Anticipation of the Goenitz interview
woobie on October 22nd, 2007
A blogging meme that has been circulating in my circle is interviewing gamers and other people who the readers might want to read about. This was started by Waukeen and we followed suit. Diwa will soon interview Goenitz, a game master (GM) in Ragnarok Online. This guy is also infamously known by some RO players as killprobots, the yahoo id he uses to entertain bot reports from concerned players.
He has always been there since the beginning; hunting bots and propagating the bot-free game that we would all like to have. Sadly, his quest was not successful in commercial server, where the financial returns from Ragnarok Online soon depended on the third party program culture. More and more addicted pRO gamers have resorted to botting than leave the game for real life activities. In this light, Levelup games (pRO’s merchant) could do nothing to stop the influx of bot users, for fear that if they do block the entry of these bot users in the game, they will lose a hefty portion of their profit.
The same thing happened to Thor, the commercial (paid game time) server initially pitched as the “bot-free” server. Bothunting activities have been encouraged and technical measures have also been taken to prevent bot entries, but with the constant upgrade of opensource bot software, people using third party programs have still been able to infiltrate the server.
With the advent of Valkyrie, killprobots’ role in the bothunting scene is magnified a thousand fold. Valkyrie, the free-to-play server, is the latest addition to pRO. There is no charge for game time, but Levelup profits from the players’ purchase of ingame item using real money (Philippine Peso). There is no doubt that bots are not allowed in this server, where honest players have a choice of manually harvesting for long hours to obtain the basic items, or simply buying those items in the item shop to concentrate on the gameplay. Bot-driven harvesters are a big no-no.
Let’s all head on over to the Master’s Den on 24 October to read what killprobots has to say on myriad topics, particularly the bot culture in pRO.
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hi, im not sure when was this posted but I would like to give a comment about this article. first, i believe that there is no way that you can prevent bot users even in the Valkyrie server. Me and my character accidentally went to morroc field which you where going to change your job as an assasin. I saw to many players there, after observing theyre movement for a couple of minutes, i found out they are bots. pretty obvious though.
@Miguel
LU will always have a love and hate relationship with Bots. Bots in paying servers mean money to them, while bots in valkyrie or valhalla don’t give them sh*t, moneywise. However, having bots in valkyrie could still be good for LU because it means that players who set up bots are still interested with the game.