MapleStory Item Refund... Group Lawsuit Against Nexon for 'Probability Manipulation'

Users of Nexon’s game “MapleStory” have launched a class-action lawsuit against the operator Nexon. This collective action was taken to seek refunds for purchased items after Nexon was fined over 10 billion KRW by the Fair Trade Commission for manipulating the probabilities of “random item” drops in MapleStory.

On the afternoon of the 19th, lawyer Lee Cheol-woo, representing the MapleStory users, along with lawyer Kwon Hyuk-geun from the law firm Busan, filed a complaint at the Suwon District Court Seongnam Branch to reclaim the purchase costs of the items.

About 500 MapleStory users have expressed their intention to participate in this lawsuit, making it the largest user lawsuit to date. The previous largest user lawsuit involved 380 users of NCSoft’s Lineage 2M in 2022, who filed suit against the company for paying YouTubers to promote the game covertly, thereby compromising the game’s fairness.

Lawyer Lee stated, “This case involves the largest number of plaintiffs ever in a game-related lawsuit, and the claimed amount will also be the largest in history. We plan to start with a claim amount of 250 million KRW out of the total purchase amount of about 2.5 billion KRW and gradually increase the number of plaintiffs and the scope of claims.”

This class-action lawsuit appears to have been influenced by a prior lawsuit filed by two MapleStory users. In that case, the appellate court ruled partially in favor of the plaintiffs, ordering Nexon to pay 572,265 KRW, which is 5% of the claimed item purchase cost of 11,445,300 KRW. Nexon has appealed the second-instance ruling.

Last month, Nexon was ordered by the Fair Trade Commission to pay a corrective fine of 11.6 billion KRW after it was revealed that the company changed the probabilities of random items in MapleStory to the detriment of consumers without proper notification or by issuing false notices.

The core of the controversy was the MapleStory random item “Cube.” In May 2010, Nexon introduced the “Cube” to exploit users’ desire to quickly enhance their in-game character stats, encouraging repeated purchases and thereby increasing revenue.

At the time of the Cube’s introduction, Nexon initially set the option appearance probabilities evenly but adjusted them four months later by weighting popular options to appear less frequently. However, this change was not separately announced.

From August 2011 to March 2021, Nexon changed the winning probabilities of certain highly preferred overlapping options, known as “Bobobo” (additional boss damage) and “Deudeudeu” (increased item drop rate), to “0%,” making them impossible to obtain. Nexon did not disclose this probability adjustment and even falsely announced that “the Cube function has not changed and remains the same as before.”

Lawyer Lee expressed confidence in winning, saying, “If the Supreme Court upholds the lower court’s judgment and partially accepts the plaintiffs’ claims, the legal principles confirmed by the Supreme Court could apply to most users who played the game during that period.”