14 ms·

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produ

by 58x14 5y ago

In the late 2000s, as a teenager, I was gifted a Runescape account. This account had level 80+ woodcutting, allowing one to chop magic trees - which would produce the most expensive lumber in the game. It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. At some point I had realized that there were different sketchy websites that would buy and sell the in-game currency, gold pieces or GP. It was something like $10 to 1M GP. I could chop enough magic logs in about 4-6 hours to make $10. I had a breakthrough. What if I wrote a macro to record my cursor and clicks during my route from the 'bank' (where you can deposit any amount of any material) to the nearby respawning magic tree forest? Weeks went by and I had passive income. Runescape eventually introduced the Grand Exchange, a literal in-game stock market that allowed power users like me to sell much larger quantities of certain items instantly, across all Runescape servers (referred to as Worlds) simultaneously. This required a standardized pricing mechanism, like an order book, where prices of any item would fluctuate based on buy and sell orders. Suddenly, I now could see a +-10% change on the value of my digital assets, on which my passive income was built. I could go on; Runescape in fact taught me much about economics. What's extraordinary is selling Runescape gold led me to Bitcoin, and I've watched cryptocurrency for nearly a decade, seeing trends from a MMO propagate throughout the world. It seems human nature to innovate and stagnate, and the more immediate our collective feedback loops, the quicker these cycles are.

steveylang 5y ago
I'm hoping the rest of the story was you putting some of your magic tree earnings into a few hundred Bitcoins when they cost pennies, and you are now a Runescape multi-millionaire.
jonathan-adly 5y ago
Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.
- jayd16 5y ago
  I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?
  - KarlKemp 5y ago
    You need NFTs to have something to trade with your cryptocurrencies. And you need cryptocurrencies to trade NFTs.
    - jamiek88 5y ago
      Yeah. It’s for those don’t wanna buy drugs.
  - jonathan-adly 5y ago
    Party hats served no purpose whatsoever in the game except as a status symbol (arguably even!). Yet, was worth a lot of money in the game (and a god sum in real life for a high schooler) Humans are emotional animals, utility is a very poor approximation of value.
  - wyre 5y ago
    NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      Except instead of a fixed (or decreasing as people slowly accidentally lose or leave the game with them in their bank) amount anyone can make a new (ugly as hell) party hat any time. Oh and the party hat could just disappear leaving you with a receipt saying you own... something no one can see any more.
  - smolder 5y ago
    A somewhat hard to erase record of which url "belongs" to whom. That, and it gives them the appearance of having some high tech magical properties that will lead to an explosion in value, helping to justify asking prices to the marks.
wswope 5y ago
Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing Runescape botting scripts. Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates a lot of the complexity of “real-world” economics. Funny how outsized that damn game’s influence has been on the world.
tmp_anon_22 5y ago
Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though. > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level * 97 logs (30 minutes) * 293 oaks (1 hr) * 714 willows (2.5 hr) * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours. About 70 hours done inefficiently. > What if I wrote a macro Macros were fine but easily detected due to the repeated patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive to keep the practice going. > Economics Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.
- 58x14 5y ago
  Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It seems many of us share nostalgia around RS.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    When I get really bored I create a new account for fun. I normally realize it’s a waste of time and stop after about 6 hours of clicking trees or ores lol. However it’s always cool to see it’s still there and normally changes quite a bit every time I go back to it. Skills go to 120 nowadays for example!
    - PascLeRasc 5y ago
      You should look into the Old School Runescape game mode. Someone just made a really captivating series limiting his character to just one region of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk5XuqLrf3U&list=PLWiMc19-qaA3u1ZawZQIKAh0BknPvoK8a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk5XuqLrf3U&list=PLWiMc19-qa...
- wswope 5y ago
Kevin_S 5y ago
RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better. Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too. My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work. I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money playing.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  RuneScape was so famous for player scams it's a miracle anyone was willing to open the trading window at all.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money) Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world identity.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - rjbwork 5y ago
    Scamming in games is part of the game. Eve, Runescape, Path of Exile, Ultima Online, etc. These all add friction to trade and uncertainty to in game interactions and allow people to attempt to carve out a scammer career in the game. If it is allowed by the rules of the game then it is part of the game. A part of which players ought to be wary. In Ultima and Eve various groups kept/keep tabs on the scammers and criminals. In Path of Exile, there is a group called The Forbidden Trove that helps the community reduce the risk of being scammed, along with providing dedicated high-reliability traders to get extra income by showing their reliable non-scammy behavior over a long period of time. These are all interesting interactions and systems that developers could totally short circuit with other design choices, but have chosen not to. On the other hand, being scammed definitely sucks.
M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago
how did you find btc via rs?
- 58x14 5y ago
  Others in this thread mentioned similar patterns of acquiring and selling virtual assets. PayPal was a common money transfer platform and eBay was a common marketplace (before they banned the sale of digital items). I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC was a functional alternative.
originalvichy 5y ago
I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues. MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.)
- bserge 5y ago
- mikhmha 5y ago
  I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot for wasting time on video games. But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork, came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with people - and that is a valuable experience. Unfortunately modern MMO’s are very asocial games and I don’t think much can be learned from them.
danShumway 5y ago
I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game. Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it. I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase. I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.
- unkulunkulu 5y ago
  > I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :) The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
- 5y ago
rapind 5y ago
In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow. Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert). Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits… once you’ve been bitten by the exploit bug…). In retrospect I regret it. I’m a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and efficient over the years. The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect has been lost.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world transactions from altering the play of the game, which is really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money transfer between players, some subset of the player base will view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have the time to put into the game, they can still get help progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the market to support their power fantasies (which of course include flexing that power on other players). There are valid uses for that market though, such as those aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to experience the game. > In retrospect I regret it. It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game the first time through. If you take away a significant portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find it's less fun too.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti money laundering laws. I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.
redisman 5y ago
I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most ridiculously priced assets in the game. The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all night as long as you did your part . You would get a captcha if you did the same thing for too long
gjs278 5y ago
DonHopkins 5y ago
Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181 I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons. One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move. That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!) I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons. My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal. I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service. The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight. And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player. You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time. There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way. So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions. One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on. So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up. When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service! It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing. So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier", which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog. Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content. Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface. And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects. You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer. That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them. Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia_i.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia... Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma" http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse_mafia_or_why_to.html http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...
Arubis 5y ago
If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde
- 58x14 5y ago
  Wow, thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my reading list!
jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. [laughs in agility] Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.
- oblio 5y ago
  > For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago. Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
  - jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
    I'm fairly sure all scams are illegal regardless of the asset because a scam is by definition fraud which is illegal.
mancerayder 5y ago
Anyone interested in some nostalgia? Long ago there was an MMO called Ultima Online. At one point gold on there reached the point that it was more expensive than the Italian lira. This was in a kooky time in 1999 when everything was at a peak. Here's the old article. The NYT just wasn't having it. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW THE NEW ECONOMY Money for Nothing A new breed of Internet profiteers is spinning virtual gold into hard currency. By JOHN COOK Fixer-upper w/moat: The real market for imaginary property in Ultima is booming. enjamin Schriefer and Michael Gmeinwieser make money the new-fashioned way: they sell stuff that doesn't exist. And their customers, who pay them in cold, hard cash, don't mind one bit. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990808mag-tech-ultima.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine...
- almost_usual 5y ago
  I remember castles in Ultima Online going for thousands of dollars around then on eBay. I think an 800pt Grandmaster build character went for a couple hundred dollars to $1k depending on the skill set. I knew someone at the time who bought a brand new sports car with all the money they made off Ultima Online. I honestly miss the game, had a blast playing it back in the day.
dools 5y ago
Seems like it taught you a lot about finance, which is different from economics.
d1lanka 5y ago
From https://medium.com/loom-network/blockchain-games-the-biggest-trojan-horse-that-experts-won-t-see-coming-and-the-startling-1846eb412aba https://medium.com/loom-network/blockchain-games-the-biggest...: > "I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell. > I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit." — Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum

by 58x14 5y ago

steveylang 5y ago

I'm hoping the rest of the story was you putting some of your magic tree earnings into a few hundred Bitcoins when they cost pennies, and you are now a Runescape multi-millionaire.

jonathan-adly 5y ago

Very similar story here.. I had a few party hats in Runescape which made the whole NFT thing and to a lesser extent Bitcoin so much easier to understand.

jayd16 5y ago
I still don't get it. We already sold digital assets so why do we need NFTs or Blockchain? What does it add here?
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  You need NFTs to have something to trade with your cryptocurrencies. And you need cryptocurrencies to trade NFTs.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Yeah. It’s for those don’t wanna buy drugs.
- jonathan-adly 5y ago
  Party hats served no purpose whatsoever in the game except as a status symbol (arguably even!). Yet, was worth a lot of money in the game (and a god sum in real life for a high schooler) Humans are emotional animals, utility is a very poor approximation of value.
- wyre 5y ago
  NFTs are the equivalent of decentralized RS party hats.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Except instead of a fixed (or decreasing as people slowly accidentally lose or leave the game with them in their bank) amount anyone can make a new (ugly as hell) party hat any time. Oh and the party hat could just disappear leaving you with a receipt saying you own... something no one can see any more.
- smolder 5y ago
  A somewhat hard to erase record of which url "belongs" to whom. That, and it gives them the appearance of having some high tech magical properties that will lead to an explosion in value, helping to justify asking prices to the marks.

wswope 5y ago

Similar to your story, I learned how to program by writing Runescape botting scripts. Fast forward to today, and my hobby tech project for the past few months has been building a OSRS market-intel website for trading on the Grand Exchange. Great toy market that eliminates a lot of the complexity of “real-world” economics. Funny how outsized that damn game’s influence has been on the world.

tmp_anon_22 5y ago

Nitpicks because this game was my childhood. I totally support your sentiment though. > It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this skill level * 97 logs (30 minutes) * 293 oaks (1 hr) * 714 willows (2.5 hr) * 19,246 maple (very inefficient compared to willow cutting rate - 60 hour). If you did yews it would be many hundreds of hours. About 70 hours done inefficiently. > What if I wrote a macro Macros were fine but easily detected due to the repeated patterns. Botting in general was the wild west in this game from about 2008 - ~2014. Interesting how botting numbers drastically inflated player counts and engagement and the company Jagex became a private equity darling getting bought and sold several times, its almost like they had an incentive to keep the practice going. > Economics Absolutely. I learned devops managing really inefficient gold farms that got free servers from the Azure promotions when Microsoft cloud launched.

58x14 5y ago
Delightful, I very nearly stopped my stream of consciousness to check the numbers, I wondered if anyone else would. It seems many of us share nostalgia around RS.
- exdsq 5y ago
  When I get really bored I create a new account for fun. I normally realize it’s a waste of time and stop after about 6 hours of clicking trees or ores lol. However it’s always cool to see it’s still there and normally changes quite a bit every time I go back to it. Skills go to 120 nowadays for example!
  - PascLeRasc 5y ago
    You should look into the Old School Runescape game mode. Someone just made a really captivating series limiting his character to just one region of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk5XuqLrf3U&list=PLWiMc19-qaA3u1ZawZQIKAh0BknPvoK8a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk5XuqLrf3U&list=PLWiMc19-qa...
wswope 5y ago

Kevin_S 5y ago

RS was the perfect game for me and dramatically changed my life. Started when I was 12, played for YEARS slowly getting better. Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money). Got into botting with some friends, made a little money doing that too. My experience with RS led me to an interest in economics, and I'm now an accounting PhD student about to graduate. My bro got into coding bots, and is now an SWE doing high level work. I love the game to pieces, and it isn't because I made money playing.

whatshisface 5y ago
RuneScape was so famous for player scams it's a miracle anyone was willing to open the trading window at all.
shkkmo 5y ago
> Discovered staking and scamming at the duel arena. Invented a new scam and made bils. Made a sizeable chunk over a couple years (enough to pay all my bills in college and a LOT of beer money) Do you feel any remorse or regret about scamming people out of thousands of dollars? I am a bit surprised that you are bragging about this sort of unethical\illegal behavior on an account directly tied to your real world identity.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rjbwork 5y ago
  Scamming in games is part of the game. Eve, Runescape, Path of Exile, Ultima Online, etc. These all add friction to trade and uncertainty to in game interactions and allow people to attempt to carve out a scammer career in the game. If it is allowed by the rules of the game then it is part of the game. A part of which players ought to be wary. In Ultima and Eve various groups kept/keep tabs on the scammers and criminals. In Path of Exile, there is a group called The Forbidden Trove that helps the community reduce the risk of being scammed, along with providing dedicated high-reliability traders to get extra income by showing their reliable non-scammy behavior over a long period of time. These are all interesting interactions and systems that developers could totally short circuit with other design choices, but have chosen not to. On the other hand, being scammed definitely sucks.

M5x7wI3CmbEem10 5y ago

how did you find btc via rs?

58x14 5y ago
Others in this thread mentioned similar patterns of acquiring and selling virtual assets. PayPal was a common money transfer platform and eBay was a common marketplace (before they banned the sale of digital items). I stopped using PayPal for... a number of reasons, and BTC was a functional alternative.

originalvichy 5y ago

I wonder if we’ll have politicians and political philosophers in the near future who will credit MMO games for awakening their keen eye on societal issues. MMO worlds and their economies taught many how the basics of our economy works. As a kid you got exposed to virtual versions of negative aspects of free markets that went against the meritocratic ethos of the game. (Especially if you were one of the kids not permitted to use money to buy virtual currency.)

bserge 5y ago
mikhmha 5y ago
I wonder the same. Played MMOs growing up. Got scolded a lot for wasting time on video games. But I look back now and realize a lot of my foundational knowledge on economics, programming, networking, teamwork, came from MMORPGS. They are social games where you deal with people - and that is a valuable experience. Unfortunately modern MMO’s are very asocial games and I don’t think much can be learned from them.

danShumway 5y ago

I know a lot of people have fond memories of this kind of thing, but from a designer perspective, is it good that a game is so boring that players are willing to pay real-world money to skip parts of it? Runescape set up a system that was so grind-heavy that players broke server rules and wrote automated scripts to grind for them, and other players gave them money to do that. Because the minute-to-minute gameplay of Runescape was bad; people were willing to pay $10 of real money to remove 4-6 hours of gameplay from the game. Well frankly, that's 4-6 hours of gameplay should never have been in the game in the first place. Players should not feel bored playing your game for that long, certainly not bored enough to pay money to get out of it. I have no doubt that learning how to exploit these systems was really fun for people, because learning how to exploit systems and build macros and read economic signals and avoid detection from a company is genuinely really interesting, fascinating work. It's just a shame that the only way Runescape could (inadvertently) enable that experience for people was to make a crappy grind process for an even larger portion of their playerbase. I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. And I think that perspective is worth keeping when we look at play-to-earn games. These are boring games, and some people are doing some fun economics stuff on top of them. That doesn't make the core gameplay any less boring though, and the fun economics stuff only works because a lot of other players are having a miserable time with the intended mechanics. I don't like praising a design ethos that says that a nontrivial portion of your players will be bored and will pay someone else to play the game for them.

unkulunkulu 5y ago
> I can't get away from thinking of the experience 58x14 is describing is a failure of game design. 58x14 has fond memories of this because they were playing an entirely different much more exciting hacking game than the crappy grind that Runescape's designers had built and intended for the majority of their playerbase. I can’t stop myself from reading this as an argument about the real world :) The grinding pricess certainly gets boring sometimes so we begin hacking a more exciting game on top of it for sure ;)
5y ago

rapind 5y ago

In my early 20s I played an MMO called Asherons Call. I discovered a vendor in one high level area that would sell bows for less than a specific vendor in a low level area would buy them, netting you a small margin per bow. Being a programmer I wrote a script that used two different teleport skills (lifestone and portal recall I think?) and a bit of movement and clicking based on pixel (Color) matching to deal with latency, tweaking it over time, and started printing in game money. I would come home from work to a backpack full of D notes (unit of currency I adapted my script to convert). Then I would sell these D notes on eBay. Did this for a few months. First month I made over 7k USD (I shit you not). 2nd month about 3.5k, maybe 1k third month, so basically the market collapsed and I moved on (to other fun exploits… once you’ve been bitten by the exploit bug…). In retrospect I regret it. I’m a total hypocrite saying this, but I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs, and gotten far more advanced and efficient over the years. The fun I had in AC before I started doing this stuff is something I wish more people could experience, but I suspect has been lost.

kbenson 5y ago
> I think this sort of crap has ruined MMOs Once you start allowing (or failing to prevent) real world transactions from altering the play of the game, which is really hard to do while still allowing any sort of item/money transfer between players, some subset of the player base will view their effort as devalued. Some other part of the player base will be delighted that while they don't necessarily have the time to put into the game, they can still get help progressing. There are of course the fringes of those that devote themselves to supporting this market or exploiting the market to support their power fantasies (which of course include flexing that power on other players). There are valid uses for that market though, such as those aforementioned players that don't have time but would like to not be stuck for inordinate amounts of time at certain power levels. Basically, the same reason some games have difficulty levels. Some people want the challenge, others just want to experience the game. > In retrospect I regret it. It's sort of like allowing yourself to use a cheat in a game the first time through. If you take away a significant portion of the challenge when that's one of the things you're there for, the game can become much less fun. Other times, it just becomes a game within a game where you're playing market trader or whatever, which is fun while money/resources are still scarce, but then less fun after they aren't because of your wealth, and then you return to the main game to find it's less fun too.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Yes but games now actively have to fight this or they become a Money transfer agent and then you have to comply with anti money laundering laws. I think that Bitcoin and Ethereum tie a lot of things together that make them weaker but are great technological achievements. Eventually governments will regulate them properly and the whole environmental impact needs at least a layer two solution.

redisman 5y ago

I traded custom scripts on a IRC channel. People would pay me with party hats and Santa hats which were some of the most ridiculously priced assets in the game. The macro client even had a captcha queue where other miners could earn credits by filling out the captchas other players were getting and then use the credits to have other people fill out their captcha. This way you could leave it running all night as long as you did your part . You would get a captcha if you did the same thing for too long

gjs278 5y ago

DonHopkins 5y ago

Here's a story about The Sims Online I posted a few years ago, in which I described making a maze solving bot to quickly and automatically generate millions of Simoleons, and an ad-hoc solution to the delivery problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11730181 I wrote a bot for The Sims Online that manufactured Simoleons, then repurposed it to catalog and describe objects in the game for you with a speech synthesizer. TSO had some ham-fisted money making multi player games that forced players to interact with each other in exchange for Simoleons. One of them was a maze solving game for two players, where one player is lost in the maze and can see the local walls around them, and the other player can see an overall map of the maze without the player's position, and has to guide them around and figure out where they are and how to guide them out by asking them what they see and telling them which direction to move. That required a lot of work for two people to do manually, so there was a big reward, but it was trivial and fun to solve mazes programmatically! (Plus it made cool bleeping and kaching sounds as it solved the mazes and printed money!) I would run two TSO clients at the same time, logged into different accounts in different windows. The bot attached to both of them, then screen scraped pixels and injected events to repeatedly solve mazes by moving the player around until it identified where they were, solving for the shortest path, and bringing them straight home quickly by machine-gun clicking on the arrow buttons. My housemate had a good eBay reputation, so as an experiment, we tried selling Simoleons on eBay for real currency via PayPal. I could generate arbitrarily huge amount of virtual currency quite quickly. The bottleneck was selling it, and the problem was customer service. The problem was that many of the customers were pouty temperamental 15-year-olds using their parent's eBay accounts, who would give scathing eBay reviews if their order wasn't delivered instantly, or they suffered some imagined slight. And the other problem was that TSO just wasn't designed to make it easy to transfer large amounts of Simoleons from player to player. You couldn't just "wire" somebody an arbitrary amount of cash via in-game email -- you had to show up on their lot and meet them at a specific real time, and suspiciously hand it over to them $1000 at a time. There was another better way to transfer cash more efficiently than handing it over grand by grand, and that was with tip jars: You could fill a tip jar with $5000 using the pie menu with a couple of mouse clicks, and then the user could empty it the same way. So when I had to deliver our first million Simoleons, I came up with a system where I'd go to the lot of the customer and meet them, then ask them to line up a bunch of tip jars in a row. I would then use bot macros to fill each tip jar one by one with $5000, while the customer would quickly empty them as I filled them up, and then we'd go back to the beginning of the row and start all over again, until we'd transferred the entire million Simoleons, in only 200 $5000 hand=>jar=>hand transactions instead of 1000 $1000 hand=>hand transactions. One time when we were making a big delivery of cash, running the gauntlet of tip jars in our customer's living room (which I admit looked pretty fishy), and their housemate came home, saw what was happening, and wisely sussed up the situation that there was some kind of deal going down, that she wanted in on. So she put her own tip jar down at the end of her housemate's row of tip jars, and I blithely deposited $5000 into her tip jar several times, which she immediately snapped up. When I realized what happened, instead of contracting The Sims Mafia to do a hit on her, I congratulated her for her loose morals and ingenuity. It was such a great hack, and I totally fell for it, and had more Simoleons than I knew what to do with anyway. It's all about good customer service! It was a fun experiment, but other bots and offshore farmers were starting to work the system too, and customer service and delivery problems made it not worth continuing. So the unemployed Sims bot wouldn't feel bored, I retrained it into a more practical assistive utility called "Simplifier", which knew how to recognize and navigate the Sims user interface to show, scroll through, and enumerate all the many items, wallpapers, floor tiles, etc, in the catalog. Simplifier demo starts at 3:15: https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s https://youtu.be/Imu1v3GecB8?t=3m15s It took snapshots of the icons, and read the text off the screen to capture the title, price and description (it was all in a bitmap Comic Sans font, so it was easy for a bot to recognize, if not for your eyes to read), and made a searchable illustrated database of all your built-in and downloaded content. Simplifier addressed the problem that many players would download thousands of objects from web sites, or make their own custom objects with tools like Transmogrifier and RugOMatic (shown earlier in the demo video), but it was impossible to search or keep track of them through The Sims interface. And it was useful for Sims web site publishers to make illustrated catalogs of their own objects. You could also operate it in manual mode, where you press and hold on an icon in the catalog, and it reads the object description to you with a speech synthesizer. That was useful for kids learning to read, old farts with bad eyesight, and snobby designers who hate Comic Sans, who would enjoy having the object descriptions read to them. Schneier on Security: Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia_i.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/virtual_mafia... Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass: Building Web Reputation Systems: The Dollhouse Mafia, or "Don't Display Negative Karma" http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse_mafia_or_why_to.html http://buildingreputation.com/writings/2009/10/the_dollhouse...

Arubis 5y ago

If you haven't already read it (or, heck, even if you have), I _strongly_ suspect you'd have a blast with Neal Stephenson's _REAMDE_: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde

58x14 5y ago
Wow, thanks for the recommendation, I've added it to my reading list!

jallen_dot_dev 5y ago

> It took a staggering number of real hours to achieve this [woodcutting] level, we're talking several hundred hours minimum. [laughs in agility] Anyway I agree with Runescape teaching some real world skills. Runescape (and some other multiplayer games) also taught me about scams and I think trained me to be skeptical whenever something seems too good to be true. For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago.

oblio 5y ago
> For a really basic example, that opportunity to double your BTC that Elon Musk is always offering his followers is literally the gp doubling scam, the most common Runescape scam from 2 decades ago. Isn't this kind of thing illegal with real assets?
- jallen_dot_dev 5y ago
  I'm fairly sure all scams are illegal regardless of the asset because a scam is by definition fraud which is illegal.

mancerayder 5y ago

Anyone interested in some nostalgia? Long ago there was an MMO called Ultima Online. At one point gold on there reached the point that it was more expensive than the Italian lira. This was in a kooky time in 1999 when everything was at a peak. Here's the old article. The NYT just wasn't having it. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW THE NEW ECONOMY Money for Nothing A new breed of Internet profiteers is spinning virtual gold into hard currency. By JOHN COOK Fixer-upper w/moat: The real market for imaginary property in Ultima is booming. enjamin Schriefer and Michael Gmeinwieser make money the new-fashioned way: they sell stuff that doesn't exist. And their customers, who pay them in cold, hard cash, don't mind one bit. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990808mag-tech-ultima.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/magazine...

almost_usual 5y ago
I remember castles in Ultima Online going for thousands of dollars around then on eBay. I think an 800pt Grandmaster build character went for a couple hundred dollars to $1k depending on the skill set. I knew someone at the time who bought a brand new sports car with all the money they made off Ultima Online. I honestly miss the game, had a blast playing it back in the day.

dools 5y ago

Seems like it taught you a lot about finance, which is different from economics.

d1lanka 5y ago

From https://medium.com/loom-network/blockchain-games-the-biggest-trojan-horse-that-experts-won-t-see-coming-and-the-startling-1846eb412aba https://medium.com/loom-network/blockchain-games-the-biggest...: > "I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007–2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock’s Siphon Life spell. > I cried myself to sleep, and on that day I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. I soon decided to quit." — Vitalik Buterin, Creator of Ethereum