BananaRO

[Lenaia]

I am a long-time player of the high-rate server HiddenRO. About two weeks ago or so, a few friends came to me (seperately) saying that there was a new server and it was "a lot like Hidden". Obviously I was curious so I headed over to their webpage and checked it out. Upon first glance it seemed like any other server until I started digging a little deeper. In their webpage I found a donations page identical to Hidden (they have since updated it with new pictures but the items/names remain the same). I moved onto their forums and found that they have ALL the same quests that Hidden does, with all the items still having the same names. In fact, the quest list was just pulled directly from our forums, it was word-for-word, with the font colors the same and all.

Here are the forum threads, for comparison purposes:
http://hidden-nw.com/forums/index.php?/topic/119-quest-location-list/
http://banana-ro.net/board/index.php?/topic/4-quest-location-list/

Now, you could claim 'coincidence' here. A lot of servers have the same items/npcs/whatever, but this goes beyond that. In game, the town layouts are identical, custom event coin and invasion systems in place, custom training grounds, even our max level quest.. all identical to HRO, and it is largely populated by ex-players of HRO. It is downright scary.

Since I'm sure you guys don't wanna hear all-talk accusations, I bring you hard evidence, comparisons of BananaRO's grf files to HiddenRO's.
See the highlighted/underlined points:

http://i.imgur.com/qXERe.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Ere5g.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/OeIT6.jpg

Here you will see that they just directly copied our files, only changing 'HiddenRO' to 'BananaRO'.

I did go to their forums and I posted about it, but my post was promptly deleted and I was banned from their forums with no explanation. Well, there you have it, it is what it is.

[Usagimimi]

Yeah, I doubt it's two different people. No one would have enough patience to glance back and forth a billion times to record the exact NPC locations and face directions. It's probably the exact same eAthena folder, since it's most likely the same person running both (in this case, since it appears he's "hiding" it, I would assume it'd be to save his reputation on one or the other if ever anything went wrong as to keep a steady donation income somewhere)

[Habuka]

Or he could just quit out.

[Lenaia]

I can see how it may seem that it is the same admin working on both servers, but I have known the admin of HiddenRO for nearly two years now and I know him well enough to know that he wouldn't do this. We think that the person behind the 'clone' server is a player who had been banned from HiddenRO.