While I firmly agree with Barotix that botting does hurt the game and it's legit players (including myself), I just have to mention a few things:
Part 1: Why the Social Trap of Botting has Spiraled Beyond the Community's Control - The Problem
-not that Barotix ever said it hadn't...
First of all, props to Barotix's explanation and model.
The farm's limit of 12 was surpassed in 2006 and is currently over capacity at somewhere around 50.
Oh, and btw, its population is growing.
When I first started playing, there were no bots. SRO was not popular enough for people to have a demand for bots. I remember the first time on Xian when my friend explained to me what a bot was and that he had seen one for the first time. It was right then that Joymax should have nipped it in the bud. Lets quickly walk through what happened in the past few years:
- No bots, a couple of servers, strong community.
- Player A deploys the first bot.
- Joymax either does not notice a developing bot problem, or does not care, or simply does not have the resources to deal with it.
- Player B witnesses the immediate gratification of Player A (bot) and decides to bot as well...
- Following Barotix's model, we now arrive at a point where bots run rampant and the game has been destroyed for everybody. Or has it?
It seems to me that if the game has been degraded for everybody by bots then eventually many players and botters alike would have become bored and stop playing and the game would die. Many people have stopped playing (including myself until recently) because of the bot problem, yet the bot population continues to grow. I think botters are able to have fun without playing. That is the problem. Because, let's face it: Silkroad is a game. You can do three things with your time while awake:
- earn money
- develop one's self
- have fun
So people, being logical, do what makes sense and have a computer program play for them until they get to that high level.
I am not condoning this behavior, nor justifying botting for this reason - I am simply stating the real reason why people are botting and why botters are not ruining the game for themselves as Barotix seemed to have implied.
Allow me to readjust Barotix's model for our current situation. What is actually happening is botters are adding more sheep to the field, pushing it to capacity. Legits are not. However, Since the Legits are not taking away one sheep for every sheep the botters add, the field still reaches over capacity and everybody still loses, but the Legits lose twice as much.
I understand that nothing in life is free. That is why I am ok with the advantage silk buyers have over non-silk buyers. I think much of the mindset of botters is "They pay for silk, we pay for bots." What they fail to realize is who is being paid. As Barotix mentioned, if everybody played legit, and enough Legits bought silk, Joymax would be able to reward the players with a better gaming experience. However, do bots not also purchase silk? Clearly the problem is that not enough players purchase silk to maintain a fun playing environment. Personally, I will never spend a dime on this game when there are games such as World of Warcraft which offer such a higher caliber of playing experience and GM support. (flame on)
Secondly, from what I've seen, a Legit who makes it to a high level spends just as much server time as a bot who makes it to a high level. It should not be a problem that bots are clogging server traffic for being on 24/7. Just think if they all turned legit. It might take even longer for them to reach a high level and server traffic would be even worse (although I must say it would be worse on Turkey's time, not mine.
)Thirdly, as I touched on before, much of the bot problem lies in the game's mechanics. Anybody who has played Silkroad for an amount of time can attest to the difficulty of leveling (especially past 40). Hand grinding takes many days or even weeks of long, tedious work. This work really isn't all that much fun (although it has improved since the release of the European party system), so people bot past it.
Conclusion:
There isn't much one can do about the problem now. If you join the bots you are contributing to the problem, and if you stay Legit you will only be watching the problem grow.
Sure, alot of Legits have done everything they can to stop botting. What is being done on Venus is most admirable (so much so that I even came back to join it), and it is even working to a degree. BUT, (and I really don't mean to sound cynical) Venus is the result of the best of the best of nearly the entire Silkroad community Legits on ONE server. I hope that what will come of the activity on Venus is renewed interest in the GMs to actually do something about the problem:
Part 2: A Different Angle - The Solution
by MARKsman7328
So what is to be done about this problem if it is beyond the community's control? Well, I have a short-term and a long-term answer to that - both of which need to be done to remedy the situation.
The Short-Term
Before anything can be done, Silkroad needs to go back to the way it was before bots. And yes, this means über-ban. Here are the specifics:
- 1) Hire more GMs
- There needs to be alot more GMs. I rarely ever see a GM. There should always always always be at least one GM on each server at any given time. More would be even better. And the GMs should be more personable. People should be able to open up a ticket to talk to them or to report a bot. Additionally, the GMs should be constantly policing the server, looking for bots and taking action:
- At least one GM on each server should spend all day walking around watching people play. If he sees suspicious activity - anything at all - he should simply whisper the suspect and ask them if they are there. A simple response, however, is not enough to verify one's legitimacy - bot programmers would simply have their program talk to all whispers. A short conversation must be held to ensure legitimacy. Just long enough to satisfy the GM. If a poor response or no responce is given, the GM issues a warning. The player will see this warning the next time they log in. Warning accumulate into bans (explained later). "But not everybody speaks English!" Simple: talk with math. Everybody speaks math. ask the Klingon speaker "10+13" or (to confuse bots) "lO + l3". You could even allow GMs to initiate an image verification, similar to the one players see when logging in. Knight Online has a similar system for preventing automated play. Besides, the Silkroad official website is in English, German, Turkish, and Spanish. Multilingual GMs who know at least the basics of two of those languages would know enough to decide whether a player is botting.
- Idea suggested by Cheeze
After the policing GM sees a suspected bot and gives them the verbal or image verification test, they would drop an invisible pile of fake gold. This would be an item that has the same code as gold but is invisible. The idea would be that Legits don't see it and therefore don't pick it up, but bots would detect it as gold and run to pick it up. By now the GMs should have sufficient evidence to ban the bot without waiting for the 3 warning limit.
- It's not that difficult. It's just another statistic saved to your account, just like the current durability of your pimped-out 8d SoSun Glaive that everybody except me has... OT: Every time a warning is issued, that warning, along with a description is saved to your account. If GMs really wanted to get fancy they could even ss it and have that saved to your account as well
. Then follow the warning system I have set up below.- The problem with a free game is that once a bot gets banned, they will come back on a different account. I have developed the über-ban to prevent that from happening (see Warning System below). It's not foolproof, but proxies are a PITA and with proper GM support, coming back would not even be worth it if they want you gone for good.
The Warning System
This could be a warning system GMs could use to effectively ban botters and keep legits:
Warning types:
- Minor offense - issued for poor response to GM's inquiry (see above) and also PK2 edits or whatever is causing some Legit players to get perm banned.
This warning would also be issued for minor infractions such as vulgarity in Global chats, or obscene guild names or emblems (which would also be renamed immediately). - Major offense - this is a last warning or you will be banned serious warning. Issued if GMs are pretty sure a person is botting, but cannot 100% confirm it and therefore do not want to risk banning them. This probably wouldn't be used very often because it really isn't that difficult to tell if somebody is botting or not. This warning should also come with a temporary ban of a few days, during which the player cannot log into his account.
The Ban Procedure:
- 3 minor offenses become a major offense and a temporary ban of a few days.
- Any infraction after recieving a major offense results in a permanent ban of that account.
- Confirmed botting results in a permanent ban.
- Confirmed account selling (ie. GM saw the account on eBay) results in a permanent ban.
- IP addresses MUST be logged for any offense.
- Two permanent bans result in an IP ban where any user of that IP address may neither register an account, nor log into an account. I call this über-banned.
- Spamming gold websites in chat results in über-ban.
- Multi-client bots (like the ones that you see dressed the same following the same path) - which are probably gold bots as opposed to normal people botting - result in über-ban.
The Long-Term
What do you get when you take all the players in Silkroad and subtract the bots? Answer: A whole bunch of Legits who are bored as hell hand grinding their characters to level {insert cap here}. Let's face it, for people like me, getting to the cap takes waaaay too long. Even if I did love Joymax enough to buy time tickets I would still be spending weeks getting to the cap. "You're a noob." "You're not dedicated enough." Aye, that may be true (my highest level character is a 40), but shouldn't people like me be able to enjoy the game too? I simply do not have enough time to hand grind a character to the cap, but there isn't much for me to do in the mid-levels other than grind and occasionally job. I think capping should be much easier- well, here is my solution:
- 1) Decrease the amount of experience required to achieve higher levels.
- "OMG YOU CAN'T DO THAT!!!1! You would completely take away the honor of achieving a high level!" Why does a super high level have to be a mark of 1337ness? Why can't SRO have a postgame like WoW does? Haven't bots already proved that you can still be capped and be a noob? I think that if it became easier to reach the level cap, more legits would be doing it, and we could focus on what really makes one 1337 - PvP and jobs - both of which bots cannot do alone. Who knows? Maybe Joymax could even introduce some extra content for the endgame like a more organized individualized PvP tournament system like WoW's Arena system, or a few instanced dungeons with better loot (again like WoW). At any rate, Joymax needs to provide more content for endgame-level characters and then make it easier for everybody to reach the endgame that way everybody gets a chance to experience all of the game's content.
- At least Joymax made grinding a little more fun with the release of the European party system. But even if you can find a decent party to play with, the quests in SRO suck. First of all, there are not nearly enough of them. There should be enough quests so that you have to pick which ones you want to do and never get the chance to do some of them. This keeps the game fresh. Second of all, drop rates need to drastically increase for quest items. I don't want to spend three weeks (at my slow noobish pace) to find "20 heads of headless monster"
. You should be spending three hours max on each quest. Sometimes killing 1000 Blood Devil Flowers for the third time gets old...Additionally, some new content needs to be added so that one is not always grinding, questing, or jobbing. I like the way Joymax is thinking with Capture the Flag. I hope that is here to stay. More things like that need to be added to keep the game moving. WoW got it right with battlegrounds, and SRO needs to offer more forms of organized PvP (ie. not cape fighting).
- When you walk into Hotan, how laggy is it for you? I know for me I just want to get out of there as fast as I can because there are waaay too many people standing around afk selling things in stalls. That is server traffic we should not have to deal with. Joymax needs to add some kind of auction house system, similar to the one in WoW and you will drastically reduce server traffic. Not to mention, maybe stabilize the economy by allowing (but not forcing) bids.
Part 3: Conclusion
The part where I get to say what I really mean.
I'm gonna make this short since I made the rest of this post waaay too long
.- There are too many bots.
- Bots are winning, Legits are losing.
- Joymax isn't doing enough to fix the problem.
- There needs to be ALOT more GMs.
- There needs to be a warning system in place and GMs need to do some über banning.
- Joymax needs to make it easier for legits to cap and fully experience the game.
- Joymax needs to add more content to the game to keep it interesting in the mid-levels.
Thank you for reading my thoughts and opinions. I appreciate that you value them, and I will certainly value yours, but you have to voice them below. I will try to address as many questions as I can. Please do not turn this into a flame-fest, because I would like to try to keep the conversation at an intelligent debate so this topic does not get locked.
Q & A
"Dude, ur a fat noob. GTFO"
That wasn't a question. Jesus loves me. Um, I think that's all I really have to say to that. Next time, please use some constructive criticism.
"Why so long?"
I have alot of strong feelings about this game (and also a couple of ideas
)."That raid thing/arena thing/specific idea X thing is a stupid idea."
Remember, I was just spewing a couple of ideas just to prove the point that there are improvements that can be made. I'm sure that if we were up to it, we at SRF could come up with a list of plausible improvements to the game.
"It would be stupid if you lowered the cap because there would be way too many capped players on each server."
First of all, I'm not saying you could cap in a week by any means. I'm going to compare SRO to WoW again because I think WoW got it right: It takes roughly 14 days playing time (so more like a couple months unless you are crazy) to cap 70 in WoW. Since the cap in SRO is 90 maybe make it 18 days playing time (again, on average). Yes, there would be more capped players, but at least there would be more Legit. What would you rather have: our current situation of a ratio of capped bot:legit 12:1 or double the amount of capped players and have a ratio more of 1:1? I think if there were more capped players that were Legit, bots wouldn't be able to be satisfied with just reaching the level cap. We make it such a big deal to hit the cap. So what? When I played WoW hitting 70 was a big deal, but it didn't make you a great player. You should have to prove yourself after capping. That would take something away from the bots.
"Joymax isn't here to entertain. They are here to make money."
So is Blizzard. But oh wait, they make money by entertaining. It sounds like Joymax really is spending our money on cheap hookers, doesn't it? I don't know the actual situation so I will just assume they are doing their best to provide us with a better gaming experience. But let's say they really are trying their hardest and are just understaffed. Why not allow members of the community to become volunteer GMs. I'm sure there are people who moderate these forums who would make excellent GMs. You better watch yourself if Fly is bot hunting equipped with a ban hammer rather than a ss camera. Granted, there would have to be a pretty decent background check on people applying for volunteer GM, and there would also have to be a system in place to prevent corruption, but I think it could be done. I came back to SRO because I believe in the community. It would be foolish not to trust them with GM powers.
"If you banned all the bots, servers would be empty."
So you mean we could actually log in at any time??? Sounds good to me! Sign me up! Ok, seriously, maybe that could be a problem. I heard somebody mention maybe after the massive bot ban there could be a period of 7 days or w/e where you could transfer your character to another server. Or (like in WoW) you can always transfer your character from a high-density server to a low-density server. That helps even things out."If players had fun at low levels, there would be no reason to buy silk."
Not true. There are a ton of silk items that low levels use. Everything from pick-up pets to HP pots - people who buy silk would still buy silk. "But what about the time tickets?" Well, I suspect some people would still buy them, although not as many. Instead, maybe offer silk items that can be used for the 'new fun' offered for low levels. Maybe a pay-for organized PvP tournament with nicer prizes than the PvP tournament that doesn't cost silk. There are really a number of new silk items Joymax could concoct to still get business (probably even more) if they adjusted the game's mechanics.
"Joymax is never going to do this."
I'm not saying they ever will. I'm just saying that this game could be fixed relatively easily. It really is a good game at its core and that is why so many of us still put up with it. The entire point of this thread was to expose the problem and offer examples of solutions that could fix it.
"Joymax doesn't care about us. We should boycott the game by quitting or not buying silk.
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.)
