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.
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.
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."
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
Moreover, this has implications for Your Rights- EULAs and network access regulations may be defined based on this. Sony creates a game and charges for the priviledge of using it- and the most popular use consists of trying to acquire goodies (which are fungible with platinum pieces) as rapidly as possible. Most gamers try to optimize their income of PP/hour (even if they don't conciously think of it like that).
But what happens when someone (like these guys) apparently discover the optimal way to earn PP? Its likely that if they spread it around, the Everquest economy will get boring. Earning will be too easy, and players will log off and lapse their $10/monthly subscriptions. Sony would lose million$.
What can they do about it? Change the game would be the best solution, but it would become a constant struggle against the PP earning optimizers. Corporations are allergic to that kind of indefinite R&D expenditure- they'd rather pay $9/hr network jerks to keep the servers running, not $30/hr software developers to perpetually modify the code.
Instead, they might try to label the optimizers as "hackers" who are subverting their system. They'll start by revoking these player's accounts, and no one likes to be banned for just doing their best. Even worse, there's the outside possibility that if digital intrusion laws get a little more draconian, they could try to have some of these users prosecuted for their lost potential revenue. (Publizing a "hack" which renders the game unplayable could cost Sony days worth of revenue by "denying" them their servers until it gets fixed. Costing other online companies (such as Ebay) a few days of income by denying their service has gotten people tossed in jail.)
Scary to imagine that someday a person could be incarcerated for cheating at a game about elf-girls killing lizardmen.
PS. When I hit google to fact-check my response, the paid ad that popped up offered me platinum cheap!
It means 'platinum pieces', just as GP means 'gold pieces' in almost every RPG.
HA! What is American currency worth? The good word of the federal government?
The fact is ALL currency is worthless these days. Forgery back in the day was the same as trying to sell fool's gold as the real deal.
You are free to use WHATEVER you want as a bargaining chip. Casino's actually USE bargaining chips. They are good ONLY in the casino. If you and I decide to agree upon chickens as the means of exchange between us thats fine. Every time I want 20 widgets from you, I will give you 20 chickens. Its completely legit. Its ONLY between us.
It is situations like this where the letter of the law is not necessarily the best indicator of the truth. However, a quick search on Lexis-Nexis would help you realize there prosecutions revolving around conterfeiting charges did not deal with anything other than someone making cold hard cash. You can barter with whatever you wish. quid pro quo is the name of the game.
Also, constitutional prohibitions against anyone other than the US government making currency was to prevent states from minting their own coinage, and to diminish the use of spanish pieces of eight. Thats a whole other story however.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I refuse to have a sig... dammit!
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.
http://macroquest.sourceforge.net/
> 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.
"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 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.