Mistress Hrin's Granado Espada Blog

Hrin's Updates: Examining The B-Files

Hi guys,

1. Revisiting The Botting Issue: The 3 Stages

Quite a few people have been asking in the forum about how we have been catching bots. After some internal discussion, we decided to reveal a little in regard to the ‘behind the scenes’ operations.

There are three stages which botting is detected. The first stage is an in-built technical system. Although the in-built technical system is highly accurate, we still activate a second stage of investigation – the human factor. This is where the [GM] team does their whole ‘invisible stalker’ thing in-game to verify if the player is indeed botting.

Upon the first two stages of detection, players gets banned. The third stage also known as log checking by the log team is activated at a later time as a means of review. This third stage takes about a week or so to investigate and it is a very tedious process by which the suspect is confirmed to be botting. In the event that players appeal their case through our ticketing system, we escalate their case from the review queue in order to deal with their cases first. We have indeed unbanned a few players who, when upon submitting their appeal via the ticketing system with their evidence why they were not botting, were cleared of all charges. For these few players, when we activated the 3rd stage of investigation, we discovered that they were indeed not botting and have unbanned them ever since. Nevertheless, there are still some players who were reported as botting. They remain on our 'Suspects List' which we are still closely monitoring.

Please note that we ONLY entertain appeal cases via the ticketing system found here. We do realize that bots will keep making a comeback via new accounts within 15 minutes of our banning their accounts and will continue this policing as much as possible.

Discuss this topic here.

2. The Ad-Hoc Colony Wars…

IMC (Granado Espada’s game developer) handles all the server side applications. This includes all the Colony War functions such as switching on and off the activation times as well as the resetting or wiping of colony maps etc.

Unfortunately, due to their hectic schedule lately in the past month having to fix various bugs amongst other new back end developments, they forgot to switch it off. The Colony Wars caught us all by surprise as well! Nonetheless it was a rather amusing experience which resulted in us converting it into a trial ad hoc war to test for any colony war bugs. It reminded me of Sun Tzu’s Art Of War whereby real wars always come with the elements of surprise and unpredictability. At the same time, it tested the ‘operational-readiness’ of everyone in IAHgames as well as every faction in Granado Espada.

Having said that, the real colony wars are usually automated by the system to activate itself once the timings are set. Due to this period of trial wars which requires manual restarts and manual clearing of maps, this is a new process to IMC themselves which needs some kinks to be worked out. So do let's give them some time to work things out amidst this hectic period. :)

Discuss this topic here.

3. Upcoming Events

[Malaysia] Roadshow @ Johor Bahru: SMM will be holding a Leveling competition during this event. Participants will have to level a team of 3 newly created Level 1 characters for 45 minutes. The person with the highest leveled characters at the end of the 45 minutes wins! Read more here.

Discuss this topic here.

4. Commercial Launch Updates

Commercial launch is soon approaching. The commercial date cannot be confirmed at this time since there are still a few dependencies on the back-end which we are working on currently. The much-speculated business model will be officially announced in a few weeks time once we have finalized the last remaining details with our various partners. Personally, I’m really looking forward to announcing it since it is a business model that takes into account the different advocates of the various models and I find that it is a very fair system as well.

On an even more exciting note, we will be releasing Granado Espada’s V2.1.18 which includes new updates to the game! Think mercenaries! Think baron quests! Think Voting and Elections! We will be releasing weekly previews of the upcoming features so stay tuned for that!

Discuss this topic here.