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A Real Living With Virtual Goods
RussHart writes "The BBC is reporting on a Julian Dibbell who has quit his day job to sell items from Ultima Online in the real world, hopefully making a living on which to support his wife & daughter."
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I've been following his blog since he wrote "The Unreal Estate Boom" for Wired.
I haven't even played Everquest but it still makes for interesting reading.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
There. So I've trashed one person and elevated another. Total Kharmic result: 0.
It works well when there are separations between the markets, either geographical or informational.
It worked best in the pre-telegraph days when, for example, you could buy spices in the the East Indies for a bag of nails and sell them for their weight in gold in Amsterdan
On the internet arbitrage is at best a short term play, because information moves so fast.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Purchasing characters and items removes much of the fun from these games. It trivializes the progression path that you would otherwise normally take and provides a 'quick hit' solution for those who can't be bothered with spending months building their characters up themselves and with their online friends. If that's what people want to do with their money, then so be it. Players build up reputations over a period of time (they can also be torn down rather quickly). Characters that have been purchased online can easily be spotted by experienced players as the person playing it often has little or no clue how to play properly. Many of the serious gaming guilds won't allow an "ebay" character to join in with their fun as they have not taken the time to build up a trusting relationship with guild, and a guild won't want to help a player who may simply sell his character on for profit in 6 months time. So individuals who buy and sell characters and items are often viewed as untrustworthy by players who play by the rules and build their characters up the hard way.
Importing spices from the Far East is not arbitrage, it's just trade. The price difference was largely due to transport costs, and you take a risk that something will go wrong during the journey. Real arbitrage is riskless and you don't have to _do_ anything beyond the buying and selling.
Buying spices, paying someone to transport them, getting insurance in case they are lost in transit, and selling them at the other end would be arbitrage because it would be riskless. But it might not be profitable.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It tends to fluxuate. I can remember several years ago when it was around $30 per million, $35 if you needed it right away or bought smaller amounts.
At that time, being a millionaire in UO wasn't rare, but it wasn't common, either. When I first started the game, it took me several months to earn 100,000 gold pieces to buy a house from someone. Fast-forward a few years. A couple of duping bugs, along with a house deed exploit, brought mass inflation and the price of gold bottomed out around $10 per million. In comparison, the house that cost me 100,000 gold pieces some two years prior was selling for 5-6 million! Around the time I quit playing seriously, the gold price had climbed a bit, back to $15 or so per million. I guess it's risen a bit higher since then.
There are also variations from sale to sale even throughout a single day. There's no standard rate, it's sort of like filling up your gas tank. One gas station might be charging $1.659/gallon, then you drive 3 blocks down the road and another station is selling it for $1.599. Similarly, you might go to Tradespot and find someone selling a million gold for $17.50, and no other sales are open, so you buy it. Ten minutes later someone else posts saying they've got gold for sale at $15 per million; you win some, you lose some.
And, just like any other business, there are always a) suckers and b) desperate customers. If gold is averaging $15.00, there'll be some guy posting 10 eBay auctions with a minimum bid and Buy It Now of $17.50, and probably half of them will sell. Someone who needs a few mil in a hurry - say, to buy a house - might stand at the bank in-game and offer to pay $20 per million; it's faster than going over to one of the trading boards.
This varies wildly. When I was last playing, experienced players who had built up or purchased decent characters (and had time to spare) could make 1 or 2 million a day through honest play, using normal game mechanics as opposed to cheating or exploiting. I didn't find this type of person to be the average profiteer, though. Like the parent mentioned, spending 8 hours "working" only to reap $30 or so is no bargain. I used to enjoy powergaming now and then, where I'd spend a day or two doing nothing but trying to earn as much gold as possible, but it was usually for my own spending in-game. After a day or two it always got very boring.
For awhile, there was a "taming boom" which introduced billions of gold pieces into the UO economy. At some point, people started to figure out that a single tamer towing around several dragons or drakes and a nightmare could literally own just about any dungeon room on the entire map. You could sit in one spot for hours on end, letting your tamed pets kill everything for you. When you wound up with more loot than you could carry, you made a quick round-trip recall to and from a bank to drop off the loot and pick up some bandages for the pets. Meanwhile, your pets gained stats and skills - and thus became stronger - from all the fighting.
And thus the taming boom started. Hunting in dungeons turned into a lame experience, because no matter where you went, you'd find tamers camping the good spawn spots. The tamers shouted "go to Felluca" but it was the same situation there, except that some of the tamers were killing each other. Worse, because taming became known as the way to make gold, and because UO became known as a game where you could make real money by playing, it attracted the worst of the worst. A game set in Victorian times tends to lose its atmosphere where you walk into the dungeon and encounter a group of tamers named PiMPiN HaRd, deeznuttz, KindGreenBud, and TupacLivzOn hogging all of the mons
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
...three years ago.
Some years ago, an unauthorized third-party program called UO Extreme (UOX) was released. Among other things, the program allowed you to send unorthodox color combinations when coloring a dye tub. I don't recall the specifics, but essentially, when you colored a dye tub through the normal process, the UO client would send an RGB code to the server indicating which color to make the dye tub. But the sanity check was on the client side. UOX let you put in arbitrary RGB values which were not available from the normal UO client.
And so the black dye tub was born, and people started dying their clothes black. Since black clothing, and black dye tubs themselves, were uncommon (because only those with the UOX program could make them), they fetched a premium price. UOX was deemed an illegal add-on and people who used it were banned from the game, thus locking the supply. For whatever reason, the existing black dye tubs were left alone. The demand continued to rise - this is normal in UO, any sort of "rare" item where there are only a certain number available will attract buyers. "Rares" trading and collecting has become a cottage industry of UO.
All of a sudden there were a limited number of black dye tubs in the world, and since they could no longer be created, they got expensive. That's why they were coveted.
Years later, a black dye tub was added as a legitimate Veteran Reward item.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.