How much real money have MMOs made you?

lost said:

I could see that working for bazaar, everquest 2, ESO for sure. has a market place aka an auction house so script lists the item he never has to hand it to a unique player. also can buy materials on the auction house, path it back and forth from crafting to auction house. after honorbuddy id believe anything is possible.

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Yeah from what I know the scripts buy the materials, crafts, and automatically list the stuff in the auction house. The more interesting part of the scripts is that it will keep track of the daily average market price and automatically change the price of his listed items to right under average. I've asked him about this before because I figured if someone noticed what he was doing they could screw him over by listing things extremely cheap, ultimately driving down his listed prices. His solution for this is that the script automatically buys any item that gets listed under the average market price for that day. That isn't just for the same items he's listing, it's for all items. So basically his script also buys/resells in the marketplace constantly as well. He can also choose to set a standard price for every individual item in the game or set a starting price that gradually increases and use the script to control the market prices as it will automatically buy and relist any item that is listed under his set price. It's similar to how people raise the prices of krono on EQ but just done wide scale by a script. The only work he has to do after the script is running is selling whatever the currency is for that game on a site for real money.

Nissir said:

Wouldn't have Riot have noticed an influx of millions of dollars worth of skins? If not, that is crazy.

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Ravishing said:

Probably depends what server these skin codes were for and other factors. A billion dollar company can lose track of a few mill rather easily. Game companies usually don't have all tools in place to track this stuff right away.

I'm actually more surprised that a Skin Code generator could work outside Riot's servers tbh.

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So back in the beginning seasons of League, Riot would host dozens of small scale tournaments across the US. Individuals could also host tournaments and have Riot sponsor them by filling out a simple form online, and Riot would provide the prizes. From my understanding according to articles that were written about it, at the very beginning of League (small indie company btw) Riot would actually provide this device at the tournaments that generated skin codes to be given out to winners and attendees and someone stole one of the devices and I'm assuming copied the software inside. This software could generate any skin code in the game you wanted on any server.

The reason that Riot didn't do anything about it for so long is because there were so many events where Riot would hand out hundreds or thousands of skin code cards to special skins that either you had to attend the event to get (like the PAX skin line) or were only available in the Riot store for limited time and never sold again. These skin code cards had no expiration date and hundreds of them were put up on ebay and went for ridiculous prices because you could no longer buy the skins in the store and were marketed as skins that would never be resold. The way the original and longest running skin site marketed themselves is that all skins on their site were limited supply based on how many skin code cards they were able to acquire. So that's what everyone thought at least as far as the customers, that this site was just buying skin code cards and reselling them. In reality the skins on their site were never limited supply at all though as they would be automatically generated and sent to you upon your purchase. The skins ranged anywhere from $45 at the cheapest to over $1k at the most expensive. Now if Riot knew what was going on or not at the beginning is unclear, but regardless they weren't really losing any money from this skin shop because it only sold skins that were no longer available in the Riot store.

It wasn't until the original skin shop started getting greedy and began selling the software to other investors looking to open up their own skin sites, thus began the birth of dozens of skin shop sites. Then one of the newer skin sites decided to start sponsoring all the biggest twitch streamers. This is what prompted Riot to quickly take action and their solution was just expiring all existing unused skin codes and creating an entirely new skin code generator system.

Vepil said:

Pled the fifth. Started in eq dupping progressed to botting in swg selling credits. Then using exploits to + gear in lineage 2 and turn for quick profit. Archeage was another good one with so many exploits you could make lots of cash quickly. While bot farming could turn a profit, exploits is where the gains were made quickly.

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Just curious, what exploits did Archeage have? I only played that game for the first month of release and I actually really enjoyed the game overall but quit because I hated how you had to pay real money to craft and do skill ups with labor. I had already invested almost $300 in that game with founders packages etc on release and didn't really want to keep sinking money just so I could continue to labor.

Almost 400k spread out over 8 years, kind of a shame it also included 40 work weeks and a daily commute of about an hour.

Back on TZ we had some rich Sheikh(or his kid) buying all the top geared characters for thousands. Ended up selling my DE Enchanter on TZ for 3k some time in luclin I believe, it was just an alt I used to power level myself at that point, but he was geared well and in the top raiding guild.

Atabishi said:

Just curious, what exploits did Archeage have? I only played that game for the first month of release and I actually really enjoyed the game overall but quit because I hated how you had to pay real money to craft and do skill ups with labor. I had already invested almost $300 in that game with founders packages etc on release and didn't really want to keep sinking money just so I could continue to labor.

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If you watch the Death of a Game of Archeage, I feel like 1/4 of his footage is of someone teleporting around.

Heck, in that first month you should've seen all the hackers who were stealing up all the land claims or whatever. It's what ruined the game for a lot of people. We were sold on being able to build a house and garden and shit, but most people couldn't because hackers grabbed them all.

Gravel said:

If you watch the Death of a Game of Archeage, I feel like 1/4 of his footage is of someone teleporting around.

Heck, in that first month you should've seen all the hackers who were stealing up all the land claims or whatever. It's what ruined the game for a lot of people. We were sold on being able to build a house and garden and shit, but most people couldn't because hackers grabbed them all.

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I didn't play beta so I actually didn't know much about the house/garden stuff on day 1 release. The draw of the game for me was the pvp aspect. I do remember though that I was one of the first people to log in on the server I chose and within a couple hours I remember hearing that all the land was already taken. I just assumed that it was by people who played beta and understood how important the land was, never really thought about hacks.

Punko said:

He had one of the best geared bards serverwide, as you know.

He also had one of the largest LoN (legends of norrath, EQ card game which you fund with real money) collections, I mean he had dozens of every mount, illusion, weapon augment, clicky, .. tons of shit, at least worth 5k$ back then.

From one day to the next he was no longer appearing in LoN for trading, and no longer logged into EQ.

I contacted him on a forum, he told me he had quit, "no longer had an interest in the game".

Basically his ass got banned, for god knows what reason, I'm sure it must have been excessive. He was into it for the money, and he couldn't have offloaded all those assets / accounts without them ever appearing again. A top 3 serverwide bard doesn't just poof, even if you banked it for 2 years and got it a namechange, it would have been noticed, since the bard community was tiny.

Mortalis was nice. I miss @Neric.

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I just randomly found this post after I was searching for some old Mortalis information. I actually barely spend any RL cash for direct LoN Card puchases at all, I bought that LoN gear in EverQuest itself via the in-game currency platinum. I was into it to stay #1 Bard after there was a vacancy following Thott's departure, but already somewhat lost interest after the original Mortalis disbanded / merged into Tide. I never really felt that much at home in Tide and whatever that other nice american guild I servermoved to later was called, It's a huge difference if you help build a community yourself and see it grow or just join along the way.

Back to Tolpan, here is the story:
What I did was create characters on all servers, run to the next Luclin portal and up to the marketplace to compare prices. At that time they had introduced relatively cheap server transfers of single or multiple characters at once. Already starting with a good fortune of platinum, I bought wares on my origin server and moved them to a server where I wanted to go on a real shopping spree. There I unloaded them fast for a already nice profit, bought tons of wares on that 1st server I moved to, knowing they wound be worth 4x or more on the next server, even if threw them on the market really fast and cheap. After servermoving the marketplace character again to the 2nd server, I managed to multiply my platinum - just to return to my origin server again with lots of cheap stuff that I wanted myself or could resell for another profit. Such a 3-Server ringtrade took about 2-3 Weeks, and I repeated it several times. But people on the other servers started complaining.

My Tolpan- and one of my twink-accounts were temporarily banned due to "disruption of server economies". After me getting in contact with SoE they were unbanned after a few weeks with all gear including purchased stuff fully intact, however more platinum than most people could ever dream of permanently deleted. That's why I quit and went to play some other games, mostly Aion where I had lots of fun and met some really nice and competent people that I still know in RL to this day

I still own that Tolpan Account, but only ever logged on 2 or 3 times after that like a decade ago.

LachiusTZ said:

Did he buy Kamzan?

There was also that triad guy up in Canada, bought several accounts, then was dead. Lol

Buddy of mine made maybe 5k selling fungi tunics.

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He bought at least a dozen accounts from Pandemonium, most he paid 5k+ for. A lot of times he'd buy the char and still let the original owner use it, dude was pretty chill

Funny seeing this because I was just talking about this a couple of days ago. The first time I ever made ‘real’ money in my life was from selling my WoW account. I was only 16 or maybe 17 by the time it sold.

I started playing EverQuest (and other shit) extremely young and usually just kept quiet and played my best and managed to sneak my way in to a pretty high skill bracket of guys (including some of you motherfuckers, astonishingly). I played on and off because I was a kid and didn’t have the time to put in so I started learned everything I could about stats and the applied math, raids, strategies, exploits, etc. to maximize my play time with efficiency and do what I could.

WoW comes around, I’m in the beta, I love it, I gear up for Day 1 release. Learned as much as possible and was even close to being the first level 60 on the server (think it was an UD Rogue named Dex? Crazy how I can remember dumb shit like that. Anyway.) but it was becoming a total clusterfuck and when they announced new servers, I was all over that shit. I made a Night Elf Hunter on Archimonde (I think?) on release day and created a guild. Fast forward a little bit and I was leading the #2-3 guild on the server and we were like #2 for server Onyxia and Ragnaros which gained us some mad traction. I was still in high school but basically coming home and playing until like four fucking AM and sleeping for three hours and going back to school over and over, lmao. I loved my guild homies, we had a dope website, solid group of people and all but I was starting to burn out. I was there for every raid, every time someone needed help, etc but I also PvP’d constantly and basically just did WSG and shit until I completely fried. There really wasn’t much content for us back then.
One day I randomly put my account description, but vague on details, on eBay and some other private RMT websites and forums for a ridiculous price positive that no one would buy it, but if they did, fucking sweet. My character at the time though was unbelievably stacked with an amazing reputation but I just didn’t think anyone would actually buy this fake shit for thousands of dollars. I had some offers but they were pretty low, not enough to make me actually give up my account. About a week or two after the listing, I got a message on the websites I was trying to sell on from a random person who was like ‘Are you X? If so, I am interested but need proof.’ or some shit. This dude nailed it, and I guess somehow I listed some gear and character combination that really could have only been so many people on the server at the time and I hadn’t even thought about it. I was nervous AF for a second and thought it was some goddamn Blizzard sting operation and I was in big trouble, hahah. He sent me a few more messages and eventually I realized he was just an observant dude who really wanted to buy my account. I wasn’t a piece of shit about it. I told my guild, offloaded a ton of resources and gold to the homies, changed Guild leadership and all that. I eventually sold that character (nothing else on the account) for $2,790. I’ll never forget that number because it was the first time in my life I ever had more than like, $100. Ended up turning it into an investment that allowed me to make my way into an Art Institute for Audio Engineering. Never got to finish the degree due to some medical issues, but still cool. Kinda neat to think all those hours spent grinding away and having fun in an MMO had a direct impact on my future in a really tangible way. What also blows my mind is that the dude I sold it to and the way these transactions work require an insane amount of trust. I basically logged in, met him in game and showed him my character and proved it was me, and he literally PayPal’d me thousands of dollars. I never wanted to scam anyone, but I can only imagine how easy that shit is dude. I’m sure you’d eat shit for it eventually but I was completely stunned when I saw it go through.
What’s hilarious is my Dad used to play EQ with me, so he totally understood the situation when I told him I needed a fucking bank account to transfer a couple grand to from selling some video game shit. My Dad used to buy plat in EQ from Yancy LMAO. He was like hell yeah, son. Good times.

Punko said:

He had one of the best geared bards serverwide, as you know.

He also had one of the largest LoN (legends of norrath, EQ card game which you fund with real money) collections, I mean he had dozens of every mount, illusion, weapon augment, clicky, .. tons of shit, at least worth 5k$ back then.

From one day to the next he was no longer appearing in LoN for trading, and no longer logged into EQ.

I contacted him on a forum, he told me he had quit, "no longer had an interest in the game".

Basically his ass got banned, for god knows what reason, I'm sure it must have been excessive. He was into it for the money, and he couldn't have offloaded all those assets / accounts without them ever appearing again. A top 3 serverwide bard doesn't just poof, even if you banked it for 2 years and got it a namechange, it would have been noticed, since the bard community was tiny.

Mortalis was nice. I miss @Neric.

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I was in Mortalis