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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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...instead of being afraid that officials'll crackdown on this and kill his livelihood?
In a capitalist society, items are worth exactly what the market will bear. Notice that nowhere here is there a distinction about corporial/non-conrporial items.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
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)
was on K5 a while ago, it's basically a HOWTO.
I played UO back in the day (around 2000) and I managed to sell my account for about $500 (US dollars).
Personally, I can't understand how someone can actually quit their job to sell game items. To me, it's just not enough money for the work that must be done. What if the game goes under? Here's a whatever year old man with no job. Good luck getting a job, considering the market. What's he gunna do, move on to another game?
[sig]www.masterslate.org[/sig]
Back in the 90's, quite a few people that visit Slashdot made a good living on virtual services. Ahh, venture capital.
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100
2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and sell it as 10 lots of 1 million gold at $15 a pop
3) !!!Profit!!!
Or:
1) Buy 10 million gold on eBay for ~$100
2) Go to uo.tradespot.net and buy up tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of cut leather with the gold you got from eBay,
3) Sell the cut leather in lots of 60,000 on eBay
4) !!!Profit!!!
Often the deals wouldn't involve eBay, you'd just arrange 3 or 4 in-game bulk trades at bargain prices for some item, and then resell smaller quantities of that item right back on Tradespot for a higher price.
The people who are really making money from UO aren't the ones sitting around mining all day. They're the ones who spend a few hours making smart trades. It's sort of like the stock market; the guys working the factory are making minimum wage, but people trading that company's stock are the ones making real money.
Oh, and blockquoth the article,Geez, I used to spend 10 or more hours a day playing UO. I guess that qualifies me as a reformed addict...
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Nope, he's a trader. He doesn't play the
game, but instead buys accounts from teens
who get bored with characters, and pieces
out the account items. He makes back 3x
what he pays for the account.
So no, he's not spending 24x7 slaying
monsters to build up an inventory.
I have a friend who spent a year playing EQ day after day. He racked up over 100 days of playing time during that year.
Did he miss out on friends, family, etc? Not to any great extent.
Was he lonely? Definitely not.
You end up creating some great friendships out of games like this. I've been half way around the world and visited people I've known from EQ. My friend eventually gave up EQ and moved from Austraila to the US where he's now happily married to one of the people he spent much of that time playing with.
At the time he quit EQ, his character was one of the most uber necros on the Tunare server but worth at most $1500 USD at that time.
You can certainly make money from these games, and you won't necessarily become a lonely hermit while doing it. But your social life will suffer and it will take a lot of work to make the same money.
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
This makes it sound like Julian Dibbell isn't what he is, a hack writer who mines the online communities he can find for grist. His article on MUDs (which he later expanded into a book was a complete smear job, a non-insightful overview of the MUD world intended to turn a small little molehill into enough of a mountain to get his paycheck. He writes self-indulgent overviews of his online comings and goings, each one crafted as if he has expertly stumbled into a forbidden cave of insight and perspective. No doubt this current project is the most recent seed for whatever next article or tome he will lure a credulous publisher into foisting on us. Take a pass, friends.
Also true - but I can guarantee you that if you do something for 60 hours a week you're going to get sick of it, regardless of what it is. Don't forget in addition to having to play the game to generate these items, he has to spend time outside of the game arranging transfers, setting up auctions, etc. He's also got something else to consider: If he sells too much (or if he has competition) the market could get saturated to the point of him not being able to sell anything else - can he afford to live without income until things get better?
Too late. I already augered your girlfriend.
You now owe me a new Dr. Pepper, preferrably not dispensed through my nose.
BIA(Brittanian Industrial Average) plummeted today. Analysts cited over-valuation as a major cause of the sudden drop in virtual commodity prices. "Virtual Futures just aren't performing as well as most E-bay traders had hoped." ........ President Bush's invasion of Brittania for 'virtual weapons of virtual mass destruction' without UVN consent also seems to have contributed to the poor market conditions....... Two virtual traders jumped out their windows in response to the market's downward plunge, but only managed to break their ankles. "He must have thought he was in a skyscraper. Good thing he was only in our living room!"
So isn't he (amongst others) using child labor? How ingenious to make work look like play.
A joke, of course, but the thought of having UO sweatshops where kids can play UO as long as they give the owner a share of the loot, is not far. :-)
"Real world" money defeats the purpose of the MUD or MMORPG, as this is for myself, and as I understand this to be for many others.
As I have said in the past, the hope in the ideal of the MUD or MMORPG is that who or what we may be in the "real world" does not in any way limit who or what we can be in this alternate reality.
While one individual selling items for "real world" cash may not have significant effect, this behavior, in principle, is unacceptable if the above is the purpose of the MUD or MMORPG.
When my opportunity to behave as I would like and have a legitimate expectation to be able to in this alternate reality is restricted as a result of my subservience in the "real world" to the political and economic power of another, or of the elite, then I have not even in this alternate reality escaped their reach.
While we might certainly pretend that those who are powerful in this alternate reality as a result of their political and economic power in this reality, are not so for this reason, but are instead for some false or fanciful reason put in the context of the alternate reality, I refuse to do this, and I urge other concerned persons to voice this position.
Why would we bring this upon ourselves? Is the political and economic power of the elite of this world not sufficiently overbearing, that we should directly permit behaviors which have the effect of extending their reach into another?
Does the thought entertain you, that your superior who has power over you from Monday to Friday, from 9 to 5, can for a price extend his power over you, his enjoyment at the price of your integrity, and his opportunity at the price of your hope, even when you at home think you have finally escaped?
I will not be the pawn of another's wealth; not in this world, and not in any other.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
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world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
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