Me and a buddy (him being the brains of the operation) made quite a profitable trade hacking EQ and WOW, for a time. He's the name behind a number of (now ille

Me and a buddy (him being the brains of the operation) made quite a profitable trade hacking EQ and WOW, for a time. He's the name behind a number of (now illegal) tools for WoW and EQ, and what we were doing was in very clear violation of the terms of service. We did well for ourselves -- I won't speak to my numbers (except to say that my buddy did better), but I know he cleared well over $200k just on EverQuest hacking. When WOW was in closed beta, we paid a few hundred for beta invites. We would get banned all the time, and have to spend another few hundred for a beta invite. When WOW was released, in the few short months before Blizzard exhausted all the hacks we'd found, we were buying, on average, a new copy of the game per day, for each of us. The challenge was awesome. Some of the hacks were brilliant, some, pedestrian. Generally, the more mundane hacks were the easiest to exploit -- for example, by intercepting the 'sendMail()' function, we were able to substitute the value of gold we actually sent with an arbitrary one -- as Blizz wasn't checking signed vs unsigned ints on their data types, sending -1 copper to a cohort meant they would receive 65,535 copper on their end. When the game was new, this was ridiculous, as there probably wasn't 1,000 gold in the entire economy at that point that was legitimately gotten. This was difficult, it was challenging, and yeah, every now and again we'd get a little paranoid at a noise outside, imagining it was a SWAT team ready to breach our house for having violated Blizzard's terms of service. The highs were high, and the lows weren't that bad, since we were making tons of dough. I cannot imagine the amount of time and energy it takes to farm $2000 worth of gold without these hacks, but I can only guess that it is insane.