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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.
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....
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.
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 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?)
Goodness, if McFly69 can't get laid, it really must be a lost cause for the rest of us.
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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)
There were two platinums in your sentence, BTW.
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!
"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"
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.