I really do wonder if I’m blacklisted by the USPS

Today I had the 5th consecutive parcel I’ve attempted to have delivered go straight to the post office instead of to my home address. None of them have had signature confirmation. They’ve all been either priority mail or parcel post. Most had DC. There was one that didn’t. Either the USPS has blacklisted my address or they’ve put a new carrier on my route who is consistently doing his job terribly wrong.

It really adds insult to injury when, in addition to having to travel every single day to pick up junk mail and letters, you also have to travel to the post office to pick up parcels. There’s no reason to pay extra for signature confirmation if the recipient has to travel to the post office in person and show I.D. in order to get a parcel that doesn’t even have DC on it.

Maybe I’ll stop defending the USPS now. In the past 2 months they’ve destroyed one parcel, sent 3 to the wrong city, and decided to send these 5 parcels to the post office for pickup when they should have been delivered by a carrier.

These SRO-R updates have utterly ruined the game for both botters and legitimate players alike

My sosun-wielding goldbots have no gold to pick

Others have said it before me, but I feel the need to reiterate how poorly thought out an update this was for the iSRO economy. Servers like Xian and my old home of Babel have players (or at least abandoned accounts) from 2006, filled with items. Those items retained their value for these six years. This is one of the reasons why the supposed database leak was of interest to so many people who didn’t even play; they hoped to be able to harvest items from old, unused accounts and sell them. Equipment and other items are not like pastries; they don’t lose value as they age. At least they shouldn’t. In fact, some, like GDFs and other items that were available only for a limited time, actually increase significantly in value with the passage of time. But now the majority of the items people have been saving in reserve, ready to sell in the event of a rainy day, have been rendered worthless in one fell swoop, like all my SoX 8th degree weapons. No other update has caused a catastrophe of comparable proportions.

Say what you will about Joymax, but none of their updates to the game thus far, not even the much-maligned abolition of the triangular trade conflict system that was the main selling point of the game (it’s called Silkroad Online for fuck’s sake) have done as much damage to as many players as the phase-in of SRO-R features in iSRO. All items below 9th degree have lost their value. Even SOSun 8th degree weapons are being sold for 100 to 200 million gold. You can’t even give Spell Paper away for 30m when it ought to fly off the shelves at 70m on my server. There is no point to the Forgotten World prior to 9th degree. What this update essentially does is transform the entire player experience from level 1 through 70 into an agonizingly long and boring tutorial before they are allowed to play the “real game”. Levels 20 through 70 used to be part of that “real game”. There was competition with other players. There was envy when someone came about with a golden glowing +7 weapon. Not to deny the repetitiveness of the game, but at least back then there was suspense, since you could get a drop at any moment. That was one of the incentives to play legitimately, without the use of bots. Now there’s really no reason at all not to bot and go afk all day.

I made a goldbot party recently in celebration of learning to use the clientless feature in iBot. Now my goldbot party is useless. I have to raise them to level 75 or so and send them into the Donwhang Cave or put them at Niyas in Taklamakan for them to be of any use. I had been counting on getting a good spot fighting Hun Archers or something and letting them all stay there as long as possible with a 9 level gap. Now I can’t do that. All this update will serve to do is drive the last remaining legitimate players to use bots, and force goldbot companies and players with goldbots such as myself to level them up more quickly, leading to armies of SoSun-clad underfarmed lightning nukers who will ks you at every turn and spawn party giants and envies to kill your wizard while you’re afk or playing Skyrim on the other monitor.

pffft…

I tried Silkroad-R today…

...and got this in the White Day event!

It was my first day playing SRO since last autumn and I didn’t even know what Silkroad-R was. Now I do. Since I’ve only played it for a few hours so far, I’m unable to conclusively say what I think of the new system yet. It’s weird getting stacks of 500 potions. I used to have to do gross estimates in my head every time I would restock on pots, trying to estimate how many inventory spots I would need to leave empty in anticipation of elixirs, alchemy materials, and, if I was lucky, equipment drops. Now I don’t have to do that. Pots take up 3 spots: one for HP potions, MP potions, and universal pills.

On the positive side, you get a free SOS equipment set every time you reach the next degree (eg. 8->16->24->32->42->52, etc…). This is nice, I suppose, especially for someone with bad luck at getting SOS drops. On the other hand, it takes all the luck out of the game. In normal SRO even killing thousands of Niya snipers has a tiny degree of suspense because you never know if a piece of equipment will drop. In the back of your mind you even maintain hope that maybe today will be the day you’ll get a SoX drop. Nearly all chance is taken out of the equation though without equipment or even gold drops in SRO-R prior to level 70.

But the reason I’m so excited is not because of SRO-R actually. In fact, I was going to play normal SRO today but I can’t get the client to update properly. Shortly after starting SRO-R I got these two White Day event items. On my very first try I got the above SOM garment chest piece. My first thought, of course, was that I had stumbled across some bug and that now I was going to be banned for “abusing” it. My second thought was something along the lines of, “Holy hell, this is one uncharacteristically magnanimous event if all the rewards are like this!” But no, apparently I’m just the luckiest noob on earth.

I’ve cashed in two sets of heart-shaped event items now. The first was a grand triumph. The second time I got a cookie that restores 25% HP and MP. The value differential between the first and second prizes is just staggering. So for all my complaining about there being no element of chance in SRO-R, it looks like it’s the events that are going to restore the premium on luck. That and presumably alchemy. I suppose that’s still all about luck, too.

I hope I can get a GDF. Those are worth barrels of money now.