MapleStory Hacked in Europe

It always gets my attention when a maplestory mesos of any significance is hacked.  In particular, I find it interesting to see how the incidents are handled.  As a result, I've had my eye on MapleStory Europe, where, for the past couple of weeks, Nexon's regional office has been dealing with what looks like a pretty sizable currency exploit.

It struck me as odd that Nexon would use wording that was subject to such a wide range of interpretation, and then, as far as I know, not amend and clarify it in the two weeks since.  This left me to guess.  Did the company intentionally choose to be so vague?  Did I read far too much into part of a sentence written by someone whose native language isn't English?  Or was the reality of the situation something else, somewhere in between?

As for resolving this matter, my first thought was to roll back the servers.  However, fast forward to February 7.  Nexon posted a situation update saying that this option had been considered, but rejected because "considering the amounts of EXP and items that you all have gained throughout the days, we have decided against a roll-back as it may have eventually brought more harm than good to your gameplay."  Again, rather vague.

For anyone who may not know what happened, the short version is two of the classes in the game have a skill called Meso Guard that they can employ to lose money instead of health when hit.  Someone figured out it was possible to hack the data so as to tell the servers that a character took negative damage, the result of which was a currency gain instead of a loss.  What's more, the amount could be as much as 2.1 billion per blow.  So, as you can undoubtedly imagine, a lot of players (I haven't seen any credible numbers in this regard) took advantage, thereby shattering the game economy.

While the time frame when this exploit began wasn't immediately known, it was clearly sometime prior to February 1 when a notice was posted on the game's referring to "the recently erupted issue, Meso Exploitation".  On that day, it appears Nexon stopped an unspecified number of accounts from trading, although the statement didn't explicitly say so.

The notice did state "we are well aware of the current situation and have compromised it well under."  The latter part of this piqued my curiosity since it represented a rather curious choice of words, the meaning of which was unclear.  If I were to interpret it with my rose-colored glasses on, I could choose to assume the exploit had pretty much been taken care of.  However, it was also possible to put a highly negative spin on it; i.e. to think almost nothing had been done yet.