Cronos real player count

[YuBeDev]

Or in other words "Ridiculous lies of server owner"

For some time already I see how server owners fake player counters in their sites but found myself unwilling to touch this garbage. But today I found myself interested in checking this. And oh boy, that stuff really stink.

Lets take one example of this blatant lie in form of Cronos Online. At moment of writing this they claimed to have 6k players. Ha-ha. There was already lot of people who state that single silkroad server can't handle more then 3500 players. That also proven by fact that ISRO and other official silkroad never had servers with more than 3500 players.


Back to Cronos. Going to their site they provided us with a handy tool to expose their own lie. Named "Search" in Ranking section.
By pressing Search button without typing anything in Name field gives us whole database of existing character.
First page of it is
Second page is
Last page

That is total of 145 pages and 3617 characters.

Among those 3.6k chars how many of them online at that point? Doubt its more than 1k.

And Cronos just one among whole lot of similar "populated and active" servers.

[Senox28]

Every server owner who fake their numbers should be banned on forum. Looks like without Fob they need to lie and just milk money from people.

[YuBeDev]

Originally Posted by Senox28

Every server owner who fake their numbers should be banned on forum. Looks like without Fob they need to lie and just milk money from people.

Well, there was already similar suggestions. But as its difficult to testify and also its not against any forum rules moderators will do nothing. Also players themselves doesn't care much about it.

So all that can be done is manually test servers to give people option to see the truth.

[HadokenV2]

No idea why they fake it tbh, it doesn't take a genius to tell when you play in-game how many are actually around. I'd rather see 300, 200 or even 100 players, but if its actually active that's way better than 3000 all afk or just a few people with countless gbots!

[YuBeDev]

Originally Posted by HadokenV2

No idea why they fake it tbh, it doesn't take a genius to tell when you play in-game how many are actually around. I'd rather see 300, 200 or even 100 players, but if its actually active that's way better than 3000 all afk or just a few people with countless gbots!

Thats more psychological effect. When you see 6k people in server you automatically assume its great server because lot of "people" play it. Thats why theres so much milking servers who fake and close after few month. Servers that don't fake usually are long term ones.

[Devsome]

Originally Posted by YuBeDev

Well, there was already similar suggestions. But as its difficult to testify and also its not against any forum rules moderators will do nothing. Also players themselves doesn't care much about it.

So all that can be done is manually test servers to give people option to see the truth.

How should we investigate, test and handle this with the mass of new servers coming in weekly?
I have privately written a tool which reads out the player numbers using a package from the server, unfortunately some servers have prevented this package via ServerFilter / custom coding.

If you are a player on a server, it is usually enough to look at the cities and go into party matching. If there are only a handful of open parties in party matching and the numbers reach 200, you know that this server can never be active in life.

[notHype*]

Originally Posted by Senox28

Every server owner who fake their numbers should be banned on forum. Looks like without Fob they need to lie and just milk money from people.

Fob might've been one of the best that this scene has had the pleasure of seeing, but let's be real. Ruby, Cronos, and Pearl, while they were under him, was no different than it is now in terms of faked player counts. Maybe it was a bit less drastic, but every Foberious server had a faked player count.

[JellyBitz]

Originally Posted by Devsome

How should we investigate, test and handle this with the mass of new servers coming in weekly?

The problem could be solved at the same way the thread author described.

I mean, it could be possible to reward a private server with a "certificated" by demanding an API or ranking (as close to realtime as possible) with all the players, where you can find the following data:
- Online status
- Map position
Note: To play fair, job mode players are just ruled out.

So having this info, we should be able to count all of them and find anyone.
If there is some irregularity, it would be an obvious inflated counter.

[YuBeDev]

Originally Posted by JellyBitz

The problem could be solved at the same way the thread author described.

I mean, it could be possible to reward a private server with a "certificated" by demanding an API or ranking (as close to realtime as possible) with all the players, where you can find the following data:
- Online status
- Map position
Note: To play fair, job mode players are just ruled out.

So having this info, we should be able to count all of them and find anyone.
If there is some irregularity, it would be an obvious inflated counter.

Also simpler way if you have players nickname is to write bot that will PM all those players in-game and count successfully sent message.

That can also be done if you have a way to parse players via Ranking if they allow search in rankings. Even if its something like for Electus that display only 20 results of search you can search for letter "a" and if results you get is 20 repeat search of "aa" and so on until you get less than 20 results.

[Devsome]

Originally Posted by JellyBitz

The problem could be solved at the same way the thread author described.

I mean, it could be possible to reward a private server with a "certificated" by demanding an API or ranking (as close to realtime as possible) with all the players, where you can find the following data:
- Online status
- Map position
Note: To play fair, job mode players are just ruled out.

So having this info, we should be able to count all of them and find anyone.
If there is some irregularity, it would be an obvious inflated counter.

Who assures me that the data I get from the API is not also faked? And just to have his thread "tagged", I don't think we as a forum get access to their database. Also, I don't think it's a good idea to store the data on our site.

Originally Posted by YuBeDev

Also simpler way if you have players nickname is to write bot that will PM all those players in-game and count successfully sent message.

That can also be done if you have a way to parse players via Ranking if they allow search in rankings. Even if its something like for Electus that display only 20 results of search you can search for letter "a" and if results you get is 20 repeat search of "aa" and so on until you get less than 20 results.

Who should write the bot, which server thinks it makes sense to keep this bot online on your server? Who collects the data, provides the server and logs in everywhere. Even the search, as described above, they just write a few "fake" players in the database and again it is not original but faked. We're going around in circles here, that's never going to happen. There will always be servers that overdo it with 4k players online.

[YuBeDev]

Originally Posted by Devsome

Who should write the bot, which server thinks it makes sense to keep this bot online on your server? Who collects the data, provides the server and logs in everywhere. Even the search, as described above, they just write a few "fake" players in the database and again it is not original but faked. We're going around in circles here, that's never going to happen. There will always be servers that overdo it with 4k players online.

There's no need to constantly monitor server for real player count. As JellyBitz said all that needed is "certificate" for server. This type of certificate can be directly on thread title or some fixed thread with list of servers that were checked and whether or not they faked.
You check server for faking periodically (once per month for example) and take away "certificate" if server faked counter even once.

No need to checks all server big or small at once, just start with big ones for example like Cronos.

Can start by marking all those who have more than 3500 players online as fake.

Also to prevent faking in ranking with adding accounts you check those accounts in-game with PM.