I believe there's a reason why a lot of the loaders broke for a while today and it just has to do with poor programming.
There are
4 login servers and if the loader doesn't try to connect to all 4 to establish a connection to the Silkroad servers, then you will see the "Server Offline" message since the servers it is trying are down. That is what Silkroad.exe does.
For a time today, the correct line to start the client was "0 /18 0
3" where as most loaders only use "0 /18 0 0" or "0 /18 0 1". A few might use "0 /18 0 2", but I don't think many people understand the process.
My loaders worked fine so far in the guides I've posted since I have code to try and connect to the first working server out of all 4. I was showing that it connected to the last login server a few times before connecting to the first again You can look at the code to see where it tries to connect to each of the gwgt#.joymax.com addresses to get a better understanding.
Don't worry, the sky isn't falling yet. I'm pretty sure we would need a new client patch first to really see the new security in place to block loaders if that even comes.
Until then, anyone that is using a loader should probably update their code to make use of all 4 login servers rather than always launching the client with a fixed command line or only trying a couple of the servers to avoid this problem again in the future.
We have had this problem in the past and Softmod was notoriously vulnerable to it because we didn't use the logic I just explained to correctly generate the client's command line! I'm sure people remember editing the config file to change the 0 to a 1 or a 1 to a 0.
Once you update the loaders to generate the command line correctly, you should be ok as you just need to retry a few times to get a Silkroad connection (sometimes even Silkroad.exe fails too at this point, so not your fault, just keep on retrying all 4 servers until one works)
I'm pretty confident that's what is going on, unless someone thinks they can debunk my theory.
