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.
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....
I'll second that. Who cares if someone is "duping" or cheating to make "money" in EQ. It's just a GAME.
Move along, nothing to see here.
I suppose that, if you were a corrupt server admin, you could make a handsome profit on the side by creating these auctions.... I smell scandle.
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?)
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.
Wow. That article is incredibly lame, even by Slashdot standards. There's a lot of hand waving, some wild guesses, some downright wrong arithmetic, and nothing even approaching a verified fact.
... That's 60,000 pp a week, and then its 3 million PP a month!" Uhh... no. 12,000 per day x 30 days is 300,000, not 3,000,000.
I mean, the whole thing reads like this: "I read that you could make a lot of money with macros. I found a place that claimed it would sell me a macro to make money for $20. I have not purchased the macro. If I looked, I may have been able to find macros for free on the net, but I didn't. I have not used the macros. I have never seen the macros. I have no idea what the macros do, and I can't even really guess. So now we have checked our facts and found out that the EQ macro program IS in fact possible." Huh?
Or, my favorite is this: "... which comes to 12,000pp a play session
Frankly, I have no idea what is going on in EverQuest. And, I have no idea what is happening to the economy in EverQuest. But, I didn't write a hysterical story about it and submit it to Slashdot, either.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
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?
They've been banning accounts for using 3rd party for some time- ShowEQ, a packet sniffer, is hard for them to detect if done right, but if they can tell you're using it they actively ban accounts. They've been doing this for a while, at least a year. There's a grey area program that allows EQ to be played in a window which they haven't been enforcing a ban for- but it encourages people to pay for and play multiple accounts. There have been item and platinum duplication schemes discovered in the past, some of which have resulted in bans.
This is somewhat different, as the characters are doing legal actions in game, they're just doing them without the effort of actually clicking from the keyboard, and likely doing them faster than that. Still, it's yet another action covered by the 3rd party software ban, and from the MOTD they may have figured out how to detect it. Once the method like this gets out to the general public they have in the past always figured out a way to shut it down.
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!
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
...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.
One man's wasted life is another man's utopia. Not everyone likes the same things, not everyone places the same values on the same things.
One man works 80 hours a week, amasses a fortune, retires at 70 with more money than he knows what to do with. He's on his third wife, has several kids he doesn't recognize (but put through college), and a yacht that could sink an iceberg.
Another man works 40 hours a week, makes a living, retires at 70 with just enough money to maintain his household. He has a loving wife, several kids (that put themselves through college), and a 1997 Buick with 70k miles on it.
Yet another man works just enough to eat and buys clothes. He followed the Greatful Dead for ten years selling buttons and T-shirts. He's 70 now, living in a little shack on some land owned by one of his buddies from "back in the day". No wife, probably lots of kids, and he has a 1965 Chevy pickup with more miles on it than there are roads in the county he lives in.
Whos to say which one of them wasted their life?
Casca