Silkroad Online Forums

I decided to write this post because I can virtually hear the frustration being shouted through type. I know that not all servers have SA's, and I know that not all SA's are as communicative in their respective servers as they should be. People are angry for lack of information etc. I would like to explain a little about our job.

We do register every complaint, bug, hack, scam etc that we hear. I have lists a mile long. Trust me, if you hacked A two months ago, it's listed.

We know you want more information, so do we. If you will remember, a couple of months back, SRO instituted a new forum at sro.net. It became immediately and devestatingly clear that not only was the code buggy, it was dangerous. People posting there, then and now, put their accounts at risk. I called an ingame meeting several times on Babel, through the use of my own globals as always, and warned players there. I also posted for the other SA's and asked them to do the same. Several changes were made to the forums, but it never has been sufficient.

After the new forums went up, the GM's for all intents and purposes, disappeared. About 6 weeks later ish (cham correct me if i'm wrong on timeline), one of our GM's reappeared. They had been unable to make a GM account for the forums, and while he maintained they had been reading the posts, they had been unable to reply. Further to this, Gargamel has always been the one mostly in charge of the forums and SA's. With Gargamel busy with GWNGCWDCGCWXCD, everything began to slide.

We SA's were left completely in the dark. All we knew was that we continued to work as hard as ever, and no post was replied to and nothing was fixed. I still have a bug list a mile long that has never been attended to.

So when asking why there have been no post or comments by the SA's to inform people about what is going on, realize that we aren't going to present fiction as fact. We (and I speak mostly for Cham and myself) are very staunch about "releasing" fabulous new info when it's not cold hard fact from a GM. When people do that they cause nothing but harm. People now are expecting rabbits, they are expecting mastery caps to go up, they are expecting new maps, etc etc etc. If none of this appears, what do you think will happen? People will get madder, they will yell harder at the SA's, and they will quit SRO. Getting ppls hopes up again and again only to have them let down again and again is a debilitating and poor way to run business. Therefore it's honestly been a better policy to not say anything at all.

There have been, since the third week of June, "expected" release dates on the lvl 80 cap. At the very least, every other week, some friend of a friend/shady confidant/roomate of Gargamel/VNSRO Developer/KSRO programmer has confidentially told his "close buddy" that lvl cap will be next maintenance. And every Tuesday, people wake up only to be more let down and more and more annoyed.

As far as these forums go, I knew they were here but haven't taken the time. I am not exaggerating how much of my time is spent in game talking, teaching, helping and gathering information. I know Chameleon is a vibrant part of these forums and have been utterly willing to let him handle the SA business from this standpoint.

It's funny, because when I reported the trade hack hmm a couple of weeks ago now? It was summarily dismissed. I still don't honestly know if Joymax has pinpointed the code or done anything about it. As I posted to them, it took my union less than 5 minutes to find what we needed to know. I commented in union chat, and 3 minutes later the comments started rolling in. People just needed to A) care and B) take the time to look.

So further to all of this, when I see misinformation being spread as "fact," yes I get highly annoyed. And that's because at the end of the day, when players miscalculate their character builds, and things don't happen on the server, and the bots multiply faster than jewellery box rabbits, people come to me and scream. I absolutely believe that no information is 100% preferential to wrong and/or inaccurate information.

A month ago when Babel began having huge server issues (after the hardware update and long maintenance), we were promised an event to repay the monkey/gold time lost plus aggravation. This event never surfaced. EVERY day ppl spam me. Not through any fault of their own mind you - I believe we earned it every bit as much as every player. To be told you are getting something and to have it not appear ever is very disheartening to say the least.

Everyone is trying to be patient while Joymax figures out it's internal issues. But to 99% of the players, regarding of whether the game is advertised as F2P, they pay money for silk and spend their time in game building a character than in turn generates revenue for a company that isn't listening to even their smallest concerns. So if people want to boycott silk, or rant, or rave - let them. They have every right to.

In conclusion to this monolithic wall of text, I would like to bridge the gap between players, SA's and GM's. I understand that this concept is inherently flawed lol because of the utter lack of information coming out of Joymax period, however I am willing to try. I do have Gargamel on my MSN, and no I will not use it. That priviledge is and was meant to expressly be for emergencies, such as when someone is trying to cause grievous harm to the servers etc. I will however promise to answer all questions in a truthful manner to the best of my ability, and if I am unable to answer I will state that, and post the question to the GM's in the SA forum, which is how Joymax prefers the communication to be.

I will ask the other SA's to join me in answering forum questions, and I have to say that this won't extend to any other forum than this. I honestly just don't have time to troll 3-4 forums, and tavern is just a snake pit anyways.

Please for the moment refrain from posting at sro.net, until someone has notified you on this forum that the coding is fixed. It is imperative that everyone is proactive about protecting their accounts.

I hope that this post was found 2 b moderately useful, and I look forward to getting to know you all in a more positive manner. We tend to get busy on our own respective servers, and need to take more time for the global community at large. TC and GL ^^

Thank your for posting this

Very well worded, tactfully done. I wish to know one thing about you. Did you, or did you not tell the person from tavern that tavern sells accounts?

Ah the Tavern issue. Awhile back, an inactive character in my guild logged in. We all went WOAH yay he's back! ( he went to Japan for 8 months 2 study). anyways...silence...and we all went uh oh.....eventually the person spoke, and embarassingly I have to admit that the original person on that account in my guild had used a bot. The person on this account that night was a hacker that had bought the user/pass list from the Cowboy cracked version.

To make a long night's story short, he knew who I was, and pm'd me from 9 different accounts as he went through and cleaned them off. I screen shotted the entire adventure. I was sick tbh, I didn't know any of the people that he pm'd me from, many sounded to be dead or mule accounts, but I was just physically sick to my stomach. I felt terribly bad for these people.

He was a very well spoken, polite [young man i assume]. In his opinion, any person that downloaded a bot deserved to be hacked. And again, in his opinion, he was just doing the sro community a service. After muling the gold, the gold went on ebay for sale.

I asked him many things about keeping accounts safe (I held 2 ingame meetings the next day on Babel to pass this information on). This fellow buys his information from several places - Forums (he mentioned gamerzplanet and tavern), the hack bot makers, and from the actual real bot makers. The real bot makers will not sell their lists, he said, for 60 days after the bot has not been paid for. They are considered fair game and inactive at that time.

He can also request any account he sees on Ebay - if it has been botted there is no 60 day waiting period, because the bot makers know that that account will not be paying to renew the bot as it's being sold.

He also stated to me that they had, at the date of our conversation, the entire database of usernames by injecting the new improved forums with faulty SQL code. Some manner of code has been repaired in those forums, but it's never been eliminated. Not that it couldn't be, it's just never been done.

While all of this did come, from a hacker, whom you would expect to be less than honest...it is however logical that all of it is true. This boy knew that I could not stop him, and wasn't telling me anything that would change how anyone plays sro, except if they bot. This information was therefore distributed as a protective measure - in that it wouldn't hurt anyone to know it, but would potentially keep people from visiting certain forums, using the same email address or username, and ending up getting hacked.

I believe CHAUD traced the source of his hacking, as well as that of a clanmates, to the username used at Tavern. Correct me if I'm wrong.

And that, I hope, answers that. ^^

Very well said Mrs. Sutaseyu SA sir, very well said!

^^

thanks for the entire post. i especially love the above part obviously. money talks. just ask kmart about walmart

The guy that hacked me at level 46 said basically the same thing. He did nt say that he bought the information, just that many ppl (me included) tended to use the same user name and PW on forums that they did in game. He just hacked the forums, got a list, then tried entering them all. We talked for a long time. He explained many things to me that I didnt know. He taught me how to make better PWs, better user names, better self protection against malware, etc. He even returned as much of my gear as he could and gave me gold to help rebuild my guild. I thought that it was a sweet gesture anyways. He no longer plays SRO and has moved on to other games.

He still reminds me to change my PW every so often.

Well that's really nice to hear. I spoke to another fellow today ingame that had disconnected while moving a sosun chest into his storage from his inventory - and when he logged back in it was gone. He assumed it had just been lost at dc - but was shocked to see it 2 days later in a shop. He spoke to the shop owner, explained the situation, and shockingly the shop owner returned it to him, asking for nothing in return. Apparently the sosun chest was just lying on the ground.... and so obviously she picked it up. He gave her a sos chest as a thank you gesture, and well it was just really nice to see ppl working together for a change and not harming each other. Honestly its' really nice for me to hear things like that and I thank you for it - because most of my day is taken up with ppl getting hacked and scammed and cheated etc etc - so this was just really refreshing

thank you

Thanks!

excellent information. Thank you.

Thanks for this, really.

I agree with you that no information is better than false information, but SOME communication is better than no communication. I would rather hear "We have no idea how to fix this problem, but we are working on it. We found 3 solutions that didn't work this week" than not hear anything at all just because there is no new news. Gargamel dropped into Xian a few days ago and had a little chat w/ us, and it was nice just to see the actual physical presence of a GM again after so long. With the problems that everyone is constantly railing against (botting, ccf, etc.) getting worse all the time, we need SOME sign of life from JM to let us know that they're even watching/listening, whether they're responding or not.

Are there any active SA's on Xian? if so, who are they? If not, how can we get one? Everyone on here knows that I have tossed my hat in the ring to Crayon in the past, and there was even a push to get me nominated as one a few months ago lol... but i don't care WHO it is as long as it's SOMEONE. It'd be nice to know that there was someone I could contact in-game w/ an issue or concern.

I too am grateful to see some information flowing; keep up the good work! As said before: I'm sure everybody, GMs, SAs, etc. is very busy making SRO a better game, but some of us are really stressed to at least know something's being done about the issues, and perhaps which problems have the current focus.

CCF, unlike botters, may not seem like a huge issue for players from JM's point of view, but the huge increase of +5-+9 items, and the complete buyout of SoX equipment by CCF'ers is really ruining the game's economy for the normal players. Many of my friends simply can't afford good equipment anymore, and even with all the gold I make from selling elements I'm having trouble finding the equipment I'd like to have. Level 52 SOS weapons went from 20-25M to 40-50M practically over night, and don't even get me started on the prices for 8th degree SOS equipment. We have a union of about 300 people, but most of them hardly seem to play anymore. Hopefully they'll come back once the botter/CCF problems have been solved, and the new areas come online.

Again tho: thanx for the update, and keep the information flowing. I'm a patient man, but I do like to be kept informed on what's going on, and this post certainly helped.

Can anyone please remind me, how many people are there working on silkroad gameplay/service improvement? Would i be able to count them on my fingers?

Too much words. Someone sum it up please.

I can definitely hear the frustration in your own experience Suta, from the POV as an SA.

You are an asset to the forum and iSRO community as a whole.

It's more likely that you could count them in your pants

Will you make a new topic for those questions or will you randomly give insight in ongoing topics?

Thanks for letting us know the SA's POV

Already said it on another post, but again THANKS SUTA

big thanks to suta

everytime ive spoken with you about an issue, the result goes one of two ways... 1. "the GMs already know about it, we reported that 2 weeks ago" 2. "ill pass the word along". following those 2 scenarios, the outcome has always been the same... nothing happens. im not placing the blame on you, because you have no more power to fix it than anyone else. but i found this section interesting:

the SA program had potential if used correctly, but joymax has decided to abandon it, or ignore until further notice. in fact if i went ingame right now, i could announce myself as both your own, and chameleons replacement as SAs. the fact of the matter is, if joymax doesnt care, you shouldnt be forced to, or pretend to either.

as much as i realize the system does not work, here is my take on it. players dont want to talk to the GMs at all. they need to get in the server and fix something instead of rhyming corny and cliche phrases once a month to show they still exist. we would rather they show they are doing their job than tell us they are.

if i were you, i would have resigned as SA long ago, because no one cares what the GMs have to say until they prove they are listening.

You spoiled little lump of meat, learn to read.

Very informative post Sutaseyu. Thx.

becoming a silk assistant should be a paid job as you could be putting in hours close to a fulltime job! i can imagine that the ones chosen for the job have quite a workload, and as far as i know they don't get any reward at all! not even a fixed amount of silk per month as a way of payment/compensation...

why don't they hire 3 people from each server to become official ISRO employees, they can supervise the server they're designated too and uphold the policy given by Joymax. Keep an eye on malpractises and report these to the GM main office, or given authorities to take care of certain ingame issues? They could organise and guide events, spawn uniques more often and keep an eye on botters and report these to the GM main office so they can be added to the final banlist.......

you should ask for some gloabal chat for your work, with all those you had to pay yourself...

I hope no one has summed it up for him yet. Chaby if that was too many words for you to handle, I'm eternally grateful I'll likely never have to listen to anything you've got to say in real life.

I'm still pretty new to SRO, but this post just made clear the kind of chaos and turmoil I happened to run into. I'm too low of a lvl for most of these issues to have any effect on me right now, so I simply hope things begin to get worked out by the time I hit my 40s or so

Anyway it's nice to know there's someone involved with the admins of the game that care about the players. Keep it up, we all appreciate it.

see? that wasn't too hard and now everyone has cleared up this misunderstanding of many months. thank you so much ^_^

Hearing information and your other post about GM posting is a relief. Also GM Pizza came on Troy last night. I saw PooprScooper globaling Hi GM pizza so I pm'd her and we had a short chat. But at least she was on doing some bot hunting. Also she said her English isn't good so probably couldn't understand half of what I was trying to say XP. No idea whether a ban list will ever come out again, but they are there checking on bots and stuff.

Well I'm glad to hear some relief coming from some players. Unfortunately, on Babel anyways, the exodus continues. If the changes that were somewhat sort of promised don't come when they were partially mostly alluded to, I don't think anything is going to save the population as such. We guesstimated, from a large chat today, that we're running about 50/50 on Babel - and with the slow trickle speeding up to a flowing stream of players leaving, I'm terribly afraid of the outcome. I quite happen to enjoy this game lol.

Anywho will keep u posted of the latest and greatest once I know it.

same here. im inactive but waiting.
i miss you BSers

you dam sure are missed too