After over year break I decided to re-install SRO to see those european areas and all the changes that have been done. Getting back to game wasn't easy trip:
1. I had forgotten my login/password and couldn't download new client since you need to be logged in to SRO site. After trying to figure this out for an hour, I finally found page from the site for lost logins/passwords - it just only gave first 4 letters of my login name.. I didn't remember rest since it was randomized for security. After some trials and errors I eventually managed to remember my login (closed my eyes and just wrote on keyboard with my fingers the login how I think it was, good thing to have some reflex memory
). Ok, so I figured out my login and finally got to change my password since I had forgotten it too. Would have been nice if there was some other way to recover your lost account info - the SRO webpages are a mess (not to mention they eat up 50%-100% processor time so I'm not impressed how those webpages are coded) and you can't use other browsers there except Internet Explorer. I didn't see anywhere how to contact account support - would have written probably angry letter so maybe better I didn't find it.
2. Downloading game with torrent, cool idea but the torrent exe file that you get from SRO site just didn't work in my computer, no matter what I do. At least you could have provided direct torrent link to the file so I could have used other torrent client (if there was one, I didn't see it anywhere). Instead I had to download it from Fileplanet (which also required registration) - I had to install download manager and then wait for
1 hour to get that download started and another hour went for download process. In my opinion this is bad quality of service.
3. Ok, so I got the client finally and installed it and it patched itself - no problems there. This was the only part without problems.
4. Login screen had new word verification. First thought it was cool, no bots in-game anymore (later more about this).. but then got the message: "Cannot connect due to server traffic". And soon after that I got disconnected message. Oh my god, this is still an issue in this game!!!! And there's like 20 servers now, much more than when I left for break. I've played other mmorpgs and in those I have never had any problems in login process. Why can't you try login to different servers in one go? Now if you can't login on 1st try, you get disconnected and client shutdowns, you restart client to get another try to beat the disconnect - lost an hour here again to try to login.
5. Login worked finally but then right after the game had loaded up I got the famous ???????? error and crash to desktop. I'm glad I remembered this was a DNS issue and could fix it with little tweaking windows/firewall settings. Still annoying to run into this problem again.
6. Spent another hour trying to login again....
7. Got finally in game, character was in Hotan and what did I see first - bots posting 4-5 times per second messages where to download bot clients, where to buy gold, where to download HP hacks.. wtf is this!!! I thought that by now all the bots would have been rooted out from the game...
8. Game crashed again back to desktop, no error messages. I bet this was caused by the massive amount of bots.
9. Do I want to spend another hour trying to login or do I want to play some other game that has no login or bot issues.. the choice is clear. I already wasted 5 hours and couldn't even get to play this game again. Maybe I'll try again late 2008...
Joymax, you still got lot to learn from other mmorpg companies. I like this game but with the current quality of service, I don't see myself playing this game.
