
A Diablo 3 Story - minimaxir
http://diablo3story.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-diablo-3-story.html
======
Paul_S
The story is fascinating but I cannot help but think what a massive waste of
time and resources it is. And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding
value to society. This puts things in perspective. I especially like the bit
where he explains that botters were helping the virtual economy.

From the article: "I know a lot of people will say that what I did was
cheating or unfair, but everyone must realize that in the end what I did was
completely legal."

Sounds familiar?

~~~
fintechthrowaw
"And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding value to society"...

Its always weird to me when people in the tech industry say that hedge fund
managers/quants "add no value to society". The presumption that any
individual's job "adds value to society" is really arrogant...do you really
think that all the software engineers working at Google or FB or Twitter to
make people click advertisement "add value to society"? Does my local grocer
"add value to society"? Its such a vacuous statement.

I apologize in advance if this is harsh, so I would offer you to read more
about finance before you make blanket statements like "hedge funds do not add
value to society"

~~~
TheEzEzz
Worse case scenario: making people click google ads is just as mindlessly
financially driven as eking out more alpha from an algo, in which case the
googlers still win, because at least some of that money generated goes toward
moonshot projects that may very well benefit society.

~~~
fintechthrowaw
I respect Google, Facebook, and Twitter because of their ability to connect
people and their genuine intellectual contributions to fields like information
retrieval and AI, and sure, their moonshots. But I think its arrogant to say
whether someone adds value to society because its an extremely complicated
philosophical question (judging the guy playing the game saying he's wasting
his time). I'm not sure its fair to characterize all hedge funds as simply
trying to squeeze out alpha though either, there are many prominent activist
investors who've pushed for greater corporate governance and transparency, in
cases like MBIA, Lehman, Herbalife most recently, etc. And if you wanted to
consider Google's moonshots, it should be only fair to consider the billions
most of the hedge fund managers have given away in a dick-measuring contest to
various charities and research initiatives. But I understand your argument and
agree that a lot of financialization provides no benefit to anyone.

------
sandymcm
Recommended reading for those interested in this story: REAMDE by Neal
Stephenson.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reamde)

~~~
fenomas
I hate to dissent but I wouldn't recommend REAMDE under any circumstances. The
first third or so begins lots of interesting threads about virtual worlds,
economies and especially ransomware, but the book then morphs into a fairly
standard-issue spy thriller, and leaves the most interesting subplots (the
ones that don't involve commandos and terrorists shooting at each other)
unexplored or unresolved.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
I actually enjoyed it. Yes there was stuff that could have been explored more,
but I still enjoyed it.

------
swanson
And with Blizzard getting a cut of the Real Money Auction House sales, there
seems to be little incentive for them to really crack down on this. The
perfect "crime"!

Blizzard gets some extra revenue, deep pocket players have a constant
selection of rare items to buy, botters make a nice chunk of change, semi-
oblivious sellers turn their items into gold instantly (reminds me of payday
loans) - everyone* wins!

* Except the folks who list the RMAH price in gold and, of course, the normal players ;)

~~~
EpicEng
Of course, the RMAH (and the GAH) are now gone completely, so they did, at
some point, decide that it wasn't good for the game.

~~~
chii
i m sure blizzard's main source of revenue is selling of the game, not from
commission earned from the RMAH. RMAH is probably players away, and i m sure
their measurments/analytics showed this and thus shut it down.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Except they only did it a long time after introducing the RMAH - they were
probably well past their peak income when it came to that income. If I were to
make a random guess, I'd say that they made twice or thrice as much revenue
from the RMAH than they did with actual game sales, and that's probably being
conservative.

I don't know why they finally decided to pull the plug, given all that money.
Probably trying to salvage some goodwill before figures were leaked about how
much they earned from it, although I'm sure those figures are out there
already, given that Blizzard is a publicly traded company and their earnings
are out in the open.

------
hcarvalhoalves
100.000,00 €/year trading things that do not exist.

Why am I even working?

~~~
readerrrr
Items mentioned in the article exist, even though you cannot touch them.

Did you mean to use the term intangible or incorporeal? In that case you can
sell insurance. :)

~~~
panzi
Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of
Blizzard. It's not real in the sense that Blizzard could just enter whatever
values they want in this DB and it would be perfectly legal.

Conspiracy theory: Maybe the didn't ban bots that much so they could hide
their own "bots" (a simple function in their servers that sells goods they
just have created out of thin air by a simple insert statement).

~~~
scrollaway
> Yes, but these items are basically only flags in a DB under the power of
> Blizzard.

So is insurance.

~~~
baddox
And so is most money.

~~~
panzi
There it's two records in two banks (in the general case) for each
transaction. The sum must check out to be zero. And beside that there are laws
that are enforced because it is not legal to create money out of thin air. Ok,
it is done anyway (when the government prints more money and thus increases
inflation) and to a degree banks are allowed to do that in some sense as well
(they loan can a certain percentage more money than they actually have). The
whole system isn't perfect (hence the economic crisis), but there are enforced
laws that aren't written by companies (well, mostly).

------
stillsut
My (somewhat lonely) contention has always been that these 'waste of time'
games are actually the source of many more of the best programmers/quants than
after school classes like 'learn to program 101'

------
frinxor
Awesome article. I remember running a bunch of D2 farm bots in high school,
and waking up every morning to put them up on Ebay, ended up making a few
hundred bucks - first time I've ever made any money.

Really appreciate the writeup; it was very well written and its cool to see
the guy figure it out and scale out from his initial experimentation.

------
readerrrr
How did the bot interact with the game? You could send key commands and text
to the program, but you can't easily read the item price for example. That
script at the end doesn't tell much.

~~~
cheepin
You can screen scrape the screen and do some rudimentary image parsing for
OCR.

~~~
Mandatum
WoW's botters took this one step further, disassembling the game to the point
where they made WoW "clients" which could bot/gold farm at <15MB of memory -
meaning you could have a hundred accounts botting on one PC.

~~~
virtualSatai
Do you have any more info/articles/discussions?

~~~
DownGoat
Here is a Defcon video about the topic
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-
no](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-no)

~~~
gre
Here's a Blackhat video with a complete C# WoW client from 2006.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbZdlUFAK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKbZdlUFAK4)
11:55

~~~
Mandatum
Ah yep, it was the Defcon video I saw which mentioned it, never saw the C#
code. Badass.

------
listic
I am interested in game design, but don't have time to really play games, as
of late.

This write-up illuminated me on what really was going on in Diablo 3 and why
Blizzard who supposedly worked hard on the Auction House feature, had to
remove it in the end.

So, does it mean that maintaining a stable virtual economy in an MMO is an
insurmountable task even for a top-tier company?

------
SheepSlapper
I made about $65 playing D3, which turned out to be pennies per hour. But it
paid for the game, and it made me feel good about wasting so much time.

I also just sold a TF2 hat for $56... not sure how I feel about _that_ one.
[http://i.imgur.com/Loqrvbw.png](http://i.imgur.com/Loqrvbw.png)

~~~
zongitsrinzler
I can only guess that top traders in TF2 make the same kind of money as in
this article

~~~
chii
hah, that would be quite awesome, if only it was possible to get the money out
of steam (which seems not to be possible).

~~~
ANTSANTS
Trade items for keys/purchase keys with Steam Wallet funds, sell keys via
Paypal for slightly under the "legit" price, ???, profit.

(for the uninformed, keys are basically virtual lottery tickets in TF2 and
DotA2 whose "legit" price is pegged at $2.50 a pop)

------
jamhan
How much of the real money actually came from stolen credit cards? I bet it
was a significant percentage.

------
dustingetz
who are the people putting 100 euro into digital goods in a single
transaction?

~~~
swanson
Would you rather grind for hundreds of hours to maybe get a rare item, or
freelance for an hour and spend that $100 on the item you want?

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I'd rather uninstall that shit and play a game that's fun immediately. Why on
Earth would I spend either 100 dollars or 100 hours to be allowed to enjoy a
game that I already paid for?

~~~
gambiting
I spent easily a 100 hours on D3 before I decided to buy something from RMAH.
I had lots of fun with the items I found, and then decided to spend 20-30
euros on some other stuff I wanted to experiment with. I did not do it to make
the game fun - it was fun without it. I just wanted to add variety without
playing for another 100 hours just to get the items I wanted.

------
thret
My biggest gripe with D3 was that the RMAH was not in HC mode. I made endless
gold through the AH but sadly it could not be traded for cash.

~~~
xentronium
They explicitly made a policy not to resurrect HC characters even if that
happened due to a technical bug, server drop or whatever else. Would get messy
with real money items.

~~~
chii
it would make the game much more exciting - facing actual loss is
exhilirating. Some people can't handle it though.

In my experience playing EVE online (which exhibit similar characteristics,
where you could have paid real money for in-game items, and yet lose them for
real), players who can't handle this sort of loss tend to be adversely against
the parts of the game that could force such losses. They then end up enjoying
the game less over all. Players who bit the bullet and take these losses on
the chin tend to have much more fun in the long term, and tend to make better
guild mates too.

