[Case Study #1] The Fake Player Problem in Silkroad Private Servers – Just80

[goosecrypt]

The Silkroad private server scene right now is an absolute circus. A ridiculous number of servers are faking their player counts with hundreds, if not 1,000+ ghost players or bots and artificially inflating the numbers shown on their website.
The problem isn't just one server either. Fake website counters, bot characters used to make servers look populated, empty stall accounts, low-level characters hidden around the map and generally manufactured activity have become more common than I thought. At this point it's getting harder to tell whether a server actually has a healthy population or whether you're looking at another manufactured number.
MeGaMaX and others have already highlighted this issue a couple of times, but after experiencing it myself, it hits different.

So instead of arguing about fake player numbers for another 20 pages, let's actually take one server and see what the numbers look like. Today's case study: JustSilkroad's Just80 :^)

I had already raised the same issues in the Just80 advertising thread after my mate and I got banned for calling them out in global chat. Admittedly, my post was a bit emotional at the time and I was pissed off.
After "[GM] Purple" got my original post on Saturday on his sro advertising thread deleted and smugly told me in a reply to "visit our Discord and see how we manage the server and ban people", I figured why not take a proper look under the hood?
Don't worry, no player accounts or personal info were touched. We just pulled a batch of over 600 character profiles with a tactic that allows us to expose further servers in the future .

Here is the actual reality behind their "active" server:

1. The Website Counter Displays Fake Numbers
Purple claimed there are "no vulnerabilities" and that everything is legit. Meanwhile, we got access to their fake player count used to pump the website counter so the server looks crowded.



Also tested this with some other servers:



^This server also keeps changing the fake player count. It's also one that is currently active and still receives replies in the PServer advertising thread.
Yesterday it was between 500 and 1000, but I won't expose them (yet), since I haven't played on that server and the owner hasn't challenged me to prove anything.

2. Bot Seeds: 1 Billion Gold & 700k SP Pool
We also got access to their character data :^).

Besides manipulated website numbers, they actually spawn bot characters in-game to fill party matching and make farming spots look crowded. The admin was so lazy setting them up that every single bot shares the exact same fingerprint.
To make sure their automated bots don't run out of gold and get permanently stuck in town, they gave every single bot 1,000,000,000 Gold.
Brand-new level 4 bots sit at 999,985,000 gold right after their initial town supply run, while grinding bots sit around 990M to 1.04B (depending on pickups versus potion costs).
Meanwhile, most legit level 67–75 endgame characters have between 600k and 48M gold on them. Even the top 10 characters by carried gold only sit between 49M and 94M (Note: all gold amounts mentioned refer only to gold carried on the character, not gold in storage.)
Legit characters currently sit at around 3k–160k SP. The bots were generated with an initial pool of ~700,000 SP.
The number of characters we have identified during our investigation with this fingerprint is around 160.

 Spoiler

3. The Discord Ban History is 100% Staged Theater
Let's get back to the "visit our Discord and see how we manage the server and ban people" part from the beginning.
We compared the public #ban-notices history directly against our dataset. 21 permanent in-game bans published in Discord. 21/21 match the same ~1B Gold / ~680k+ SP bot fingerprint.

 Spoiler

Screenshots from their #ban-history on Discord

 Spoiler

UPDATE:
30 minutes ago we had another ban wave!

It's not 21/21 anymore, but 25/25.

 Spoiler

4. A bit of statistics
I personally never owned my own Silkroad private server. We collected over 600 character records from the database. The highest CharID we have found is 653.
We have also made sure that our dataset includes all of the information that is present on their public website, including all leaderboards, and that every character that was online at the time of collection is present in the dataset.



So let's be generous and calculate with 700 existing characters. Currently the website shows 615 online players.
If we take your own website counter at face value, you're claiming 90%+ of every non-banned character ever created is simultaneously online.
Congratulations on that Purple! You created a server that is so engaging that basically everyone keeps playing 24/7!
We haven't mapped the characters to unique players, so if someone has 2 chars on a single account, they are counted twice.
In other words, the number of actual unique players can only be lower, making their claimed 615 online players even more ridiculous.


5. Interactive xSROMap Visualizer (shoutout to JellyBitz - you're a hero and I love all of your work!)
To make verifying this effortless for everyone, we converted the dumped character dataset into a fully interactive xSROMap instance.
You can inspect coordinates, view character details, and filter the map directly by Gold (> 900M), SP balance, and Level to clearly see the bot clusters parked across farming spots versus real players in towns.
I can add a link to the tool to make it publicly available for everyone, but will only do it once admins have approved that this does not violate any rules of the board. The public-ready version contains character data only. No email addresses, passwords, phone numbers or other account information are included.
The public xSROMap is based on the static snapshot from 15/08. We also have a separate live version which regularly refreshes the character data. Some of the screenshots below were taken from that version, so they may contain newer values than the public snapshot. Also keep in mind that timestamps in some screenshots are displayed in the local timezone of the machine running the tool, not UTC.



with filter set to 900M+ gold:

 Spoiler

with live details about characters:

 Spoiler

6. Legitimacy of the data
If you don't believe the data is real, post your character name together with an in-game screenshot showing that it's yours. I'll send you the corresponding character data via DM or post it here if you want me to.
Since the player "Panda" (also known as beso2300) called me a mad server owner (which I am not, I never owned a server and never will...) and felt the need to comment 10 times on the epvp Just80 ad thread (only 9 of those are still available because the one where he defended the server owners against me has also been deleted by the moderators), I got you:

 Spoiler

I guess the "500 + real players with 1 IP 1 PC first 24h post hits different now" :^)

 Spoiler

I am also more than happy to give access to the full dataset to moderators if they want to verify the data as well.
If [GM] Purple also says that the things that I wrote are completely made up and that the data is complete bullshit, I am also more than happy to publish the full dataset .

7. @[GM]Purple



No idea about the forum comments, but we can answer the in-game part and the 'no vulnerabilities' part now :^)


And honestly, this is the part that bothers me more than JustSilkroad / Just80 itself. The private server scene has become a joke when server owners apparently spend more time building fake player counters, bot armies and fake activity than actually building a server that people want to play on.

If your server is good, you shouldn't need 500 imaginary friends to make it look alive.

Anyway, JustSilkroad was interesting to look at. If your server needs fake players to look alive, maybe I'll have a look at yours next :^)

And if all of this somehow made you excited to play Just80, don't worry — here's their advertising thread:

[AceSpace]

All of private silkroad servers are using fake player count to get the attention of what we call "randoms" and it's a hopeless case at this point, if you go real, you lose because they are like "oh draculla server has 10k and u have 1k omg fail"

It's about the mentality of the average player. I know some big servers advertising 10k+ while having 1k ~ 3k max ingame. So yeah this won't change.

[seniourmarquies]

I have read all content.
It is same as in Knight Online Private Servers. I think they are tricking users and probably laundrying money.

[_HouseMusicx3]

Would be interesting to see if someone who actually is able to bypass on their server will be detected. I thought they would actually care and provide legit information. Sad..

[goosecrypt]

Originally Posted by _HouseMusicx3

Would be interesting to see if someone who actually is able to bypass on their server will be detected. I thought they would actually care and provide legit information. Sad..

We did. Initially we didn’t try to hide new accounts but got HWID banned again and again. Funny enough - our bans have not been announced in Discord.
But we needed multiple accounts to get the dataset we wanted.

We won’t publish any details about that because:

a) the hwid check can change at any moment, so anything we publish would become irrelevant immediately

b) Showing players how to bypass security controls is not in our interest. We only wanted to highlight the practice of server-owner inflated numbers. Purple was right about one thing: every HWID check can be bypassed eventually. It’s mostly a question of how much time you’re willing to spend on it. Even solutions from larger servers like Electus or Sailor can be bypassed.

c) if someone has basic reverse-engineering experience, they can probably figure out the weak points themselves in minutes

[B1Q]

they have been doing that for a decade

[Grumpt]

Great job! This is a horrible issue in the pserver scene, its also so evident when a server is advertising 1k + players but when you check the guild rankings there are clearly 4-5 active guilds in the server and the rest are just gbot alt account guilds lol.

[Rev 9]

Bro spend more time setting up a bot party on his own server instead of creating a good server for the community xD

[Fanal]

Thanks i was thinking about should i try out the server or not

[Cal_Again]

The saddest part (in my opinion) is that even if those player counts weren't fake, there is no chance in hell any server is reaching that active count. Combined in the community I'd hazard a guess there is much less than 10k globally total.

The inflated, fake numbers are what sell dreams.

[InZiDeR]

Interesting, I would be definitely to lazy for that

[Cal_Again]

Originally Posted by InZiDeR

Interesting, I would be definitely to lazy for that

you should come and save the community (again)

[ƛssman]

Originally Posted by goosecrypt

The Silkroad private server scene right now is an absolute circus. A ridiculous number of servers are faking their player counts with hundreds, if not 1,000+ ghost players or bots and artificially inflating the numbers shown on their website.

Oof, someone has spent lots of time here. I really appreciate your efforts. I think the sad thing is that this kind of faking **** works out, even though it's obvious and known that almost all servers fake activity. "Developers" and players both only wanna earn money, and there's only a very small part of the community which actually plays the game for fun. We've reached a point where most PSRO servers pay their players for playing on their server. This "Just80" server will be dead in a few months and re-opened in another half a year, and the cycle repeats, and no one will give a ****. Also, if you look at the server "concepts," you'll see that it's mostly copy-paste bullshit, and they all look and feel the same because most of them share the same generous vsroplus dirt. It's not like that are no alternatives for fair play2win servers without bullshit, but players just don't want nor value it (NGE, SRProjects, Aeternitas, Hanami) - Sorry for shamelessly naming my own server here. Imo, the whole PSRO scene is completely cursed on a level where good gameplay doesn't matter.

[InZiDeR]

Originally Posted by Cal_Again

you should come and save the community (again)

I’ve been running my project since 2021! ^^ But honestly, no server is ever going to save this community unless someone actually licenses the game from Joymax(WeMade) and launches a server without 10,000 gold bots clogging up the login queue.

Originally Posted by ƛssman

Oof, someone has spent lots of time here. I really appreciate your efforts. I think the sad thing is that this kind of faking shit works out, even though it's obvious and known that almost all servers fake activity. "Developers" and players both only wanna earn money, and there's only a very small part of the community which actually plays the game for fun. We've reached a point where most PSRO servers pay their players for playing on their server. This "Just80" server will be dead in a few months and re-opened in another half a year, and the cycle repeats, and no one will give a shit. Also, if you look at the server "concepts," you'll see that it's mostly copy-paste bullshit, and they all look and feel the same because most of them share the same generous vsroplus dirt. It's not like that are no alternatives for fair play2win servers without bullshit, but players just don't want nor value it (NGE, SRProjects, Aeternitas, Hanami) - Sorry for shamelessly naming my own server here. Imo, the whole PSRO scene is completely cursed on a level where good gameplay doesn't matter.

It's exhausting to see yet another server relying on the standard VSROPlus and MaxiGuard setup...players are clearly suffering from burnout.

[379332]

tbh, I knew from day 1 those numbers were rigged.
Every server does this. It’s not like they're trying to hide it. Every server I've stepped into in 2026, I could feel it as soon as I started wandering around towns/checking the party list.