Atibu wrote:
And then people demand we release venture without the anti-botting system

Please release it i with the anti-botting system. . .however make the game so that people don't feel the need to bot in the first place (i.e. decently low level cap. . .60 is good)
Just come out with a lot of cosmetic stuff/make alchemy extremely hard, to make money.
compound that with the anti-bot system, you should be good. . .
thing is you gotta figure something else that can draw the masses already playing at other p-servers/used to bots...
Meaning you have to create some awesome content.
One Idea is giving HUGE amounts of rewards for jobbing: weekly silk for top jobbers(not much like enouh silk to buy a pet after 5 weeks of being in the top 5 or something. . .yeah its not worth it, but players wont realize it since you're giving away "free silk" *snicker*)
Since the alch will be hard people will want to buy premium which creates a market of premium buyers in silk and people who use gold instead of silk to buy it.
You could also include some big rewards for capturing FW, and maybe 3X as more rewards to the union that defeats the current holder (so that there's incentive to fight, and the union who gets it first doesn't always dominate. . .) And if it's foudn out that the same two unions are "trading" fw's you can always add another fw with an extra buff for capping it, basically you'd make the top guilds choose forts to hold/take/trade/whatever, which stretches out the total gold lead that guilds can hold so that people still want to fight.
Also it would be good to just reset the forts once ever two months randomly, (especially if the same guilds are holding it)
there's lots of things you can really do to keep the server active and people wanting to come play it without botting. You'd have to make the other options worth plaaying more than grinding.
you could also increase trading by a lot for lower lever, like 35-45 gets 128109898%(some random absurd amount) for a 6* trade. This would encourage some peeople who don't want to grind to just go merchant and rely on a guild for hunting etc etc. . .this is actually what the devs kind of envisioned if you read the info. . .they wrote a whole bunch of stuff up about how it isn't that important to level so much since you can do this. . .it was written when Xian first came on line at 60 cap. . .unfortunately the devs F8cked up that one when they used their pay2win model in the states.
But I kinda feel that if you really took some time and focused on some cool features to bring people to the server without relying on botting, you would'nt really even need to worry about it (of course you will sitll combine that with an antibotting system so yeah)
but I kinda think doing this is extremely difficult. It will take a lot of thinking, experimenting etc. . .
League of legends does this well but that may or may not apply to SRO. . .but still something to look at.
Your goal really is to make a server that draws in people, keeps them there, and doesn't give anyone a reason to bot, all while making enouh money so that the server(and the people working it) stays alive and well fed...
untill you (or someone) can do that, SRO will just be another bot fest, or sparsely populated/dead.
Salvation tried I guess. . . .but I don't really think they had the coding expertise, nor the decent ideas that could have made that a reality. . .they kept making weird changes that actually alienated lot of legits (I know because I brought about 20+ legits with me for the purpose of trading/hunting and they left when fly made the changes to the map and the trading system. . .without adding really much incentive (written above))
And THEY worked reallly hard on this, so you guys are going to have to work 100X as hard. . .or 100x smarter than they didd, to keep the server alive and vibrant.
I don't know if you're up to that task but I'm not holding my breath(as making a server like that is nearly impossible), I'll just wait for your server to be out and then see if it will be "the one" P-server or not.
P.S. Just had another idea.
Whhat you could do is to actually let the botters come into your server BUT.
Reward the legits.
What you could do is to have the server detect when people are playing legit, and time how long they are grinding for (like the TSRO time limit things)and then have that turn into a voucher for every hour that person played legitly, the voucher would generate every 24 hours, and the rewards
would be like 2-3x higher than what a bot gets from 24/hour botting
so you'd get a TON of extra exp and gold more than the botters(and throw in some items there too), so that legits would always be ahead of the botters BUT the server would have a decent population as well.
So instead of fighting botters, reward legits enough as to where they don't need to bot.
problem solved.