Where do we begin?

You can't select the people who make up your community when you have no filter. People don't cheat or abuse the system for any set number of reasons. Nor will addressing this problems have a proportional effect on abusers who take advantage of exploits or openings in the system. The only thing that any company can account for is to try to address the lowest common denominator and hope that is sufficient enough to continue turning a profit for their business.

For most circumstances I'd be following this logic. However with a game like maplestory, where players who play the game as it was intended to be played, certainly do hit a wall, just like any other free to play game. The wall in maplestory is much more steep than the free to play games that I know about though. There are even worse ones, but just because there are worse doesn't justify what we have now.

The thing about it is, the profits you make in maplestory without a huge investment, which varies by generation, are non existent. So you go to methods that aren't supported by the game, such as purchasing NX through another player, or just the currency in general. Much like gateway drugs, not in terms of "satisfaction" but if you already crossed certain barriers, why bother pretending? That's where I feel this game has gone, and the difference is people who pretend to play by the rules, vs people who just objectively go against the rules.

And we're not talking about real life profit either, although that is a big component, I'm talking about turning over a profit to the point you can once again upgrade your gear to a result that actually shows improvement. We lost that type of 'gameplay' a long time ago.

The goal here isn't to discuss how to get rid of cheating in general as a whole, but rather how to make it so that no player feels like they have to deal in these risky type of business' in order to achieve a threshold to enjoy all of the game itself.

Aren't you the one who doesn't play MapleStory, like at all? Just curious.

Anyways, I think they did make a start with something that maybe not many people don't know: GND aka No delay was been patched along with FMA aka full map attack. Though it did take like a year and a half lol.

I don't play maplestory any longer, I consider it a masochistic type of game nowadays, as I've probably stated half a billion times. However opportunities have started to pop up that may actually end up creating results. But it's been awhile since I've asked what the general moral of the game is currently, which is why this thread exists.

Even if (High cost of cubing gear/NX dependency that walls progress/Dependency on paid for risks creating a market for purchasing gurranteed results) may have contributed slightly to the problems with hacking by pushing people to seek "illegal" methods to play the game, I don't think it is/was the main factor - IMO the main reason was that:
1) Nexon is good at making people hate them through their incompetence in handling certain situations
e.g. Autoban and refusing appeals for actual legits, not reading/ignoring "valid" (i.e. ones that aren't just complaining or looking for freebies) tickets, allowing banned hackers to return to the game, not knowing what the community really wants at times, not responding in a timely manner to game breaking hacks... etc.
2) Nexon is complacent at actively fighting hacks. Not that they don't, but they don't prioritize it at all.

Even so, I'd say that fixing the second takes priority - even if a person can play in a bubble inside Maplestory without being TOO drastically affected by the first, the second is a large deterrent to anyone aiming to actually play Maplestory.

I really don't think people retort to these activities because "LOL I HATE NEXON", it's not like people steal from companies on the premise "I HATE YOU". It all goes down to one thing, profit, and back when I played it had the same allure. It's just that people got tired of depending on gachapon, or nx in general to reach those "perfect" scrolled weapons. So once duping became a thing in 2007 or 08 I can't remember which, it became the better of the two options.

Between 08-09 is when the games perspective on hacking changed, it became a tool for those who didn't want to break bank, more and more people started to accept it, to defend it.