Normally I say perma ban all of these RMT scumbags, but after this article I honestly think they don’t deserve a single penny of my money and I can totally understand why ppl are RmTing 
They can and have played global LA. If you read into it more, you would know they only blocked a certain ISP in Korea. Zeals is playing NA again like nothing happened.
Bruh the bots have been pretty obviously for a whole lot longer than 2 weeks
2 Likes
No steam negative review, no results. This forum community is a shame. Just creating these reports without do truly moves.
Considering how GoldRiver kinda threw Amazon under the bus in his first interview in the west, I think SG might not be too happy with how AGS is handling stuff and just did this to say “fk u, we give up” to Amazon
Weird how this thread where Roxx assured us this exact thing isn’t happening got locked out of nowhere 25min ago despite having no messages in it for over a month…
Editted in image of thread lock.
5 Likes
It’s possible someone said something pretty toxic there, probably replying to Roxx’s original message.
Then a mod/cm saw it, deleted the msg and locked the thread.
Entirely fair, however let’s not pull attention away from the fact that the very thing we were assured wasn’t happening, has indeed happened - as based on the main topic of this thread.
We need to get a response from CM on this.
If this is true then SGR is exploiting players and benefiting from bots. SGR would be straight up lying about their numbers.
If this is true then we might need to start a gofundme and send protest trucks over to both AGS and SGR.
1 Like
This isn’t in doubt though.
This is literally smilegate’s own website. It isn’t just some journalist that are looking at the steam numbers. It’s articles smilegate themselves are releasing.
5 Likes
Weird how this thread where Roxx assured us this exact thing isn’t happening got locked out of nowhere 25min ago despite having no messages in it for almost a week…
LMAO this seriously can’t get any more tragic, holy fuck…
2 Likes
It can. All we need to make this PR fire into an inferno is for Amazon to release their own press release today about how many concurrent ‘players’ the game has.
lol
We need korean players that have access to Inven to respost this as well.
1 Like
Crazy how nature do that.
@Roxx and @Shadow_Fox sorry to be yet another person tagging you, but this is an extremely important issue that is far worse than it seems at first glance. I doubt this post will be seen, but whatever. There are multiple layers here that are extremely disconcerting.
-
The impression this gives to players in the west is that smilegate is embracing the bot problem as a means of promoting the success of their game. That is, if what has been represented to the player base is true in regards to smilegate being aware of the bot issue.
-
I’m not sure of smilegates ownership/capital structure and whether it’s privately or publicly held, but surely this must be massively misleading whatever investors/shareholders/stakeholders there are. Like any company, the shareholders and investors rely on information given to them by management to be accurate, and pretending that more than 50% of the player numbers are not bots is massively misleading as to the actual success of the game which will lead to then investing more money under the premise of growth and revenue projections that is just not there.
-
Not only are more than half the player base numbers not real players that will not spend money on the game, they are gold farming bots that will A) steal revenue from the game by selling gold to players that would otherwise have spent money in game and B) likely causing a loss of players due to issues like long queues, new players having a bad experience in early zones, etc. If smile gate is representing these all as real players, surely the related revenue projections will be wildly inaccurate for budgeting purposes, investor relations, borrowing from banks, etc. This is going to lead to the impression that the game has failed when those revenue projections are not met.
The reality here is that the bot issue is the largest problem with the game and the most likely thing to lead to the games failure in the near future. Smilegates response of boasting about the numbers including the bots shows that they either are embracing it and misleading stakeholders (cough cough fraud cough) or are ignorant to it, both of which are absolutely not ok and extremely dangerous for the games long term performance and financial feasibility.
Please provide some information to the players to demonstrate that smilegate is in fact aware of the problem and not intentionally misleading investors so players know there is at least some hope of a resolution in the future and the games survival in the west.
1 Like
Already did.
1 Like
Smilegate is not a public company. There are no investors influencing it’s decisions as it’s fully private.
Even private companies have investors, stakeholders, etc. Most also have substantial borrowings from banks that rely on financial projections from the company in order for the company to remain in compliance with their debt covenants with the bank, etc.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people have said that 100% of Smilegate is owned purely by the few directors and the CEO, but unfortunately, I can’t read Korean to verify anything. Probably have to wait for Korean-literate people to get any surefire answers with some source(s).
EDIT: There is an article dating back to 2015 that claims he owns 100% of Smilegate himself: Online Hit Game CrossFire Mints South Korea's Richest Self-Made Billionaire