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Confessions of an Ultima Online Gold Farmer
petbath writes "A long time UO player who is moving on makes some interesting confessions on how he managed to earn over 100k in real world money by setting up a bot farm." Commentary available on Terra Nova. From the post: " Between the pressures of my competition, the required maintenance work and the impending doom of on-line game markets, I decided to retire my bot farm in favor of other possibilities that required less work to maintain. Last May I sold off the last of my game assets and today I have posted my bot army for sale on Ebay. I don't want to part with these beasts of burden, but I do have to close this final chapter in the gold farming adventure."
He's offering them virtual gold for real gold and they're taking him up on the offer. There's no possible way to call this scamming as long as he's delivering the product.
You may not like it. You may consider it exploiting or breaking the ToS. Go for it, I'm a bit peeved at people in AC that'd been doing that (a lot of duping going on there too the devs and MS didn't have the balls to ban), but mainly because when I eventually quit, I couldn't ebay my house/account.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
1. Powerlevel a character to very high level, kill monsters, collect loot, sell loot. They may target specific, high-profit monsters, or they may just slaughter everything in a lower level area.
2. Uh, the whole concept of "player economy" is based on trading items for gold and gold for items. Mugging is a problem in real life, but we still need to be able to transfer money to one another.
3. The killing of monsters and collecting of loot is done by the bot.
In some games, tradeskills like fishing are just as good or better than killing monsters, so the farmers do that instead, but the idea is the same.
Random and weird software I've written.