Silkroad Online Forums

For the people who keep complaining about silkroad online being dead, not being able to login, joymax being a crap company and the game being full of botters. Think again, however now do so from a business point of view.

Joymax is a commercial company, which means in order to keep a company going it needs money. Nothing is free in the world neither is Silkroad although they advertised it (also known as marketing communication).
From a sales management point of view, lets take Joymax as a company being under its current circomstances.

- Game full of bots
- More and more turks
- Goldbots
- No support or service at all
- Small changes on the same level (new cap, new items in item mall)
- New players not being able to play

Etc. etc. you people complain about it every day.

Joymax their plan was to get people to play the game with advertising that its free, knowing that people will get hooked to play and as soon as Joymax has a solid gamer community introduce item mall to generate profit for the company (makes sense).
If you play SRO, it does NOT mean you are a customer of Joymax! You become a customer of Joymax when you have bought silk. If you play SRO and never bought silk before, it means you are still a prospect, Joymax wants you to become a customer to generate profit.

If you did not notice, Joymax does make changes to the game, just not major ones because that would cost to much money. That is also the reason why you cannot compare World of warcraft with SRO. World of warcraft wants to keep their customers happy for a longer term due to the monthly subscriptions and expension packs, they need to spent more money on service, support, administrators etc. Joymax doesnt. but why?

In salesmanagement there is something called the 20/80 rule. This means 20% of your customers (people who buy silk) generate 80% of your total income. This would make sense referring back to SRO thinking of players from kuwait who spent a fcklot on the game. As a company being what do you do? You obviously look which players consist of that 20% group. If it turns out that the majority of these players are turkish, they will introduce the turkish language and have some events aimed at turkish players (which they did, Ali baba etc.). If it turns out these 20% bot, do you really think that Joymax will get rid of 80% of their income just because people who do not buy a premium (so are not a regular customer but merely just a prospect) are not happy where the game is going and losing its original fundementals? They wouldnt.
You are speaking about a new player not being able to play the game? Getting a new customer normally costs money, you need to advertise, do effort, and it takes time before it becomes a customer and generates as much profit as a regular customer already does. It IS possible for new players to play the game, however they'd need to buy silk. Meaning if they do so they will become a customer towards Joymax meaning they make profit already.

Product Life Cycle,
Joymax was not an innovator when it comes to MMO's, however in the introduction stages of the game they made sure people could play the game for free to create a decent community to get more and more players to play leading to the growing fase of the product life cycle. In this fase SRO became popular with the big crowd. After that the grownup fase comes, here is where they introduce the item mall to start generating profit. SRO as a game being can be seen as a cash cow (according to the BCG model) it makes profit which they use to invest in new products, called wildcats (think of games as DarkEden). After the grown up fase they try to keep their current costumers WHO MAKE THE MOST PROFIT as long as possible by making small suggestions, more people from the middle east and turkey and egypt play, they adjust the way of being able to pay, the language packs and names of events etc. Making sure that they will create as much profit as possible (marketpenetration, up-selling, and trying to extend the product life cycle as much as possible).

I do believe joymax can see who bots and who not. Joymax can see who buys silk and who not. Joymax can see where you are from and how much cash you spent monthly/yearly etc.

Conclusion:
Joymax is not a company that cares about customer relationship much, meaning trying to keep everyone happy. However as a company being on the area of sales they are doing really good. They keep track of who their main customers are, sketching a profile for those who create the most profit and see where the most profit can be created in the future. If they see that the people who create the most profit are people from the middle east who bot, they will not do anything to stop them from playing. They will encourage them by adding language packs and make them feel welcome. Those who do not bot and buy silk (!) are a small majority of their customers who they would like to keep happy aswell, hence why they advertise with ANTI BOT and make it LOOK like they do effort (just a matter of marketing communication) while as a company being, you would never ever get rid of your top-core- customers.

And if your making alot of money already doing as less as possible (automatic repleis customer support) why do effort? If your current main income group is still going strong?

Makes sense much doesnt it? :o
I wouldnt have a problem owning Joymax at the moment in its current state, i don't support the way they run their company but on the area of sales, they are doing damm good.

Well, you put it in words that most people have known for a long while. Those who did not see this before will probably get their eyes TORN open now. Its disappointing, but its true to every aspect, and the reason why I quit SRO. Hopefully people will either quit paying for SRO, or they will quit entirely. Those who buy silk every single month are just enablers to iSRO JM's ways.

I read the first sentence of your post and then gave up to much of this crap thats been posted before. lol

so we have to forgive JM?

For what should you have to forgive JM in the first place? Ruining your personal game experience?

You should forgive yourself;
- You chose to play

I don't see any reason why people should complain about SRO being dead on this forum, i still enjoy the game, yes i dont like some aspects yet still i choose to play it.

If you would own JoyMax and looked at your options... what would you do? Invest money into a game knowing that probably eventually yes it will have a good community but will only loose money instead of generating profit??
We are speaking about commercial companies here.

Nothing new, just worded differently and longer...

Joymax doesn't work on a business model of constant returns over a long period of time, they rely on legends to spur large monetary investments which in turn leads to short term profits for them. In other words: their leakages are far greater than injections over a long period of time and they have undermined the lifespan of this game by relying solely on addicted/naive -pick your poison- players.

I don't think they undermined it, if a game lasts 5 years the way they run it, i think alot of people would sign for that with the profit they are making. SRF got some rumors about SRO2. Think about it, let the first SRO run for 5 years till its almost dried out, start promoting SRO2 being the better version with new options/gameplay and some false promises, let that run over the original engine and you got profit for a couple of years again.

Your right but all you've done is give a explanation as to why JM suck balls.

It doesn't change the fact they run a dodgy business.

You don't need to look deeply for reasoning behind JM's bad ways. All you need to do is look at just one of the things.

(No GM's in game for instance).

This shows the customer all they need to know about JM.

They suck balls!

Pretty much what deedee said.

It was really well written and I enjoyed reading it. Even though I've spend hours of thinking since I started playing silkroad, and came to the same conclusion

The game only last as long as Joymax is willing to keep the servers up, have you logged into the servers? The game is dead. They have undermined the "blood" all MMOs rely on - that is, new players - by keeping them from joining in a timely fashion. A good community, with good service, and balanced gameplay will deliver greater returns over time than "Joymax's model."

I agree with Barotix. Need new players or it's game over.

Wouldn't it be great if another company started SRO?

Just like 2moons/Dekaron and Dreamlords. they all have different companies hosting the English versions.

Even if they started the game on 70 Cap or something it would be awsome.

I don't know why only JM have the rights to an English speaking version.

Seriously you would of thought many many other companies would of picked up on this shitty management and thought about having a go.

Shame they havn't

Baro hit it on the head: without getting and keeping actual new players, this game isn't going to last all that much longer. It's pretty "dead" already, and everything JM has done, or is doing isn't working towards getting new customers. As for example: every new login system JM has added has made it more difficult to login. I was considering coming back to play, but glad I didn't: The first time I tried the Queue system, I didn't login even after going to sleep; talking about 10+hrs here. So, one must ask the question as to why would one give JM money when you can't even login in a timely fashion?

Game might be dead as in gameplay, Joymax their income sure isn't.
A reason for joymax current way of handling instead of a good community, good service and balanced gameplay to deliver greater returns over time might be to do with the competition. Every year a new MMO pops-up and alot of players switch, might've developed a strategy to just gain alot of profit to develop something new or invest it into new games. Nothing lasts forever, not even a good community.
And i highly doubt their profit/income went down much... might even be on their peak at the moment due to magic pop and due to Joymax not monitoring any servers (most likely) and looking at their income/profit, they'd say they are still running a successfull business and still going strong.
Still though you got to admit the reason why most of the people complain on this forum is because they still want to play, thats the strength they got, SRO is addictive as hell.

Well if the first post is correct, then wouldn't it make more sense to pool all the legit silk buyers together and buy MORE silk than the botting community buys? Recruit non-silk buying legits and convince them to buy as much silk as possible.

If we turn the tables around so botters as a whole provide a smaller amount of revenue to Joymax than legits do, then Joymax will be more likely to listen to legits and keep them happy.

Boycotting silk will just make Joymax ignore you even more. The only thing that will accomplish is to make the game 100% bot infested instead of 98%. It solves nothing.

The thing is they can't. The Kuwait'is and Egyptians/turks will ALWAYS out purchase silk over legits. Why? Because there are no legits left in iSRO. Or just enough to count on your fingers. iSRO will always live because of middle easterners. Legits need to "get smart" and move to a different version of SRO. Why pay a shit company anything, when you could just move to a real joymax and get your money's worth. There is NO hope for a brighter future of iSRO under its current management. I'm sorry, but thats just the truth and everybody knows it. Just let the middle east have iSRO, its a worthless slum now, move somewhere, anywhere besides iSRO.

tl;dr

Everybody already knows that the Joymax CEO is a genius because he uses unexplainable methods to get idiots to pay for this game to compete with bots.\

tl;dr my post?

EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS JOYMAX DOESNT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THE PLAYERS/CUSTOMER, THEY JUST WANT YOUR MONEY LOLS

No Joymax doesn't care about our money. They only care about which method would be the most effective in torturing legits and make them cry about the updates and bots everyday. Joymax wins.

I seem to remember there was always an issue in iSRO with Vietnamese players, until they created a Vietnamese version of the game, restricted to only Vietnamese residents. I believe this only happened, someone correct me if I'm wrong, when some company in Vietnam was willing to buy a license for SRO's server files to host the game themselves.

They could do the same for Spain, or Turkey, or France, or any other country or region if they have enough players to support it. It would make sense to do that for any of these countries, if there's a company willing to do it, so that the game in that region can be geared more to those players' language/culture.

Or instead of doing that, I guess they could just make half of the servers bot servers and the rest lock down on banning bots for real, etc. That way both sides of the community are happy. They can make the legits happy giving them a "mostly" clean server, and make the cheaters happy letting them cheat until the cows come home.

Not like any of that would ever happen.

didn't someone here by joymax stocks? how's that going for him?

Hes lost all his money, which explains why hes not posting here anymore cause he now has no internet.

What Joymax has to do, is just like cs: Sale the game on a cd like WoW, then start selling its Pathes(Legends), but the game still free only you got pay for the game(cd), item mall stay the same as it is. If Joymax works this out, bann bots and fix all its issues like ctf, they game won't die, there still making money off the game/patches(legends) and item mall, if today there wasnt any bots i still buy prem to get higher faster same as for my monkey and devil powers...

Selling the SRO client on a CD isn't going to solve anything. I can just buy this CD and install it on 50 computers, create accounts, and log in. I can buy a single CD, create an image of it and store it on a server. All my gold company employees (I don't have a gold company) can download it, burn it, and install.

You don't even need to install the game to play it on additional computers. Just copy the "Program Files\Silkroad" folder to a new computer.

Perhaps Joymax could use some system like Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage thing, but you know how well THAT is working to keep all Windows installations legit...

WOW I'm shoked! You put a code on the cd smartypants, that code goes into one account OMG no way guess who else dose that Guild Wars OMG no way

@ PR0METHEUS

For Joymax to make a difference in legit and bot servers they would first have to make public that they are aware of botters yet while they did nothing about it for a long time, contradicts the statement they are making now. Which im sure they wont do. Second of all making a difference in servers, as in splitting up groups means they have to do effort again and actually maintain the legitness on legit servers (maintenance) which is yet again time and effort. Why do so when your income is good enough?

Same goes for the fact of publishing cd's, making code's and monthly subscriptions. With item mall you can earn much more with a smaller group of customers. Expanding towards a bigger community by using these methods cost money, money JM wouldnt wanna waste if they are happy with their income. JM is at the point they dont want to create goodwill anymore...

@ BuDo

Its not 80% bullcrap. I understand where your comming from totally. Every other big major commercial company would hold a strategy with a goal for a longer term base. However most sales strategies are written on 3-5 years tops, not longer. Joymax is doing a hit and run method basically keeping their sales based on transactions not using relationmanagement. I do think that Joymax wanted SRO to become a game with a good community, however i think they lost control. They set up a sales plan (by the use of introducing item mall) to make money on a longer term however due to investing money in the beginning (keeping the game free to play) they probably didnt have enough resources to keep a wide control over their server when it comes to bots or simply did not use the time for it. Then you get forced into doing something as a company being, if you find out the majority of your players on the iSRO server are breaking the TOS and you still want to make a profit due to the fact that you've invested alot of money into SRO already what do you do? Ofcourse you still want to get as much income out of it as possible, so they adjusted their strategy to a shorter term to make as much money as possible (3-5 years by using item mall) to keep JM as a company going strong, SRO is merely a project. And as PR0METHEUS said, in the end they can always sell the engine towards other developers who are willing to release the game in a sub-market or use the codings for new games. Back to PR0METHEUS, iSRO is making alot of money, meaning if there is a buyer who is willing to buy the license, they would have to offer alot of money. Referring to my first post, JM uses iSRO as a cashcow for profit for their entire company, why sell your major profit line or even a part of it when it makes more money if you keep it? In the end if SRO's profits go down, i'm sure you will see more SRO versions pop-up.

BuDo you need to think wider then just SRO as a game being. Its apart of JoyMax but JoyMax consists out of more production lines, games, even SRO versions. You never know what the plan or thought was of Joymax with SRO, maybe they wanted it to have a good community, maybe they just wanted to milk it, maybe they used it as a test project for a new project to rise. Not to mention the intervenience of external factors which make Joymax hold the strategy they do now.

One thing is for sure. If Joymax makes the switch from their current situation towards a good community with only legits. They will loose alot of income and customers. Because of the fact that the majority of the customers bot now and are used to it. If they wanted to make this change they would have to have done it sooner. At the moment, it would only lose alot of income. Maybe for a long term it would be able to build again, but is Joymax willing to take that risk? Is Joymax willing to go from low-maintenance to a high-maintenance on a game that is making enough profit already.
Joymax also knows the technology goes fast and that the game engine of SRO gets older. Thats why i think (personal opinion) they will just let SRO die out and eventually sell the licenses, learn from it, use the cash they made to invest in a new project with a new engine.

I couldn't agree more. It's the community that matters in an MMORPG, the "life blood".

Joymax is just doing what the majority of it's customers (botters) want. They just need to make a shift and realize that if they deny the botters what they want, and enforce their TOS, they will gain new life blood, new players, that will feed into this game and into their profits to replace what they lost with the botters that get banned. New life blood will raise the popularity of SRO. The more new players that play this game, and like it, the more even newer players will join and recruit other new players. Build a good player base, and keep building it, and it will set the grounds for moving a subset of those to SRO2 if it ever comes out. Stick with botters and sure, they'll move to SRO2 and bot it up, but they'll get bored with no interaction from other botters and eventually quit that as well.

In the end, the problem with this game isn't even player bots, or gold bots. Those are effects, not causes. The cause of problems in this game is gold buying, or even more simply greed. If people wouldn't buy gold, there would be no (or a LOT fewer) gold bots. If there were (nearly) no gold bots, the servers would be populated and everyone could log in first try. If there were no gold bots, prices would go down and people wouldn't feel the need to run their own gold bots to cheat their way to more gold.

Why do people buy gold? Because they're too lazy to earn it themselves, because they are greedy, because the prices of equipment are too high. Prices are too high because people buy gold.

Stop buying gold. Everyone.

The other "problems" people come up with, no game content, no end game, HUGE leveling requirements, SP requirements... shouldn't be a problem. If all these people have issues with these things in the game, why even play the game? No one is forcing you to play. If you don't like how "hard" (long) it is to play this game, play something that's easier for you to handle. There are plenty of people who do like playing this game, even at lower levels. Playing at lower levels is just made more difficult by the people who cheat their way to the top and then complain about everything in this game but continue playing (botting) it.

If the only thing most SRO players do is bot to cap, then cry for a cap raise, what do you expect Joymax to do? They won't work on low level content, they'll just raise the cap so players can continue to bot and cry for a cap raise.

This is what you've all asked for isn't it?

If the community as a whole changes what they ask for in this game (stop gold buying and cheating) Joymax will just have to listen to the players' new desires for this game.

tl;dr

That's not surprising since you couldn't be bothered to at least reply "too long, didn't read." Even that is too long for you.

What else does Joymax do to make revenue besides hosting Silkroad, Deco, and Darkeden?