Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Unmaking The Game

Posted by Hemos on from the inflationary-world dept.

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.

5 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Scary by CounterZer0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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....

  2. Re:Slow Day by DaytonCIM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Who cares if a football player's taking steroids.. by Goonie · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's just a game.

    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?)
  4. Re:Wow, weak server. by bellings · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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 ... 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.

    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.
  5. Tax and Legal Issues by jaaron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?