

The decline and fall of an ultra rich gaming empire  - e1ven
http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/16-12/ff_ige?currentPage=all

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alanfalcon
For all the great depth and anecdotal insight provided in the article, not one
mention of the number one means of "inventory acquisition"? I'm talking about
account compromises: stealing passwords, logging on to another player's
account, selling (and trading) off all their virtual possessions for gold,
then selling that gold to other players. The article makes it sound like
there's a hint of legitimacy, as if these gold farms really just go around
earning gold in the game worlds to sell it; by and large they don't,
especially not in the behemoth that's WoW. And it's the reason why there are
seemingly more options available to you for securing your World of Warcraft
account than your bank account. Is it any wonder why Blizzard is quoted as
hating them (IGE specifically, and all gold sellers in general)?

~~~
plorkyeran
That's a relatively recent development. In the time period talked about in the
article, they _did_ earn the gold, sometimes even entirely legitimately (other
than the account sharing). In Vanilla WoW, the main problem caused by RMT was
that on larger servers every single non-instanced good farming spot would be
saturated with Chinese farmers 24/7. The transition over to hacking accounts
to acquire gold didn't happen until late 2006-2007.

I don't remember account hacking being any real concern at any point in EQ.

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dfischer
Wow. Well, can I just say I _loved_ EverQuest so much between 1999-2004 that
when I found out there is an EverQuest Mac Client that still runs with a
population AND also has a "time-lock" until PoP... well let's just say I
started last week and I'm having a blast!

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goatforce5
Article is from December 2008, FWIW.

