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.
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."
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
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
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
I smell scandle.
Does it smell anything like scandal? 'Cause we all know what scandal smells like, you know.
I write in my journal
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.
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)
"So what we did is simplify the process by just rounding off all those fractions of a platinum piece... into an account that we opened."
"So.. you're making alot of platinum?"
"Yes.."
"And it's not yours?"
"Well.. it becomes ours."
"Tell me again how that's not stealing?"
"I don't think I'm explaining this very well."
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
"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"