Post by Stephen on Jun 22, 2010 16:50:02 GMT -6
Some of you cringed at the name Blackout before opening this thread - it's one of those servers best summarized by the word "controversy." It has an even share of positive reviews (usually extolling the community) and negative reviews (almost invariably along the lines of "that Anxiety is a real bastard"), and rare is the review that isn't polarized exclusively in either direction. Evidently, of those that speak out, one either loves Blackout RO, or hates it.
Too curious for my own good, I set out to confirm or dispel certain prevailing accusations regarding the bRO server environment, using only the miracle of birth and two kilos of pure cane sugar. What follows is extremely text-intensive, even in spite of several images I created to break up the monotony, so if you're not terribly interested in reading a novel about something only a fragmented minority of the world population might care about if they are told that they'll be given free money for their participation, or you don't have a collegiate level of English comprehension (mea culpa, Eastern Hemisphere, mea culpa), I compassionately recommend you go play video games instead. On with the show...
Someone will inevitably call my experience into question; I've played RO on and off since 2004, always on mid- to high-rate private servers, and I care less about "the community," be it general or server-specific, than I do about the likelihood that I might live to see the end of chewable Flintstone vitamins (hint: not a lot). As such, my interests lie in matters such as server stability, bug fixes, economy, the competence and promptness of server staff, and other issues that impact players who play the game with only nominal interest in the multiplayer aspect. As with all other games, I stop playing when I get bored or find something more entertaining to do. It is notably difficult to get banned if you don't interact with anyone.
Granted, a forum is probably the strangest and least sensible venue in which to express that sentiment, it being a place chiefly comprised of people who do care about non-gameplay factors like community friendliness. So in the interest of making my position a little more relatable, I drew this purdy picture, which will also serve as the beginning of my review proper:
I am no stranger to MMOs. I survived Barrens Chat. I have made many new games titled "Hell Rush 4 Forge." I have both given and received a lion's share of zerg rushes. I have laughed at 13-year-olds with the volume on their microphones maxed out as they screechingly lament another unfortunate headshot. Like some of you, I nearly predate console gaming, let alone online gaming, and I've ridden the wave from Rogue, to Sinistar, to Toejam and Earl, to Goldeneye 64, to all 4,000 of those weird adult Mahjong arcade games... and one advantage that offline gaming will always have against online gaming is this: You will deal with fewer aggravating morons.
The bRO community, since at least late 2008 (when I first registered with them), is reflected perfectly by the above image. The persons supporting the server via monetary donations usually speak English as a second language, which complicates interacting with the predominantly North American staff almost as much as being an excitable and poorly-supervised gradeschooler - which, not at all surprisingly, they also are. This isn't unique in any way; in fact, it's bog-standard for virtually all private servers, RO or otherwise. One also expects to see, and finds represented in the bRO community: A clique of gossipy teenagers flaunting themselves as the "in-crowd," making cookie-cutter signatures with garish color schemes and laughably typical embedded poetry or lyrics; Isolated ethnic mini-cultures that interact exclusively amongst each other and have little desire (or practical incentive) to deal with other cultural pockets, who view them as bizarrely eccentric anyway so perhaps that's for the best; At most two people who know every obscure detail about the game's mechanics, and try in vain to word oceans of algebra in a way that makes sense to Group 1; and the faceless but omnipotent staff, whose desire to address you helpfully is usually determined by coin toss.
"That's generalizing," readers may cry. And they're absolutely right. These are the features of a typical server community. Now that I've established the reference for mediocrity, I will go on to explain how (or how not!) bRO meets or exceeds these standards, and qualify it with examples.
Show of hands: Who here gets excited at the prospect of dealing with more than 6,000 disorganized, very upset, possibly illiterate, usually confused children, from an entirely different country, whose unwritten behavioral code is likely very different from yours, and whose documentation for the game is almost definitely poorly-translated (provided anybody bothered reading it), who may or may not pay or thank you for your services? To those who raised their hands, let me clarify: You will be assisting these persons, ideally with a pleasant demeanor, and not beating them into unconsciousness and tossing their stunned and disfigured bodies into traffic. The persons who didn't put their hands back down are probably either 1) terribly optimistic, 2) lying, or 3) in the right mindset to try administering technical assistance to a game server.
The observant might draw a comparison between being an admin and an entry-level position at a tech support call center. Good eyes! Both positions involve dealing with people who have no idea what they're doing, and who are becoming increasingly frustrated by the fact that something isn't operating as they think it should. Anyone who has actually worked a tech support job will know that it is the closest you can get to simulating Hell without having to sacrifice a newborn goat - in particular, this is because you are obligated to remain calm and friendly with the customer. Your reward for surviving a single day of this torture is usually only a single step above minimum hourly wage, and possibly the satisfaction of having helped an elderly woman access her email.
But the extreme frustration inherent to the task is where the similarities end. A server as populated as bRO sees an alleged 3,000 USD per month (and I've heard figures like 3,000 USD per week, which might actually be closer to the truth), and very, very little of that is necessary to maintain server equipment (and don't let anyone tell you otherwise) - the rest goes into the pockets of the people running the show. In bRO's case, the vast majority of the staff are unpaid volunteers; aside from that, I can't pretend to know any specific details regarding who gets a paycheck and of what size, but those familiar with the server's history will recall that the second-in-command was once able to take a year off and tour Asia... something which cannot be done on a simple tech support monkey's salary.
The fact that anyone is being substantially overpaid to do entry-level work is not even the least bit surprising. But consider that the aforementioned second-in-command would not ordinarily be able to keep such a job because of his deliberate mistreatment of clientele (which has been laboriously documented), and that most of the day-to-day maintenance tasks are being delegated to unpaid underlings...
Of course I'm referring to Anxiety, who infamously makes no attempt to combat allegations of being a remorseless codpiece. It wouldn't be fair of me to draw conclusions or make assumptions about him based on the testimony of hundreds of his victims, so I made a point of interacting with him personally. And by that I mean "from the sidelines," using their largely anonymous in-game IRC chat handler to see how he treats the hoi polloi, the player base with no formal identity and with whom he has not established a prior relationship. I would infrequently post a variety of chatter ranging from inane comments about server functionality to assisting players in using online resources to answering their own questions, from dirty jokes to idle banter about Pokemon. One expects a chill reception from a person with Anxiety's reputation, and I was certain that one day I'd draw the short straw and suffer one of his "random bans," and that would be the premature conclusion to my adventures.
Actually he's a neat guy. He's no otaku fanboy queer, he's got an operating knowledge of computer networking crud, a fairly dry sense of humor, catches a handful of obscure film dialogue references. He just has zero capacity for retardedness. I was very pleasantly surprised. Is he capable of doing what is essentially a minimum-wage and highly specified tech support job? Hell no, no no, no no-no, no. No. He can't manage a (disgustingly lucrative) business venture without lashing out against the people who pay for his ability to attack them in the first place. If Anxiety were obligated to respond to all inquiries with a civil tone and upbeat demeanor, he might actually die. In fairness, his job description includes higher-level gameserver maintenance and organizing the rest of the bRO staff, so comparing him to a call center manager is probably more appropriate, but that position still demands the courteous treatment of customers no matter how plainly stupid they are, does not pay nearly as well, and perhaps most importantly, requires submission to and fear of disgracing a superior within the company - another thing effectively absent from his bRO job description.
"You only talked to one admin, though," say readers capable of critical reasoning, "that's hardly an adequate sampling of the staff's ability!" And I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I deliberately did not limit myself to a single administrator. Naturally, I made a point of experimenting with Anxiety's temper because it's a bone of much contention, and concluded that, whereas he's not exceptionally calm, he is not prone to exploding without cause. Satisfied with those results, I moved on to more interesting experiments.
If a purportedly frequent ban reason is "the admin was angry even though I didn't do anything," and by not doing anything I failed to make an admin angry, I wondered if actual offenses were being dealt with on the server. The more astute reader realizes what I'm suggesting, and her anticipation is not in vain: Yes, in the name of Science, I had to do something explicitly forbidden by the server regulations; for if the server were truly at the heights of corruption, it would turn a blind eye to legitimate complaints.
So I went down the Naughty No-No list, and decided upon "Player Harrassment" as my sin of choice. I resolved to relentlessly belittle the next person who elected to sass me. I figured a dungeon frequently populated by low-level players who don't know about bRO's special party-leveling XP bonuses was the perfect setting for my crime, because as we all know, newbies who aren't familiar with server tweaks are unlikely to have much political sway; this avoids any potential "you insulted a popular player!" bias.
After explaining to a novice that she obviously had terminal brain cancer for trying to level here - and then repeating that over and over again on all of my other characters, after I deliberately taught her how to block whispers and save chatlogs (I'm not entirely heartless) - I was convinced that I had thoroughly desecrated the most holy of sacraments, "Thou Shalt Not Be a Hater." I thought that, if I was going to receive any attention whatsoever, it would be in a matter of days, given that the server's population numbers in the thousands and the admins constantly complain of backlog...
Nope! Within twelve hours of the offense, I received a 24-hour ban for (go figure) "player harrassment." What a bargain! I did at least a week's worth of emotional damage, I reckon. Maybe my sentence was mitigated somewhat by the fact that I taught my victim how to avoid being harrassed? Either way, it only took them twelve hours to respond to one (relatively minor) harrassment complaint. I don't know what evidence was collected or how the determination was made that I should be banned, but this experiment further demonstrates that, perhaps, the allegations of staff inefficiency on bRO are somewhat exaggerated.
Which is the position I maintained until experiment #3. I had tested the handling of decidedly meta-game issues; what remains is that I test the handling of game issues, i.e. how promptly bug reports are addressed, and how quickly non-verbal harrassment issues are dealt with. Obviously this experiment required the most time, because it necessitated that I find an unresolved bug and, thanks to the result of my last experiment, other people doing something bad. Having a ban on my record, I thought, might possibly influence future ban durations, which would taint this experiment's results. The only factor working in my favor was the sheer volume of players online at any given time - increasing the likelihood that someone, somewhere, was misbehaving.
A system was put in place to handle "support tickets," which is actually just a highly idiosyncratic and specialized category on their forum. This is the official method by which players are to interact with game staff: You make a new "ticket" (forum topic, which is visible only to you and administrators, not other users), which you fill out with necessary information and possibly links to applicable screenshots, and post it for admins to review at their convenience. Sounds good. It's a very efficient, private method of prioritizing complaints and responding to them in an organized fashion. Seeing the machine they had in place, I expected Experiment 3 to be over in a flash.
So after the lengthy waiting game, I happened upon some upstanding Malaysian gentlebeings who were enjoying a rousing game of "kill AFK vendors in a major city." A Creator (Biochemist) would summon a lowly plant creature, which a Sage (Professor) would then transform, via Hocus-Pocus (Abracadabra), into a different monster, hopefully an aggressive one that would fly around butchering the innocent. I happened upon them mid-game, in a field of corpses and scattered wagon carts, merrily chattering away in their exotic tongue. I thought this clearly constituted bug exploitation, if not also good ol' fashioned "player harrassment," so I filed the necessary paperwork, took a dozen or so screenshots with player names visible for convenience, and submitted the ticket to the system.
After two weeks, it had yet to be filed or addressed. "Odd," I mused. "I have thus far been very impressed by the prompt and even-handed judgments handed down by the forces at work here. I think I will give them the benefit of the doubt this time; perhaps there is only one administrator capable of handling this issue right now because the others are on vacation, or there's been a freak technical glitch and the ticket is only visible to me..." Yes, I thought it would be sporting of me to excuse them, at least this once, even if I couldn't come up with a very convincing justification. After all, I'd imagine they receive dozens of tickets a day, and even if they had a hundred-person staff (they have roughly half that), it would be unreasonable to expect them to address both these support tickets and simultaneously deal with an unknown but still assuredly very high number of in-game issues, all in a timely manner.
So as I waited for a response to that particular abuse report, I lucked out and happened upon another incidence of horrible criminal activity, something I'd imagine that runs rampant on all servers who haven't taken draconian measures to prevent it: A High Wizard was clearly running a macro program, instructed to repeatedly use a command which warped her to a random tile on her current map, and also rapidly spam AoE spells directly under her own feet. Her goal was to farm quest items without actually playing the game. Some will argue that this constitutes intelligent gameplay, and I can understand that view; but the bRO server regulations explicitly forbid the use of third-party programs, and the offending Wizard was doing just that (the Ragnarok client doesn't offer unprivileged users any means of automating the described process).
Once more, as per The Great Grand Rulebook, I revisited the ticket system and again filled out the necessary paperwork, and noted that screenshots and other evidence of the sort were not necessary for accusations of botting, which is very sensible as a single screenshot of a player using an AoE is not convincing (nevermind the robotic reflexes you'd need to take such a screenshot in the first place), and reviewing something like a movie assembled by screen-capture software is just infeasible, both for time considerations and because such files would be many tens of megabytes in size and therefore could not be easily hosted or transferred.
The ticket, only a week younger than the previous one, still sits without an update.
"This, too, is odd," thought I. "The administration was, not three weeks ago, capable of responding to my misdemeanor offense within a lightning-fast 12 hours." But I could not know for sure what was causing this incongruity. Could it be that the ticket system is, for whatever reason, less streamlined than logic would otherwise dictate? I decided to excuse the bRO staff a second time, and investigate this possibility. It was much more sensible than just assuming I was being ignored, and far more productive.
We return to the in-game IRC protocol. Upon logging into the game server, your session is given a four-number identifier appended to the end of "bRO" and separated with a hyphen - for example, bRO-2571 - and this number is used as your temporary nickname in an IRC channel directly accessible from the game client's chat terminal by typing "!chat" followed by your message. This means that any player can readily interact with any other player who hasn't somehow been removed from the channel (e.g. banned or kicked from the channel, opted out by typing "!chat off"). I will address the IRC environment in more detail later; for my purposes at this point in time, I only needed to confirm that it was monitored by the administration, and it was. This means it is potentially a much faster means of attracting their attention, and would explain the response time descrepancy I illustrated earlier. This would, as a side benefit, also possibly serve to gauge the receptiveness of the staff to people opting against the use of the ticket system (so basically I was tempting fate).
I am intimately familiar with the IRC protocol, and had been long, long before this encounter. This experience means two things: Foremost, I know idling to be a sacred ritual. Also, I can sniff out coding oversights in remote mIRC scripts used in robots, possibly to exploit and/or debug them. Armed with this practiced intuition, I set out to find something related to the bRO IRC that would ordinarily justify writing a support ticket... but instead, I would immediately seek to bring it to the attention of an administrator present in the IRC channel.
It didn't take long, actually. I noticed that a good chunk of players were being automatically kicked by a user named Tachibana_Kanade for saying the word "lag," regardless of context. It is evidently a very effective means of discouraging IRC users from discussing server latency. Since Tachibana_Kanade was not talking, I made the reasonable assumption that he was an automated channel services bot whose purpose was to maintain some semblance of order in the channel while the rest of the staff was busy attending to far more important matters. I thought it would be totally hilarious to trick another user into saying "lag," but that's just a delinquent prank and didn't help in my quest at all. (I still did it at least twice.) What would help me, though, is if Kanade's script autokicked for any instance of the three letters "lag," and I could test for that very easily...
I typed "!chat i salute the american flag" and was immediately kicked by the ever-vigilant robot. This was an unexpected success! After that demonstration, which was broadcast to an entire game server full of onlookers which included staff members, I would surely have no trouble alerting an administrator to the issue and having it resolved very quickly. Especially since, upon my return, I shared with everyone the exact line of mIRC scripting that was faulty, and the single-character change that would fix the script.
For those interested, the faulty remote script line being used was something along the lines of 1:text:*lag*:#blackoutro:{, which would activate for strings which included the phrase "lag" like flag, collage (a frequent mispelling of "college"), flagrant, camouflage, pillaged, plagues, accusations of plagiarism, someone talking about knocking back an ice cold lager... Using the wildcards (asterisks) before and after a short phrase is a very amateur and thoughtless coding mistake. Instead, a more reasonable code would be 1:text:* lag*:#blackoutro:{, which would serve the intended purpose of booting users who said they were laggy and that the server lags, without affecting innocents who make an offhand comment about broken quest flags, the black plague, stalagmites, the village they live in, and perhaps even food spoilage. (People referring to rabbits as lagomorphs, I'm sorry. You'll have to be weird elsewhere.) I explained all of this, in fewer but just as concise words, to all present.
As I did this explaining, an administrator suddently appeared, so I took the opportunity to flag her (him?) down. My initial reception was neutral; I explained that the robot was kicking any user who spoke the string "lag" and that this included "flag" and other innocuous phrases. To my horrified surprise, this administrator - "Touhou," a GM not listed on the (very incomplete) index of bRO staff, but arguably well-known and who enjoys an almost universally positive sentiment from the community - flatly asserted that the robot "was not a robot" (which may be true, but it is not obvious to the uninformed observer because Tachibana_Kanade did not react to channel goings-on whatsoever and was otherwise also totally indistinguishable from a bot) and that he "did not kick for that word."
Wh.
But, I just. Dude. Were you not looking? Okay, so maybe she wasn't looking. I am more than happy to demonstrate a second time. You know, like an Instant Replay. So I did just that: I saluted the flag once more for good measure, and the robot threw me on the street, right on schedule.
Surely after this display (provided, of course, she was looking this time), the problem was obvious, and would receive due attention. A malfunction like this, which affects all users and whose solution requires literally three mouse clicks and a single keystroke by the person running the script (and that's IF mIRC isn't the active window), bRO would soon be relieved of this problem.
Nope. Instead, upon my second return, I only had time to say "tada!" and pat myself on the back before my game client closed and a series of self-replicating alerts slowly began flooding my screen. Alerts which read "Do not abuse IRC. Thank you!! :D" and originated from the same process as the game client (Blackout RO.exe).
That is correct: Instead of debugging the now-inarguable code fault, a process which would consist of telling Kanade to add a single character to his remote.ini file, the bRO administrator opted instead to terminate my client and initiate a particularly impotent forkbomb attack; given the message content, this functionality could only have been deliberately programmed into the game client with the express intention of disrupting the stable functioning of the target computer.
The audience gasps. "Do you have any evidence to support this conclusion?" As in, do I have a series of screenshots chronicling these events? I have better: To cause a different condition that triggers the same attack, simply log into the bRO game server, type !chat off, then !chat on, and alternate between the two until your game client closes and your screen becomes littered with a stream of alert dialogues. This is to punish persons who are attempting to flood the IRC with join/part messages, which are not broadcast to the game's IRC handler, but are visible and very distracting to persons using other clients to access the channel.
To disarm the forkbomb after it has begun replicating, open the Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del), switch to the Processes tab, find the process named "Blackout RO.exe" and select "End Process" from the right-click menu. Because the offending module has a single root process, it lacks a key feature of "stronger" forkbombs in that you only have to kill a single process; this punitive measure is therefore only really effective at scaring the computer illiterate.
Nevermind the fact that the bRO game client may be subject to antimalware legislation, that's not important - out of three tests used to determine the efficiency of the staff, we had one mark each from across the board, in respective order: Warp-speed attention, "No Contest," and a flat-out tantrum sparked by being corrected while also being made aware of a debilitating oversight with an embarrassingly simple solution.
"Well maybe that's just Touhou," says an optimistic audience member. "Maybe the other admins would have treated you differently." Perhaps so; that's why I performed one further test...
It is reasonable to assume that, if the bRO administrators are capable of integrating IRC channel functionality into their client, they should also have at least two staff members who know how to create and maintain channel robots. If they have only one person who knows mIRC scripting language, that means he'd have to be on-call 24/7 to diagnose and address any problem related to the bot; two or more, and the workload on each programmer is more tolerable. Since bRO has a high number of staff personnel, this assumption is even more likely to be true.
The experiment aimed to garner attention to the flag bug from as many IRC-using administrators as possible, thereby increasing the chances that one or more mIRC programmers will recognize the coding mistake, and quickly fix it. I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that the offending single line of code needs only a single character added to it; afterward, the problem will be fixed.
I carried out the test by joining the in-game IRC channel once a day, at a different hour each day, and posting the line "i salute the american flag" or "i live in a village." I would be immediately auto-kicked by an IRC script each time. It was during this test that I saw at least two other administrators running the same broken script: MdBCruise (which is odd because he seems like the kind of guy who would know better), and your very own Riotblade, a regular in #blackoutro and part of bRO's developtment team.
In-between "salute" announcements, I would wait and see how the administration responded to the auto-kick. Oddly, there was nothing to be seen; it's possible that admins were discussing it either on the bRO Ventrilo server or in private messages, but no discussion was had in-channel, be it from other players or administrators. Only maybe one or two other players laughed and asked "What happened, why was he banned for saluting a flag?" They received no response.
The experiment was ended abruptly after nine days. My final salute occurred without anything out of the ordinary. I saluted, Cruise's autokick script swung its baseball bat, and my shins split like fiberglass toothpicks. However, two minutes later, my client suddenly closed connection, returning me to the login screen... Attempting to log back in revealed that I was "Banned from the server."
Welp. Saw that comin'.
I checked the account control panel, and discovered a one-day ban (by Riotblade, no less), the reason given for which was "Abuse of IRC." And with that, the fourth and latest experiment yielded its results: In fact, the bRO administration prefers bans to fixes (It's not like they just couldn't fix the problem - I explained it once, demonstrated it at least 11 times, and even gave them the solution), and what's more, they will go out of their way to ban you even if the fix would take less time.
In this example, three people would have to add a single character to their remote script file, and then the problem would be fixed. Instead, an admin had to /whowas me for my hostmask, cull the IP address from it, and query their account database for user accounts associated with that IP and automatically assign them 24-hour bans. (I could tell this ban was automated because, unlike my previous ban for harassment, it had a unique 14-digit ban code, and listed the HID timestamps in the Ban Reason field, indicating that the command was carried out by the system itself.)
I have a suspicion, and I suspect Riotblade will respond to this later, that another bRO user (probably Cruise, who I don't believe has admin powers) asked him to ban the guy "WHO KEEPS EXPLOITING MY SCIRPT!!1" and Riotblade just did as he was asked; I suspect this because, given Riotblade's dual involvement with the heavily-trafficked RMS machine and the decidedly less important bRO escapade, he doesn't actually devote much of his attention to #blackoutro or the script he's running there, and thus wouldn't care unless explicitly asked to do so.
Regardless, this is pretty substantial evidence that, if someone is complaining of bRO staff incompetence and of their dismissive and apathetic treatment of customers, you should listen to them no matter how stupid their post looks. If this IRC episode is any indication (and it is certainly not the only indication), the members of the bRO staff responsible for anything related to customer inquiries or game maintenance are horrifyingly incompetent, and what's more, if your actions even border on exposing them for their incapability of doing what their job description suggests they should be able to do at a moment's notice several dozen times a day, they will not hesitate to verbally attack and, later, ban you without warning or even cursory consideration.
If you're still not convinced that the bRO staff is deserving of its frequent criticism, you can find many dozens of threads just like
So what do I write to summarize my findings? Well, honestly, it's something I'll be repeating very often throughout this narrative. A reminder to anyone who elects to play on any private server anywhere. Something that should be at the forefront of your thoughts as you decide to forego a monthly subscription, and so as to avoid spending the next 20 years of your life grinding Porings just to gain four levels.
These servers are not operated by professionals. These servers are operated by kids. These kids are not obligated to be reasonable, polite, or even follow their own rules. Often moody, often diehard fans, often given over to violently defending their e-reputations, often seemingly incapable of walking away from petty feuds, often having the mistaken impression that their customers are interested in knowing the names, the birthdays, and the favorite Code Geass characters of the administration team... in other words, they have the emotional maturity of, at most, a highschooler. If you use these servers, and are even the slightest bit taken aback at the treatment you receive from the players or staff, you are being stupid. Your money is now their money. There are no other guarantees.
Too curious for my own good, I set out to confirm or dispel certain prevailing accusations regarding the bRO server environment, using only the miracle of birth and two kilos of pure cane sugar. What follows is extremely text-intensive, even in spite of several images I created to break up the monotony, so if you're not terribly interested in reading a novel about something only a fragmented minority of the world population might care about if they are told that they'll be given free money for their participation, or you don't have a collegiate level of English comprehension (mea culpa, Eastern Hemisphere, mea culpa), I compassionately recommend you go play video games instead. On with the show...
Someone will inevitably call my experience into question; I've played RO on and off since 2004, always on mid- to high-rate private servers, and I care less about "the community," be it general or server-specific, than I do about the likelihood that I might live to see the end of chewable Flintstone vitamins (hint: not a lot). As such, my interests lie in matters such as server stability, bug fixes, economy, the competence and promptness of server staff, and other issues that impact players who play the game with only nominal interest in the multiplayer aspect. As with all other games, I stop playing when I get bored or find something more entertaining to do. It is notably difficult to get banned if you don't interact with anyone.
Granted, a forum is probably the strangest and least sensible venue in which to express that sentiment, it being a place chiefly comprised of people who do care about non-gameplay factors like community friendliness. So in the interest of making my position a little more relatable, I drew this purdy picture, which will also serve as the beginning of my review proper:
I am no stranger to MMOs. I survived Barrens Chat. I have made many new games titled "Hell Rush 4 Forge." I have both given and received a lion's share of zerg rushes. I have laughed at 13-year-olds with the volume on their microphones maxed out as they screechingly lament another unfortunate headshot. Like some of you, I nearly predate console gaming, let alone online gaming, and I've ridden the wave from Rogue, to Sinistar, to Toejam and Earl, to Goldeneye 64, to all 4,000 of those weird adult Mahjong arcade games... and one advantage that offline gaming will always have against online gaming is this: You will deal with fewer aggravating morons.
The bRO community, since at least late 2008 (when I first registered with them), is reflected perfectly by the above image. The persons supporting the server via monetary donations usually speak English as a second language, which complicates interacting with the predominantly North American staff almost as much as being an excitable and poorly-supervised gradeschooler - which, not at all surprisingly, they also are. This isn't unique in any way; in fact, it's bog-standard for virtually all private servers, RO or otherwise. One also expects to see, and finds represented in the bRO community: A clique of gossipy teenagers flaunting themselves as the "in-crowd," making cookie-cutter signatures with garish color schemes and laughably typical embedded poetry or lyrics; Isolated ethnic mini-cultures that interact exclusively amongst each other and have little desire (or practical incentive) to deal with other cultural pockets, who view them as bizarrely eccentric anyway so perhaps that's for the best; At most two people who know every obscure detail about the game's mechanics, and try in vain to word oceans of algebra in a way that makes sense to Group 1; and the faceless but omnipotent staff, whose desire to address you helpfully is usually determined by coin toss.
"That's generalizing," readers may cry. And they're absolutely right. These are the features of a typical server community. Now that I've established the reference for mediocrity, I will go on to explain how (or how not!) bRO meets or exceeds these standards, and qualify it with examples.
Administration
Show of hands: Who here gets excited at the prospect of dealing with more than 6,000 disorganized, very upset, possibly illiterate, usually confused children, from an entirely different country, whose unwritten behavioral code is likely very different from yours, and whose documentation for the game is almost definitely poorly-translated (provided anybody bothered reading it), who may or may not pay or thank you for your services? To those who raised their hands, let me clarify: You will be assisting these persons, ideally with a pleasant demeanor, and not beating them into unconsciousness and tossing their stunned and disfigured bodies into traffic. The persons who didn't put their hands back down are probably either 1) terribly optimistic, 2) lying, or 3) in the right mindset to try administering technical assistance to a game server.
The observant might draw a comparison between being an admin and an entry-level position at a tech support call center. Good eyes! Both positions involve dealing with people who have no idea what they're doing, and who are becoming increasingly frustrated by the fact that something isn't operating as they think it should. Anyone who has actually worked a tech support job will know that it is the closest you can get to simulating Hell without having to sacrifice a newborn goat - in particular, this is because you are obligated to remain calm and friendly with the customer. Your reward for surviving a single day of this torture is usually only a single step above minimum hourly wage, and possibly the satisfaction of having helped an elderly woman access her email.
But the extreme frustration inherent to the task is where the similarities end. A server as populated as bRO sees an alleged 3,000 USD per month (and I've heard figures like 3,000 USD per week, which might actually be closer to the truth), and very, very little of that is necessary to maintain server equipment (and don't let anyone tell you otherwise) - the rest goes into the pockets of the people running the show. In bRO's case, the vast majority of the staff are unpaid volunteers; aside from that, I can't pretend to know any specific details regarding who gets a paycheck and of what size, but those familiar with the server's history will recall that the second-in-command was once able to take a year off and tour Asia... something which cannot be done on a simple tech support monkey's salary.
The fact that anyone is being substantially overpaid to do entry-level work is not even the least bit surprising. But consider that the aforementioned second-in-command would not ordinarily be able to keep such a job because of his deliberate mistreatment of clientele (which has been laboriously documented), and that most of the day-to-day maintenance tasks are being delegated to unpaid underlings...
Of course I'm referring to Anxiety, who infamously makes no attempt to combat allegations of being a remorseless codpiece. It wouldn't be fair of me to draw conclusions or make assumptions about him based on the testimony of hundreds of his victims, so I made a point of interacting with him personally. And by that I mean "from the sidelines," using their largely anonymous in-game IRC chat handler to see how he treats the hoi polloi, the player base with no formal identity and with whom he has not established a prior relationship. I would infrequently post a variety of chatter ranging from inane comments about server functionality to assisting players in using online resources to answering their own questions, from dirty jokes to idle banter about Pokemon. One expects a chill reception from a person with Anxiety's reputation, and I was certain that one day I'd draw the short straw and suffer one of his "random bans," and that would be the premature conclusion to my adventures.
Actually he's a neat guy. He's no otaku fanboy queer, he's got an operating knowledge of computer networking crud, a fairly dry sense of humor, catches a handful of obscure film dialogue references. He just has zero capacity for retardedness. I was very pleasantly surprised. Is he capable of doing what is essentially a minimum-wage and highly specified tech support job? Hell no, no no, no no-no, no. No. He can't manage a (disgustingly lucrative) business venture without lashing out against the people who pay for his ability to attack them in the first place. If Anxiety were obligated to respond to all inquiries with a civil tone and upbeat demeanor, he might actually die. In fairness, his job description includes higher-level gameserver maintenance and organizing the rest of the bRO staff, so comparing him to a call center manager is probably more appropriate, but that position still demands the courteous treatment of customers no matter how plainly stupid they are, does not pay nearly as well, and perhaps most importantly, requires submission to and fear of disgracing a superior within the company - another thing effectively absent from his bRO job description.
"You only talked to one admin, though," say readers capable of critical reasoning, "that's hardly an adequate sampling of the staff's ability!" And I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I deliberately did not limit myself to a single administrator. Naturally, I made a point of experimenting with Anxiety's temper because it's a bone of much contention, and concluded that, whereas he's not exceptionally calm, he is not prone to exploding without cause. Satisfied with those results, I moved on to more interesting experiments.
If a purportedly frequent ban reason is "the admin was angry even though I didn't do anything," and by not doing anything I failed to make an admin angry, I wondered if actual offenses were being dealt with on the server. The more astute reader realizes what I'm suggesting, and her anticipation is not in vain: Yes, in the name of Science, I had to do something explicitly forbidden by the server regulations; for if the server were truly at the heights of corruption, it would turn a blind eye to legitimate complaints.
So I went down the Naughty No-No list, and decided upon "Player Harrassment" as my sin of choice. I resolved to relentlessly belittle the next person who elected to sass me. I figured a dungeon frequently populated by low-level players who don't know about bRO's special party-leveling XP bonuses was the perfect setting for my crime, because as we all know, newbies who aren't familiar with server tweaks are unlikely to have much political sway; this avoids any potential "you insulted a popular player!" bias.
After explaining to a novice that she obviously had terminal brain cancer for trying to level here - and then repeating that over and over again on all of my other characters, after I deliberately taught her how to block whispers and save chatlogs (I'm not entirely heartless) - I was convinced that I had thoroughly desecrated the most holy of sacraments, "Thou Shalt Not Be a Hater." I thought that, if I was going to receive any attention whatsoever, it would be in a matter of days, given that the server's population numbers in the thousands and the admins constantly complain of backlog...
Nope! Within twelve hours of the offense, I received a 24-hour ban for (go figure) "player harrassment." What a bargain! I did at least a week's worth of emotional damage, I reckon. Maybe my sentence was mitigated somewhat by the fact that I taught my victim how to avoid being harrassed? Either way, it only took them twelve hours to respond to one (relatively minor) harrassment complaint. I don't know what evidence was collected or how the determination was made that I should be banned, but this experiment further demonstrates that, perhaps, the allegations of staff inefficiency on bRO are somewhat exaggerated.
Which is the position I maintained until experiment #3. I had tested the handling of decidedly meta-game issues; what remains is that I test the handling of game issues, i.e. how promptly bug reports are addressed, and how quickly non-verbal harrassment issues are dealt with. Obviously this experiment required the most time, because it necessitated that I find an unresolved bug and, thanks to the result of my last experiment, other people doing something bad. Having a ban on my record, I thought, might possibly influence future ban durations, which would taint this experiment's results. The only factor working in my favor was the sheer volume of players online at any given time - increasing the likelihood that someone, somewhere, was misbehaving.
A system was put in place to handle "support tickets," which is actually just a highly idiosyncratic and specialized category on their forum. This is the official method by which players are to interact with game staff: You make a new "ticket" (forum topic, which is visible only to you and administrators, not other users), which you fill out with necessary information and possibly links to applicable screenshots, and post it for admins to review at their convenience. Sounds good. It's a very efficient, private method of prioritizing complaints and responding to them in an organized fashion. Seeing the machine they had in place, I expected Experiment 3 to be over in a flash.
So after the lengthy waiting game, I happened upon some upstanding Malaysian gentlebeings who were enjoying a rousing game of "kill AFK vendors in a major city." A Creator (Biochemist) would summon a lowly plant creature, which a Sage (Professor) would then transform, via Hocus-Pocus (Abracadabra), into a different monster, hopefully an aggressive one that would fly around butchering the innocent. I happened upon them mid-game, in a field of corpses and scattered wagon carts, merrily chattering away in their exotic tongue. I thought this clearly constituted bug exploitation, if not also good ol' fashioned "player harrassment," so I filed the necessary paperwork, took a dozen or so screenshots with player names visible for convenience, and submitted the ticket to the system.
After two weeks, it had yet to be filed or addressed. "Odd," I mused. "I have thus far been very impressed by the prompt and even-handed judgments handed down by the forces at work here. I think I will give them the benefit of the doubt this time; perhaps there is only one administrator capable of handling this issue right now because the others are on vacation, or there's been a freak technical glitch and the ticket is only visible to me..." Yes, I thought it would be sporting of me to excuse them, at least this once, even if I couldn't come up with a very convincing justification. After all, I'd imagine they receive dozens of tickets a day, and even if they had a hundred-person staff (they have roughly half that), it would be unreasonable to expect them to address both these support tickets and simultaneously deal with an unknown but still assuredly very high number of in-game issues, all in a timely manner.
So as I waited for a response to that particular abuse report, I lucked out and happened upon another incidence of horrible criminal activity, something I'd imagine that runs rampant on all servers who haven't taken draconian measures to prevent it: A High Wizard was clearly running a macro program, instructed to repeatedly use a command which warped her to a random tile on her current map, and also rapidly spam AoE spells directly under her own feet. Her goal was to farm quest items without actually playing the game. Some will argue that this constitutes intelligent gameplay, and I can understand that view; but the bRO server regulations explicitly forbid the use of third-party programs, and the offending Wizard was doing just that (the Ragnarok client doesn't offer unprivileged users any means of automating the described process).
Once more, as per The Great Grand Rulebook, I revisited the ticket system and again filled out the necessary paperwork, and noted that screenshots and other evidence of the sort were not necessary for accusations of botting, which is very sensible as a single screenshot of a player using an AoE is not convincing (nevermind the robotic reflexes you'd need to take such a screenshot in the first place), and reviewing something like a movie assembled by screen-capture software is just infeasible, both for time considerations and because such files would be many tens of megabytes in size and therefore could not be easily hosted or transferred.
The ticket, only a week younger than the previous one, still sits without an update.
"This, too, is odd," thought I. "The administration was, not three weeks ago, capable of responding to my misdemeanor offense within a lightning-fast 12 hours." But I could not know for sure what was causing this incongruity. Could it be that the ticket system is, for whatever reason, less streamlined than logic would otherwise dictate? I decided to excuse the bRO staff a second time, and investigate this possibility. It was much more sensible than just assuming I was being ignored, and far more productive.
We return to the in-game IRC protocol. Upon logging into the game server, your session is given a four-number identifier appended to the end of "bRO" and separated with a hyphen - for example, bRO-2571 - and this number is used as your temporary nickname in an IRC channel directly accessible from the game client's chat terminal by typing "!chat" followed by your message. This means that any player can readily interact with any other player who hasn't somehow been removed from the channel (e.g. banned or kicked from the channel, opted out by typing "!chat off"). I will address the IRC environment in more detail later; for my purposes at this point in time, I only needed to confirm that it was monitored by the administration, and it was. This means it is potentially a much faster means of attracting their attention, and would explain the response time descrepancy I illustrated earlier. This would, as a side benefit, also possibly serve to gauge the receptiveness of the staff to people opting against the use of the ticket system (so basically I was tempting fate).
I am intimately familiar with the IRC protocol, and had been long, long before this encounter. This experience means two things: Foremost, I know idling to be a sacred ritual. Also, I can sniff out coding oversights in remote mIRC scripts used in robots, possibly to exploit and/or debug them. Armed with this practiced intuition, I set out to find something related to the bRO IRC that would ordinarily justify writing a support ticket... but instead, I would immediately seek to bring it to the attention of an administrator present in the IRC channel.
It didn't take long, actually. I noticed that a good chunk of players were being automatically kicked by a user named Tachibana_Kanade for saying the word "lag," regardless of context. It is evidently a very effective means of discouraging IRC users from discussing server latency. Since Tachibana_Kanade was not talking, I made the reasonable assumption that he was an automated channel services bot whose purpose was to maintain some semblance of order in the channel while the rest of the staff was busy attending to far more important matters. I thought it would be totally hilarious to trick another user into saying "lag," but that's just a delinquent prank and didn't help in my quest at all. (I still did it at least twice.) What would help me, though, is if Kanade's script autokicked for any instance of the three letters "lag," and I could test for that very easily...
I typed "!chat i salute the american flag" and was immediately kicked by the ever-vigilant robot. This was an unexpected success! After that demonstration, which was broadcast to an entire game server full of onlookers which included staff members, I would surely have no trouble alerting an administrator to the issue and having it resolved very quickly. Especially since, upon my return, I shared with everyone the exact line of mIRC scripting that was faulty, and the single-character change that would fix the script.
For those interested, the faulty remote script line being used was something along the lines of 1:text:*lag*:#blackoutro:{, which would activate for strings which included the phrase "lag" like flag, collage (a frequent mispelling of "college"), flagrant, camouflage, pillaged, plagues, accusations of plagiarism, someone talking about knocking back an ice cold lager... Using the wildcards (asterisks) before and after a short phrase is a very amateur and thoughtless coding mistake. Instead, a more reasonable code would be 1:text:* lag*:#blackoutro:{, which would serve the intended purpose of booting users who said they were laggy and that the server lags, without affecting innocents who make an offhand comment about broken quest flags, the black plague, stalagmites, the village they live in, and perhaps even food spoilage. (People referring to rabbits as lagomorphs, I'm sorry. You'll have to be weird elsewhere.) I explained all of this, in fewer but just as concise words, to all present.
As I did this explaining, an administrator suddently appeared, so I took the opportunity to flag her (him?) down. My initial reception was neutral; I explained that the robot was kicking any user who spoke the string "lag" and that this included "flag" and other innocuous phrases. To my horrified surprise, this administrator - "Touhou," a GM not listed on the (very incomplete) index of bRO staff, but arguably well-known and who enjoys an almost universally positive sentiment from the community - flatly asserted that the robot "was not a robot" (which may be true, but it is not obvious to the uninformed observer because Tachibana_Kanade did not react to channel goings-on whatsoever and was otherwise also totally indistinguishable from a bot) and that he "did not kick for that word."
Wh.
But, I just. Dude. Were you not looking? Okay, so maybe she wasn't looking. I am more than happy to demonstrate a second time. You know, like an Instant Replay. So I did just that: I saluted the flag once more for good measure, and the robot threw me on the street, right on schedule.
Surely after this display (provided, of course, she was looking this time), the problem was obvious, and would receive due attention. A malfunction like this, which affects all users and whose solution requires literally three mouse clicks and a single keystroke by the person running the script (and that's IF mIRC isn't the active window), bRO would soon be relieved of this problem.
Nope. Instead, upon my second return, I only had time to say "tada!" and pat myself on the back before my game client closed and a series of self-replicating alerts slowly began flooding my screen. Alerts which read "Do not abuse IRC. Thank you!! :D" and originated from the same process as the game client (Blackout RO.exe).
That is correct: Instead of debugging the now-inarguable code fault, a process which would consist of telling Kanade to add a single character to his remote.ini file, the bRO administrator opted instead to terminate my client and initiate a particularly impotent forkbomb attack; given the message content, this functionality could only have been deliberately programmed into the game client with the express intention of disrupting the stable functioning of the target computer.
The audience gasps. "Do you have any evidence to support this conclusion?" As in, do I have a series of screenshots chronicling these events? I have better: To cause a different condition that triggers the same attack, simply log into the bRO game server, type !chat off, then !chat on, and alternate between the two until your game client closes and your screen becomes littered with a stream of alert dialogues. This is to punish persons who are attempting to flood the IRC with join/part messages, which are not broadcast to the game's IRC handler, but are visible and very distracting to persons using other clients to access the channel.
To disarm the forkbomb after it has begun replicating, open the Task Manager (Ctrl + Alt + Del), switch to the Processes tab, find the process named "Blackout RO.exe" and select "End Process" from the right-click menu. Because the offending module has a single root process, it lacks a key feature of "stronger" forkbombs in that you only have to kill a single process; this punitive measure is therefore only really effective at scaring the computer illiterate.
Nevermind the fact that the bRO game client may be subject to antimalware legislation, that's not important - out of three tests used to determine the efficiency of the staff, we had one mark each from across the board, in respective order: Warp-speed attention, "No Contest," and a flat-out tantrum sparked by being corrected while also being made aware of a debilitating oversight with an embarrassingly simple solution.
"Well maybe that's just Touhou," says an optimistic audience member. "Maybe the other admins would have treated you differently." Perhaps so; that's why I performed one further test...
It is reasonable to assume that, if the bRO administrators are capable of integrating IRC channel functionality into their client, they should also have at least two staff members who know how to create and maintain channel robots. If they have only one person who knows mIRC scripting language, that means he'd have to be on-call 24/7 to diagnose and address any problem related to the bot; two or more, and the workload on each programmer is more tolerable. Since bRO has a high number of staff personnel, this assumption is even more likely to be true.
The experiment aimed to garner attention to the flag bug from as many IRC-using administrators as possible, thereby increasing the chances that one or more mIRC programmers will recognize the coding mistake, and quickly fix it. I'll take this opportunity to remind everyone that the offending single line of code needs only a single character added to it; afterward, the problem will be fixed.
I carried out the test by joining the in-game IRC channel once a day, at a different hour each day, and posting the line "i salute the american flag" or "i live in a village." I would be immediately auto-kicked by an IRC script each time. It was during this test that I saw at least two other administrators running the same broken script: MdBCruise (which is odd because he seems like the kind of guy who would know better), and your very own Riotblade, a regular in #blackoutro and part of bRO's developtment team.
In-between "salute" announcements, I would wait and see how the administration responded to the auto-kick. Oddly, there was nothing to be seen; it's possible that admins were discussing it either on the bRO Ventrilo server or in private messages, but no discussion was had in-channel, be it from other players or administrators. Only maybe one or two other players laughed and asked "What happened, why was he banned for saluting a flag?" They received no response.
The experiment was ended abruptly after nine days. My final salute occurred without anything out of the ordinary. I saluted, Cruise's autokick script swung its baseball bat, and my shins split like fiberglass toothpicks. However, two minutes later, my client suddenly closed connection, returning me to the login screen... Attempting to log back in revealed that I was "Banned from the server."
Welp. Saw that comin'.
I checked the account control panel, and discovered a one-day ban (by Riotblade, no less), the reason given for which was "Abuse of IRC." And with that, the fourth and latest experiment yielded its results: In fact, the bRO administration prefers bans to fixes (It's not like they just couldn't fix the problem - I explained it once, demonstrated it at least 11 times, and even gave them the solution), and what's more, they will go out of their way to ban you even if the fix would take less time.
In this example, three people would have to add a single character to their remote script file, and then the problem would be fixed. Instead, an admin had to /whowas me for my hostmask, cull the IP address from it, and query their account database for user accounts associated with that IP and automatically assign them 24-hour bans. (I could tell this ban was automated because, unlike my previous ban for harassment, it had a unique 14-digit ban code, and listed the HID timestamps in the Ban Reason field, indicating that the command was carried out by the system itself.)
I have a suspicion, and I suspect Riotblade will respond to this later, that another bRO user (probably Cruise, who I don't believe has admin powers) asked him to ban the guy "WHO KEEPS EXPLOITING MY SCIRPT!!1" and Riotblade just did as he was asked; I suspect this because, given Riotblade's dual involvement with the heavily-trafficked RMS machine and the decidedly less important bRO escapade, he doesn't actually devote much of his attention to #blackoutro or the script he's running there, and thus wouldn't care unless explicitly asked to do so.
Regardless, this is pretty substantial evidence that, if someone is complaining of bRO staff incompetence and of their dismissive and apathetic treatment of customers, you should listen to them no matter how stupid their post looks. If this IRC episode is any indication (and it is certainly not the only indication), the members of the bRO staff responsible for anything related to customer inquiries or game maintenance are horrifyingly incompetent, and what's more, if your actions even border on exposing them for their incapability of doing what their job description suggests they should be able to do at a moment's notice several dozen times a day, they will not hesitate to verbally attack and, later, ban you without warning or even cursory consideration.
If you're still not convinced that the bRO staff is deserving of its frequent criticism, you can find many dozens of threads just like
- this one, which eventually lead to this post which serves to highlight Anxiety's dangerously arrogant overestimation of the "legal screen" he wrote up in the hopes of offering some pretentious legal protection to Blackout Gaming Network's business model, the voiding grammatical flaws of which should prove to be an interesting point of contention if someone ever takes them up on Canada's adaptation of America's DMCA legislation
- this one, wherein we learn that 200 USD is little more than a drop in the bucket to bRO
- this one, illustrating the sad reality that something as embarrassingly mild as bullying is enough to cause Anxiety's cheerleaders to squeal "PWANAGE LOLS"
- ESPECIALLY this one, which doesn't involve Anxiety but expressly confirms that no other member of bRO's active staff roster is authorized to even investigate anything involving Anxiety
- and this one, wherein Anxiety acknowledges a site problem (HOORAY!) that has gone without an update for many months, but invites a user to fix it for free (... not hooray, that's totally shyster, dude)
- and many, many others, just by logging in to a boards.blackout-gaming.net forum account and clicking here to search through all Anxiety's posts and read the threads associated with them.
So what do I write to summarize my findings? Well, honestly, it's something I'll be repeating very often throughout this narrative. A reminder to anyone who elects to play on any private server anywhere. Something that should be at the forefront of your thoughts as you decide to forego a monthly subscription, and so as to avoid spending the next 20 years of your life grinding Porings just to gain four levels.
These servers are not operated by professionals. These servers are operated by kids. These kids are not obligated to be reasonable, polite, or even follow their own rules. Often moody, often diehard fans, often given over to violently defending their e-reputations, often seemingly incapable of walking away from petty feuds, often having the mistaken impression that their customers are interested in knowing the names, the birthdays, and the favorite Code Geass characters of the administration team... in other words, they have the emotional maturity of, at most, a highschooler. If you use these servers, and are even the slightest bit taken aback at the treatment you receive from the players or staff, you are being stupid. Your money is now their money. There are no other guarantees.