
How I helped destroy Star Wars Galaxies - mziulu
http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2012/03/06/how-i-helped-destroy-star-wars-galaxies/
======
Skywing
I was 14 years old when Galaxies was first announced, two years prior to its
release. Like the author of this article, I too was crazy excited about this
game when I first heard about it. My friends and I did all the same things
that the author said he did, such as fantasizing about being a bounty hunter,
or chillin' with Luke, etc. The idea of the game excited me more than actually
wanting to play it, though. I've never been much of a gamer but games were how
I learned to program. So, my approach to Galaxies took me to similar places as
the author, but I got there a different way.

When Galaxies was announced, I was in my peak of reverse engineering Blizzard
games. I had been reverse engineering the Battle.net client protocol since
Diablo 1 and StarCraft. Battle.net had a community full of people who reverse
engineered the Blizzard games and there was somewhat of a competition as to
who could write the coolest bots, as we called them. Bots were apps that
emulated the official clients and could completely sign into Battle.net
without using the actual game. Most of mine were just console apps, because I
enjoyed the reverse engineering more than the coding.

So, when Galaxies finally came out in beta, a friend of mine luckily got a
copy. The computer that I used at that time, which was a shared family
computer, was terrible so I didn't expect to play the game, but I did ask him
for a copy of the game's directory so that I could start writing Galaxies
bots. I focused all of my time on reverse engineering the Galaxies client
protocol. I would stay up until the sun came up, staring at the game in a
debugger. When a family member need to computer or I had to go to school, I'd
hit print on IDA and print out an entire dll - tons of paper. I'd basically
annotate the printed out assembly with what I thought was happening and then
I'd get home and confirm or deny it with the debugger at run-time. I'd borrow
my friends account so that I could see the sign in process in real-time and
get packet dumps. I did this for months straight and it never got old.

The end result was a console application that could emulate the official
client and sign in to Galaxies, select your character and respond to various
events. My friends would level up new character's professions and I'd run them
on my terrible computer while we were at school, and over night. I could run
many at once with no problem.

While we did not have the in-game success with making tons of money, I did
save a lot of money up front on a lot of new computers and tons of copies of
Galaxies. :)

~~~
jacques_chester
I hope all this is on your resume.

You're the sort of person I like to mention when folk come up with half-assed
"encryption" schemes. The kind of person who reads hex for fun.

~~~
Skywing
Haha. Funny enough, when I was a sophomore in college, I applied to Nortel for
a C++ job. During my interviews, I told them these stories. It was one of
those cases where you feel like you're the object of a show-and-tell, or
something. My interviewer kept walking me around to all of his friends, having
me tell them these stories. Everyone seemed so interested. Needless to say, I
ended up getting the job. It was a cool job. I got to help code Nortel's 4G
wireless data service, doing low level network protocol stuff. That is, until
they went bankrupt.

------
nihilocrat
I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then
he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by
programming one.

The irony is staggering.

~~~
larrydag
I immediately thought of this too. Could there possibly be a revenue
opportunity for these game developers that they are missing? Should the game
developers focus on the gameplay with economics in mind so as it should be a
an objective and not just a byproduct?

~~~
patio11
Yes. The US MMORPG companies resisted the Korea/China Free2Play model, where
you sell advancement fairly directly for hard currency, for cultural reasons.
(My read is that their business guys were totally clueless and their devs had
passionate hatred for selling advancement. They wanted you to earn advancement
the proper way: by dropping out of school and devoting your life to the game.)

Every gold farmer was competing on price with someone who had INSERT ... INTO
ITEMS; available to them _and the manual labor was winning_.

There were many folks who said that there were solid commercial reasons for
this refusal at the time. A lot of them boiled down to "I don't know about
those crazy Asians but sophisticated American consumers don't want to do this
thing that we're spending thousands of man-hours a month unsuccessfully trying
to prevent Americans from doing." Those have been pretty decisively proven
wrong since a) when AAA US MMORPGs experiment with item sales they make
serious bank and b) the Free2Play model empirically has worked very, very well
in the US, especially when you compare the revenue per user and in aggregate
against the HUGE premium embedded in development costs of the AAA subscription
RPGs.

Oh, also, Zynga ROFLstomped the entire industry. (10~50% of the revenues of
the most successful MMORPGs for 2~3% of the development costs of the median
AAA MMORPG... and they did it more times in a three year period than there
have been successful AAA MMORPGs in history.)

~~~
samstave
Too be fair, zynga is a parasite on facebooks infrastructure. So while syngas
direct development costs are low, the real cost of developing what was
required to provide zynga the platform is over a billion. (considering
Facebook stated their network inf investment has been 1B)

Also, zynga is an idea thieving bandit of a company - so their costs are also
far lower due to their hiring people that can copy as opposed to the thought
leaders who would have come up with original content.

But if the only metric you choose to measure them on is revenue to expense,
then by that myopic unethical lens - sure they look good.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
> zynga is a parasite on facebooks infrastructure

They are facebook's largest advertiser, IIRC. Additionally, I believe facebook
has invested in zynga, so the relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic. I
am anti-zynga, but its important to be accurate in our critiques.

~~~
samstave
I agree that it is symbiotic, but they are still a parasite :)

------
justjimmy
I used to make some money selling pixels as well, mainly from UO ('real
estate' mainly since land in that game was very limited), City of Heroes, SWG
and WoW. If you got in at the start (when selling on eBay was still 'legal')
you made a pretty penny.

But it was unsustainable due to new MMOs, new tech and the rise of
professional farmers. You had to constantly adapt, see where the game is
going, and jump ship before the game collapses. I remember getting calls in
the middle of the night from the west coast, asking about my auctions and how
it all works and if there was more. And getting interrogated by my mum since
I'm getting all these calls from strangers.

Farming by hand, or playing the auction house no longer is the optimal way to
go. Now people offer full blown services to play your toon for you, using VM,
to mask/hide your IP incase you/they get caught (so you can claim you got
hacked), with really good players charging up to thousands of dollars to play
your character.

Good times.

EDIT: Now that I thought about it some more, I noticed my pattern at the
beginning was doing everything myself, whether is scouring for bargains,
farming gold, flipping properties – then I moved on to hiring people within
the game and paying them in-game gold for them to farm for me (in SWG, I would
provide locations of mineral fields to my 'employee's and set a price ahead of
time how much I'd pay per unit, and I'd buy all they have) – then I moved on
to automatic botting/scripting in WoW. Interestingly, this aligns somewhat
closely to real life industries and how they improve output.

Then I also realized first there was the emergence of sellers (the farmers),
then came the companies that has its own farming team in addition to buying
pixels from farmers and flipping them for profit. And finally, the arrival of
platforms – connecting direct buyers with direct sellers while taking a cut
(similar to eBay) – and it's these guys are making the real money – taking
zero risks (not worrying about getting caught), providing minimal support and
very scalable.

And now the gaming companies wants to keep everything to themselves and take a
cut. Blizzard's D3 will be paid close attention to how its Auction House
system works out – it will be very, very interesting to see where it all
leads.

------
AnthonBerg
An interesting insight into how bits of the modern world actually work.

The most significant thing for me was the romanticization. How the guy
ascribes emotional significance to a shitty MMO. He's gaming the shitty MMO,
just like he is being gamed by the shitty MMO's designers. And it has all this
importance to him. Sad, poignant, alarming, eerie.

~~~
itmag
Sounds like pretty much every salaryman in the "real world".

~~~
AnthonBerg
Heh!

------
robododo
Was anyone else reminded of Catch-22?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder>

"At the beginning of the novel, it [Milo's syndicate] is merely a system that
gets fresh eggs to his mess hall by buying them in Sicily for one cent,
selling them to Malta for four and a half cents, buying them back for seven
cents, and finally selling them to the mess halls for five cents."

~~~
ktizo
The character of Milo Minderbinder is one of the greatest satires of laissez-
faire capitalism ever created.

"In a democracy, the government is the people," Milo explained. "We’re people,
aren’t we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the
middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether
and leave the whole field to private industry."

------
cdmoyer
I really enjoyed this article, but the interesting thing to me is the need to
rationalize why things like MMOs fade away. It seems like they have a natural
life cycle. This guy didn't bring Star Wars Galaxies down. The developers
adding New Game Experience (NGE) or the Combat Update (CU) didn't destroy the
game. The world went on.

The game was released in 2001. In 2003 it had 400,000 subscribers. They
released the controversial NGE/CU changes in 2005. It wasn't until 2009 that
they shut down about half the servers. And they didn't shut down the game
until a new Star Wars MMO was imminent.*

I can't image that most of the market for a Star Wars MMO hadn't tried it,
maybe played it quite a bit, and then moved on in the space of 10 years. I
understand the desire for things to last forever, but I don't know that most
things will.

* Numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, they were culled from wikipedia.

~~~
tsotha
Not all MMOs fade away. WoW still has over ten million subscribers and doesn't
seem to be fading at all. And I'm not surprised changes they made in 2005 took
so long to kill SWG. People who have put literally years into a game are
emotionally invested and have online relationships they don't want to abandon,
at least not casually.

What actually kills a game is the lack of new serious players to balance out
the slow attrition of the veterans. The temptation for companies running these
games is to make them more "accessible" to more casual gamers. But there's a
fine line between "accessible" and "not addictive enough to flip people into
paying customers".

~~~
intended
SW was a case study of what never to do in an MMO. Its pretty much necessary
knowledge when designing a game of the type.

------
dangrossman
I was buying and selling virtual weapons in text MUDs almost 20 years ago.
This offline market for virtual game items predates the MMORPG genre itself.

<http://realmsofdespair.org/> was my MUD of choice as a kid.

------
trotsky
Did I miss something in the article? I clicked on a title promising the
ruination of SWG and all I found was a guy contributing significant revenue to
Sony while providing their players with a service they obviously desired. I
understand there is an argument that virtual currency sales may decrease
buyers' CLV but in the absence of an argument or evidence along those lines
all I read was a story about an MMO players inflated self image and his tragic
love affair with his game.

~~~
unreal37
I think the TL;DR; is that he was a huge part of the economy on 3 SWG servers,
and when they changed the game to make being a Jedi easy, he stopped playing.
And when he stopped playing, he ended up accelerating the downfall of Galaxies
as a whole since he was such a big factor on those 3 servers.

~~~
herge
I thinks it's more that the downfall of Galaxies was tied to being able to get
very cool powers without making much effort, like the new Jedi who killed his
character. He encouraged it by feeding a system where players could buy
credits with real money instead of 'earning' it in-game.

------
tobtoh
I really loved playing SWG - not so much for the game, but for the ‘business’
aspects of it. Whilst not as successful as the OP, I made thousands of $US
from the game by being part of a oligopoly.

One of the game mechanics was the concept of ‘buffs’ - basically chemical
stimulants your character could consume to temporarily boost critical stats
which aided in combat. They were an essential item in PvP (player vs player)
combat if you wanted to have that edge and so were in high demand. Buffs could
only be made by the ‘doctor’ class and only by the top level doctors. Another
critical game mechanic was that the quality of the buff affected how much of a
boost you could receive to your stats, and the quality of the buffs was
affected by the quality of the raw materials you sourced to make the buff
(every resource had a variety of stats - this game was a real minmax-ers
delight). The highest quality buffs were the only one that people were
interested in buying.

Most of the resources required for the buffs were reasonably easy to find -
but there was one which was rare - avian meat. The highest quality avian meat,
harvested by killing particular birds, only appeared (real-time) once a month
for a few days. Without this avian meat, you could not produce the highest
quality buffs.

The first time I made buffs - I happened to time it during the HQ (high
quality) avian meat period. I spent hours killing the birds to collect meat. I
made my buffs, had a shop near Coronet (the main trading city in the game) and
sold out within a few days. And I noticed that all the doctors sold out within
days too - and that the last few that had some stock could request extortion
prices for their stock. That gave me an idea …

The next month when the avian meat spawned, I parked my character in the main
spaceport and keyed up a macro (the game had an in-game macro system). All my
macro did was cause my character to shout out every minute “Buying avian meat
@ Z credits/piece - sell to my vendor at coords X,Y”. I basically bankrupted
myself buying up as much avian meat as I could whilst it was available.

I made up a batch of buffs and started selling them - I ran out after 20 days
- but I was now substantially more wealthy! I figured - heck I’m on a good
thing - let’s do that the next month. Of course, no good thing goes unnoticed
…

The next month, there were three other doctors in the spaceport shouting out
that they were buying avian meat. Well this simply would not do! So I
basically upped the price I was offering to purchase avian meat above theirs -
heck - I was flush with funds from last month so I figured I could out buy
them. It turns out I was right - I was able to purchase even more avian meat
than the last month and I was able to produce enough HQ buffs to just last the
month. Then the third month - this is when the market dynamics got interesting
…

By now, several people had noticed that avian meat was in hot demand once a
month. In the third month, there were several ‘shouters’ when the HQ avian
meat started spawning. Like last month, I upped the price I was willing to
offer to price them out of the market - a bidding war erupted, but with my
bankroll, I could outbid anyone (although I was cringing how fast I was going
through my credits). Like any market, with the prices rising so quick, it
changed behaviours - suddenly many of the ‘hunters’ in the game were out
killing birds to collect meat. I effectively had my own contractor workforce
out hunting avian meat!

By the end of the third HQ avian meat season, I had more meat than I ever had
before. I realised I almost had complete control of the buff market on my
server so I changed my selling tactics. I made my batch of buffs and started
selling them, but I jacked the price up (100% increase) - this time I wanted
to be able to continuously sell my buffs to last the full month. Other buff
sellers kept selling them at the going rate … so I did the rounds of the
cities each night and bought up any HQ buffs which were under my price and
added them to my stockpile. By the end of the first week, I was bankrupt
although I had a huge stockpile of HQ buffs - but most importantly, virtually
every buff vendor was empty … except mine. I jacked my price up even further
and did a roaring trade.

Over the next few cycles I cemented my reputation as one of the few reliable
buff vendors who could consistently offer the highest quality buffs month-
round. With the constant trade and monopoly prices, I was able to further
entrench my dominant position each month by continuing to out bid any other
doctor who tried to purchase avian meat. There were two other doctors on the
server who managed to offer buffs for most of the month, and whilst I never
talked to them, I noticed that they never went below whatever price I set. Our
little oligopoly had a total lock on the buff market - it was a golden age!

When I quit the game a couple of months later, I had millions in credits which
I sold for a few thousand $US. SWG let me play out my monopolistic
capitalistic fantasies - how I loved that game :D

~~~
xlpz
And some people argue laissez-faire capitalism does not naturally lead to
concentration of capital and oligopolies/monopolies. I guess they should play
MMOs ;)

~~~
RickHull
This particular anecdote relies upon incompetent competition:

> Other buff sellers kept selling them at the going rate … so I did the rounds
> of the cities each night and bought up any HQ buffs which were under my
> price and added them to my stockpile.

As well as high barriers to entry:

> Buffs could only be made by the ‘doctor’ class and only by the top level
> doctors.

Basically there is massive demand for buffs, but the supply is restricted by
the avian meat availability. Thus a huge demand for avian meat with low
supply. The price should go up, and this guy brought the market price in line
by outbidding everyone else.

He corners the market, and like any cornerer, he has to overbid the "market
price" to shut everyone else out. Now he is in a weak and vulnerable position,
to any of his competition. He has a large supply of capital goods that he
overpaid for.

The overbidding for avian meat should induce more "mining" (hunting) of the
avian meat -- it should be wildly profitable relative to effort invested. This
should tend to raise supply, making the overbidding market cornerer's job even
harder.

Anyone with half a brain should mine some avian meat and then offer to sell it
for (pinky to lower lip) 1 billion dollars (or whatever). The market cornerer
will either pay the asking price or relinquish some control of the market.

Since there is no monopoly on buff producers (per the anecdote), the meat
miner can lower the price until it sells to a buff producer (whether the
cornerer or not). The miner extracts the profit, and the buff producer, with
such high input costs, should have smaller margins on the finished product.

~~~
tobtoh
> Anyone with half a brain should mine some avian meat and then offer to sell
> it for (pinky to lower lip) 1 billion dollars (or whatever). The market
> cornerer will either pay the asking price or relinquish some control of the
> market.

What prevented this from happening is that supplying a months worth of buffs
required a lot of avian meat. And avian meat was a pain in the arse to harvest
- you had to roam all over the map looking for the changing spawn points and
if I remember correctly, you would only have maybe 20 pieces of the resource
for every hour hunting - it was seriously time consuming. So I never
encountered a hunter who was selling bulk amounts of avian meat - they all
sold in dribs and drabs and so had no negotiating power with me. The small
amounts they potentially could individually withheld would have almost no
impact to my manufacturing -the only way to affect me was if they ganged up,
which would have required substantial coordination.

I was also very dynamic with my pricing - the amount I set was based on what
other vendors offered. With my huge bankroll (thanks to first mover
advantage), I trumped any bid and scared other doctors away - they simply knew
they couldn't compete. As soon as they gave up, I reduced my prices.

~~~
RickHull
Ah, makes sense. I would still tell this story in terms of a first-mover
advantage, as well as one of innovation. The point is, in a market economy, it
is nearly impossible to maintain a monopoly (or oligarchy) over time. Your
margins will get squeezed by new competition enticed by your margins. It seems
like you got lucky in discouraging your competition, but I don't think that's
a reliable tactic. A determined competitor could severely damage you and open
up the market by forcing you to overbid.

~~~
intended
I think innovation is baked into your assumption, which doesn't necessarily
hold true.

On a separate note Video games are some of the best laboratories we have to
allow us to test economics - and iirc papers have been done to test and learn
from these environments. I doubt I can dig any up, if I can, I will post it.

------
Tarks
If you enjoyed this article you might like to give "For the Win" by Cory
Doctorow a read, it's a pretty fun book that asks questions with regards to
game economies and how they might affect the real world.

~~~
lordlicorice
Same subject, vastly different caliber. I can't read four sentences of
Doctorow's writing without seizing in a paroxysm of grimacing and twitching
and all sorts of disapproving body language.

~~~
TylerE
Thank you for saying that. I've never understood why a large portion of the
tech community seems to worship him. Thought I was the only way that felt that
way...

------
withad
I've never really played a lot of MMOs (though I had friends who were very
into SWG and still lament its changes and eventual demise) but the crazy stuff
that goes on in virtual economies like this has always interested me.

Reminds me of Julian Dibbell's "Play Money" [1], where he spends a year trying
to make Ultima Online his main source of income.

[1][http://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Money-Millions-Trading-
Virtual/...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Money-Millions-Trading-
Virtual/dp/0465015360/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331120748&sr=1-1)

~~~
masklinn
> the crazy stuff that goes on in virtual economies like this has always
> interested me.

If you want crazy, you should check Eve Online's economy, it's on a wholly
different level and scale.

Especially as CCP (the game developer) takes a cut of real-world to in-game
money conversions: you can buy PLEX (1-month account extension) with real
money, and it's an in-game item which you can exchange for virtual currency
(by selling it to other players).

~~~
shearn89
EVE is ridiculous - I remember reading about a guy who spent months setting up
an in game bank, and then stole all the funds and made about $100,000 of real
money.

~~~
SkyMarshal
EVE had at least one other great story from the early days, the Nightfreeze
scam:

<http://www.wirm.net/nightfreeze/part1.html>

~~~
FlightOfGrey
This makes me feel so sorry for HardHat and the others, I don't think I could
ever pull something like this off. One good reason to stay away from EVE in my
opinion.

------
sek
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.

~~~
methoddk
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
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
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
Thats pretty cool.

Did you hit the gold cap, and do you still run the programs?

------
kenrikm
I was a Master Armorsmith on Lowca I would bring in 20mil credits/week that
had a value of around $200 on Ebay. I made thousands selling credits from SWG
on eBay which was great for a teenager (I was 17 - now I'm 27) They killed the
game in 2005 trying to make it "assessable" and that's the last time I played
SWG or any MMO. I have fond memories of the economy and learned a lot that has
helped me in the real business world (taking care of customers etc..) I
actually had been thinking about writing something similar to this about SWG
for a while now glad someone took the time to write it.

------
cyanbane
Good interview from a couple of years ago along the same lines:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I&feature=play...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I&feature=player_embedded)

+1 for Julian Dibbel's book Play Money also. Great read if your into virtual
economies, along with Castronova's Synthetic Worlds.

------
robryan
This sounds similar to what happened with WoW, at first things are really hard
to obtain, going after the real hardcore gamers and those that want to spend
the time to know the economy well, work together well and master professions.

As the game goes on they try more and more to appeal to the casual gamer which
either doesn't have the skills or the time to master the game in the same way.
Meaning it becomes hard to really differentiate yourself from others playing
the game as most of everyone has pretty good items and didn't have to work
hard to acquire them.

Even though I have nowhere near enough time to be a hardcore gamer at anything
these days, I still don't think I'd really enjoy playing something causally
and having it all handed to me.

~~~
drostie
There's also a worthwhile case study in the Neopets economy, which as far as I
know didn't really adapt in these ways. You could grind on puzzle games for
the local currency, but it stopped being about the puzzles and started being
about trying to make in-game money. And then, what happened is that non-casual
gamers would know all of the shop-inventory respawn times and would camp them,
to buy up all of the commodities that the shops contained -- especially
medicines and such. They would then resell them for much more money in their
own user-defined shops. So it became the exact opposite: at first things were
really easy to obtain, and they were mostly going after kids -- casual gamers.
But their surge in popularity seemed to create a change in focus towards
hardcore gamers eager to camp the spawn points and use multiple accounts to
get freebies. At one point I even remember putting all of my money in the
stock market just so that I could feed my Neopets with free soup from the in-
game welfare department, because getting food was such a nuisance otherwise.

There is a deeper question lurking beneath all of this, I feel -- and
unfortunately for me it has deep ties with questions of meaning and purpose
and thus gets bound up in my religion, which I do not want to talk too much
about here. But the question is, "what makes a game worthwhile? why do you
keep playing?" My Neopets were not very worthwhile and, since they're
immortal, I imagine they've been starving in a cold computer database for the
last way-too-many years. I obviously got bored with the grind necessary to
take care of them, but why? Why did I complete all of Morrowind and yet found
Oblivion impossible to play? What is it in my human quest that I am looking to
create in a game, and are games unreal or real or hyper-real or something
else? If we don't enjoy "having it all handed to us" but yet we also don't
enjoy "working for it", what exactly do we want?

~~~
brador
Sounds interesting, got a link to that study?

~~~
drostie
Sorry. When I say "case study" I mean "case to be studied," in the future
tense, as opposed to in the past tense. I do not know whether anyone has ever
done an academic user-economy study of Neopets.

------
spoiledtechie
I love the last paragraph in his post.

"Because it wasn’t the game I loved. That game died in 2005 with the NGE/CU.
It died when developers turned their backs on the gamers who had spent the
effort and instead listened to the lazy, whining voices who wanted it all
given to them."

Sounds a lot like the government of today.

~~~
jpdoctor
Nonsense. Game companies cater to those that are the most profitable.

Oh wait.... Nevermind.

------
Evernoob
Exploiting computer games for temporary cash seems like an incredibly pathetic
way to earn a living. Surely those with the intelligence to accomplish such
things could contribute their time to something more productive?

~~~
AerieC
How is it pathetic? It's just like any other business. Identify a consumer
need, provide that need, ????, profit. You could make the same argument for
almost any other business, especially anything related to art.

"Drawing pictures seems like an incredibly pathetic way to earn a living.
Surely those with the intelligence to accomplish such things could contribute
their time to something more productive?"

If we all we ever did was "something more productive" the world would be a
damn boring place, and one in which I would not want to live.

------
blahblahhhhhh
Good for the OP to have made money doing something he loved, however time
spent gaming (or writing useless SAAS apps or mobile applications for that
matter) is a waste of good brain cells. Unless something helps our future
generations either by providing an example for how to love and care for each
other or by furthering humanity's development, it is waste of time.

------
euccastro
_[In summer 2001] We talked constantly, speculated, made suggestions, argued
about how Jedi should work; we were two years from ever even playing and we
already had deep and powerful opinions about a game that didn’t exist yet. It
was unprecedented._

It was at least a year late for being unprecedented :). I was doing exactly
the same in mid-late 2000 with Eve Online.

------
MRonney
I played Star Wars Galaxies for 7 years and met a lot of cool people. At times
it didn't feel like a Star Wars game but I made the most of it. I didn't agree
with some of the changes (both major and minor) but now I appreciate that I
was part something great. I miss it from time to time and regret 0 time I
spent playing Star Wars Galaxies.

------
silentscope
This is terrifying on so many levels.

------
throwaway99999
Sounds like our beloved banking system tbh. Say you take a loan out. You give
it to someone to buy a house. They put it into a bank. Then another guy takes
a loan out from that bank, and gets twice loaned money to buy a house of his
own. The guy he buys it from puts it into a bank. That bank then loans out the
money to another guy who gets thrice loaned money for his house. All the while
the banks are placing interest on the money they lend out (which BTW was
widely considered illegal/immoral until ~1600) which ends up with the modern
banking system literally creating money.

A hypothetical economy has $10,000 in total currency, a bank has all $10,000
in cash reserves to begin with. There are 40 members of society, each of them
with a different occupation but together they form a basic economy.

Pete is loaned $9,000 from the bank.

Pete pays Bill that money for an old car.

Bill puts $9,000 in the bank.

The banking system has $10,000 cash.

Jane is loaned $9,000 from the bank.

Jane pays Matt that money for renovations to her house.

Matt puts $9,000 in the bank.

The bank has $10,000 cash.

The bank charges interest on these loans.

The bank is owed $10,000 from Pete

The bank is owed $10,000 from Jane

The bank owes $9,000 to Bill

The bank owes $9,000 to Matt

Pete and Jane pay back $10,000 each, $20,000 collectively, but wait, that
can't happen, because there is only $10,000 in the entire economy and Bill and
Matt each have a net worth of $9,000, accounting for 90% of the wealth of the
economy (as far as they think, anyways). Lets step back.

The bank has $10,000 cash

The bank owes Matt $9,000

The bank owes Bill $9,000

Jane owes the bank $10,000

Pete owes the bank $10,000

## The Bank's Assets

Pete $10,000

Jane $10,000

Cash $10,000

\---

Total $30,000

## Liabilities

Bill $9,000

Matt $9,000

\---

Total $18,000

The Bank's Net worth $12,000

Pete's net worth -$10,000

Jane's net worth -$10,000

Bill's net worth $9,000

Matt's net worth $9,000

Total currency in the system $10,000

The total currency in the system is still $10,000, but the bank's accountant
says it is worth $12,000. What? Not only that, but if the bank were to be
found in the wrong, it would not just crumble the bank, but the entire
economic system -- because everyone is involved and has a stake in what the
bank is doing here.

Now, there are plenty of businesses in the world that, more or less, have a
license to "print money" so to speak. People who offer their time for money
have this to a certain extent, if I give you 10 hours of my day and you have
to pay $1000 for it, I have basically created a debt in the system for $1000,
without having first put $1000 of actual currency into the system.

The banking system is remarkable in this context however, because it uses
money itself to create more money, while simultaneously making everyone a
stakeholder in their being right -- increasing the danger to the system far
more than any other existing entity. Bank's also vest rich people into their
system by making them little lender's themselves (when our money makes
interest by way of our banks investing/loaning it to others)

If I dont get paid my $1000 that I say you owe then too bad for me and I may
sue you. But if the bank doesn't get paid it's $18,000 in the scenario above
the whole economy is coming down with them. The banking system of borrowing
and lending money that is not backed by anything tangible is a house of cards.
It is a similar system to the OP's article that feeds itself. The guy who
wrote this article I think got a first-hand perspective in how extraordinary
it is when you see all of the working parts at once.

So, what happens when the bank does get found in the wrong in the above
scenario? Let's walk through that.

Pete and Jane can't find the money to pay back their debt. They may have
thought they had it in their sights, but for some reason they just can't seem
to get enough money to pay back the bank (obviously, the money necessary just
doesn't exist unless they can find a way to print money faster than the bank,
but more on that later...) and so they both decide the bank is a sham and take
up legal claims, suing the bank in their society's courts for usury and fraud.

The bank is (quite hypothetically) found guilty of both usury and fraud, since
the extent of the economy is easily defined in this society it is easily
reasoned that the bank is corrupting the system. A single entity cannot claim
to have more currency than is in existence. It's loans are voided ab initio.

## The Bank's Assets

Cash $10,000

\---

Total $10,000

## Liabilities

Bill $9,000

Matt $9,000

\---

Total $18,000

Pete's net worth $0

Jane's net worth $0

Bill's net worth $9,000

Matt's net worth $9,000

The Bank's Net worth -$8,000

Total currency in the system $10,000

Bill and Matt hear of this debacle, and quickly go to the bank to withdraw
their money. But it's a race to the counter, the bank only has $10,000 and
they are both owed $9,000. It is worth noting at this point that the bank has
literally no legal measures to take to prevent it from being liable for it's
debts to Bill and Matt.

Bill gets to the counter first and withdraws all of his $9,000. The bank is
legally obligated to pay Bill his $9,000 and does so. Matt gets to the counter
but there is only $1,000 left, he withdraws the $1,000 that he can.

Matt sues the bank for not paying him back his money (he gave them his cold
hard earned cash, afterall). The courts find Matt in the right and the bank
owes him $9,000 that they do not have. The bank goes bankrupt, the economy
goes bankrupt (funny that word) -- Matt and everyone else in the society
refuse to use money as currency because it is not reliable.

But was it the currency that made the system collapse? No. It was the failed
predictions of those in the banking system, who have more stakeholders than
any other business ever has or should have. It is indeed true that once a
stakeholder was made out of the richest few (themselves and those who produced
the most in this scenario), every single person who relies on money
subsequently became stakeholders, which is everyone in society.

System's that are similar to that described in the OP's article quickly fail,
unless accurate predictions can be made about what the "economy" can "absorb"
or rather, what can be skimmed off the top while not bringing the house of
cards down. In OP's case there was little pre-planned organization and he had
no insight into too many other things affecting his process so it was not
really possible.

~~~
driverdan
Fractional banking has nothing to do with what the OP described. Users were
earning game money through other means and combining it with game money they
bought with real currency. There was no lending.

~~~
throwaway99999
There was no lending but there is a strong correlation. The game creators
decided to start giving away what was once worth time, effort, and money. That
ultimately destroyed the OP's process. In a similar fashion, giving away money
as a bank does with a loan, destroys the economy's process. This is done under
many guises of course. Loans can actually help the economy, just as in OP's
case, a free character given to someone who was a merchant would have helped
the gameplay because more competition and production of goods would have
resulted, but free characters for any and all destroyed the system.

tl:dr I believe that loans from banks should only be legal as investments into
a business and loans to individuals (even for houses) should be financed from
private companies so that the total risk to the economy is evenly dispersed.

EDIT: My apologies for the way-too-long scenario and explanation, but it
seemed remarkably similar to the banking crisis (to me at least) and I thought
it might make for an interesting discussion.

