Silkroad Online Forums

That was... great!

first of all i will tell you this most legit players are usually kids who cant afford a bot or a person who truely love to play online games. Most people who use bot programs are the ones working and making real money. So they are the ones who buy silks. Most people on this forum are kids and if they have a chance to bot they will do it. Only a few honest people will not bot. after i wrote this i can feel flame is coming....lol.

My experience is just the opposite. So I don't know what to say. Nearly all of the legits on Venus are older, mature players who have jobs, families and lives. There are a handful of kids.

Although most of the bots are non-English speakers, the ones from NA/EU are mostly kids roughly between the ages of 13 and 19. I know that botters always use the excuse that they have lives and jobs and blah blah blah, but that has been pretty roundly disproved.

There is a free bot out there. What do u mean they dont have money to buy bot? -.-

read it all

Thing is, Joymax is testing new things actually. But not on isro, they test all that on ksro, we usually dont get something ksro doesnt have yet.
Therefore, as nice as it would be to have some mid-lvl entertainment aside grinding ~ it's most likely not going to happen anytime soon.
Jobbing is the real fun part of sro in my opinion, but its not fun when you are lower than your competitors.

Now there are some really annoying parts of the game that led people to get it done in an automated way. Drops are farking rare the higher you get, exp is getting slower all the time, and then you also have to sp farm. Do all that in a legit way and have a real life at the same time... it will take you about a year. So after this 1 year that you have invested time and energy, bots had time to high lvl jobb for about 6 months, and are waiting for a cap raise. So they raise the cap a bit later, and the whole thing starts all over again.

I didn't really understand why so many ppl here were upset about the existence of powerlvling, it saves a lot of time that is being "wasted"(in my opinion) later on, you could job instead of grinding your ass off.

What I like about one of the things that we will get (ksro got it) are the repair invalid sox drops from uniques. This finally gives the chance to be temporarily close to the strength of someone who has a real sun. Also, those new caves seem to be so damn hard to get through, with a whole bunch of uniques that you have to kill first to get to the last one ~ that sounds like a high lvl event to me! (I guess that is something similar to raids?)

Its true that most bots spends waaaaay more silk than most of the legits.

Almost all highlevel botters seem to have PT+ and pickuppet. Then they also have nice weapons which probably required some astrals and immortals.

However, there are some legits that buy loads of silk too, but they are much less
Also take in consideration that the bots are probably 6:1 compaired to legits, so it kinda evens out i guess...

Free things always suck, so does the free bot. I've met many so called legits that would bot, but they did not have the money for it, or were simply scared to get banned. non ego man explained pretty well the situation, and it's true most of the time. Most botters are addicted to the game, cause they have the urge to level up and keep up with other botters, most won't admit it but that's how it is. The "lol i haz life" thing is not true of course, every botter who uses that excuse is addicted. Then there are the botters, that simply bot + plvl chars and resell, and they don't pvp much.

I agree with everything you have here, the highest level I have gotten to is 30, because lvling just becomes so unbelievably boring..

A major thing I think would help this game would be to have a mini game that would reward you with big amounts of xp. Like in runescape they have that, and I used to do that and had a lot of fun while gaining levels (I was like lvl 90 when it came out, and it took a long time to lvl up before that minigame) ..

It's all so true.... Majority of the silk income comes from botters. To expect Joymax to ban botters is like asking them to virtually shutdown half their company. People that are willing to pay for bot almost certainly will pay for even more silk.

And me? I pay none for both

You guys never get satisfied

Joymax bans a silk-buying bot - you complain
Joymax does not - you still complain

Besides, this is the first ban list where I saw some actual silk-buying bots I have seen. More will probably come ^^.

You're so gullible, that's what jm likes. Do you think they are fixing ANYTHING with the weekly bot bans? No. You can still buy billions of gold, you can still bot your ass off, you can do everything what you want without even thinking of getting banned, unless its related to cheating on item mall items. Yes the traffic went down a bit, one good point. But the game is still the same, everyone buys gold, everyone bots, everyone scams. And the funny thing is, jm bans 500 chars, next day you will see 500 noobs spawning in jg.

That part alone shows 1 obvious thing. That you're relatively new to the fray. But I shouldn't have assessed on that too much since it came from an 08er no less. I apologize since I rarely play these "registered at x dates" card but I felt compelled to make an exception this time.

Simply because I consider 5 or more lines of the same toned responses are a waste of readers' time in good threads like this.

Getting back to the topic I can agree to what the OP, barotix and non ego man had said. Having said that, I can't really gather the necessary patience to post more additions or arguments to provide a diff POV. Pardon me for sounding a bit bitter.

What I'm gonna say though is this; The listed solutions, causes & effects had been read, rinsed, repeated and hung dry countless of times since for as long as I've been a member here.

I'm gonna boil it down to these:-
- To the OP, you've done a commendable job and so did barotix. But there's a distinctly similar flaw(s); that much of these proposal lays complete and utter "faith" squarely on the recipient's (Joymax) abilities to act. It's been proven again and again that JM, while they can in fact "deliver" (arguable on definitive standpoint) the necessary and promised expansions and game additions "on time", putting up more game servers in the same time frames seems to be their best corrective measure along with posting ban lists. A weekly list that costs mere cents in my country in its standard aligned HTML form to do.

- On a not so related note and more directed to the current crop of "JM's Defensive Coalition" players, I just love to read all of you "name me 1 MMO that doesn't have bots?" chest tumping posters. You're simple that's it... There's a simple line of retort available that is "Name me 1 MMO p2p or f2p with enough botfest that it virtually places an extra login queue as an accidental function?"...Trust me you'll be hard pressed to name others when you've done this 1 or have multiple titles experience.

- We keep discussing on player side contributions of ideas not so much on making a stronger statement and stance.

Well I've made mine a long time ago and it was easy...TEMPORARY ACQUITTAL. Yup I've said it. Quit. No matter how ludicrous or defeatist this sounds, it actually makes a better food for thoughts.

Quit until the Arabs come. Or continue to play while stopping the financial support (silk payments). DO instead of TALK.

Noobs reading this will feel the twitch in their panties and the standard light bulb will go "wtf is this guy still doing in this forum then? gtfo!"

LOL
I don't hate the game.
Heck I'm not even hating the playas.
I just lost all measurable faith on the devs/publisher that backs it.

We expect the publisher to heed and be receptive to civilized presentations of ideas. We expect the publisher to be able to accommodate the legit set of PAYING players not by privileges but by basic bread and butter thing we call rights.

Now idiots can use the age old EULA comeback. Idiots will be idiots. Only idiots who tries to come off as smart asses with that argument can only work on me IF I've said anything or anywhere along the lines of threatening PR campaigns or litigious actions on said company.

You don't have to pay a legal team and a bunch of lawyers to stop logging in. You don't have to google for "how to sue a MMO publisher for dummies" guides to stop paying for silk. You don't have to read any instruction manual, scholarly thesis, long drawn analysis or The Bible (if you're one of those who must do any of these, then I pity what's left of humanity..) to rapidly drop the legits population. That my peers, are the strongest message that we can collectively send.

A few thoughts.



Why punish everyone for the wrongs of one person. Most ISP's use dynamic address. So if a bot got his ip banned all he would need to do is get a new ip address, which in most cases can be done by unplugging your router for a min or ipconfig /release /renew. After the botter had a new ip address the old ip would be in the pool waiting for a new user. If this new user was a so called legit player they would not be able to play. You would end up with large blocks of people who could not play.



What would stop people from botting till they had 2 warnings then playing legit? Would this be a problem in your eyes?


Wheres the extra money going to come from?



Here are a few idea I had to get rid of bots.

1. Community action.
What if a system was put into place where you could flag bots? I know there would be a lot of potential for abuse but if you made it so you needed be be at least x level to use this and 3 wrong flags would make it so you could not use the system any more.

2. Technology.
The idea I had was to make an invisible gold drop. At random have a pile of gold be dropped that would not be shown to the user. If a user picked this up you know they would be doing something funky. An easy way to do this would patch the program and silk pets so if they saw a code don't show/grab this pile of gold. So bot programmers would not know what this code was it could be updated every week.

These were just 2 ideas I had.

I have been playing since January 2006. What I meant was that the first time I have seen players that actually buy silk get banned. Sorry if I sounded otherwise, in fact, I will go edit that post now ^^.

I never said that I thought JM was going to do this, just that this is what they need to do. The entire point of my thread is that it really doesn't need to be that difficult to fix this game.


I thought of this too, as it does seem like the only solution. However, I left it out of my proposal because I think it would be vastly ineffective. Here's why: I think you would agree with me that most players these days are botters. So even if ALL the Legits quit, there would still be full servers and everybody would be a bot. As before mentioned, bots buy silk too, so JM wouldn't lose any business. I know it's a sad thought, but the Legits would not be missed. I think what Avalon, BHA, and many other guilds are doing on Venus is probably the best thing the community can do to remedy the situation. That is making as big of a fuss as they can in an effort to attract JM's attention, while making life as miserable as possible for the bots. Now if ALL the Legits did that rather than quit, I think we would have more of an effect. Boycotting silk would seem more reasonable (use their servers but don't give them money). However, we honestly do not know whether or not JM is using our silk dollars on cheap hookers or if they really are hard up for cash. I would hate to take away the little amount of money going toward the bot war by not buying silk (not that I buy silk anyway, but I speak for those Legits who do.)


First of all, I'm guessing a good amount of people who bot would be too stupid to figure out how to use their router. I'm not saying all of them would be, but certainly alot of them. Secondly, the chances of any SRO player getting a bad IP address are slim. That player being Legit are even slimmer. I think that is a chance I would be willing to take. And even if a Legit did get the IP address, what's to stop them from renewing as well?


I did specifically say confirmed botting resulted in a permanent ban. The minor warnings were only if the GM did not have solid proof that the player was botting. Usually it isn't that hard to get that proof, but you need to have a system in place for all situations.


This was assuming that JM was spending our silk money on cheap hookers. If they really are that hard up for cash (although I can't imagine that being the case with such few servers and so much money coming in from silk) then they could appoint volunteer GMs. Read my whole post for more details.


These aren't bad ideas. The only problem I see with Community Action is the fact that we are greatly outnumbered by bots. What if an entire bot guild wanted to flag Fly just to get revenge? How would the GMs be able to tell if the flag was false or not if 30 people flagged the same person? It just seems to me like that could be manipulated too easily. My volunteer GM solution is similar, but maybe a little safer too because now you are appointing one trusted person who would be much easier to monitor for corruption.

I do like the Technology idea though. Say they did get more GMs. The GM policing the server could ask if somebody would bot. No response and they pop open an image verification window. No response or incorrect response and they get issued a warning. Then the GM drops fake gold on the floor. If they pick it up you now have several sources of excellent evidence that the person is a bot and you could safely ban them right then and there.

Again everybody, Thanks for the feedback and intelligent debate. I have updated my OP with suggested ideas and more Q & A.

@ontopic

You are indeed correct, wonder why joymax bans each week on all servers and leave all goldbot on babel, if this is just an experiment lets hope the outcome will be positive and actually see a big change in the future.



love that idea but the problem is bots will update it each week too its that simple, gives them more work.

The only way we can stop it is simple don`t bot and don`t buy gold, what Joymax can do is ban few well known goldbuyers and silk buying bots to shows us they are in serious business right now, had a few chats on msn and most bots simply tell me oh well it is going to be another goldbot banlist anyway all they are afraid of is losing their stall chars
Wouldnt it scare people off if for example http://www.rev6.com/player.asp?id=187301 got banned instead of 500goldbots?

have you try free bot? there is a chance that people put key loggers in it. so the safest way is to buy it.

It's not because it's a pay bot that they wont put a secret keylogger in it. Did u try to scan the pay bot? Found a trojan? backdoor?
It also depends on the free bot u are talking about. A free bot made by a no one in a forum probably will have keyloggers. But there is a well-known free bot developped by rev***** which gains the reputation over a year. At least, now is not the time to put keyloggers. They'll wait u till u reach lvl 130-140 then hack your account then sell for money.

You Really Thought This Through All Great Ideas I Think The Game Needs More Gms And Initiate Mods and The Invisible Gold Idea Is Nice

I was speaking from more of a network engineer prospective then a game player. A much better idea would be to give each client a uniqe id based of something like the MAC address of the network card. This way you can ban by computer rather then ip address. This idea still has problems but I think it would cause less problems.


Ok I must of missed that part.



I'm not sure what they are spending their money on, but Network Operation Centers are not cheap. Take a look at this site SOLIDSPACE.COM. Looks like they could be paying 200 and up per-server hosted plus bandwidth. I do like the volunteer idea.


*EDIT* There was a lot of text so some of the formatting got messed up.

HOLY F***ING S**T!!!
Thats almost full SoSun 9D!


And, yes, if he is going anything considered illigal by JM's rules, he should be punished for those actions.

Ya, I'm no network expert, but I think since it costs nothing to register an SRO account, there needs to be a more permanent ban available. The MAC address would be better because at least that would force the botter to buy a new network card every time they got banned. Anything to prevent stupid gold farmers from making a new account every time they get banned.

Ya, I guess we will never know what Joymax's budget is. It just seems like most other MMOs have so much better GM support than SRO. And if they fixed the bot problem they could downsize servers I think. O well, no use speculating if it's never going to get done.

Guess 90% of babel enjoyed it when he failed +9 first few times but as you can see, money talks

at both of you who where talking about floating bad ip addresses.. you guys are really dumb.

so everyone knows from now on, when you renew your ip and or unplug your router, your router/computer TRYS to get its old ip back. it does everything possable to do so, and 9 times out of 10 it succeeds. go test it, i dare ya.

So how does that make me dumb? The fact that the IP address attempts to renew only strengthens my argument.

it makes you dumb because there was like 4 posts aurgueing about bad ip addresses going to good ppl, which... would never happen. so yes you both are dumb.

There are different ways to serve ip addresses, dependent on service provider/service ordered. So don't be flaming people.

If you got a dynamic ip, then it changes ALWAYS after you reboot your internet, if its static then it NEVER changes. It's simple as that, banning someones ip does _NOT_ help, especially it doesn't help if you want to get rid of goldfarmers with this method. There is a limit set so max 30 clients can connect to the gameserver from the same IP. But it's useless cause you can simply rent a VPS and run your bots there.

@Cheeze

There is a Mac Address check included, but it's easy to bypass. Not to forget that it's easy to change it if you get banned.

http://www.nthelp.com/NT6/change_mac_w2k.htm
http://www.tech-faq.com/change-mac-address.shtml
http://amac.paqtool.com/

If you're talking Olympus, it's really hard to find a Euro party, for sure. The Chinese have the server pretty much. And try to be a Euro hunter? Rogues everywhere.

One way to level is to be a cleric and post "free cleric lvl xx" or just watch the parties for one requesting a cleric. My other Euro characters have a difficult time leveling unless I level them

Kinda depends on the IP address lease, and whether or not you have rebooted while another PC is requesting an IP address and getting yours... Most of the leases expire once per week, some of them once per day, some of them hardly ever expire.

Also depends on whether or not you're behind a router. In a large company, 3 minutes rebooting will usually get you a new IP address, but at home you have to shutdown the router and wait to see if you get lucky. True, your device will try to use the old one.

Banning someone's IP doesn't always work, thus they try to ban the subnet sometimes...which REALLY sucks for some legits if you're on the same subnet.