New Silkroad Correspondent Lewis Buckley pens this article about his experiences with and opinions of the bot problem that exists in Silkroad Online.

What is a bot? Well, I describe it as the illegal use of a standard player account in an MMORPG. Throw in a little automation, and you have a description of what many feel is the scourge of the MMO industry.

So, with Silkroad, where and why did it start? Could the purpose of such scripts be put to a real use within the game itself as a user function, or are most of the auto-bots merely for amusing anarchists, the people who like to annoy other people?

What do we know? Well, for starters most bots are used for help in levelling up player characters without having to sit in front of the PC playing the game for long periods of time, which of course none of us enjoys too much every time we get to that magical 99% then level, and as we celebrate getting to that 0%, realise that we have to go through all that time consumption all over again...and again..and again. Can this be a user feature? What else are these scripts used for?

Read it all here.