188 replied with a plain message: "Hold." Then disappeared into a private channel.
While the community braced for disaster, 188 moved fast. They traced the exploit to an old input validation routine left over from the earliest days of Classic. The fix was surgical—sanitize the payload, throttle message rates, and add a cryptographic nonce to handshake packets so replay attacks would fail. But deployment was tricky. Eaglercraft servers were scattered across volunteer-run hosts; some had custom mods and older clients. A naive patch would break more than it fixed.
But the story didn't end with a quiet fix. In the weeks that followed, the community matured. Server operators adopted better practices. New players learned how fragile the scene had been and how much it depended on people willing to step into the dark and fix things. 188's patches became a template for transparent fixes—publish the code, explain the change, and let others verify.