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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.
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.
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Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
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
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.
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...
As for the economy aspect, I think it's kinda dumb to spend real money on Diablo II items. However, some people want uber-characters than can walk into any game and kill other players. Or maybe they're not good enough to take on Hell mode without help.
Dunno. Spending money on Diablo II items isn't any worse than spending it on an astrologer or the lottery.
At any rate, the economy associated with Diablo II has been interesting. There's been a lot of shifts in the marketplace in response to bugs allowing duplication of items, and the changes to gambling rules. 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. Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up.
Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!
I've also seen people auctioning off fully equipped high-level characters on eBay. However, with the balance changes in Lord of Destruction, some of these characters (which might have sold for hundreds of dollars) are now nearly worthless.
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.
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
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
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.
The problem isn't the market itself, but its consequences.
There are already enough lowlifes to worry about in normal online games (take Counterstrike as an example). However, when there's the possibility to win real cash in a game is where the bottom feeders really begin to show up and ruin everyones fun.
In Everquest, this has lead on some servers to a total cornering of the item market by ebay-sale-guilds. If you wanted a rare item, you had no choice other than to buy it for cash, since all the important places in the game had been occupied by them.
This had such a profound impact on most people's gaming experience that (as mentioned in the article) sony's lawyers approached ebay and were able to shut down the sales.
In Diablo 2, real-cash sales have lead to a staggering surge in cheats and scams. Whole game accounts were cracked by brute force and all their contents sold away on ebay.
Other people used exploits to allow them to loot duel players, often leaving more unexperienced players without a single dime while all their stuff was sold away by the looter.
There have also been numerous hacks to steal and duplicate items, mostly with the intention of selling them away for hard cash.
All in all, the ability of making cash has severely damaged the playing communities of the affected games.
I definitely hope that any future online games forbid the sale of items. And the final statement from Paul Sams gives me a little bit of hope that it will at least be so in Blizzard's future game World of Warcraft...
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}
"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