Silkroad Online Forums

I have some suggestions that may help make SRF the forum for LoS like it was for the first one.

Don't allow the witch hunt mentality poison the atmosphere again: Delete Exposed Botters completely, consider unbanning those banned for botting, or at least allowing them to come back if they create new accounts. Instead, simply have rules against the promotion and advertisement of bots on the forum. If they brag about botting, advertise a bot, get rid of them, but don't allow hunters to try exposing them, it isn't the forum's job to hunt bots for the game makers.

Consider changing the current skills and builds section so it's named for Silk Road, and make one just for LoS.

Consider having some new flags and sections for the new server names as needed.

Are the heralds still active? If they are, ask them to flag SRO announcements as SRO, and create a flag for LoS game announcements too, or find someone to do the LoS ones.

May have more suggestions later, hope you're paying attention Ryoko!

One more thing, consider unbanning Avalon people like nb and Fly, they were banned for making trouble, but fact is people purposely went after them all the time, and they were mostly defending themselves. Fact is, I think forum activity dropped drastically after their ban, and if you get rid of the bot hunts, tha will be less of a problem anyways.

That's actually not a bad idea!

Alright man.

So this was my policy from the very get go. Game makers enforce the rules of the game. Forum moderates enforce the rules of the forum. It was not our job to take care of the game makers dirty work. I still believe that. We disallowed the advertisement, promotion or links of anything against the games TOS.

It didn't work.

For one, every other post was a bot accusation. Do you remember? Any time any person suspected of botting posted anything, people would reply with jabs about botting. It was everywhere. You can't punish people for DISLIKING the idea of others cheating. You cant reprimand droves of people when every other response is bot bot bot botter botting bot

It was so bad, any time you had a decent character or really nice weapon, you must have been a botter. It also doesn't help that many people who botted were too stupid to conceal their ingame identity on the forum.

No yellow boxes!!!!!

But, I also believe you can't ban half the users on a board to appease the other half.

And then. There was some underground movement to portray SRF staff members as supporting bots for not banning those 'suspect' on the forum which essentially triggered the mass cleansing. The people in your second post had a hand in that, and very much disliked the policy/proposal of your first post. Mods caved on that issue and the house of cards came down.

Granted, this was a many years ago.

What went wrong?

The game makers didn't uphold their end. That's what went wrong. We could never achieve equilibrium because we never had the support of the game makers themselves. And since they couldn't effectively control the cheating, people took it to the forums, waged war on the forums, waged war against the forums.

1. In a grind game like this, people will write bots and scripts.
2. When bots are unregulated, many of the players are going to do it.
3. If the game sells gold/silk for RMT, people will buy and trade it.

If that doesn't sit well with people, they have a number of options.

A. Complain to the company. The forum has no power over ingame affairs.
B. Stop giving them real money.
C. Get over it. Its just a video game.
D. Don't play the game

So in sum-up, I completely agree with you. Always have on this topic. Not our job. Unfortunately, the side effect it had was reprimanding all of the 'legits' for spamming the forum with "bot bot botter botting bot." instead of taking options A, B, C or D.