultimately people would use the same trick as caring PQ with the passes to just kind of skip stages but yeah people tried to apply smuggling to everything you could smuggle things like the guild PQ exclusive earrings that's right the old Guild PQ the one where you had to sacrifice a member of your party to even access the boss man this game used to be a lot more Grim that's for sure you think they'd put in another NPC like Mr sweat bottom hell no anyways people would smuggle anything there's even videos of people smuggling the magic Mitten out of Happyville there's really nothing special about the magic Mitten other than being able to flex on your friends usually players would use this in Happyville to throw snowballs at the Snowman boss outside of Happyville however though you could use this to throw arrows which was pretty cool and unique well you may be thinking to yourself now why did I explain all of this to you I mean it's pretty interesting but where's the significance is there really any point to remembering this after all these years that I just waste a lot of your time with useless knowledge well I think if you look back at that last section that I just covered the message is pretty clear about what the point of all of this is bring back Happyville Nexon you cowards I swear to [Music] [ __ ] well sorry it took me so long to get out another video like this if you're watching this video then you probably know how it goes when you play mushroom game let me know if you guys would be interested in something more casual such as account progression I definitely have a lot to show off since the last time I uploaded a video like this one my cousin and I are also trying to upload more random maple story junk to a channel called two palm trees and I could always definitely upload more there also it definitely feels kind of wrong to plug a patreon when you've only uploaded about two videos within a year but um you know who knows who wants to see more of my content so I figured why not full disclosure this is definitely not a highquality patreon yet by any means but I've got to start somewhere and I'll obviously improve it if there's enough interest in it if you enjoyed this video definitely check out my top five iconic hacks video if you haven't already it's of the same flavor and I think you'd really enjoy it lastly I always like to try to plug some high quality content creators when I see them recently toen swall has caught my attention quite a lot I really hope I didn't butcher that pronunciation but they put out some really really highquality maple story content and odds are if you like this you'll probably like theirs too as always thanks for watching and uh I'll see you guys in 8 months

Channel: Dusk The Hero

Views: 43,846

Keywords: MapleStory, Maple, Story, Hacks, maple, story, Most, most, Iconic, iconic, hacks, Dusk, The, Hero, duskthehero, DuskTheHero, Duplication, StarHack, Starforce, Dupe, Duping, Game, Manipulation, PacketEditing, packet, editing, Botting, botters, Farmers, Meso, mesos, MMO, History, Remote, Hack, remotehack, GM, hacked, GMHacked, Comprimized, stolen, Smuggle, Smuggling, smuggle, smuggling, exploit, OPQ, KPQ, Orbis, Kerning, LPQ, Ludi, Ludibrium, Party, Quest, PQ, Party Quest, Tower, Glitch, Pass

Id: AMrEdYDo7YU

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023