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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 simila

by sek 15y ago

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.

troels 15y ago
I think the case is that if a game grows large enough, it will inevitably develop an economy. It's just a natural aspect of human society.
methoddk 15y ago
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.
- sek 15y ago
  WoW is extremely easy to exploit, because there are so few players in the market and so many important items. I made artificial scarcities before raids started, it did this over a few months or so until somebody made bets against me and from this point we attacked each others strategies. It was just fun for me, i had no financial involvement. It was probably similar to old days on the wall street, when you get too many savvy players it get's difficult. I thought about trading algorithms, but feared Blizzard will close my account if they find out.
  - zmj 15y ago
    I wrote an Auction House bot and ran it for most of a year without any interference from Blizzard. It was a simple poll/buy/sell script against a price database that I maintained. When Blizzard launched the web interface to the auction house, they also exposed a bunch of JSON accepting/returning URLs that implemented searching, buying, and selling. The URLs and their parameters were easily reverse-engineerable from the web Auction House's javascript. I had to log in to that account once or twice a week to manage inventory space, but other than that it was autonomous. My trading account was flagged only twice - once because I mailed a large amount of gold to my main character, and once because I intercepted some items that a gold seller was using to launder hacked gold. In short, Blizzard's involvement with their economy is entirely focused on policing RMT. They don't care how players manipulate markets.
    - intended 15y ago
      Thats pretty cool. Did you hit the gold cap, and do you still run the programs?

by sek 15y ago

troels 15y ago

I think the case is that if a game grows large enough, it will inevitably develop an economy. It's just a natural aspect of human society.

methoddk 15y ago

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.

sek 15y ago
WoW is extremely easy to exploit, because there are so few players in the market and so many important items. I made artificial scarcities before raids started, it did this over a few months or so until somebody made bets against me and from this point we attacked each others strategies. It was just fun for me, i had no financial involvement. It was probably similar to old days on the wall street, when you get too many savvy players it get's difficult. I thought about trading algorithms, but feared Blizzard will close my account if they find out.
- zmj 15y ago
  I wrote an Auction House bot and ran it for most of a year without any interference from Blizzard. It was a simple poll/buy/sell script against a price database that I maintained. When Blizzard launched the web interface to the auction house, they also exposed a bunch of JSON accepting/returning URLs that implemented searching, buying, and selling. The URLs and their parameters were easily reverse-engineerable from the web Auction House's javascript. I had to log in to that account once or twice a week to manage inventory space, but other than that it was autonomous. My trading account was flagged only twice - once because I mailed a large amount of gold to my main character, and once because I intercepted some items that a gold seller was using to launder hacked gold. In short, Blizzard's involvement with their economy is entirely focused on policing RMT. They don't care how players manipulate markets.
  - intended 15y ago
    Thats pretty cool. Did you hit the gold cap, and do you still run the programs?