fake players count?

[Pheonix]

Well when your trying to find a server and you see they have like 100-150 your like oh its got a good population
but once you play your realize its all people on the street saying to vote and what not

Like for example Godly RO LIke Kasumi said ^_^

[PhattyDanny86]

I don't think it's right, but there's no ruling entity to say what's legal and what's not.  I guess it depends on how you define "fake players count".  If a server shows not just the number, but the class and location of each character, it's pretty easy to figure out whether a character's an actual player or a vendor.  Of course, there are those servers that either show only numbers to give a better impression, and there are those who actually fake numbers.  But, like already mentioned, people leave those kind of servers as fast as they join.

On a minor note, when I played on a dying server (population was in the single digits), I once thought about having a non-accessible room full of bots with different names.  Then they look like real players, instead of just @autotraders.  Lol, I wasn't serious about that, just a joke...

[GM Lif]

I think its quiet despicable, honesty is the best quality no matter how you spin it.

[Descent]

It's ridiculous. Especially the people who make it blatantly obvious that the seven merchants in a vending area are indeed, themselves.

*************Who's Online***************

Pagloko        Merchant        32/20        alberta.gat
Pagloko2        Biochemist        95/67     alberta.gat
Pagloko Shin     Blacksmith      62/2       alberta.gat
PaGIok0        Assassin Cross    99/70     alberta.gat

All merchants selling a blue pot for 1,000,000,000Z, with chats saying "ei buy GR pm PaGIok0 rushhhhhh".

If it gets out of hand with my server, I'm disabling it. :X

[Poki]

It makes me giggle to see how desperate people can be.  Too bad it's a terrible move in trying to look successful.

[Hutchy]

It's sad, but it's commonplace. I personally prefer servers with populations around... I dunno, ~50. One can try to boost the player count with vendors, but people who decide which servers to play based on player count will see this and then leave. It doesn't really accomplish much.

I get if someone has a whole crapload of items and has two or three characters vending, but honestly, who has more than that? Speaking from a LR pov, I've never known anyone who had so much to sell that they had to log 20-odd merchants in. As I mentioned somewhere else, it becomes even more sad to see one of these 20 merchants selling a grape for 9999999z.

Well, not sad after all, I guess. Can be amusing, depending on how you look at it. Or annoying. O_o;

[XionSiphon]

Here's a little insight on it

During my brief stint as an Admin at The Bosses Lair/Sun & Moon (still a fun server, with a bunch of stuff you'll never see on any other server due to my genius ideas  ) we used this as a way to look "friendlier" to new players, because really, having your server look like it has 5 players versus 500 players? No chance.

Soon we were able to get our hands on a new @command, @logout, meaning that ALL characters could enter an @at state.

To sum it all up, the whole fake player count is just an illusion until the players log in and realize that there's nobody playing! It doesn't help much at all, and with the RO community kind of...dying out due to the continued success of "bigger and better" MMOs, servers are getting desperate to make it look like their server is good. Anything to snag those players.

That's my input anyways, hopefully it's helped in someway to this topic

Couldn't of said it better.