Well there are 2 different races in the game: Europeans and Chinese. European characters have a longer potion delay than Chinese ones, but they generally deal more damage.
When you reach lvl 20 (doable within 1 day), you can choose one out of three available jobs: trader, hunter and thief. As a trader you can go from town to town with a horse or a camel transporting your goods. As a hunter your job is to protect the trader and as a thief you try to find traders and steal their goods. You can also change your job, but that costs some money.
This is a job war: Hunters vs Thieves. I took the screenshot in the Chinese version of the game, so don't wonder because of the names
The worst thing about the game are the crowded servers (you need some time to log-in, depending on server), the countless bots and the boring grinding.
But once you get addicted to Silkroad, you usually can't get off it easily
This game is worth a try, but because of the (gold)bots, server traffic and very bad customer service it's sadly going downhill.
Edit: I played the game in year 2006 for the first time. The level cap was 70 back then and there was only the Chinese race. Now the level cap is level 90 and the map is more than twice the size it was when I started. The good thing about the game is that it's still not finished. I heard the last level cap planned is 150 and there is also going to be a third race.
This post was edited by Spo0n on Nov 6 2008 05:45pm