RO-fan

Just a small update in the world of Ragnarok Online.

Last September 23, 2009 kRO had an update that added an anti-bot captcha to the login procedure. On September 30, the procedure was updated again, and here how it looks like:

Cool, huh?

Of course, the OpenKore team is really excited with the new developments, as the past few months (years?) had been relatively quiet and boring.

A workaround is being tested right now, and there are currently discussions on how best to integrate this into OpenKore. One would be doing a fully automated process using optical character recognition, and another would be to simply show the image to the user and have the user solve the captcha himself.

Assuming that OpenKore can “read” the captcha, the implementation of the anti-bot may not be as efficient as it should be (from the perspective of Gravity). If the captcha will only be displayed during login, that means a user can just start his bot and solve the captcha, then leave the bot running – not much difference with the current setup, and the captcha only serves to annoy legitimate users without really preventing bots from logging in.

However (and I speculate) if the captcha will be implemented the way it is done in Granado Espada, that might make botters think twice (ha ha, I’ve been watching Majo Saiban too much). The way it’s done in GE is that a player can right click on another player, and a drop-down box pops up. There and entry called “report bot” can be found, and when that is selected, the target player receives a captcha similar to the one shown above. If the player fails the captcha, he is sent to jail where he needs to do some quests to get out. Get in jail too many times and the quests get progressively harder, to the point that the botter might eventually give up botting altogether at the risk of getting jailed one more time.

Again these are speculations, but it’s nice to see that Gravity is finally doing something to address third party software, instead of relying on such hacks like gameguard and hackshield. I hope Gravity will also introduce functionality such as direct GM communication from the client, some sort of replay capabilities, and fix client bugs that enable bad players to cheat other people.

Watch out everyone, I foresee a really fun ride