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Diablo 2 Items Bringing Home the Bacon
||Plazm|| writes: "I read an update over at Diabloii.net that talks about how some items in the game are producing sizeable income for some people. It points to an article at the San Francisco Chronicle describing some of these money makers. One banker claims he's made $25000 since he started with Diablo 2 and Ultima Online! Who are the people paying real money for this stuff? A few bucks is one thing, but a few hundred? I believe this has been talked about on /. before, but is the 'problem' getting worse? Is it a 'problem' at all?"
Check this out. I'm dropping out of school now =).
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
People take there high level characters and kill things at a much lower level just for the items. This is called farming.
When this happens it takes away from the people who need that item for game play. There are whole guilds that just farm, and camp the monster with the items and don't allow anyone else to fight that monster, even if its neccesary for the continuation of the game.
of course I have no sympathy for the makers of these game since they insist on not solving these problems programatically.
Its really not that hard.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Its actually kind of funny, the "coin" of the Diablo 2 world (for in game trades at least) is a ring called the Stone of Jordan. Since it is rather good equipment, and only takes up one slot in the inventory, it made sense to be the standard monetary unit. Then everyone figured out ways to either dupe them (a way that you could trick the game into giving you two of them if you only had one to start) or ways to get them through gamboling for items. Now, one would expect that since there were so many fake ones out there, or that since there are so many of them, that the value of them would plummet. Oddly enough that hasn't happened, and most people who trade in game will start out by listing the item they have, and how many SOJ's they want for it. Now if only the US economy could work like that I wouldn't have to worry about getting laid off any time soon.
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How is it impossible to track this income? EBay takes a percentage of their income from the auction, and EBay as to file tax paperwork. You think that paperwork can't lead back to the farmer?
I can just picture little 12yr old jimmy answering the door only to the find the IRS smiling at him.
Because you can't edit your weapons on realms.
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Killswitch
Judging from your user ID#, I suspect you weren't around when this was tried.
/. management (well, Rob and at least one other) described the whole thing.
Somebody with a high-hundreds/low thousands karma (i.e. a student with *far* too much time on their hands) (was it FascDotKilledMyPR? apologies if I'm wrong.) tried to flog their account on ebay. Apparently, there were some ridiculously high bids (some valued karma more than dollars)
In one of his rare moments of creative lucidity, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda aranged for the karma for this individual to vary (at random) between a cap value and zero, with the cap value reducing at a rate that would bring it to zero at the moment the ebay auction closed.
The whole debacle is best recorded in an IRC log where the
This ends your "Boring And Useless" slashdot history lesson.
{ps - no URLs, because I have better things to do than look them up}
Diamonds are the best example of this. Diamonds are actualy only slightly rarer than Quartz(SiO2). Because DeBeers owns the vast majority of the worlds diamond mines, however, the flow of the gems is reduced and they are thus valuable.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
It used to be that people would write into contracts that a certain portion of debt had to be repaid in gold, as protection against devaluation of the dollar. By making the greenback legal tender, these sorts of contracts were made unenforcable. Furthermore, in the options and futures markets, one does not necessarily have to pay in shares of stock or barrels of oil, or whatever. One may instead delviver the fair market value of those goods. Finally, if you were to offer in trade a car in exchange for (for example) two cows, then you would be legally obligated to accept the dollar value of two cows.
Basically what I'm driving at is this: it is illegal to refuse to accept US dollars within the borders of the US. You are right that hyperinflation could devalue currency very quickly, however as long as the police and, push come to shove, the armed forces, have enough power to keep the population in line, the value of a dollar cannot hit zero.
That being said, I agree with your point that if people will give you money for your Diablo stuff, it has value. It is certainly a highly unstable investment, but that doesn't mean its necessarily worthless.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
And if the inspiration runs out, KarmaCo also has enough accounts that it can do cooperative Karma farming. With an average catch of 40 randomly assigned moderator points per day, KarmaCo can guarantee its production even when there's a shortage of like-minded independent moderators.
:-)
You have received this message in error.
"Legal tender" only applies to "payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal law mandating that a person or organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services."
read the full explanation
When buying directly from DeBeers you must accept the Diamonds they sell you. If you refuse then you lose the privlage of buying from them. If you buy 10,000,000 in diamonds from them 4 times a year and one time they send you more low quality then you want, but till values 10,000,000 and you do not accept then you will no longer be able to buy form them. They can do this because someone else will agree when you do not. Just like Mc Crappy, can pay most everyone the min wage, there will always be another High School kid to take your place.
"Um, that's perfect topazes, not diamonds. Current reports suggest that a magic find percentage over 200 doesn't do much good, so there's no need to go overboard."
In the most recent patch (v1.09) Blizzard implemented a Diminishing returns formula for items that added a % chance to find magic items (magic find). A full explanation of magic find is here at Blizzard's official strategy site. Items can drop normal (white colored), magical (blue), rare (yellow), part of an item set (green) or unique (gold). The diminishing returns formula is not posted on that site, but basically diminishing returns kick in bigtime for unique items around 200% increased MF, kick in later for set items and even later for rare items. If you're wearing items that give you a 400% increased chance to find a magical item, you only get like, a 220-230% increased chance of getting a unique.
Blizzard probably implemented this because with the previous patch (1.08), magic find worked on all monsters, including bosses (who always drop at least magical items), so characters were loading themselves down with MF gear and "farming" the bosses over and over to get rares, sets and uniques to drop. (Normal monsters don't always drop, so it's simply more reliable to farm bosses for drops). So since people were abusing magic find, it was decreased in potency ("nerfed").
"And they 'balanced' telekenesis so that you can only pick up minor items (like potions). This is very annoying in single player mode, where there is no one to steal drops from..."
Actually, telekinesis (TK) was changed because someone (or a group of someones) wrote an "item-grabber" hack. The hack basically was a packet sniffer/sender, and when it registered that a rare, set, or unique item had dropped on the ground, it send a packet to the server saying "I picked that item up." Of course, the program could be configured to also grab gold, potions, scrolls, runes, anything. I don't recall if Blizzard broke the functionality of the hack in a patch before deciding to kill Telekinesis to solve the problem...but if they did it most likely took about two days for the people writing the hack to figure out the new packets and re-write the program. The program still works, but since TK is broken it only lets characters pick items up if they are right next to it (I think, there were rumors that players could send packets to make the server think they walked over to an item and picked it up when they didn't move, but that sounds fishy).
"Some moderately valuable items (like the Stone of Jordan ring or perfect skulls) became the new currency for a while. SoJs have become much more rare these days, and aren't used as currency as much."
The Stone of Jordan (SOJ) became a currency because it was a useful item, took up one inventory slot, and was relatively easy to get if you had enough gold (prior to patch 1.08 you could "gamble" for items. The Stone of Jordan is a unique ring. There are two other unique rings, but since before 1.08 uniques couldn't generate if one was already in the game, you could hold the other two rings and spend lots of easily obtainable gold gambling on rings and makes lots of SOJ's).
"Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up"
PSkulls used to be currency before patch 1.08. PSkulls could be used to "re-roll" the stats on a rare item (rare items have up to 6 modifiers, magic items only 2), and this reroll could produce ANY stat available, with better stats possible than any drop you could get from a monster. PSkulls were also rare, since gems dropped *very* infrequently from monsters, and the highest quality gem that could drop was a normal (3 normals make a flawless, 3 flawless make a perfect, or a gem shrine makes 1 normal go to 1 flawless, etc. there are also chipped and flawed under normal). Now, in 1.09, flawless gems (skulls are gems, technically) can drop, and do drop quite frequently, so they are much more common. Also, the main reason PSkulls plummeted in price was that the way to use 6 PSkulls and a Rare to reroll the rare had it's power decreased GREATLY. It can now produce items with stats 40% as powerful as the previous max (item level of 100 previously possible, max level of 40 available now).
Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!
That's because you lose a set percentage of your gold when you die, and you can only carry a certain amount of gold. There are other smaller reasons, but those are the main ones.
All in all, it's not too easy to base your economy on factors (like rarity) that can be changed at the whim of some programmers.
Then the programmers deliberately try to affect the economy. Right now new SOJ's are going up because no new ones are coming into the game, and all other items are being produced at an alarming rate. A few more weeks of this and the SOJ currency *might* break, but I doubt it, it's too ingrained in people's minds.
That's about all I can think of about the subject. Hope it helped.
~Moller