01 Jul 2020

A Message From CM Astrea : Regarding Recent Service Instability Issues

Dear Maplers,

First and foremost, on behalf of the entire PlayPark team, I wish to humbly apologize for the intermittent service disruptions which you have experienced over the past week since 20th June 2020.

We know how much all of you love and enjoy playing this game and we understand the frustration and rage that these disruptions have likely caused. Here, I would like to explain what had happened, and what we are doing to lessen the likelihood of further such disruptions, or in the very least, lessen the effect and impact on your gaming experience.

Our engineers identified and confirmed that we were actually experiencing a series of repetitive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to our network. Like MapleStorySEA, many of our other games and services were also affected by the DDoS attacks and were experiencing massive latency and frequent disconnections.

For those who are not familar with the term, a DDoS attack is when an attacker floods a network with so much traffic until the network is unable to respond to legitimate requests. While we do already have existing security systems in place to prevent these types of attacks from happening, the nature and severity of this attack was of an unexpectedly massive scale and unpredictable, and it wasn't something that we could safeguard completely from.

Since then, all relevant teams and various security solution providers have devoted all available resources in working round the clock to getting our network and game services back on track as well as to put newer and stronger methods in place to mitigate further attacks that may happen to our network. Up until a day ago, the attacks on our network have been both persistent and unpredictable.

We remain fully committed to providing you with a stable and enjoyable Maple experience, and we are greatly appreciative of your patience as we continue to actively monitor for any ongoing issues and mitigate any further attacks. In the meanwhile, we will be preparing a compensation plan to be distributed once we have managed to bring an end to the DDoS attacks and fully return to a stabilized service.

During this time, our i-Gacha webportal was also affected by the attacks, and resulted in several missing and duplicated purchase transactions for our 15th Anniversary Websale Extravaganza. Affected users will be compensated with the respective item codes that they failed to receive at the time of purchase, as well as item codes plus Maple Points refund for all duplicated purchases that occurred due to the non-responsive checkout page. We have received some of your iBox reports, and will be responding to them within 2 working days from the date of this announcement. Affected users who have not sent any iBox report will be contacted via registered Passport email address. Note: Users who have successfully received their item codes from the websale system are exempted from this compensation plan.

Please accept our utmost apologies for the inconvenience and frustration that this has caused. Thank you for your kind understanding and continued support.

Sincerely yours,