Before I say anything : I just want to point out that anybody who will feel the need to make this personal / accuse me of ruining the server by trying to get a problem fixed / is known to be completely unconstructive are pre-emptively on ignore.
I don’t even know where to start... Hrmm. Well I guess people noticed I stopped streaming. That’s a lot because I haven’t been playing. People log on my characters and do guild things and stuff, picking up loots and changing guild titles and borrowing gear and recalling. I’ve logged on about twice in the past two weeks, mostly to just chat to the people at west prontera. One of those times I logged out instantly, because of the presence of a certain person.
Yeah, see when you’re logging on to a game to have fun, I guess (especially those who don’t have much play time) dealing with unending abuse and harassment isn’t really high on my priority list. Granted, it’s just a bunch of words on the interwebs... But it gets old and boring. There’s only so many times I can sigh and type /ex <name>, and then get up and walk off screen to ignore the chat rooms, hoping that the rest of the people I was hanging out with will follow... they usually don’t.
There’s also only so many times I can say “you’re a knob” to this person before I feel like I’m a five year old.
Some people in the community take it way too far. People been banned from the forums for posting videos with real life pictures of mine, or just being an ass in general toward me personally. Before anyone says it about the pictures, there’s very few of me out there... they were leaked by a guy I stopped being on good terms with IRL. Not through my own stupidity with online privacy.
There are people I thought who were perfectly reasonable and “normal” players within the community... who seem to think that just because someone takes it upon themselves to do the guild leader thing, they should expect (and that in some cases it’s deserved) to be verbally abused, stalked, attacked, trash talked. Now whilst I expect that within reason I don’t think it should ever cross lines from ingame to out of game.
okay : You’re a -_- sinx and should delete your character
not okay : You’re a fat ugly loser and should kill yourself
Also not okay : saying that kind of thing every day, making videos belittling that person’s irl persona, following them around, rape threats (yes I get those) and general misogyny. It might be funny once or twice but after a while, if it doesn’t become creepy, it does become irritating.
Once again let me stress, I expect some of this crap. It comes with being any combination of visible on the forums, a guildleader, a long term player, female, having an opinion. I do however, expect the game company to keep that stuff to a reasonable amount. No matter how trivial it is, when this stuff is becoming a daily occurrence or the only part of RO you experience, then yeah, staff it’s time to step in and discourage it.
No, you can’t blame it all on me having an opinion on the forums. You’d be terse and abrupt too after 3 pages of it. Or people just generally believing everything that comes out of the rumour mill.
My favourite part about that, by the way, is you can make -_- up about other players being scammer and what not on these forums and face zero repercussions. If you attack their forum identity, it generally goes untouched. But if you dare post a screenshot or video of someone doing something actually untoward, that will get removed.
Worst of all if you tell the person making the unwarranted comments to be quiet and do some fact checking, you get banned from the forums. A touch of classy public humiliation from the staff, letting everyone know what side they’re really on. After all the people mentioned in the first section of this tirade are mostly untouched, free to continue their stuff in game.
Attacks and infractions against specific individuals aren’t logged anywhere, so what happens is they just all get removed and swept away. It just keeps happening, over and over and over and over.
Yes, that is the kind of thing that really makes the playerbase lose respect for the admins. That and the fact that the moderators can’t ever be bothered to PM a user and tell them what they did wrong. Expecting them to narcissistically re-read all their prior posts on the off chance there was an edit/warning editted in.
The system is terrible, sporadic and entirely based on the mood of the admins.
And it shows.
Did I mention yet that I think RO is an awesome game? It’s a giant sandbox of a game where we can do many things. There’s a few flaws with it... I guess the positive thing I can say is that the staff are sort of taking on board feedback against pay to win on classic. There’s been some horrible decision making about adding equipments. There’s no real vetting process to keep things from renewal that are “bad” out. (examples : VOH, EMH, LFH, ninja scroll). We need to have this stuff put before the community in advance so that it can be demonstrated how it affects the game. But it feels impossible to reach anyone about technical or systematic problems with Classic. (examples: Being able to save on WoE maps opens a bunch of different abuses - not just the one that everyone thinks about, massive duped items, endless tower farming)
If you’ve read this far, congratulations, now I’m getting to the real meat of the post. Everything else prior to this is just scene setting.
Autopot is something that comes up pretty often. Mostly because it’s a quick and easy way for less experienced players to explain their loss, or because it’s a visible sign of unfairness.
For me, there’s another factor here at work - the staff just aren’t keeping their promises.
Each time I get sniped by something because I wasn’t paying attention I can say “Autopot would have saved me” and grumble about. I’ll probably feel a bit stupid - but in my eyes and the eyes of many players. I deserved that. I totally did. Even if I feel a bit of a derp for it.
Like it or not, it does provide an advantage, in that it requires less multitasking/ less divided attention - allowing the user to “be a derp” or to focus purely on damage output. We’re all human and lapses in attention are pretty normal. That’s also what will separate the good players from the bad ones.
What I’m saying is, Autopot changes the game in a way that I see as mostly negative.
HOWEVER: A more negative experience is to play a different game to everyone else. People have been protesting against its use for a long long time now. And sure, everything came to public vision when Oda made that comment on tiki tuesday about a possible legal autopot.
For once, regardless of the outcome, it felt like the staff actually gave half a -_- about the quality of gameplay their userbase were experiencing.
The thread progresses. Oda states no, Autopot is not allowed and it all gets shut down. We’re told that the staff will be watching WoE and to send tickets with [Classic WoE watch] in the title, to get the reports looked at in real time.
Classic WoE watch tickets were mentioned a long time prior to this, in this disappointing thread:
http://forums.warpportal.com/index.php?/topic/169664-classic-2015-q1-roadmap/
Anti-Bot/Cheating
-The GMs will be watching for tickets with the subject [CLASSIC WOE WATCH] during the hours of Woe 1 and 2 for requests to monitor specific individuals for suspect activity during woe.
To send in to this group, use that subject line. In the body of the message all we need is the name of the character, the guild and a quick blurb about what they are doing. We do not require screenshots and videos at that step, but it's recommended that you add a reply to your ticket later with that information if you have it.
This isn’t working : Here’s a reply from a ticket sent by a friend last night during WoE:
“Thank you very much for bringing this issue up with us. I understand your concern. Would you happen to have a video recording of the character which you suspect of using a third-party program? It would help us a lot, if you would be able to give us something to look in to so that we'll be able to investigate and make a far judgement. We will be waiting for your response on this matter.
If you would be having other concerns with the game or your account, please write us back. Have a great day!”
I didn't ’t like sending tickets during WoE... Actually I tried to avoid it, but in some cases you have to ask yourself why you should continue to play against people who clearly have an advantage. An immediate example I can think of is a nodelay arrow shower sniper (whom I thankfully haven’t seen for a couple of months in WoE but certainly isn’t banned. ) A player who persistently, yet sporadically does this. They never get caught because they only log on that char once every couple of months or something, but this has been going on since two years ago.
Actually, WP are just really bad at handling long term cheating.
There’s very few players we felt the need to report after the autopot thread. It was only a couple of extremely obvious ones that we have been reporting since April. And I mean, BLATANT kind of obvious. The GMs who were monitoring WoE started following me around I was finding dead titles appearing where I was at for a couple of WoEs, even though we weren’t fighting anyone. I mean I guess that’s one way to do it, but it doesn’t help! Go to the people that were reported! If you really want to know if I’m autopotting, my livestream is a better source than just watching me. You can see my HP bar and sometimes, you can hear my key presses depending on my ptt.
So there’s been some pretty solid reports against a few individuals. I wanna say about three of them. The rest fall under “we know it’s happening but we can’t prove it so whatever”.
To narrow it down further, there is one individual who openly posts videos of himself cheating as well as harassing other players. He’s proud to post videos attacking community members, showing himself being bad mannered in game, autopotting, GRF editting and using maya purple hack. Every video he posts has in it’s title some iteration of how terrible iRO is.
Posting one of these videos here scored him a ban from the forum (which I am certain he is evading at this stage) but I’d like to point out that isn’t much of a penalty for anything. He only exist on the forums to troll me in particular, so I doubt he cared about that forum acc made purely to be a dick going byebye. I felt an ingame sanction was necessary, but I am just a player, who am I to judge the CMs decisions? Ingame repercussions for forum shenanigans are only reserved for the select few.
It’s no secret we’ve reported his maya purple hack videos, his autopotting, his abuse. His coming to our spot in game bragging about how he’s unbannable, his personal attacks on forums. This guy is a blight on the community and game - publicizing iRO as being “terrible”, making the game unpleasant for those who play it (and did I mention cheating). Yet he is untouchable, whilst players get banned for having obviously troll overlays.
I’ve been in pm with Oda, I’ve been forwarding tickets to him and warnhal. There’s no movement in any direction here. I read my guild teamspeak chat, this person comes around our spot to point out that he is still unbanned.
Nobody that knows me wonders why I don’t log in anymore, they know.
I feel as if the staff have made a choice between myself, promoting the game positively and bringing people to play the server via my stream and this guy and his yt channel full of “iRO IS S**T”.
Edited by Xellie, 13 September 2015 - 03:50 AM.
waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too far to the point where they will go on ur fb get a pic and idk put a knob on it ( funny u should ask someone actually did that for me hilarious but kinda bad taste), u don't let 
To sum it all up iRO is in poor condition right now. But what can be done about it that hasn't already been tested and failed? 
