Silkroad Online says no to botters

by Seraphina Brennan Sep 28th 2009 at 3:00PM

Filed under: At a glance, Fantasy, Historical, Business models, Culture, MMO industry, News items, Silkroad Online, Free-to-play

No botters! Bad botters! Down! Ban! You're banned!

Well, that's not exactly how bannings go, but Silkroad Online is starting to crack down on their botting problem. The game has recently changed their anti-botting rules, converting over to a three strike policy. The first instance of your account being suspected, you get a 7 day ban. The next time your account gets flagged, it's a 14 day ban. And, if your account gets flagged a third and final time for the use of illegal programs, you can kiss your account goodbye.

It's a pretty strict system, doubly so for a free-to-play game. Usually we see larger MMO developers, like Square-Enix and CCP, moving towards initiatives like these. However, it's clear that Joymax is interested in cleaning up their game, a move that many will undoubtedly enjoy.

Tags: ban, botters, botting, clean-campaign, joymax, silk-road, silk-road-online, silkroad-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Pingles said on 3:21PM 9-28-2009

I must be out of touch with MMO terminology. Is a bot a macro'd toon?

In my day a bot was just a support class that you had /stick to you to buff you during solo play. I can't imagine being banned for that.

Colin Brennan said on 3:32PM 9-28-2009

It's a character that's played by a macro program or any illegal 3rd party solution. Basically, it's a character that plays itself with no human input.

danarchy said on 3:38PM 9-28-2009

I honestly miss the occasional "glider toon" back when I played wow. Screwing with those guys was the ultimate fun! Especially if their other faction, just flag yourself and stand closer to them than the next closest mob =P

Scuffles said on 6:12PM 9-28-2009

Yeah not so much messing with SR bots, well there is and it was fun but they traveled in packs and over ran entire zones.... made areas totally unplayable

Scuffles said on 6:09PM 9-28-2009

Thats all nice and good but the majority of their botting problem is coming from throw away accounts anyhow so a ban just means spam create five new accts and let the bots fly.

This is honestly too lenient, save for cases of mistaken botivity?

BubleFett said on 7:22PM 9-28-2009

What a joke of a company that can't solve botting issues for the longest time.
If they were really interested in getting rid of this menace they would have
place a simple add or subtract program that lets players solve the
math problem every 3 to fours hours of game play just like Tantra F2P MMO does.

Sword of the new world was able to get at least the botting down.

Anyway Silkroad is nothing more that a WoW clone and not a god one at that
and worse of all just a pure grinder.

Silkroad is now and will always be known as Silkbot

rawr said on 2:46AM 9-29-2009

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late for me to care.

Could have been something good but botroad just became out of control for too long.

kasapina said on 7:20AM 9-29-2009

How did their rules look like before? I mean, 3 strike policy isn't actually harsh, especially if I can get a boost of a few levels just by leaving my pc on for the night, and if I am able to do that for a few times before they catch me (IF they catch me..). I have seen to many wannabe MMOs on the F2P side, so I was not very willing to try this one out the first time I saw it, but most of the F2P's I've played weren't so full of botters (actually, haven't seen a bot in a while, except for the auto spammers). Was it that bad?