I was 14 years old when Galaxies was first announced, two years prior to its release. Like the author of this article, I too was crazy excited about this game when I first heard about it. My friends and I did all the same things that the author said he did, such as fantasizing about being a bounty hunter, or chillin' with Luke, etc. The idea of the game excited me more than actually wanting to play it, though. I've never been much of a gamer but games were how I learned to program. So, my approach to Galaxies took me to similar places as the author, but I got there a different way.
When Galaxies was announced, I was in my peak of reverse engineering Blizzard games. I had been reverse engineering the Battle.net client protocol since Diablo 1 and StarCraft. Battle.net had a community full of people who reverse engineered the Blizzard games and there was somewhat of a competition as to who could write the coolest bots, as we called them. Bots were apps that emulated the official clients and could completely sign into Battle.net without using the actual game. Most of mine were just console apps, because I enjoyed the reverse engineering more than the coding.
So, when Galaxies finally came out in beta, a friend of mine luckily got a copy. The computer that I used at that time, which was a shared family computer, was terrible so I didn't expect to play the game, but I did ask him for a copy of the game's directory so that I could start writing Galaxies bots. I focused all of my time on reverse engineering the Galaxies client protocol. I would stay up until the sun came up, staring at the game in a debugger. When a family member need to computer or I had to go to school, I'd hit print on IDA and print out an entire dll - tons of paper. I'd basically annotate the printed out assembly with what I thought was happening and then I'd get home and confirm or deny it with the debugger at run-time. I'd borrow my friends account so that I could see the sign in process in real-time and get packet dumps. I did this for months straight and it never got old.
The end result was a console application that could emulate the official client and sign in to Galaxies, select your character and respond to various events. My friends would level up new character's professions and I'd run them on my terrible computer while we were at school, and over night. I could run many at once with no problem.
While we did not have the in-game success with making tons of money, I did save a lot of money up front on a lot of new computers and tons of copies of Galaxies. :)
I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by programming one.
There's tons of people making more within the Microsoft/Oracle/SAP/Apple/etc ecosystems than employees of those companies, too. This is different insofar as the market was not intentionally created, but it's hard to blame him for "exploiting" the circumstances.
I immediately thought of this too. Could there possibly be a revenue opportunity for these game developers that they are missing? Should the game developers focus on the gameplay with economics in mind so as it should be a an objective and not just a byproduct?
MMO designers far too often create the need and people like the guy from the story naturally arise to fill it. This is usually done by having items to be purchased from NPCs for absurd values. Examples are pets, mounts, movement speed, costumes, and the like. Designers reason that not every one will need or what them but fail to take into account human emotions like greed, envy, and fear. These drive competitiveness for many a player and item sellers provide a simple and effective means to remedy it.
The costs of these items or services in game helps to establish the value of what is traded among players, either directly or through an auction house.
I used to make some money selling pixels as well, mainly from UO ('real estate' mainly since land in that game was very limited), City of Heroes, SWG and WoW. If you got in at the start (when selling on eBay was still 'legal') you made a pretty penny.
But it was unsustainable due to new MMOs, new tech and the rise of professional farmers. You had to constantly adapt, see where the game is going, and jump ship before the game collapses. I remember getting calls in the middle of the night from the west coast, asking about my auctions and how it all works and if there was more. And getting interrogated by my mum since I'm getting all these calls from strangers.
Farming by hand, or playing the auction house no longer is the optimal way to go. Now people offer full blown services to play your toon for you, using VM, to mask/hide your IP incase you/they get caught (so you can claim you got hacked), with really good players charging up to thousands of dollars to play your character.
Good times.
EDIT: Now that I thought about it some more, I noticed my pattern at the beginning was doing everything myself, whether is scouring for bargains, farming gold, flipping properties – then I moved on to hiring people within the game and paying them in-game gold for them to farm for me (in SWG, I would provide locations of mineral fields to my 'employee's and set a price ahead of time how much I'd pay per unit, and I'd buy all they have) – then I moved on to automatic botting/scripting in WoW. Interestingly, this aligns somewhat closely to real life industries and how they improve output.
Then I also realized first there was the emergence of sellers (the farmers), then came the companies that has its own farming team in addition to buying pixels from farmers and flipping them for profit. And finally, the arrival of platforms – connecting direct buyers with direct sellers while taking a cut (similar to eBay) – and it's these guys are making the real money – taking zero risks (not worrying about getting caught), providing minimal support and very scalable.
And now the gaming companies wants to keep everything to themselves and take a cut. Blizzard's D3 will be paid close attention to how its Auction House system works out – it will be very, very interesting to see where it all leads.
An interesting insight into how bits of the modern world actually work.
The most significant thing for me was the romanticization. How the guy ascribes emotional significance to a shitty MMO. He's gaming the shitty MMO, just like he is being gamed by the shitty MMO's designers. And it has all this importance to him. Sad, poignant, alarming, eerie.
"At the beginning of the novel, it [Milo's syndicate] is merely a system that gets fresh eggs to his mess hall by buying them in Sicily for one cent, selling them to Malta for four and a half cents, buying them back for seven cents, and finally selling them to the mess halls for five cents."
The character of Milo Minderbinder is one of the greatest satires of laissez-faire capitalism ever created.
"In a democracy, the government is the people," Milo explained. "We’re people, aren’t we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry."
I really enjoyed this article, but the interesting thing to me is the need to rationalize why things like MMOs fade away. It seems like they have a natural life cycle. This guy didn't bring Star Wars Galaxies down. The developers adding New Game Experience (NGE) or the Combat Update (CU) didn't destroy the game. The world went on.
The game was released in 2001. In 2003 it had 400,000 subscribers. They released the controversial NGE/CU changes in 2005. It wasn't until 2009 that they shut down about half the servers. And they didn't shut down the game until a new Star Wars MMO was imminent.*
I can't image that most of the market for a Star Wars MMO hadn't tried it, maybe played it quite a bit, and then moved on in the space of 10 years. I understand the desire for things to last forever, but I don't know that most things will.
* Numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, they were culled from wikipedia.
Not all MMOs fade away. WoW still has over ten million subscribers and doesn't seem to be fading at all. And I'm not surprised changes they made in 2005 took so long to kill SWG. People who have put literally years into a game are emotionally invested and have online relationships they don't want to abandon, at least not casually.
What actually kills a game is the lack of new serious players to balance out the slow attrition of the veterans. The temptation for companies running these games is to make them more "accessible" to more casual gamers. But there's a fine line between "accessible" and "not addictive enough to flip people into paying customers".
Yeah, he seems to forget that it's just a game, and after a while people want to play new games. Games, by their very nature, appeal partly for the novelty (who wants to play a game if all the challenge is gone?) which means that when the novelty wears off, people will go elsewhere. Nothing wrong with that. It's like thinking a movie is leaving the theater because the popcorn is getting stale.
I was buying and selling virtual weapons in text MUDs almost 20 years ago. This offline market for virtual game items predates the MMORPG genre itself.
Did I miss something in the article? I clicked on a title promising the ruination of SWG and all I found was a guy contributing significant revenue to Sony while providing their players with a service they obviously desired. I understand there is an argument that virtual currency sales may decrease buyers' CLV but in the absence of an argument or evidence along those lines all I read was a story about an MMO players inflated self image and his tragic love affair with his game.
I think the TL;DR; is that he was a huge part of the economy on 3 SWG servers, and when they changed the game to make being a Jedi easy, he stopped playing. And when he stopped playing, he ended up accelerating the downfall of Galaxies as a whole since he was such a big factor on those 3 servers.
I really loved playing SWG - not so much for the game, but for the ‘business’ aspects of it. Whilst not as successful as the OP, I made thousands of $US from the game by being part of a oligopoly.
One of the game mechanics was the concept of ‘buffs’ - basically chemical stimulants your character could consume to temporarily boost critical stats which aided in combat. They were an essential item in PvP (player vs player) combat if you wanted to have that edge and so were in high demand. Buffs could only be made by the ‘doctor’ class and only by the top level doctors. Another critical game mechanic was that the quality of the buff affected how much of a boost you could receive to your stats, and the quality of the buffs was affected by the quality of the raw materials you sourced to make the buff (every resource had a variety of stats - this game was a real minmax-ers delight). The highest quality buffs were the only one that people were interested in buying.
Most of the resources required for the buffs were reasonably easy to find - but there was one which was rare - avian meat. The highest quality avian meat, harvested by killing particular birds, only appeared (real-time) once a month for a few days. Without this avian meat, you could not produce the highest quality buffs.
The first time I made buffs - I happened to time it during the HQ (high quality) avian meat period. I spent hours killing the birds to collect meat. I made my buffs, had a shop near Coronet (the main trading city in the game) and sold out within a few days. And I noticed that all the doctors sold out within days too - and that the last few that had some stock could request extortion prices for their stock. That gave me an idea …
The next month when the avian meat spawned, I parked my character in the main spaceport and keyed up a macro (the game had an in-game macro system). All my macro did was cause my character to shout out every minute “Buying avian meat @ Z credits/piece - sell to my vendor at coords X,Y”. I basically bankrupted myself buying up as much avian meat as I could whilst it was available.
I made up a batch of buffs and started selling them - I ran out after 20 days - but I was now substantially more wealthy! I figured - heck I’m on a good thing - let’s do that the next month. Of course, no good thing goes unnoticed …
The next month, there were three other doctors in the spaceport shouting out that they were buying avian meat. Well this simply would not do! So I basically upped the price I was offering to purchase avian meat above theirs - heck - I was flush with funds from last month so I figured I could out buy them. It turns out I was right - I was able to purchase even more avian meat than the last month and I was able to produce enough HQ buffs to just last the month. Then the third month - this is when the market dynamics got interesting …
By now, several people had noticed that avian meat was in hot demand once a month. In the third month, there were several ‘shouters’ when the HQ avian meat started spawning. Like last month, I upped the price I was willing to offer to price them out of the market - a bidding war erupted, but with my bankroll, I could outbid anyone (although I was cringing how fast I was going through my credits). Like any market, with the prices rising so quick, it changed behaviours - suddenly many of the ‘hunters’ in the game were out killing birds to collect meat. I effectively had my own contractor workforce out hunting avian meat!
By the end of the third HQ avian meat season, I had more meat than I ever had before. I realised I almost had complete control of the buff market on my server so I changed my selling tactics. I made my batch of buffs and started selling them, but I jacked the price up (100% increase) - this time I wanted to be able to continuously sell my buffs to last the full month. Other buff sellers kept selling them at the going rate … so I did the rounds of the cities each night and bought up any HQ buffs which were under my price and added them to my stockpile. By the end of the first week, I was bankrupt although I had a huge stockpile of HQ buffs - but most importantly, virtually every buff vendor was empty … except mine. I jacked my price up even further and did a roaring trade.
Over the next few cycles I cemented my reputation as one of the few reliable buff vendors who could consistently offer the highest quality buffs month-round. With the constant trade and monopoly prices, I was able to further entrench my dominant position each month by continuing to out bid any other doctor who tried to purchase avian meat. There were two other doctors on the server who managed to offer buffs for most of the month, and whilst I never talked to them, I noticed that they never went below whatever price I set. Our little oligopoly had a total lock on the buff market - it was a golden age!
When I quit the game a couple of months later, I had millions in credits which I sold for a few thousand $US. SWG let me play out my monopolistic capitalistic fantasies - how I loved that game :D
I've done some business in EVE Online for a while, and it's as much fun as you describe, but a somewhat more mature market. Any competent EVE trader would have squeezed into your market quite easily, and even have a choice of two methods.
The "Chinese gold farmer" way is to be in the spaceport all the time and keep outbidding you minimal amounts. At the end of the month, your resource stocks would be bought at the same price, and their quantities proportional to the relative time amounts each of you has spent in the spaceport. So they can sell at the same price as you, or even lower if they value their time less and would accept less profit.
The "lazy" way (my favorite) requires very little capital and very little time. The idea is to seriously outbid you but only offer to buy small quantities. You will only be able to match this bidding war up to a limit, since you're paying very inflated prices and buying a hundred times more than I do. (If you miscalculate, you'll end up with a huge stock of finished products that you can only sell profitably at ten times the previous price, and people will simply not buy.) Once you've reached this limit, you have to allow me into the market, and I'm buying and selling at pretty much the same prices as you do.
And some people argue laissez-faire capitalism does not naturally lead to concentration of capital and oligopolies/monopolies. I guess they should play MMOs ;)
I was the same, except I targeted a different portion of the economy. I became a resource dealer.
The resource spawning system drew my attention, and I ended up spending countless hours developing tracking systems outside the game to both keep track of the current and past spawns as well as keep track of my harvester fleet. I knew almost immediately when the best Rhodium Steel for a particular weapon spawned and would drop every harvester on the strongest vein I could find.
For those unfamiliar with the resource mechanics of SWG, there was a fixed hierarchy of resource types that different crafting recipes required. The more advanced the recipe, the more specific the resource requirement (e.g., Rhodium Steel instead of just Metal). Every couple weeks the current spawn of a given type would dry up and a new one would come along to take its place with different stats. These stats ultimately determined the final stats of items crafted with the resource.
Resources also spawned in "veins" similar to how they're found in real life. The closer to the center of the spawn you were, the more yield your harvesters produced. It was possible to effectively block out any competition by placing enough harvesters on a vein, and this is exactly what I did.
At one point I even started doing "contract" work for the high-end crafters. They would give me a quantity of a resource they wanted and I would deliver it daily as the harvesters collected.
At the end (sometime around when the Jedi questing was introduced) I had amassed enough credits that I was within the top 5-10 on the server I played. I sold it all on eBay and more than paid for my time playing.
It's amusing that even in universes built specifically to fulfill people's power fantasies, the biggest power is usually achieved by people who do shady business :-)
If you enjoyed this article you might like to give "For the Win" by Cory Doctorow a read, it's a pretty fun book that asks questions with regards to game economies and how they might affect the real world.
Same subject, vastly different caliber. I can't read four sentences of Doctorow's writing without seizing in a paroxysm of grimacing and twitching and all sorts of disapproving body language.
I've never really played a lot of MMOs (though I had friends who were very into SWG and still lament its changes and eventual demise) but the crazy stuff that goes on in virtual economies like this has always interested me.
Reminds me of Julian Dibbell's "Play Money" [1], where he spends a year trying to make Ultima Online his main source of income.
> the crazy stuff that goes on in virtual economies like this has always interested me.
If you want crazy, you should check Eve Online's economy, it's on a wholly different level and scale.
Especially as CCP (the game developer) takes a cut of real-world to in-game money conversions: you can buy PLEX (1-month account extension) with real money, and it's an in-game item which you can exchange for virtual currency (by selling it to other players).
The big question is: Do game economies make sense at all, do they benefit the game enjoyment for all users?
This story sounds very common today, i tried similar things in WoW but never to earn real money. Common players don't care much about game money, that makes it so easy to exploit the system. In the end it is was fun for myself, but the common player was forced to grind a little more because of people like me.
I've only ever played WoW, but jacked up economy on servers wasn't fun. And I mean JACKED up. It does add an element of realism though, nothing comes for free in this world.
I was a Master Armorsmith on Lowca I would bring in 20mil credits/week that had a value of around $200 on Ebay. I made thousands selling credits from SWG on eBay which was great for a teenager (I was 17 - now I'm 27) They killed the game in 2005 trying to make it "assessable" and that's the last time I played SWG or any MMO. I have fond memories of the economy and learned a lot that has helped me in the real business world (taking care of customers etc..) I actually had been thinking about writing something similar to this about SWG for a while now glad someone took the time to write it.
This sounds similar to what happened with WoW, at first things are really hard to obtain, going after the real hardcore gamers and those that want to spend the time to know the economy well, work together well and master professions.
As the game goes on they try more and more to appeal to the casual gamer which either doesn't have the skills or the time to master the game in the same way. Meaning it becomes hard to really differentiate yourself from others playing the game as most of everyone has pretty good items and didn't have to work hard to acquire them.
Even though I have nowhere near enough time to be a hardcore gamer at anything these days, I still don't think I'd really enjoy playing something causally and having it all handed to me.
There's also a worthwhile case study in the Neopets economy, which as far as I know didn't really adapt in these ways. You could grind on puzzle games for the local currency, but it stopped being about the puzzles and started being about trying to make in-game money. And then, what happened is that non-casual gamers would know all of the shop-inventory respawn times and would camp them, to buy up all of the commodities that the shops contained -- especially medicines and such. They would then resell them for much more money in their own user-defined shops. So it became the exact opposite: at first things were really easy to obtain, and they were mostly going after kids -- casual gamers. But their surge in popularity seemed to create a change in focus towards hardcore gamers eager to camp the spawn points and use multiple accounts to get freebies. At one point I even remember putting all of my money in the stock market just so that I could feed my Neopets with free soup from the in-game welfare department, because getting food was such a nuisance otherwise.
There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?
World of Warcraft was designed from the beginning with casual in mind. You cannot lose anything and player A is better than B only because A spent more time on the game than B. They introduced bound items and made crafting more of a time-sink than a player-based economy. Years of WoW market dominance has warped the meaning of 'hardcore' somewhat though. I still wouldn't make it a function of how much time is spent on something; it would make Farmville full of 'hardcore gamers'.
PS. The above statements are to be taken in context of MMOs with a player-based economy, such as EVE.
"Because it wasn’t the game I loved. That game died in 2005 with the NGE/CU. It died when developers turned their backs on the gamers who had spent the effort and instead listened to the lazy, whining voices who wanted it all given to them."
Exploiting computer games for temporary cash seems like an incredibly pathetic way to earn a living. Surely those with the intelligence to accomplish such things could contribute their time to something more productive?
How is it pathetic? It's just like any other business. Identify a consumer need, provide that need, ????, profit. You could make the same argument for almost any other business, especially anything related to art.
"Drawing pictures seems like an incredibly pathetic way to earn a living. Surely those with the intelligence to accomplish such things could contribute their time to something more productive?"
If we all we ever did was "something more productive" the world would be a damn boring place, and one in which I would not want to live.
Why is that any more pathetic than cat-picture-websites?
A few people will be more able to do this kind of informal work from home than more formal work for an employer because they are ill and not able to get work, or not able to get support at work.
Good for the OP to have made money doing something he loved, however time spent gaming (or writing useless SAAS apps or mobile applications for that matter) is a waste of good brain cells. Unless something helps our future generations either by providing an example for how to love and care for each other or by furthering humanity's development, it is waste of time.
[In summer 2001] We talked constantly, speculated, made suggestions, argued about how Jedi should work; we were two years from ever even playing and we already had deep and powerful opinions about a game that didn’t exist yet. It was unprecedented.
It was at least a year late for being unprecedented :). I was doing exactly the same in mid-late 2000 with Eve Online.
I played Star Wars Galaxies for 7 years and met a lot of cool people. At times it didn't feel like a Star Wars game but I made the most of it. I didn't agree with some of the changes (both major and minor) but now I appreciate that I was part something great. I miss it from time to time and regret 0 time I spent playing Star Wars Galaxies.
[+] [-] Skywing|14 years ago|reply
When Galaxies was announced, I was in my peak of reverse engineering Blizzard games. I had been reverse engineering the Battle.net client protocol since Diablo 1 and StarCraft. Battle.net had a community full of people who reverse engineered the Blizzard games and there was somewhat of a competition as to who could write the coolest bots, as we called them. Bots were apps that emulated the official clients and could completely sign into Battle.net without using the actual game. Most of mine were just console apps, because I enjoyed the reverse engineering more than the coding.
So, when Galaxies finally came out in beta, a friend of mine luckily got a copy. The computer that I used at that time, which was a shared family computer, was terrible so I didn't expect to play the game, but I did ask him for a copy of the game's directory so that I could start writing Galaxies bots. I focused all of my time on reverse engineering the Galaxies client protocol. I would stay up until the sun came up, staring at the game in a debugger. When a family member need to computer or I had to go to school, I'd hit print on IDA and print out an entire dll - tons of paper. I'd basically annotate the printed out assembly with what I thought was happening and then I'd get home and confirm or deny it with the debugger at run-time. I'd borrow my friends account so that I could see the sign in process in real-time and get packet dumps. I did this for months straight and it never got old.
The end result was a console application that could emulate the official client and sign in to Galaxies, select your character and respond to various events. My friends would level up new character's professions and I'd run them on my terrible computer while we were at school, and over night. I could run many at once with no problem.
While we did not have the in-game success with making tons of money, I did save a lot of money up front on a lot of new computers and tons of copies of Galaxies. :)
[+] [-] jacques_chester|14 years ago|reply
You're the sort of person I like to mention when folk come up with half-assed "encryption" schemes. The kind of person who reads hex for fun.
[+] [-] memoryfault|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nihilocrat|14 years ago|reply
The irony is staggering.
[+] [-] turbinemonkey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larrydag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shivetya|14 years ago|reply
The costs of these items or services in game helps to establish the value of what is traded among players, either directly or through an auction house.
[+] [-] watty|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justjimmy|14 years ago|reply
But it was unsustainable due to new MMOs, new tech and the rise of professional farmers. You had to constantly adapt, see where the game is going, and jump ship before the game collapses. I remember getting calls in the middle of the night from the west coast, asking about my auctions and how it all works and if there was more. And getting interrogated by my mum since I'm getting all these calls from strangers.
Farming by hand, or playing the auction house no longer is the optimal way to go. Now people offer full blown services to play your toon for you, using VM, to mask/hide your IP incase you/they get caught (so you can claim you got hacked), with really good players charging up to thousands of dollars to play your character.
Good times.
EDIT: Now that I thought about it some more, I noticed my pattern at the beginning was doing everything myself, whether is scouring for bargains, farming gold, flipping properties – then I moved on to hiring people within the game and paying them in-game gold for them to farm for me (in SWG, I would provide locations of mineral fields to my 'employee's and set a price ahead of time how much I'd pay per unit, and I'd buy all they have) – then I moved on to automatic botting/scripting in WoW. Interestingly, this aligns somewhat closely to real life industries and how they improve output.
Then I also realized first there was the emergence of sellers (the farmers), then came the companies that has its own farming team in addition to buying pixels from farmers and flipping them for profit. And finally, the arrival of platforms – connecting direct buyers with direct sellers while taking a cut (similar to eBay) – and it's these guys are making the real money – taking zero risks (not worrying about getting caught), providing minimal support and very scalable.
And now the gaming companies wants to keep everything to themselves and take a cut. Blizzard's D3 will be paid close attention to how its Auction House system works out – it will be very, very interesting to see where it all leads.
[+] [-] AnthonBerg|14 years ago|reply
The most significant thing for me was the romanticization. How the guy ascribes emotional significance to a shitty MMO. He's gaming the shitty MMO, just like he is being gamed by the shitty MMO's designers. And it has all this importance to him. Sad, poignant, alarming, eerie.
[+] [-] itmag|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robododo|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder
"At the beginning of the novel, it [Milo's syndicate] is merely a system that gets fresh eggs to his mess hall by buying them in Sicily for one cent, selling them to Malta for four and a half cents, buying them back for seven cents, and finally selling them to the mess halls for five cents."
[+] [-] ktizo|14 years ago|reply
"In a democracy, the government is the people," Milo explained. "We’re people, aren’t we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry."
[+] [-] cdmoyer|14 years ago|reply
The game was released in 2001. In 2003 it had 400,000 subscribers. They released the controversial NGE/CU changes in 2005. It wasn't until 2009 that they shut down about half the servers. And they didn't shut down the game until a new Star Wars MMO was imminent.*
I can't image that most of the market for a Star Wars MMO hadn't tried it, maybe played it quite a bit, and then moved on in the space of 10 years. I understand the desire for things to last forever, but I don't know that most things will.
* Numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, they were culled from wikipedia.
[+] [-] tsotha|14 years ago|reply
What actually kills a game is the lack of new serious players to balance out the slow attrition of the veterans. The temptation for companies running these games is to make them more "accessible" to more casual gamers. But there's a fine line between "accessible" and "not addictive enough to flip people into paying customers".
[+] [-] stinkytaco|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nowarninglabel|14 years ago|reply
Take Gemstone, it's still around after 24 years and still earning money. http://www.play.net/gs4/
[+] [-] dangrossman|14 years ago|reply
http://realmsofdespair.org/ was my MUD of choice as a kid.
[+] [-] trotsky|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unreal37|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobtoh|14 years ago|reply
One of the game mechanics was the concept of ‘buffs’ - basically chemical stimulants your character could consume to temporarily boost critical stats which aided in combat. They were an essential item in PvP (player vs player) combat if you wanted to have that edge and so were in high demand. Buffs could only be made by the ‘doctor’ class and only by the top level doctors. Another critical game mechanic was that the quality of the buff affected how much of a boost you could receive to your stats, and the quality of the buffs was affected by the quality of the raw materials you sourced to make the buff (every resource had a variety of stats - this game was a real minmax-ers delight). The highest quality buffs were the only one that people were interested in buying.
Most of the resources required for the buffs were reasonably easy to find - but there was one which was rare - avian meat. The highest quality avian meat, harvested by killing particular birds, only appeared (real-time) once a month for a few days. Without this avian meat, you could not produce the highest quality buffs.
The first time I made buffs - I happened to time it during the HQ (high quality) avian meat period. I spent hours killing the birds to collect meat. I made my buffs, had a shop near Coronet (the main trading city in the game) and sold out within a few days. And I noticed that all the doctors sold out within days too - and that the last few that had some stock could request extortion prices for their stock. That gave me an idea …
The next month when the avian meat spawned, I parked my character in the main spaceport and keyed up a macro (the game had an in-game macro system). All my macro did was cause my character to shout out every minute “Buying avian meat @ Z credits/piece - sell to my vendor at coords X,Y”. I basically bankrupted myself buying up as much avian meat as I could whilst it was available.
I made up a batch of buffs and started selling them - I ran out after 20 days - but I was now substantially more wealthy! I figured - heck I’m on a good thing - let’s do that the next month. Of course, no good thing goes unnoticed …
The next month, there were three other doctors in the spaceport shouting out that they were buying avian meat. Well this simply would not do! So I basically upped the price I was offering to purchase avian meat above theirs - heck - I was flush with funds from last month so I figured I could out buy them. It turns out I was right - I was able to purchase even more avian meat than the last month and I was able to produce enough HQ buffs to just last the month. Then the third month - this is when the market dynamics got interesting …
By now, several people had noticed that avian meat was in hot demand once a month. In the third month, there were several ‘shouters’ when the HQ avian meat started spawning. Like last month, I upped the price I was willing to offer to price them out of the market - a bidding war erupted, but with my bankroll, I could outbid anyone (although I was cringing how fast I was going through my credits). Like any market, with the prices rising so quick, it changed behaviours - suddenly many of the ‘hunters’ in the game were out killing birds to collect meat. I effectively had my own contractor workforce out hunting avian meat!
By the end of the third HQ avian meat season, I had more meat than I ever had before. I realised I almost had complete control of the buff market on my server so I changed my selling tactics. I made my batch of buffs and started selling them, but I jacked the price up (100% increase) - this time I wanted to be able to continuously sell my buffs to last the full month. Other buff sellers kept selling them at the going rate … so I did the rounds of the cities each night and bought up any HQ buffs which were under my price and added them to my stockpile. By the end of the first week, I was bankrupt although I had a huge stockpile of HQ buffs - but most importantly, virtually every buff vendor was empty … except mine. I jacked my price up even further and did a roaring trade.
Over the next few cycles I cemented my reputation as one of the few reliable buff vendors who could consistently offer the highest quality buffs month-round. With the constant trade and monopoly prices, I was able to further entrench my dominant position each month by continuing to out bid any other doctor who tried to purchase avian meat. There were two other doctors on the server who managed to offer buffs for most of the month, and whilst I never talked to them, I noticed that they never went below whatever price I set. Our little oligopoly had a total lock on the buff market - it was a golden age!
When I quit the game a couple of months later, I had millions in credits which I sold for a few thousand $US. SWG let me play out my monopolistic capitalistic fantasies - how I loved that game :D
[+] [-] zeteo|14 years ago|reply
The "Chinese gold farmer" way is to be in the spaceport all the time and keep outbidding you minimal amounts. At the end of the month, your resource stocks would be bought at the same price, and their quantities proportional to the relative time amounts each of you has spent in the spaceport. So they can sell at the same price as you, or even lower if they value their time less and would accept less profit.
The "lazy" way (my favorite) requires very little capital and very little time. The idea is to seriously outbid you but only offer to buy small quantities. You will only be able to match this bidding war up to a limit, since you're paying very inflated prices and buying a hundred times more than I do. (If you miscalculate, you'll end up with a huge stock of finished products that you can only sell profitably at ten times the previous price, and people will simply not buy.) Once you've reached this limit, you have to allow me into the market, and I'm buying and selling at pretty much the same prices as you do.
[+] [-] xlpz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbritton|14 years ago|reply
The resource spawning system drew my attention, and I ended up spending countless hours developing tracking systems outside the game to both keep track of the current and past spawns as well as keep track of my harvester fleet. I knew almost immediately when the best Rhodium Steel for a particular weapon spawned and would drop every harvester on the strongest vein I could find.
For those unfamiliar with the resource mechanics of SWG, there was a fixed hierarchy of resource types that different crafting recipes required. The more advanced the recipe, the more specific the resource requirement (e.g., Rhodium Steel instead of just Metal). Every couple weeks the current spawn of a given type would dry up and a new one would come along to take its place with different stats. These stats ultimately determined the final stats of items crafted with the resource.
Resources also spawned in "veins" similar to how they're found in real life. The closer to the center of the spawn you were, the more yield your harvesters produced. It was possible to effectively block out any competition by placing enough harvesters on a vein, and this is exactly what I did.
At one point I even started doing "contract" work for the high-end crafters. They would give me a quantity of a resource they wanted and I would deliver it daily as the harvesters collected.
At the end (sometime around when the Jedi questing was introduced) I had amassed enough credits that I was within the top 5-10 on the server I played. I sold it all on eBay and more than paid for my time playing.
[+] [-] cousin_it|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tarks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordlicorice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|14 years ago|reply
I'd also recommend Stephenson's "Reamde", and Stross's "Halting State".
[+] [-] lytfyre|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] withad|14 years ago|reply
Reminds me of Julian Dibbell's "Play Money" [1], where he spends a year trying to make Ultima Online his main source of income.
[1]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Money-Millions-Trading-Virtual/...
[+] [-] masklinn|14 years ago|reply
If you want crazy, you should check Eve Online's economy, it's on a wholly different level and scale.
Especially as CCP (the game developer) takes a cut of real-world to in-game money conversions: you can buy PLEX (1-month account extension) with real money, and it's an in-game item which you can exchange for virtual currency (by selling it to other players).
[+] [-] sek|14 years ago|reply
This story sounds very common today, i tried similar things in WoW but never to earn real money. Common players don't care much about game money, that makes it so easy to exploit the system. In the end it is was fun for myself, but the common player was forced to grind a little more because of people like me.
[+] [-] troels|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] methoddk|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenrikm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyanbane|14 years ago|reply
+1 for Julian Dibbel's book Play Money also. Great read if your into virtual economies, along with Castronova's Synthetic Worlds.
[+] [-] robryan|14 years ago|reply
As the game goes on they try more and more to appeal to the casual gamer which either doesn't have the skills or the time to master the game in the same way. Meaning it becomes hard to really differentiate yourself from others playing the game as most of everyone has pretty good items and didn't have to work hard to acquire them.
Even though I have nowhere near enough time to be a hardcore gamer at anything these days, I still don't think I'd really enjoy playing something causally and having it all handed to me.
[+] [-] drostie|14 years ago|reply
There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?
[+] [-] yvdriess|14 years ago|reply
PS. The above statements are to be taken in context of MMOs with a player-based economy, such as EVE.
[+] [-] spoiledtechie|14 years ago|reply
"Because it wasn’t the game I loved. That game died in 2005 with the NGE/CU. It died when developers turned their backs on the gamers who had spent the effort and instead listened to the lazy, whining voices who wanted it all given to them."
Sounds a lot like the government of today.
[+] [-] Evernoob|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AerieC|14 years ago|reply
"Drawing pictures seems like an incredibly pathetic way to earn a living. Surely those with the intelligence to accomplish such things could contribute their time to something more productive?"
If we all we ever did was "something more productive" the world would be a damn boring place, and one in which I would not want to live.
[+] [-] DanBC|14 years ago|reply
Why is that any more pathetic than cat-picture-websites?
A few people will be more able to do this kind of informal work from home than more formal work for an employer because they are ill and not able to get work, or not able to get support at work.
[+] [-] blahblahhhhhh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] euccastro|14 years ago|reply
It was at least a year late for being unprecedented :). I was doing exactly the same in mid-late 2000 with Eve Online.
[+] [-] MRonney|14 years ago|reply