Good Evening,
My name is XXXXXMyungXXXX, and I have been actively playing a MMORPG by the title of Silkroad Online international version, or as we commonly refer to it in the game forum, iSRO for short. This iSRO is own and operated from Korea by a company Joymax Co. I have been playing this online game for over 3 years now, from almost since it began up until about 2 weeks ago.
It was mentioned in the game forum by other players several days ago that we should try to contact major gaming trade magazines, web pages, ect. in hope that they can perhaps put some pressure on Joymax as they lie constantly to, and refuse to listen to their players and paying customers.
What I would really like to see is a review or story, I was thinking something along the lines of -When good MMORPGs go bad- and documenting the story of Joymax Co.s rise in MMORPG popularity with Silkroad Online, and their betrayal of those who originally supported them after submitting to corruption and greed and eventually selling their honest players out in a quest to wring the most USD they can out of the game.
When iSRO began about three and a half years ago, it was hailed by many people as a wonderful, graphically beautiful, and yet free, supported by voluntary purchases of premium items in their Item Shop, MMORPG. There were 3 servers to chose from, and everyone playing it was having a wonderful time, interacting with their international gaming community despite a few minor problems such as some poor English translations of text, abnormal sentence structures, and minor graphical glitches. There was no way to directly contact Joymax about these problems, but as they were so minor this was not a problem, We usually refer to this as iSROs Golden Age
Jump forward a year. As the game increased in popularity, it expanded from 3 to 6 servers. Unfortunately, as will all popular games, the undesired element began creeping in. The first bots began appearing, they were rare, and very basic, unable to use any player special skills and polite, as bots go. If you attacked the same monster as they were, they would leave and find another. They were uncommon to find and not much of a nuisance.
As players did not like these bots, even in small amounts and very basic in their abilities, complaints began in the iSRO player forum found on the games web page
www.silkroadonline.net There still was no real way to contact Joymax with these player concerns, so there was not much people could do except discuss them in the forums. Over time, the bots slowly began increasing in number and programming sophistication, and complaints became more and more common. Unfortunately, as there was no way still to contact Joymax Co. about these concerns. Players could still only talk to other players about these problems. Eventually, some enterprising webcrawling players found Joymax Co. in a Korean business listing and published their phone number and e-mail on the forums.
Needless to say, Joymax was less then impressed that their players managed to find a way to contact them. Players would post in the forums that they tried calling Joymax Co. but as soon as they would mention that it was regarding Silkroad, they would hang up on them. e-mails to their address all went unanswered. After about a month or two of this, Joymax Co. finally broke down and posted on the forums that they would be creating a customer service department to handle complaints and to police the player servers for ToS violations. The staff consisted of Mary Min, from Korea who headed the department, and 3 other un-named people who only went by the pseudonyms Employee A, B and C. They all shared one game account -MorningDew-.
One very serious problem from around this time that is that players were reporting that after posting on the forums, they were having their accounts hacked. Many people began creating second accounts for use in the forum because of this, to which Joymax vigorously denied a problem and threated to ban anyone passing this -rumor- on in the forum. After several months of this, finally several players found out how account information for players could be retrieved though the forums from a post and repeatedly brought this to Joymax Co.s attention until they were finally forced to admit that there was a problem. They promised restitution to those who lost accounts -Which to this day still has not happened- and created a Temporary player forum, that is still in use two and a half years later.
Another problem from this early time is that several players found a ingame exploit to create infinite gold. They attempted to bring this to Joymaxes attention in the forum, and were threatened with bans for -rumors-. These players, all belonging to a guild called FABLE then forced Joymax to do a 3 day game roll back after creating several trillion gold ingame and freely distributing it to all players on their server. Only after they did this did Joymax Co. admit to the flaw, which was then fixed and most of FABLE was banned for using an exploit.
At about a year and a half back, iSRO was then up to 12 servers, each with a capacity of 3000 online accounts. Older servers, expecially the original ones, such as Troy which I had played on, were usually very close to capacity, and lag was beginning to become an issue, as bots were increasing considerably and Goldsellers were flooding the servers with their bots to mine online gold for them to sell to players though their web pages. Bot accounts were now fairly common to see, and now could use special skills. It was also about this time that the makers began programming them to be more aggressive. If a player attacked the same target as they did, they would not move. If there were no targets in close proximity of the bot, they would begin attacking monsters already engaged by other players, common refered to as -Kill Stealing- or KSing. This was a problem as the bot accounts usually would mine for gold on monster much weaker then they are, thus players would never get a complete kill. Quests and leveling became much harder to do under these conditions.
The customer service people jumped right into action ,they posted replies to almost every complaint in the forums, and promised that servers and bot accounts would be examined and banned. It was at this time they began to use their slogan catchphrase -You Bot, We Block- after much conversation and promising, bot lists began to be produced, at about one list a month. Unfortunately, to say the least they were nothing more then jokes. There were usually about 10-15 accounts per server blocked and only the very obvious goldgrinding bots were ever on the lists.
By this time iSRO was up to about 15 servers, with still only 4 people to police and manage all player complaints. After many player complaints over the lack of names on these lists, and that they never included any player bots seeing that player and goldgrinder bot accounts now were making about 50 percent of each servers population, the Customer service employees finally admitted that they had no actual authority themselves to ban any accounts. They could only pass lists on names to Joymax Co. and there the list was gone over by three managers, and if any of them vetoed a name, it was taken off the list.
Jump to about 10 months ago. all servers now are at full 3000 online account capacity almost 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Complaints are common in the forums that it takes hours of effort to log in, and the lag is so horrible that even if you get in, you cant play anyways. Joymaxes ban lists still only have about 15 names per server of approved bans. They now are adding at least one new server a month to try to keep ahead of the extreme load, but they are immediately filled by more bot accounts. Popular consensus among players is that bots now account for about 60 of the games population, for the first time real players are outnumbered. Joymax promises a -grand ban list- and -Declares war on bots-. After about 2 months of this deplorable gaming conditions, the first -grand- ban list was produced with thousands of accounts blocked. For the first time in months, players can log in without hours on hours of server full messages. Everyone is enthused... for a short while
Though the servers are now depopulated to normal conditions, observant players notice something. Though the goldsellers bots were the majority of bots in each server, they were the only names on the ban lists. Player bots for the most part were left alone. Discussion on the forum about this begins. Joymax re-stated their policy of -You bot, we Block- and insist that all accounts found to be botting in violation of the games Terms of Service or ToS, will be blocked when found.
Because most of the accounts banned were run by goldselling companies, these accounts were quickly replaced and within a month or less, the servers are almost back to their former condition of full status, 24/7 with massive lag issues. Ban lists are back to 10-15 accounts per list, and after another few months of this. the 2d Grand ban list is released, again with thousands of accounts blocked. Servers are up to about 18 or so at this point, with still only 4 people to manage all complaints and police servers for ToS violations.
After the 2d -grand- ban list, the player population is up in arms. Again, after reviewing account names, most player bot accounts are again exempt from the list. The player opinion of that if you buy Silk Item Shop currency for real USD, you are exempt from bans is voiced in the forums. The Joymax Co. Customer Service department, which by this time is now answering less and less of the players messages to them, denies this vigorously, and promises ban to those voicing unbased -rumors- in the forums. Despite this threat, talk continues.
Talk increased about Joymaxes preferential treatment of paying bots when they released what I refer to as their -Honest Player- ban list. Most bots at this time were programmed to immediately log out when messaged by one of the Customer Service accounts to avoid a possible ban. These ingame accounts all could be identified to players because their ingame name always showed a -GM- then the account name. Enterprising players discovered that by creating accounts with the name -GM_- something, they could trick bots into thinking it was an admin account and they would log out. For about 48 hours, the servers were relatively bot free as everyone was having fun finally having some revenge on the omnipresent bots. Then Joymax Co. started banning these players, for Disrupting servers with their behaviour. As it was only the bot accounts that were bothered, it was then that at least I personally realised that Joymax was protecting their income from bots, which were now the majority of accounts, at the expense of their honest players.
Jumping to about 4 months ago now, Customer service now replies to only a few posts a day from players, and only those with either the most basic questions or those with questions involving methods of payment for buying Silk. Ban lists are sporadic, none at all in the last 4 months. And again only contain a few goldseller account bots ever blocked. Popular consensus among players in the forum is that now that servers are now about 80 percent bot accounts, finding another real person playing is becoming uncommon. Player accounts that use bot began bragging online in both game and forum that Joymax Co. will not ban them because they spend USD in Silk purchases. After those bragging about their immunity are brought to Customer Services attention with evidence in screenshots, and references to posts in their own game forum, Customer Service now only curtly relies -ToS violation punishments are up to our discretion, we do not answer to you-. Joymaxes changes their -You bot, We block- policy to -We manage the bot problem- A considerable change in most players minds.
Also at this time, there was much discussion in the forum among players as to the best times to try to log into the game. One player posted that Joymax should offer a -premium log-in ticket- for sale, for USD which guaranteed server access at any time. This was answered by exactly six players out of the the entire iSRO gaming population as a good idea. The rest suggested that Joymax Co. should begin to deal with all the bot accounts instead of selective bans of non-playing ones to free up more server space. In less then a week after this was posted, Joymax released their -Premium Ticket- guaranteeing 24/7 server access for 20 USD a month. Somehow they still can call their game Free-to-Play though the only real real way to get online in less then several hours of trying was to buy one. A week after this Premium Access fee was introduced, complaints began in the forums that people were suddenly being disconnected from the game for no reason. After much discussion it was found that the common link was that non-premium members were the only ones having these problems. It was then suggested by other players that Joymax was making room ingame for premium members by disconnecting non-paying players when a slot was needed. As logging in for non-premium members already required hours of failed Server Full attempts those kicked out could not get back in.
in the last three months, Goldsellers have been continually been getting more aggressive ingame. In each online city there are now at least 3-5 different gold and or bot sellers actively promoting their wares in public and global messages non-stop. Player complaints about this to Customer Service get a we are aware of this problem reply, and nothing more if they even get a reply. This problem continues to today, with players getting offers to buy gold and bot services even though the game mail system now. Joymax Co. refuses to acknowledge or fix this problem.
Server capacity for all of the now 24 player servers have been considerably increased so logging into the game is now usually easy for at least most of the day, excepting the older servers. In their recent webpage update, though it is now very well hidden, they have also changed their ToS for Silkroad online. Suddenly botting is no longer listed as a violation as it was for the last 3 years. Mary Min has quit Customer Service for Joymax Co. So now for 24 servers support, iSRO is now down to 3 people to handle the work. Replies to posts of any kind from them are now very rare, maybe a few times a week and are cut-and-paste. They have about 6 replies that they use, and every time it is the exact same wording. An actual response from them is an exceptional event now.
Joymax has gone from a gaming company with a vision of producing an exciting game, supported by happy customers to actively encouraging cheating, and turning a blind eye to offensive, racist and sexist behaviors as long as the offending party is paying them. They refuse to acknowledge any flaws in their product, and punish or threaten those who try to bring problems to their attention. I seriously hope you look into this and write some sort of story on this. I realise this letter is exceptionally long, but it does not even begin to touch on some of the problems that Joymax has, and has caused, and what they have done in the name of money. I suggest you create accounts, go ingame and see for yourself what it has degraded to. Find players, if any remain, that have played for years and listen to what they have to say about Joymax. Read in the forums the complaints and by all means try to contact Joymax Co. yourselves and ask them questions. I readily admit that my timeline may be a bit off, important things that happened years ago I still remember, though what came first in some cases may be in error.
Thank you for reading, and I hope that if enough people contact you, that eventually our story of betrayal in the name of money by Joymax Co. is brought to the public eye. Joymax is planning on releasing another game soon Darkeden and I would hate for people to be sucked into spending money on a product like I was, and many others that is created and managed by people who are totally indifferent to their players beside the fact of those who pay the most gets to make their own rules.
XXXXMyungXXXXX
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I forget who originally brought up the -write a letter- idea, but I agree wholeheartedly with the concept. Its obvious that Joymax Co. doesnt want to listen to their players, except the ones who pay best, the bots.
So if you ever want any improvements you need to bring their dirty laundry to the light for the world to look at. They still will not care one bit about players of course, but then they at least need to make improvements or risk bad press which eventually effects their bottom line. And that they care a lot about.
PC GAMER is at
editor@pcgamer.com I suggest Silkroad as a topic for the letter.
vom silkroadonline.net forum (nicht von mir)
