Slashdot Mirror
Unmaking The Game
Teknogeek writes "Player2Player has just posted an interesting article concerning the massive amounts of platinum being sold on sites like PlayerAuctions, and how it might have been obtained. Quite an interesting read, to be sure!" This is in Everquest, BTW.
Cherish my balls as though they were lost children.
Speaking of which, does anyone have any mod points for sale? :)
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
That the editor had to add the fact that this was in EQ. Think of all the people who don't read the article's expression when /. posts a story about platinum being sold....
Bet you $100, that getting platinum jewelery will not help /.ers get laid. Its a lost cause in most cases, as for myself :( *sniff*
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Round and round my Mozilla tab goes..
Loading? No one really knows..
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Ah, well, here's the story text:
Recently, someone posted on the P2P forums about how macros are affecting EQ. This got me to thinking that maybe he was a troll. He was claiming that 3 million PP per day, per server is dumped into the economy that is not earned through entirely legitimate means.
I decided to start by checking www.playerauctions.com, and found out that on my home server right now, over 3,500K pp is for sale. Currently. That's right, it's about 3 million, 675 thousand platinum for sale. Think about that figure for a minute. That is one server, and that's only the PP that is for sale. Imagine what is NOT for sale and then tell me that 3 million PP per day per server could not easily be dumped into the game?
Next, I wanted to check the availability of said macro program, to see if in fact a person COULD as easily acquire "free PP" as the poster made it sound. I went to Yahoo and started fishing around, and came up to a lot of sites that offered the "free" macro program along with their guide at the low cost of 20 bucks. I'm sure that, if I was willing to be a bit more in depth, I would find the program itself. But how many are willing to do that?
What I did find was this site, and I am going to use it as a reference for the remainder of my article: http://www.eqtotalsecrets.com/. Not to act as a pusher, but I found this in 5 seconds. For 20 dollars I could buy this, make the money, and sell PP at half the normal cost. I would make my money back in maybe 2 hours. So yes, the program, for 20 dollars, is easily found.
So now we have checked our facts and found out that the EQ macro program IS in fact possible. We have found out that it is entirely possible that 3 million PP per day is being made per server. Now that we have our information, lets look at the effects of said facts.
First, each server averages 10k+ accounts. If you figure on any day 3K people play per server, each person plays for 4 hours a day, and the average level is 40, you can make a make a guess that each account makes 200pp per hour. This is figuring in the 500+pp per hour from Hill Giants and the no PP per hour you make in certain zones. When a newbie makes 10pp an hour and a level 60 makes 500+, the average is not that great. This is a conservative but fairly accurate guess, considering that the normal 60 can pull in about 1k an hour if he wants to. This is simply figuring in PP coming INTO the economy, not PP trading between players. So you subtract the PP coming from rezzes, spells, item trades, MQs, and so on and it's not all that much. Now you add the totals up and you come to 2.4 million PP. That's my guess at the created PP per day per server, but for the sake of argument lets say I low-balled it and 3 million a day is created, on average.
Now lets do some rough fact checking against EQTotalSecrets. At level 40, they claim you can make 950pp an hour. So 950pp with 4 hours put in a day. That comes to 3800pp a day. If the person doing this is the average player, that is. Let's assume for a moment, though, that the average person is not doing this, and it's mostly the higher-ups. According to this site you can net 4500 PP per hour. Now being fair...at level 50, let's say...I could make 3000pp an hour (using this guide), which comes to 12,000pp a play session. That's not too shabby, to say the least. That's 60,000 pp a week, and then its 3 million PP a month!
This is going to screw the economy up! ROYALLY! That's all there is to it. One person is going to introduce enough PP into the economy to create ripples, but 100 people a server can seriously do A LOT of damage in a short time. I am not an economist, but if one person in a month can create as much as the ENTIRE economy can in a day, there is going to be huge, post WWI-like German inflation. Useful things will skyrocket in cost, making it virtually impossible for the relative neophyte to attain them in a reasonable amount of time, and things that are no longer deemed useful will be destroyed, or sold for next to nothing at all. A prime example of this is that famous haste item, the Flowing Black Silk Sash. It used to cost, at the lowest, 10k. Now it runs (on my server, at least) 25k. Then, there is the Brown Chitin Protector, once among the finest of druid chest armor. It used to cost 5k. Now it costs 50pp. This is what I would call a major depression, and without an outflow of money, we will continue to see the cost of goods rise, and there is no end in sight. Without a clear, well-defined money sink, you cannot have a stable economy. They implemented the horses then added innate run speed, making the horses a pretty pony with no real use to most people. It's like the Pyreal from AC: it got hit hard by the dupe bug, and now has little to no actual value in the game. People might be willing to trade for C-notes, or whatever other form of currency the game has created, such as the shards and all them, but the pyreal itself is almost valueless.
Now many of you are asking how easy this bug REALLY is to exploit. Well first off, its not a bug. That's part of the problem. There is no bug. I will explain this to you as I understand it. Mind you, I found this at 2amwhile working on my trade skills in EQ. I did NOT go out there looking for this bug, and I would never have noticed it if not for the fact that another PC, a blacksmith, pointed it out. I am a tailor who needs studs and bonings made occasionally. After a great degree of testing we found that with only a 75 skill in smithing, this man was able to make 5pp7gp into 7pp1gp6sp1cp. Now this is a good thing, it gives smiths a way to make PROFIT! No normal player has the 100k+ laying around to up their smithing to 200+! I am sure that boning's are the same way, with a higher degree of profit. One PC without a macro program did all this in about 7 minutes and 30 seconds. I am sure you could stream line the process down to 6 minutes, and if you had a macro program, well, 1 minute. 1 minute, 2 pp. I am adding a few gold in there because his faction with the merchants of shadow haven was apprehensive, even though his charisma was 137. This guy had been playing EQ for a month only, and still he was quickly able to do the math on this and figure it out. So, that's 60pp per hour, if you macro it, which is not much. Unless there are larger degrees of this, which there no doubt are!
Verant was probably trying to give new smiths a leg up with a way to profit. Perhaps the other trade skills have similar things, slight profit margin items built in. The problem was that it took one guy to write the code on how to exploit this, and they are going to ruin it for the rest of us. Verant actually tries to make trade skills better, and PEOPLE screw it up!
DAoC was smart, and made trade skills cost money, rather then the majority of the EQ system. EQ has little to know expenses in it, it's mostly what you can hunt up. DAoC has huge out-going expenditures, relative to the other games in its genre, because all of the best stuff is crafted, and crafted items take materials paid for, rather then materials gathered through assassinating monsters. I doubt the EQ dev team ever thought that so much money would be pumped into their system via artificial means, and they never thought it would happen on such a grand scale. I will NOT roast Verant or SoE for this mistake; instead, I am going to leave the blame up to you. I wanted to give you some information to work with, and some facts to draw from. I have made a few observations, and hopefully given you all enough to work with. Personally, though, let me direct your hatred to the players using this. They have decided to screw you over, and for good reason: 3 million PP a month, going for about 20USD per 10kpp. Actually the going rate for PP is 40USD a month, but if you only sell half of it, then you're only going to make 20USD. Only about half of the PP for sale sells. So 3million goes into 10,000 300 times. 300 times 20 is 6000. 6 grand, USD. That's cold, hard American money. That's the motivation, that's the reasoning. Money does not talk, it whispers seductively into your ear promising you everything you have ever wanted. It is the ultimate woman. The second you have a little, you want more, the second you have a little more, you want a lot. These people decided that 6000 dollars a month PER account was worth more to them than playing Everquest. Now, if I offered you 12 grand a month to macro on two computers in a game, even though you might be banned, would you?
I mod down anyone who uses M$ in their posts. I like to live on the edge.
Are these the same people in the "WillNeverTouchABoob Clan" on Counter Strike?
... they can buy themselves a faster server. Sheesh.
... along comes the stampeding horde of Slashdot and waBAM! away they go ....
This "/. effect" business is just totally out of control. Poor guys, have a nice little site for gamers
I don't know what is worse, to be materialistic in the meat world or to spend your meat money to be materialisitc in the the game world.
I wish the Everquest world had a white collar prison.
Actually, no. I don't even care that much.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Pre-SoL I read a stat from sony that said they finally reached the mark where there was 1,000,000 platnium dropped by monsters (both in straight money, and things you sell to merchants, discounts all things sold to people). So people who have been playing since '99... its reasonable to have more than thier fair share of that plat (I would estimate 10,000 active players per server or less, if you were wondering).
A good article with insight on the economics of RPGS.
The author says, "Players - in contravention of the game's rules - also trade in EverQuest paraphernalia and characters offline. The online auction Web site, eBay, is flooded with them and people pay real money - sometimes up to a thousand dollars - for avatars and their possessions. Auxiliary and surrogate industries sprang around EverQuest and its ilk. There are, for instance, "macroing" programs that emulate the actions of a real-life player - a no-no."
That stuff is selling at USD578/oz. You'd think with that kind of money that they'd be able to afford a fatter bandwidth pipe for their server.
I've got 5, and I need money for food.
I don't play EQ, but it seems a lot of people do, and if people are cheating to spoil the game it's of interest.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The guild I am in has over 1 million plat in the guild bank. We kill monsters in game that drop items that sell for up to 400K for ONE item.
So FYI, it is not hard to amass 3 million plat over an entire server. You don't need some NON-exsistent exploit to do it.
I used to play EQ (cancelled my acct just under a month ago). I witnessed the price changes over the time that I did play. I don't really find it all that disturbing though, and it's nothing to get upset over. I played PvP so my experience may be different from bluebies'. On SZ there are enough people who couldn't take the heat of PvP that the economy doesn't get shaken up too much.
Market saturation and subsequent boredom of players I think has to be two reasons that Verant keeps releasing expansions. If you don't give people new and exciting things to do they will get tired and quit. There are drops now that are so rare and that so few guilds can obtain that the same power structures are maintained. By this I mean basically that the mass of goodies have shifted down with newer sweeter pieces filling the top. EQ has changed A LOT from its inception, but this isn't a necessarily bad thing. I know people that pay rent and make good money playing. Of course they don't do much of else though. EQ can become a JOB, and it's everyone choice whether to do so.
So if you are quit bitching. So what, something that cost you a bunch of pp a month ago you can't sell for chicken scraps now. You still used it and there is always ways to make the money back. Let's not forget also that this is a GAME. For most of us who play(ed), we did it for the fun not the RL cash.
sig
The Everquest economy will go bust in ~2 years. This calculation is based on a recent article in the respected Economic Theory journal. Also, for all you lawyers out there, can't this be considered making counterfeit money under U.S. criminal law? I think someone should report this.
One of them players might be willing to do it for about 20,000 platinum. BTW, is the plural of platinum not platina?
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
Say my name, bitch! Yeah!
(This handy-dandy translation was brought to you by BabelTroll. BabelTroll, translating trolls since 2001.)
Good god. How can you mod that as off topic. Have you read the article? Anything off topic from that is welcome!
platnium peices. Thats where they get the acronym pp from ex: 60,000pp.
For about 3 or 4 months around when Velious came out, I had a group of five friends who I would go to the fungi camp in lower guk (at 4am, it was almost always uncamped) once or twice a week. We stayed 'til we all had a fungi tunic (they are lore) or school started. So we each made ~60k-90k plat a week, from 3-4 hours of playing, which is alot easier than this 60,000pp in a week with constant playing.
Could somebody please translate the text above into some commonly spoken language. I have tried babelfish but it did not work. The 'Fungi Tunic' part is especially confusing - and frankly the explanation that they are 'lore' did not help me much.
Tor
If someone is cheating to "spoil" EQ, then
1) Verant should step up and fix what is wrong
or
2) Stop paying Verant $12.95 a month and go play one of the other 4 or 5 OnLine roleplaying games.
You do have a choice.
Are you suggesting that young kids look up to EQ players and dream of playing in the EQ bowl, and that cheating by these super EQ players will induce these young kids to also cheat and therefore harm their health?
Or were you just using an inappropiate analogy because it took too much work to think of a good one?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
concept of money is people continuing to pay $12.95 for a game that has no customer service, an obviously flawed monetary system, several "show-stopping" graphics and lag issues, broken zones and loot tables, pathing and xyz axis bugs, and of course very limited in-game support now (except for those playing on the $49.95 a month "Legends" server).
If someone is exploiting the monetary system (and they have for some time) then Verant should step up and fix the problem. However, please don't figure on that happening for at least 6 months. It took Verant 6 months to address the issue of ManaBurn and the affect it had on the "game" and Planes of Power is due for release next week (and with EVERY new release there are several new and fun issues to deal with, not the least of which a day or two of downtime).
Bottom line, it is just a GAME. And because it is just a GAME, you have choices. There are numerous other online roleplaying games (albeit they do not have the population like EQ) people can enjoy (and exploit!).
Nope. Platina is platinum found in an impure form. The plural of platinum is simply "platinum" ;).
-Shatai.
The plural of platinum is simply "platinum" ;).
No, the noun platinum has neither singular nor plural. This is of course true for silver and gold too. You can, however, say things like 'one (two) platinum coin(s)'.
Tor
Yeah right... next you will be telling me the plural of sheep is "sheep". ;)
I refuse to have a sig... dammit!
Whoa. I bet you stutter.
And this is effecting the economy. Items that used to not be sold are being sold but for prices unobtainable w/o the use of macroing. Items no longer go to the most worthy but to the people who macro or use the various other exploits which exist, (and which VI is aware of as they are of macroing). No longer is skill the determining factor but instead cheating.
But VI/SOE(Verant Interactive/Sony Online Entertainment) have given up on the game. They have an expansion due out next week and most conclusions are that it will be the last for Everquest. Everquest 2 is in development and has been for quite some time. While it is possible that the lack of response to the multiple exploits that have been divulged to VI/SOE is due to the cramming required to release a non-buggy expansion on time, (something the company is not known for), it is also possible that by allowing corruption of the economy along with the loss of customer service that has been identified recently VI/SOE is sinking it's own ship in the hopes that those on board will be forced to swim to one of its newer games, (at higher prices and even more 'alternate' - read pay for power - payment plans).
I am very disguisted with VI/SOE's treatment of it's players recently. Things that were 'against the Vision of the game' have been introduced to ring more cash out of the game. Things such as name changes and server transfers. The Fanfaires that used to be solely run to foster community in everquest are now run instead to make money for the company. I am part of the staff at one of the largest everquest message boards, (currently 37594 registered users). We have an active staff of 10, 9 of which are able to attend this FanFaire. We were originally told by the person in charge of Fanfaires that we would receive vendor badges for the Fanfaire for all our members free. We all made travel plans including a person flying from Germany and another from Britian in good faith. The next email we get back, which we believed would be a confirmation of our badges and table, stated that giving us badges would cost the company 1000 dollars and that we would only receive 4 badges and the table. At 85 dollars per badge, there are those of us who cannot afford it. We are hoping to relinquish such things as the meal in a possible compromise, but the clear backpedaling on their openness to recieve us has definately hurt us since many of us had already spend hundreds on the flights to get us there. It's just another example of the company squeezing money from a product and at the same time killing it to benefit it's next product line.
I do security
The plural of platinum is simply "platinum"
;)
Yeah right... next you will be telling me the plural of sheep is "sheep".
I am always amused when I get to teach native English speakers (?) their own language.
Platinum does not have a plural, it is a noun but you can't count it. Thus 'two platinum' is incorrect (try two platinum coins, instead). Sheep does have plural, it is just that that the plural form coincides with the singular form.
Tor
of course, platinum becomes an adjective in your example rather than a noun...
No, but they are all in the same class of lusers. the "WhatIsAWoman Boys" at SciFi conventions or "ITookMyMomToProm Crew" here at Slashdot.
the plurual of platinum is plat
duh.. j00 are the suxor.. ph33r dr00d powa!
That's 60,000 pp a week, and then its 3 million PP a month!
Aha. Sure. Can you say 'flawed foundations'?
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
I refuse to have a sig... dammit!
Can someone put up a mirror to the article? It's been slashdotted
there isn't much talke about MLMs in EQ...
Then again, since I don't play the game, I could be wrong. Are people really loosing hundreds or millions in pp's to MLM scams?
-Rusty
You never know...
This was brought up once before on an article about selling MMORPG items for real world cash -- what are the _real_ world legal consequences of this? Specifically what about taxes? Now granted, most of this is happening over ebay and places that make it hard to track, but still, what happens when the IRS knocks on your door and says, "Hey, I see that you have a level 40 bard with an amulet of zed. According to our research your account has a fair market value of $1000. I believe you're a little short on your taxes this year..."
Now yeah, I'm being simplistic, but the point is, if these online virtual economies continue to grow (and slip over into the real world), one day some legal genius is going to realize that there's money waiting to be collected. So what are these consequences? Do you think it's likely? What would be the liability of companies like Sony and Mythic?
Who said Freedom was Fair?
exactly I used to play DAOC then stopped...when I went to grab a MMORPG I thought...hey evercrack...50billion cant be wrong.
;) Or any decent MMORPG....back to the mudding I spose.
Frankly, it sucked. If only DAOC had a linux client
1) Verant should step up and fix what is wrong
I played Diablo2 for quite some time, and I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix bugs that allowed item duplication ("duping") and various other cheats. Without exception after every fix, within a week, I became aware of a new method of duping (I didn't engage in it, but I knew people who did). I don't know what version Diablo2 is currently in, so I can't say this applies at the moment. My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
2) Stop paying Verant $12.95 a month and go play one of the other 4 or 5 OnLine roleplaying games.
And lose all invested time spent building up a character in EQ? Not to mention every one of those other games will suffer from similar bugs. In First Person Shooters it's wall-hacks and aimbots, in map-driven information warfare games (AKA "fog of war") it's map-hacks, in resource management games it's resource duplication, in economy based games (Diablo2 multiplayer, EQ, UO, and a host of others) it's currency counterfeiting.
There are a number of complex problems behind each of these cheats but they all boil down to basically the same thing: a combination of finite trusted resources and the untrusted client problem, there aren't enough trusted resources to do all the calculations, so some must be shifted over to untrusted resources, the puzzle is to choose which calculations will allow the least severe and lowest number of cheats, taking into account the amount of trusted and untrusted resources available. I have yet to hear of any game with a significant number of players and no cheats/bugs, granted though, some have fewer than others.
You do have a choice.
Yes, that choice is to play with the cheaters, or not at all.
Here is the translation:
Velious is an EQ expansion pack. Each time Sony develops another part of the EQ world, they charge everybody $39.95 for the expansion pack, in addition to the $9.89 monthly fee. Think of it as add-on pack.
Lower Guk is the name of a zone. The EQ world is divided into zones. This cuts down on network traffic and server crashes. If everyone piled into the same zone, imagine the network traffic from updates, and people sending broadcast messages called "shouts" constantly. Velious added more "zones" to the EQ world.
The "fugi camp" is where a certain MOB (in game monster or creature) spawns (appears). Some MOB's are very rare and only occur once every two weeks or so. I think it's probability based. Anyway, if you want a particular item and don't want to spend all your hard earned cash, you have to wait and wait and wait and wait. When it finally spawns you and your buddies kill it and hope it has the item. In this case the item is a "fungi tunic" which I believe has regenerative powers. That means it heals you when you get beat up in battle. The word "lore" means that you can only have one in your possession at a time. In the U.S. a wife can be considered a "lore" item, since you can only have one. This is an attempt to keep the hardcore players from harvesting all the good items. The theory is once they get their "Fungi Tunic" they'll go try to get something else, since they can only have one.
The guys in this post weren't interested in the tunic for themselves, they just wanted to get them and sell them for the PP (platinumn) which is the form of currency used in EQ.
If you need to know anything else, let me know.. I had to quit, it was runing my life. The game is highly addictive and the longer you play the harder it is to make any progress. If you are a person who like to "WIN" video games, don't ever start playing EQ, it's IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!
The game has ruined many a marriage and cost many a geek their job. It is worse than crack.
Ding 15!! woot!
Hi, My name is Harib Zabar Mitchell III sr. and I am a board member of the Erudin Senate for Platinum Pieces moderation committee. We need your help getting 4.5 Million PP (yes that is 4,500,000 PP!) out of royal tax holding accounts. We are exclusively asking for your help because we need an outside investor to pay the levys and taxes involved with releasing our 4.5M PP. We will refund your money plus a 100% interest. Now note that there may be mulitple normal taxes and leveys that may arise during the course of this transaction...
:)(smile)
http://macroquest.sourceforge.net/
One of them players might be willing to do it for about 20,000 platinum. BTW, is the plural of platinum not platina?
I thought it was platinii.
There were two platinums in your sentence, BTW.
I don't play Everquest, but I find the whole topic simultaneously enthralling and ludicrous. It reminds of the visions of the future worlds from sci-fi writer's such as Philip K.Dick (Perky Pat), Gibson, and more recently Stephenson (Snow Crash). I mean, REAL money invested for all this virtual paraphenalia. I love it.
Rake Free + Mac Poker: CardCrusade
No. S/he means Platinum is an adjective already. You can't say "Two golds", because gold is an adjective (already).
You placed a different interpretation on my analogy to that intended.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
They are a pretty cheaply run gaming rant site, but this /. might put them out of business
not a wealth tax. They IRS could get you if you sold it, but not if you just kept playing it.
... and I was able to automatically level my character to Level 5 with appropriate equipment in order to go through a DM-ran quest. What was even cooler, I can customize my character the way I want to with multiple character classes.
Maybe I did not like my character or my server. I made another one, level him/her if need be and equipped accordingly and go to search for other worlds.
May I will pick a server where I have to start from ground zero. That is okay because I am not worrying about catching up with the Jones' or Smith's because I can actually roleplay my character. If I die due to the storyline, then I can choose to remain dead forever.
I went to one server who had every type of weapon imagined and to help you buy those weapons, you could exchange 1GP for 50,000GP.
In my game, I can play gawds or mere mortals on a whim. I can have weapons which destroys waves of enemies or I can tough it out with a humble longsword and the clothes on my back. I play on servers where there are dedicated staff wanting to help those players. The DM-to-player ratio is no more than 1-to-10.
All of this at the cost of buying the game.
The game I am refering to should be quite obvious.
My gawd, why in the hell do people still play and pay MMORPG's especially UO, EverQuest or DAoC? Do you actually think that spending days upon days in a room killing the same creature over and over again just so you can get one item is fun? Is killing the same MoB's over and over again just so you can level up just so you can do it all over again fun?
That sounds like torture to me. Thanks but no.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
Who cares if a football player's taking steroids...
:)
Not me. It is only a game, and there are much more important things in life, although many people have pretty fucked priorities.
deus does not exist but if he does
I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix...My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
I'll bet you don't eat, either....a few hours after one meal, you just have to eat another. =)
Software development is an ITERATIVE process. If a bug is discovered a year after a product comes out, it obviously hasn't affected a whole lot of people...but it's fixed anyway, because clearly people have begun to exercise the software in a fashion that has caused the bug to be exposed. There's something comparable to a learning curve with any software product. Some features are widely used immediately, some take a while to enter widespread usage. Until there's a good-sized userbase for a feature, usable bug reports don't come in for the feature. Once the bug reports start rolling in, the feature is obviously being used (or misused). Failing to fix the bug means that further development for that aspect of the software is halted; users don't use the feature (since it doesn't work), they don't suggest ways to expand it, they don't exercise the features "beyond" the feature, etc.
At this point, it has obviously stopped being a game, and have become an investment. Then, ask yourself: What is the expected return on that investment.
I'm not saying that I don't understand. I do! I have played a few Muds, and when I stopped playing one, there was always the feeling of "losing the investment".
At that point, it needed to be reminded that I play games to have fun. Whenever I began playing a game for other reasons than fun, it would no longer be a game (or fun, ofcourse).
I still haven't been able to find one single reason for playing Diablo 2 on Realms. I always played alone or with a few friends, so we could just host the game ourselves. Especially after single player games could be set to simulate more people in the game, Realms were pointless and laggy. So, there went my invested time again, but it was an investment with no chance of ever giving a return.
Morale (and I have to keep telling this to myself, because it is obviosuly quite counter to my nature): F**k the "investment"! I played because I had fun playing! The playing was the reward!
I play EQ and as a player I can truly say, "who cares?". If they cheat to get plat. the advantage they have over me is in auctioning for "uber loot". Bottom line, it's a game and I expect to pick things up one bit of equipment at a time and gradually progress through the game. If they think it's more fun to buy pre-fab equipment/outfits that's fine by me. What it says to me is that they don't play the game for the reasons that I play the game. I can only hope for their sake that they get the same satisfaction from a "hard-won" auction as I get from a hard-won battle.
Hello!
My name is Kaz-ryn, I'm really nice, and I'm asking for your help!
You see, I have this huge platinum debt and I need 20,000 pp to pay it off!
So if you have an extra "fugi tunic", please send it my way!
All I need is 1 pp from 20,000 people, or
2 pp from 10,000 people, or
5 pp from 4,000 people...
-You get the picture!
Together, we can banish EverQuest debt from my life!
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Next, I wanted to check the availability of said macro program, to see if in fact a person COULD as easily acquire "free PP" as the poster made it sound. I went to Yahoo and started fishing around, and came up to a lot of sites that offered the "free" macro program along with their guide at the low cost of 20 bucks. I'm sure that, if I was willing to be a bit more in depth, I would find the program itself. But how many are willing to do that?
What I did find was this site, and I am going to use it as a reference for the remainder of my article: http://www.eqtotalsecrets.com/. Not to act as a pusher, but I found this in 5 seconds. For 20 dollars I could buy this, make the money, and sell PP at half the normal cost. I would make my money back in maybe 2 hours. So yes, the program, for 20 dollars, is easily found.
So now we have checked our facts and found out that the EQ macro program IS in fact possible. We have found out that it is entirely possible that 3 million PP per day is being made per server. Now that we have our information, lets look at the effects of said facts.
The EQ Total Secrets guide is a joke, a huge scam that's been around for well over a year. I love how the article author uses it as a "fact" that you can easily make plat in Everquest.
The reason there's so much plat in EQ is really pretty simple, it comes into the economy and never really leaves it. So over 3 years a big ole piles of it built up.
But if you really do believe EQ Total Secrets can tell you some hidden secrets of earning more EQ plat than you can ever imagine, I can do one better.
Send me 20 dollars and I'll tell you how to MAKE MONEY FAST! You'll be a millionare within a year, easy. I'll let you in on the secrets those MILLIONARES have used to BUILD THEIR FORTUNES!
And you know since the above was written on the Internet, it's just gotta be true.
> I played Diablo2 for quite some time, and I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix bugs that allowed item duplication ("duping")
> and various other cheats. Without exception after every fix, within a week, I became aware of a new method of duping
Same thing here really, but there's 3 reasons diablo2 had this problem in the worst way:
1) Items was allowed to be sold on ebay, making copying them a lucritive effort
2) Programming-wise, blizzards code is amazingly naive and stupid. For example, up until the expansion pack, items didn't have unique id numbers, so there was no way to tell if a item was a dupe or not. Some of the methods here was just so
easy, my best one duped 40-50 sojs in 4-5 seconds.
3) No punishment: Only recently have blizzard begun banning accounts, and up until then, people had no penalty whatsoever for hacking the game and trying whatever trick there is.
#2 is probably very important, as a software engineer, I have NO respect whatsoever for blizzards production code, some of it is just embarrasing.
really WGAFF????? (who gives a fly'n ****)
"EQ cracks down on macroing, finally huh....
I thought since the cat was now out of the bag I would share some interesting EQ news that is currently going on with people selling plat for real money on sites like Player Auctions & Ebay. I have been a long time sellers and have always made a nice bit of money selling EQ gear, however about eight months ago I stumbled on a gold mine, err platinum mine.
I found out how to macro a trade skill in Everquest that made me about 40,000 plat a day, so naturally I set up one computer and started macroing 24/7 and turned around and sold the plat I made on PA for about $240 (for 40,000pps). Well it didn't take long before one computer turned into ten computers, and 40,000 plat a day turned into 400,000 plat a day and $240 a day turned into over $2000 a day in real cash. After a month I noticed other people using the same macro as myself and before long the prices of plat started dropping on all servers from about $60 to depending on the server anywhere between $35 to $50 per 10,000 plat, down from $60 per 10k on all servers. So at this rate I figure I was flooding in about twelve million plat a month into the EQ economy, not bad for one guy!
Everything was going fine and dandy until about three months ago when everyone and their mother found out about the macro, prices fell both in game and out of game and I saw that I was now making about half of what I used to, still not bad for having a computer sitting there macro on its own and I was making more money of this macro than I was off doing item and character sales. I used to make about $8,000 a month doing item and character sales and I was now making well over $20,000 a month even with the price dips just from this macro! Being a everquest seller you have a lot of contact with other sellers and I was simply amazed at the amount of plat being pushed through, hell I was running ten computers with the macro but I talked to at least six, yes six other sellers who were running more computers than me! One guy was making over a million plat a day! At one point I added up more than 30 million plat being pushed through Player Auctions a day.
OK, now hopefully you get the idea, a LOT of plat was being made and dumped into the EQ economy, a conservative guess of at least 30 million plat a day for the last three months, I tend to think the number was at least three times as high as you can't see all the sales going on, you only get a small window to look through to see the amount of sales on PA & Ebay. I can't count how many times I was contacted by people claiming all this plat was ruining the game and economy, mainly other sellers worried about the drop in prices of EQ items & characters. I agreed but I wasn't going to sit back and let others do it while I sat by idly. I have seen several posts on various message boards about how there must be some kind of dupe as the amount of plat on the servers is out of hand and EQ has to put an end to it over the last eight months I saw several people defending Sony saying they were doing everything they could to find and put a stop to the influx of plat destroying the servers.
I know for a fact that Sony has known about this macro for the last six months, as I was cc'd a copy of a email sent to three different people at Verant from a person who used to macro and was trying to get it stopped. The person in question gave them every last detail of the macro, what vendors it worked on, what skill, every detail needed to put a stop to it.
Of course today was the big crack down, most everyone running macros was finally getting caught, you can read it about it on the boards over at hackersquest and player auctions from a variety of people getting busted. I find it amusing that Verant has never cared a whit about all the plat being dumped on their servers until the time leading up to the release of planes of power. They don't care that all that plat was being dumped on their servers, well at least unless it hurts their sales of planes of power. But don't worry, a month or two after the release, there will be something new, there always is.
I have no point really, just thought someone out there might find all of this interesting.
Anonymous"
this sounds equivalent (or at least analagous) to the problem of making secure digital cash/wallets for anonymous peer to peer financial transactions. Also to the problem of secure electronic elections.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
The game has ruined many a marriage and cost many a geek their job. It is worse than crack.
Maybe they need to put a "CAUTION: Do not play this game under the influence of crack!" warning?
You can't take the sky from me...
This is probably too late to get modded to a point where anyone will see it, but..
Verant's oversights in this case may ruin the player economy, but they don't affect the history and lore within the game. A person who plays the game with the intent to have the most awesome equipment available is going to find this cheating frustrating, but this shouldn't affect people who are playing for the role playing element and a chance to explore an expanding world of lore.
I find the game is more interesting if you refuse to twink (that is, to equip your lower level characters with equipment from your higher level characters). The equipment that you acquire by hard work (so to speak) has greater value than just the currency it will yield, and the effort put into generating a character instead of a "warm body" to put equipment on is well worth it.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of this, or at least what I saw as the point.
:)
The author of the article is talking about the damage potential to the EQ economy. Now, I am not an EQ player, so I could not care less, but I have seen what the damage to an MMORPG can be with Ultima Online.
I thought the point behind the article, or at least the direction my thoughts ran in, was that you could come into this game, use a few accounts, and make some real world money. After going through some numbers (those in the article and a few posted here), you can make a good living from this.
Using one slashdot poster's numbers (1k pp per hour selling arrows), you could make (real world) $5 USD per hour. Burger King rates.
Using the numbers from the article (4500 pp per hour), you could make $22.50 USD per hour. Skilled technician rates.
Using some of my own numbers, inflating slightly but IMO not unreasonably to 6000 pp to 8000 pp per hour, you could make $30 - $40 USD per hour. Administrator/Engineer rates.
For most people, that is damn good money.
These were all calculated assuming an 8 hour day, constantly playing and making pp, and using an average from www.playerauctions.com of $50 USD per 10,000 platinum. Overtime would of course make you more, but not at time-and-a-half.
Only one word: bravo!
The real point here is that the only thing of value in EQ is time. The penalty for dying? time. Need to improve? time. Travel? Time. By changing the money/time equation, these macros take the challenge out of the game. They also shift the balance away from people who have no life.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
There were two platinums in your sentence, BTW.
:) There WEREN'T two platinums in his sentence, there were two "platinums". Your sentence is only correct if you slip into metalanguage.
Very witty... but not, strictly speaking, accurate
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
This problem boils down to the bot-problem. The solution lies in the rules of the game: If something in the game is easily repeatable by a machine, you shouldn't be able to profit from it. The software engineers at Verant overlooked this when they implemented profitable tradeskills (over a certain skill %).
Sadly this is so because a bot can keep going, simultaneously if you're greedy, much longer and reliable than a human player.
What I don't understand is how the craftsman can get all the raw materials if he has to "hunt them down" as it says in the article. Me suspects he buys them in a shop.
I found out a long time ago a better solution is to drop Everquest and play with people who want to have FUN.
I don't play EQ, so please excuse any inaccuracies.....
Also, IANAL...
If I understand correctly EQ players can learn trade skills, ie making arrows, and sell these for EQ platinum.
By using a macro to do the work, they are simply mechanising the process, much like say knives were made by hand (by a blachsmith?) in the middle ages, but are manufactured by machine these days.
The macro users are simply automating a manual process; the manual process of mouse clicking!
I think it would be hard to convince a court or jury that this deserves punishment. I wouldn't be surprised if Verant killed your account for this activity though; there would be something in the EULA.
I'm sure that the 18th century hand textile spinners also cried shame upon their neighbours who'd bought Hargreave's Spinning Jenny, allowing them to spin 6 or 8 threads at a time - the same level of acceleration as quoted for the macro.
Advances in technology permit faster production over manual methods - sounds like an industrial revolution to me.
If you're building what claims to be a realistic economic model then this should be perfectly reasonable. Not fair, you say? Well, realistic economies aren't. Get over it.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Note: Does not apply in the State of Utah.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
...in economy based games (Diablo2 multiplayer, EQ, UO, and a host of others) it's currency counterfeiting.
There are a number of complex problems behind each of these cheats...
Much as there are complex problems with real life "cheats". The problem is that some folks will game the system if there's a payoff, no matter what the system actually is. The funny bit about game cheats is that the software company controls the "reality" within the game, and in spite of that they still can't lock everything down.
This sort of thing is never going to go away. The "trusted client" problem isn't just a virtual one. Every day each of us has to trust that those around them are obeying the rules. When that trust is violated, it's called "crime". And if we had an answer to that... *resigned chuckle*
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
And hence have no idea how their monetary system works.
I saw "Platinum" and immediately thought "Dark Age of Camelot". (Not that I've seen evidence of things like this happening over there...)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Tickenest, is that YOU?!
As far as I can tell from reading this, it seems every platinum farmer is flooding a vendor with goods, all sold at the same price. Why is that possible?
Why don't the game developers put in an economy model, that works on supply and demand. If you sell 200.000 arrows to a vendor, that only sells 10.000 arrows a year, why the fuck should he pay you full price for the arrows?
It can't be THAT hard to build some kind of simple supply and demand model into a game.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I am a tailor who needs studs and bonings
Write stories and submit them to Slashdot? Why didn't thxinfo think of that?
(If it's really 8pm, why am I still at work?)
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
Simply not true.
There isnt that much plat being sold and / or macroed.
Dont fall for the hoax.
Personally I don't care, it's all virtual stuff so what does it matter how much of it you have, but the money macroing is much more common in Asheron's Call than EQ.
For the last 12 months it's been well known how to make over a million "pyreals" an hour. Some people have accounts full of characters simply holding cash in the most dense format available (stacks of 100 platinum scarabs). This has lead to the collapse of pyreals as a player tradeable -- nobody will accept them for most trades.
The bots that generate this kind of cash are very sophisticated. The most popular one would use tradeskills to make arrowheads and sell them.
This involved casting spells, moving around towns, opening doors, etc.
However, since this was always going to be nerfed by changing the sell prices (although it took a year for it to happen), more sophisticated bots have been developed.
Now bots can hunt, kill monsters, loot their corpses, search for rare random loot drops and randomly generate tradeable items (e.g. maximum damage swords), teleport to shops, sell loot, go to house, store tradeables, return to dungeon, keep hunting. They can also do this outdoors, navigating through the map, using basic path finding algorithms or preset routes.
I wrote a bot that made better XP and better loot than most players could do, and it could run 24/7. AC is the most programmable MMORPG I've seen, the third-party software lets you do all sorts of bot writing that most games have nothing like. AC is now full of buffbots (bots that cast beneficial spells on people completely automatically) so the average new player can powerlevel without even having to talk to a real player. AC never provided players with a facility to do offline trades (e.g. renting a shop) so players have written macros that will conduct trades automatically with live players.
These bots are not macros like the old keypress and mouse movement macros -- they tie directly into the client and provide functionality like TurnToHeading(angle) and CastSpell(spellname). As a programmer, it's a fun game to program against. As a player, it's a pain in the arse because so many people are just using macros to play the entire game.
None of this is new, however. Some old MUDs used to let you get a gold piece by bowing in front of a statue. Didn't take long for people to jam down the "paste text" keys of their keyboard and keep sending "bow" to the server until they were very very rich. Any economy that has no limited supply is eventually going to have problems.
. My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
.... its not a bug - its how the games works. But by using macro programs you can go through the motions much faster than if you were clicking and pointing yourself.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
#2 is probably very important, as a software engineer, I have NO respect whatsoever for blizzards production code, some of it is just embarrasing.
I suppose you've gotten a good look at blizzard's code, then. If so, please optimize the mac version for Cocoa. If not, don't be a fucking idiot. Blizzard has sold millions of copies of Diablo II. When you have that many copies of your software out in the world some fucker (like you) is always going exploit a perfectly innocent bug in their code. Thus ruining it for people who casually play to enjoy some sensless hacking and slashing.
Help I'm a rock.
>When you have that many copies of your software out
>in the world some fucker (like you) is always going
>exploit a perfectly innocent bug in their code.
here's one example out of 30 or so:
At some point, you could buy items by sending a packet containing basically: 'buy item #23'
There was no check if item #23 was actually for sale. You could buy other people's gear like this.
Innocent bug? Or just blizzard totally missing out a VITAL check?
My point is, security with regard to duping was mostly ignored by blizzard, beyond the most naive checks. They should have done better, if they intended to keep their 'cheat free' realms.
Suppose for a moment that the automobile industry had developed at the same
rate as computers and over the same period: how much cheaper and more
efficient would the current models be? If you have not already heard the
analogy, the answer is shattering. Today you would be able to buy a
Rolls-Royce for $2.75, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and
it would deliver enough power to drive the Queen Elizabeth II. And if you
were interested in miniaturization, you could place half a dozen of them on
a pinhead.
-- Christopher Evans
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