Slashdot Mirror
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.
I don't see a problem with it. It's just the free market at work, supply and demand. This is the kind of thing we told the russians that they needed.
Buying this stuff is not for me, but I'm not one to stand in the way of capitalism.
the people that are buyign this stuff, at any price, are the same people that play Quake in god mode and look up all the cheat codes for a game before they even install it. It's sad but their will alwasy be an aspect of society that will want to cheat or get an advantage no matter what the cost. Look at the proliferation of scripts, pinging other players, etc. That occur in most games. People willing to pay for some advatantage, no matter how much it destroys the play ability of the game, are the script kiddies of the gaming world. 20 years ago they would have been using loaded dice to roll up their D&D characters.
At least this time it is costing them something in real money to get these kind of advantages. I tip my hat to blizzards work that they have locked their game down tight enough that people are going to extremes outside the game to get these kinds of advantages.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
...buying a copy of Microsoft Office!
To each, his own.
The Script Kiddies have to do _something_ with the credit card numbers they steal.
OK, excusing the title, this is quite serious. My little brother and his friend showed me a while ago how to make money on Diablo II.
Get a Sorceress, put some diamonds in a helm, and wait. Your odds of finding magic items goes up.
As you fight on Battle.net, have a really good Telekenesis skill, so that you can steal every dropped item. Have a goodly stock of identify scrolls/books so that you don't need to Town Portal to check the items as you grab em.
Do this for 4 hours a day for 3 weeks and you'll have enough items to start eBaying. Happy hunting.
So people are spending money to get an advantage in a game, buying items that are essentially just bits on a server. A few years ago, people were spending about that much money buying items that were images on cardstock. It's not that different, except that the games of today weren't designed with the collectability and sale value of items in mind.
Keeping in the spirit of things, I'll start taking bids on some slashdot logins with 50 Karma points each.
/. community (and who doesn't), you need to be able to post with the +1 bonus. Now you could go about the long and tedious process of posting insightful, informative, funny, or just plain underratted comments. But that takes time, and you're a busy person.
Yes, that's right. If you want to be influential in the
Leave the dirty work to us. We here at KarmaCo have the knowledge and experience to create YOUR perfect Slashdot ID. Our trained Karma Consultants know how to build Karma quickly. We post early, we can be funny, we say nice things about Linux and Open Software, and mean things about Microsoft. Once your ID has reached the magical 50 point Karma Level, and after we've received your payment, we turn the password over to you.
Once you take control of the ID you can troll all you'd like as you wait for your Karma level to slowly decrease. Alternatively, you can post non-troll messages without having to concern yourself with others' opinions of you. Remember, your new Slashdot ID makes you look important and smart. Because not only do you get the +1 bonus, but other people will recognize you as that-guy-who-said-that-cool-thing-last-month.
But wait, there's more. Act now and we'll include a limited edition Signal_11 flame.
Act now, low ID #'s are going fast!
Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
You know, if thats what makes someone happy, purchasing virtual items, then why shouldn't we let them purchase virtual items. I buy lots of Legos and I'm a big fish guy, I spend 1000's of dollars on these things a year. Lots of people think I'm stupid for it, but you know what, thats what I like in life, I enjoy it and it makes me happy, thats what its all about.
The only problem I see is the fact that you can win at something because you have lots of money. But you know what, isn't that what the real world is anyway? I think Microsoft used this tactic, and someone by the name of my favorite breakfast juice...
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
A few years back, a programmer working on Ultima Online was fired for selling in game items on e-bay. He would create the accounts on the server, stack in a few of the requested items, and then sell them.
It could turn into an extra revenue stream for the developers if used very carefully, but such a thing would eventually destroy the game for average players. And here is another question for you to consider. Is it illegal for a hacker to create these items using a bug or hack, and then sell them for cash? And of course, I mean outside of the legality issues of hacking onto the servers in the first place.
END COMMUNICATION
Several people have posted complaining that these gamers are trading "real money" for "flipping a few bits inside a machine".
Wake up guys, MONEY IS NO MORE REAL THAN THESE GAME ITEMS.
What is the value of a $20 bill? The paper and ink (and metal threads, and whatever else they throw in these days) aren't worth very much. The value of a $20 bill is *whatever people will give you for it*.
I think the people who are trading hundreds of dollars for these game items are paying far too much, but there is no inherent reason why such transactions are wrong.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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
Just the idea of being able to go back to my parents and saying "See, you were wrong! I *can* make a living playing video games!" would be worth it.
What the hell -- people auction off domain names. Isn't that the same thing? It isn't "real", either.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
A buddy of mine played Everquest every night for months. His wife constantly told him what a waste of time it was. Then, one day, he got tired of the game and sold his high level character on EBay for $1500. She hasn't bothered him about playing games since.
This sort of thing is no worse than the Beanie Baby craze. If you can make good money playing games (or buying and selling stuffed dolls for hundreds more than the 50 cents worth of material they're made of), more power to you. I'm not into gaming as much as I used to be, but if I was I'd be more than happy to harvest items and sell them for cash. Talk about the ultimate job.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Ok, so you've got $25,000 eating a hole in your pocket and you want to buy that extra-special Sword of Sudden Doom (and tomato slicing) in Evercrack, DiabloII, .
/is/ the suffering and stress and paranoia of the lower levels. It's the effort and intrigue it takes to survive at those lower levels and work you way up. Once you get up high and don't have to worry any more, the game's over. So throw away your character and start a new one from scratch.
Sure, you can probably find someone to sell it to you. Sure, you can pick it up and start using it in game. Sure, it'll help you survive (probably by a large margin). But then where's the fun?
The game
If you leapfrog that whole phase and jump right into the uber-powered elite, then you've just skipped over all the enjoyment. It's just like when I was playing AD&D all the time and constantly encountering players who didn't want to play mages below 5th level "because it was just too hard". Phtt. Rodents.
Sure, I'll accept that the overwhelming majority of players out there don't appreciate the pleasure of struggling at the low power levels. These guys just hate that low level crap and want to get over to wailing on critters so large that only its ankle appears on their monitors.
Let these guys waste their money robbing themselves of the true pleasure of the game. It doesn't do anything to reduce my pleasure, and it removes these weenies from my immediate surroundings.
They're doing what they want and giving me a reason to call them lamers. I like that. Everyone wins.
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
The one problem I can see with having virtual items being sold for real currency is that ultimately the market for items in the on-line world is very malleable. The value of items is ultimately dependent on their scarcity and when the scarcity of an item is as simple as a changed parameter in a computer system, I can see real problems developing.
A couple examples of what could go wrong:
1) Somebody buys an item for $1000 figuring that it's going to go up in value. A few days later, the game designers decide to make that item very common. Can the game designers be held liable for financial losses incurred by that person's failed speculation?
2) In a permutation on item 1, what if the developers had made that change intentionally to destroy the market for those items?
3) What if a game designer adds a powerful item so that they can corner the market, selling them off for a handsome profit?
4) What if a bug in the system accidentally causes a fluctuation in the scarcity of a particular item (making it much easier to come by)?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I don't think it's a problem in the sense that it's spoiling the fun of the game for others, in the sense that it's cheating, or anything. It's just like buying and selling Magic cards or something like that. It doesn't spoil everything for the people who just like to play from time to time.
It can be a problem for those who spend more money than they have, and end up going into debt or denying themselves food and the like for weapons.
It's the same as any other hobby, y'know? Why single it out as a "problem" because it's with video games instead of baseball cards or something?
If you gain an advantage from something you did not work for, could it be said that you have gained an unfair advantage?
I don't play these online roleplaying games, but let me give you a real-life example...
Let us say I am beating the snot out of Mike Tyson (hey this is my example, I can beat up Mike Tyson in my exmples) and I'm up by several points. Don King comes over to my corner, hands me some cash and I take a enough hits to give Mike some more points.
Money for a score, where as this Ebaying is money for an item in a game without scores. Either way you're taking a dive.
How would you feel if you were playing online chess and discovered that the opponent that beat you 10 straight games had done so with a chess program he purchased? I know that I would feel cheated because I was playing against him to test my skill against his. I don't care if he bought the chess program on "the free market."
The idea of a game is to pit players against one another and let the best player win, not to sell the victory to the player with the most disposable income and least scruples.
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}
See for yourself. Recently closed items w/ "Diablo II" in the title, sorted by closing price.
I did some hunting around on e-bay to see how viable this really is. I found that of the 5227 items that popped up in a search for "diablo 2":
4397 of the items were priced less than $10.
456 of the items were priced between $11-25.
227 of the items were priced between $26-$50.
95 items were priced between $51-$100.
38 items were priced between $101-$200.
and 14 were priced higher than $201 (and one of those 14 isn't related to the game, it's a windsurfing sail).
Eyeballing the lists, it appears that more than half of the auctions at all level have no bids. This is just a guesstimate (I don't have time to count up the number of bids on the 5,080 items less than $50, it is true for the items over $51)
I'm highly skeptical that anyone could routinely make >$5000 month, easy, as is claimed by the guy in the article.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
I am a Sysadmin. I do not work cheap. My services run a minimum of $25 an hour, which is not cheap (Although if I wanted a much more intense job I could get double that.).
I play EverQuest in my free time. In EverQuest, there is a very cool item I wanted called A Flowing Black Silk Sash. The sash is a rather powerful item, is always in demand, and is somewhat rare. This has created conditions that make getting the sash take anywhere from a few hours with help from some friends, to a few days with a bit of luck. Given my character's status on her server, it probably would have taken me six to twelve hours to get this item. That works out to $150-$300 US of my time.
Instead, I tracked down someone selling his EverQuest account on ebay. I emailed him to see if he had said sash for sale on one of his characters, and sure enough he did. Within 24 hours we had exchanged the money via paypal and the item in game. Total cost to me = $100 and about ten minutes of free time, and I actually did the work while on the job. I was then able to use those extra hours study new things to do as a sysadmin, thus increasing my marketability, and in the long run, my overall salary.
Some people call me a cheater, I think of myself as economically minded.
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
you're missing econimies of scale, or in this case, power.
If you have one or two killer items, it then becomes much, much easier to aquire other killer items.
Otherwise known as "it takes money to make money" (but once you have it, many doors are opened to you)
I have a fairly high-level Diablo II character, a level 70 barbarian who has completed all quests to include the newly-added Act 5 quests from the expansion pack, all in Hell difficulty.
He's already got some real kick-ass gear, chief among those a war club capable of basically insta-gibbing Andariel on normal difficulty and a set of ancient plate providing 700+ in defense.
Now, I've had some folks lambast my character due to the fact that he uses this big old hammer without the use of a shield, but I figure that's okay: It's within his character to get hit a bunch by the boogerheads, and I accept that outcome during a normal gaming session.
Now, with the expansion pack, I see on Diabloii.net that there is this new item set that seems for all intents and purposes to be genetically designed for my character: big honkin' hammer, plate, belt, boots, gauntlets, and helmet -- all way more better than what he's currently packing.
Now that he's passed all the trials before him, I see no better way for him as a character to wile away the days than to search for that complete item set.
However, in all honesty, it would me/him YEARS to collect them.
I myself would pay a premium for the complete set from some other D2 player, but certainly not in triple-digits. I would do so because the D2 character I run in question is ready to ascend to NPC status, I have no interest whatsoever in playing him other than to have him help out other folks finish the necessary quests.
Maybe I might be interested in getting him to clvl 99, but not nearly as much as I'd like to see him get that set.
I'm ready to retire him to being a secondary character to someone else's adventure, I'd just like to get him 100% complete in the process.
If the game itself would only drop *one* of those items, I'd forego the monetary route, but in all sad honesty, it's not gonna happen.
Does this make sense?
IF.cmg
"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
"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