This is a very important issue that needs to be let out of the bag.
I ask please if the mods feel this is inappropriate, could you let me know what I need to change to get the point across. I tried to be as careful as possible to conform to the board requirements and respect the community here.
Hi there, many of you may remember me, some may not. I posted two years ago on The Safehouse forums regarding what was going on a the time, which was massive duping and macroing of platinum flooding the economy with plat and inflating bazaar prices to crazy levels. If you remember, ornate armor patterns at the time, the hot items out there, were selling for 10k to 20k each, but after all of this happened prices on them went up to 100k or more. Most everything else went up in price as well. Within the week of my posting, a patch came about with a letter from on of the higher ups at Sony stating they had banned massive amounts of accounts, and fixed some exploits and loopholes. The very same day, mysupsersales.com, the main contributor of the problem, had no platinum.
Well, it is happening again. Have you been a bit puzzled as to why, on most servers, the prices of items which usually gradually fall over time, have not? Because since the middle of the summer, or perhaps earlier, there has been an artificial influx of platinum into every server economy. If what is going on continues, expect prices to actually start going up and up, and forcing anyone who likes to buy their items in the bazaar or enjoys the more casual playstyle, twinks, etc, to have their only option be to buy platinum from those who are bleeding this game dry.
The main offender here is Gamingnook, a company which sells and distributes platinum for real life money. They used to buy and sell platinum, but around early summer they closed up all their plat buying, and no longer bought any more at all. Immediately after this, they had for sale, over 2 million platinum per server overnight. If they sold 1 million, or 2 million, or 3 or 4 in a day, they had it right back up again the next day.
Something was obviously wrong. There are several ways to make platinum in game. The main one being through normal play. At the high level a group member might come away with 1000 platinum in sellables after an evening of fighting. Secondary is collecting items and selling in the bazaar. This is unreliable, and though you can make large amounts of platinum, you certainly can't make millions per day with it, even with a full group pooling everything they get and selling it, coming away with a million or more platinum would be exceptional. Selling it all in the bazaar without over flooding the market with the items is about a 1 in a million chance.
Now, tertiary are the little less known things like for profit quests and tradeskill combines. These can net a good amount of coin if someone were to sit and repeatedly do them over and over. Maybe a few thousand with a human at the keyboard. With a macro, though, these are limited only by the speed of your connection and how fast your computer can buy, sell, and combine. Since things in the infamous macroquest program allow you to use vendors and world combiners like the forge and oven from across the zone, a macroer only needs to write a macro that will buy and sell and combine, and do it at the fastest speed possible. A macroer running a simple 6 platinum profit combine every second doesn't sound like much, but when you look at what this does over the course of a day, then things start to get crazy.
Consider
6 platinum per second
360 platinum per minute
21600 platinum per hour
518400 platinum per day
Now consider that the macroer could run 2, 3, 20 of these at once, and you have 1,000,000 to 10,000,0000 platinum easily entering the server per DAY. Now multiply that by all the servers....
With 3500 people online in an average day, varying levels, varying amounts of coin, assuming the average player made 500 plat in the course of playing that day, which is generous, the players legitimately contribute about 1.75 million platinum per day to the server. Now consider a SINGLE macroer can introduce this simply by running 3 accounts at once. ONE person, not even at the keyboard, can make as much as 3500 people playing about 4 hours each. For about 5 minutes of one person's time setting up their characters to macro, the equivalent yield for them is as much as 14,000 hours of other people's time.
And I am not even saying it is a macro right now. That's just one option. It could be a dupe. Dupes would be far worse, as a duper can and will take 10,000 plat and turn it into 20,000 plat, then 40,000, then 80,000, and so on and so forth.
And it is not just Gamingnook which has access to this. IGE, though they may not have direct access to it, are overstocked to the gills with platinum. This is almost certainly due to the exploiters selling to them and keeping their stock high. The normal workings of the platinum for cash business is supply and demand. When things are working properly Gamingnook and IGE and all the other resellers out there have increasing and dwindling stocks of platinum available. Often they will have none on a server. Again, this has not been this way since midsummer.
Enter October. 4 or 5 sellers now have platinum on every server in unlimited quantity, most of them based in China. Keep in mind please, that even if you hired 100 kids mashing buttons a day in china they could not make millions and millions of platinum per day reliably like these guys had.
Enter the patch at the end of October with the new UI. Gamingnook has no platinum after this patch. The chinese sellers vanish overnight. IGE no longer has platinum on 3/4 of the servers.
5 days later, Gamingnook has platinum again, all servers. Inquiring in the period they did not have plat as a buyer, got the answer that they did not have plat available, but they would soon. Inquiring as a seller, no, they refused to purchase platinum, period.
A few days later IGE had millions on every server. A week later 2 of the chinese sellers are back, and today, there are 6 new sellers total with millions and millions on every single server.
Because of this, the price has fallen by over 50% in a month, and continues to fall daily as these guys duke it out with their free platinum.
This may sound great for the guy who likes to buy plat, but consider that prices are not going to fall and will likely increase in the bazaar with so much platinum entering the economy, and the benefit is short lived. And the entire community who does NOT purchase platinum gets screwed by this. As these individuals fight it out with their price wars and their illbegotten platinum, the price will continue to fall, as quite simply "lowest price wins." Eventually they will turn to buying stuff in the bazaar with this money. If you think it is bad enough that it enters the economy at the rate people buy it with real life money, consider what is going to happen, and what exactly happened two years ago. The high price items will become the currency, and these exploiters will buy these items to sell instead. I'm sure you have all heard the expression often used when a currency becomes worthless, and that is that it is not worth the paper it is printed on. Well, the same can and will happen to any "virtual" currency.
It has been suggested to me that this is indeed the only way to get things fixed. To let the community know what is going on in your game, and allow you to weigh the facts, and decide whether or not you feel this is a real issue. If you do feel this is a real issue, I urge you, please send feedback and post making your voice known to the Everquest developers and community. Regardless of your feelings on selling platinum or items or powerleveling or any other service in EQ for real life money, set that aside, look at what is going on, and decide then on your choice of action. In my opinion, this has reached the point of emergency. The point which requires finding it, getting it fixed, and letting the community know that such activity will not be tolerated.
I don't get this post. This is your first post on this board. Are you on a crusade and just hitting all the boards? Or are you fishing for information?
Anyway, Chicken Little, the sky started falling a long time ago .. but believe it or not, its getting better.
AFAIK, there are no easily combinable tradeskill recipies that generate a 6pp profit per combine with easily obtained components as you have suggested. There have been in the past, but the were nerfed. SOE seems to be pretty conscious about that stuff these days.
There are other hacks that were present in the game such as some no drop transfer hacks, something called 'ghosting', and i think some zoneing and gate commands that have been nerfed.
I haven't heard about any real 'dupe' hacks in the game, I'm not saying they don't or can't exist .. I just simply haven't heard of any. About the only time I've ever seen anything 'duped' was actually due to fault on SOE's part. Bunch of people died right when the servers crashed .. people ended up dead in PoK with all their equipment, but a fully equipped corpse where they died. It was a fluke, and it happens once in a blue moon, but I imagine its probably more due to database syncronization problems between the various servers that run the zones across the game.
About the same time as the banning of the accounts, Sony made it so that tradeskills loose roughly 10 to 500 pp per successful combine, thats on vendor purchasable combines, the loss is even bigger if you buy your components from the bazaar.
It would have been nice if they had let the tradeskillers at least break even on successful combines, the failures alone can rack up a significant cost.
*sigh*. When will there be a snopes.eq.com, I wonder?
While this may be a real problem, posting it on a forum that advertises EULA-violating platinum for sale (c.f. the Google adds at the top of every one of these forum pages) probably won't result in much action. It's a shame too, because that's just one more reason for the developers to stay away.
While the original poster strikes more more as a crusader (notice the lack of verifiable details?), I am a little surprised to find we have plat ads in this forum. I had to turn off my firefox ad-blocker to see them, but they are there.
The ads have been in place for quite a while. I've added many of them to the list of ones not to show but I haven't had time lately to add the ones that are showing now.
Frankly, they have been up for months with the occasional one getting through and until today, no one even noticed so I hadn't put much effort into removing them with the large amounts of other things I have to do, it doesn't leave much time for removing ads that no one seems to see anyway.
Edit: Also, once Sony made their own forums, they stopped visiting or listening to any other forums anyway.
That first email is almost exactly what was posted about 2-3 years ago by some other person that had zero evidence or anything at all to back up the claim. Getting PP in EQ now is so easy that even with a dupe it doesn't really matter.
As for the ads the list of sites to ban on our Adsense is a mile long, they just keep popping up new sites after new sites. It is not against the EULA to have those ads up there, it is only a violation if you use them. :)
I had actually noticed those ads back some time ago. I wondered why they were there. They mess up the streamlined effect of the site, but I'm fairly good at ignoring content I don't like or care for. I'd love to see them gone, but.. *shrug*
below: remains to remind me I din do it proper....
/shrug (Tas? did I shrug properly? :-P )
above: remains to remind me I din do it proper....
edit: fixed *shrug* per Tas' suggestion...or was that an order? *shrug* :-P
What ads? I seriously dont see them .. guess Firefox + Adblock works pretty good =)
. Since things in the infamous macroquest program allow you to use vendors and world combiners like the forge and oven from across the zone,
Untrue!
It almost seems like a really creative ad. The OP talks about how easy it is to get piles of plat from this website, or that, and these people, and also throw out a program or two. Fact is... there is cheating, and always will be, not sure if it is as rampant as the OP suggests. Either choose to take part or not. Every security measure sony can come up with can/will be hacked, sadly that's just how it is. It's a game... stay away from the stuff you don't like.
Yea the previous letter like this was against Yantis and IGE, it was almost exactly the same dribble being posted.
As for the ads they aren't harmful and the admins here deserve to get a little something back for the $$ and work they put in.
At this point, I'm just hoping to get enough from the ads to pay for a renewal of the domain at some point ;)
I really don't care if you block the ads or not. They are just there in the hopes they might prove useful to someone and be clicked. I can't & won't tell you to click them (google has rules against it and i dont want to tell people just to click on crap ads anyway). I've tried tomake the ads blend in some, mostly on the default skin at this point. Just got too many projects on the go and haven't gotten everything updated here to try and make the ads less noticable / intrusive.
Yeah I'd randomly noticed some of the ads getting through, but all things considered I was pretty impressed how well they were being handled.
As for the shrug, I prefer the doube * approach. like...
*shrug*
the *'s reprsent both shoulders being used in the shrug to really make it clear just how shruggy of a shrug it is.
Going with the / appraoch just makes it seem like you got a weenie one shoulder shrug going which looks like a really bad dancer trying to keep up with a beat. Either that or some guy in a relationship trying to semi-block the incomping attack from their other half. *shrugs* 8P
jaeren, dun worry about the adds.
Scott Kurtz over at pvponline got himself a lil worked up over em when they popped up re: WoW gold sales... after a bit he gave up, bcs, again, of the massive amount of sites that post it.
We all know about em and if we had any inclination to use em, we could google it just fine.
The ads help keep this site running, and they're not that invasive, so meh to em.
I dont worry much about the ads as long as this site isnt owned by yantis (or some other company of that kind). I dunno if you have a donate button, could probably help to raise a bit of cash to keep this site running without ads, no idea on return on those donate buttons though.
No this site won't be owned by Yantis or IGE. The whole forming of the site was because the old one was bought out from under the members. I host the website and Kash has the domain reg just because I've been too busy to remember to transfer it over yet. I'll be doing that when we both have the time and trust me, I won't be selling the domain. I haven't played eq in over a year personally but I know people still use the site and until such time as the site gets no traffic at all, it will be here.
<3 Jaeren :)~
Quote from: Jaeren on December 07, 2005, 05:30:21 PM
No this site won't be owned by Yantis or IGE. The whole forming of the site was because the old one was bought out from under the members. I host the website and Kash has the domain reg just because I've been too busy to remember to transfer it over yet. I'll be doing that when we both have the time and trust me, I won't be selling the domain. I haven't played eq in over a year personally but I know people still use the site and until such time as the site gets no traffic at all, it will be here.
Been since last November that I finally quit EQ. We still have this site and about 15 other EQ sites hosted on our servers. Yantis made an offer on a few of them, but I kept them and Jaeren is playing with them now in his spare time. I have always tried to get sites like this to come over to our servers and do a simple backlink to us in trade for free SP01 plans.
I just wanted to give you all an update, since this does especially reinforce what I 'thought' was going on.
After this last patch, the resellers I mentioned were trafficing this duped platinum, went dry. They had no auctions up, and none available for purchase at all. Emailing them, and speaking with one of them as a buyer I found out that all of their accounts had been banned and they had none for sale at the moment, but they assured me if I checked back in a day they could fill my needs. Emailing them as a seller they were not interested in buying any plat at all. They said they have 'one supplier' they have an exclusive deal with and they assured they would have new accounts and full stocks of plat within 1 day's time.
Sure enough, the very next day they had millions for sale on every single server. We're not talking about 1 million plat for sale, on a couple of servers, we are talking about 4 million and up for sale, on every single server. Anyone know a way to make 4 million plat in less than 16 hours? I don't care how good you are, or if you had 10 farm teams of characters, you can't do it. You especially can't do this on all servers without any discretion.
Of another note, I am not sure if I mentioned it, but there is an individual offering powerleveling and AA services, on all servers, with no server transfer needed. Their pricing is about one third of what the other powerlevelers charge. After the last patch, they too disappeared citing problems with their accounts when an inquiry was sent. Though one day later they again had every single server covered with auctions for 1-70 or hundreds of AA points at rock bottom prices, and in record timing. If the plat situation doesn't bother you, perhaps this will. If someone is able to get level 70 and 400 AA in two to three days through exploit, does that not negate the hard work of every single player? And no, monster missions are not an option for this kind of advancement, at this speed. I figure someone will offer that as an option, but quite frankly monster missions will not take you 1-70 and 400 AA in 60 hours.
So it sounds like some good news, that Sony is banning these accounts. But it doesn't appear that they have fixed whatever it is that is causing the problem. If the people are able to just buy up another 20 or so accounts and be up and running duping plat again within 24 hours, or powerleveling folks up to 70 with hundreds of AA in two days, that doesn't really fix the problem. Yeah it puts them out some time and about $400, but they are sure to make that back within an hour or two.
It's the exact same situation as was going on two years back, and it will continue to go on. As time wears onwards it will likely get much worse, too. As they figure ways to optimize and streamline whatever it is they are doing, we may see 1 to 70 with 400 AA for a hundred bucks and done in 18 hours, or plat for $50 per million. Price is the limiting factor for most. If it gets that 'cheap' then you can expect to see many more people running around at the top level and maxed out on AA. When something like that costs a couple grand, people think twice. When it costs less than the cost of EQ itself, lots more will be able to 'justify' purchasing their level 70 maxed out character. And yes, it will have impact within the game. Sony needs to put a stop to this as soon as possible. Simply banning the offenders once a month is not working. They need to fix whatever it is that these individuals are using to exploit. Make your voice heard, if you feel this is a problem. Feel free to copy this and send it in to SOE. The more people that do, the better. Coverage on the SOE boards would help as well.
*Noting here that out of respect for the boards this is posted at, I removed any and all names of companies and individuals doing this. This is not an advertisment. It is my hope with this post to inform the EQ community so that people can make their voices known to Sony. 1 person bringing this up tends to get ignored. It took many people with concern for the game two years ago to get it fixed.
Quote from: Jaeren on December 05, 2005, 08:39:58 PM
The ads have been in place for quite a while. I've added many of them to the list of ones not to show but I haven't had time lately to add the ones that are showing now.
Frankly, they have been up for months with the occasional one getting through and until today, no one even noticed so I hadn't put much effort into removing them with the large amounts of other things I have to do, it doesn't leave much time for removing ads that no one seems to see anyway.
Edit: Also, once Sony made their own forums, they stopped visiting or listening to any other forums anyway.
The last 30 times I went to this site, every single add was for some plat-selling site. When they refresh, just more of the same. So it's sortoff hard to believe that they only make out a small percentage of the ads. I was there when the old Beastlord site sold out to Yantis and this site was founded, and the drama from people burning Yantis and IGE to the ground still rings in my ears. I am only slightly bothered by the ads, it just feels wrong to see them on this website specifically. But if it pays the bills then I understand.
concernedeq: what server are you on, and would you mind letting us know your character name?
Quote from: concernedeq on December 12, 2005, 01:51:02 PM
After this last patch, the resellers I mentioned were trafficing this duped platinum, went dry. They had no auctions up, and none available for purchase at all. Emailing them, and speaking with one of them as a buyer I found out that all of their accounts had been banned and they had none for sale at the moment, but they assured me if I checked back in a day they could fill my needs. Emailing them as a seller they were not interested in buying any plat at all. They said they have 'one supplier' they have an exclusive deal with and they assured they would have new accounts and full stocks of plat within 1 day's time.
I can't help but find it odd that they would so freely give up the fact that they were banned. I question this statement in its entirety. It may have indeed happened, but I suspect you simply guessed at the reason.
Quote
Sure enough, the very next day they had millions for sale on every single server. We're not talking about 1 million plat for sale, on a couple of servers, we are talking about 4 million and up for sale, on every single server. Anyone know a way to make 4 million plat in less than 16 hours? I don't care how good you are, or if you had 10 farm teams of characters, you can't do it. You especially can't do this on all servers without any discretion.
I'm still loooking for a way to make that much plat that quick. If anyone knows the secret, hook me up. My druid needs some DoN crystals. :)
Quote
Of another note, I am not sure if I mentioned it, but there is an individual offering powerleveling and AA services, on all servers, with no server transfer needed. Their pricing is about one third of what the other powerlevelers charge. After the last patch, they too disappeared citing problems with their accounts when an inquiry was sent. Though one day later they again had every single server covered with auctions for 1-70 or hundreds of AA points at rock bottom prices, and in record timing. If the plat situation doesn't bother you, perhaps this will. If someone is able to get level 70 and 400 AA in two to three days through exploit, does that not negate the hard work of every single player? And no, monster missions are not an option for this kind of advancement, at this speed. I figure someone will offer that as an option, but quite frankly monster missions will not take you 1-70 and 400 AA in 60 hours.
Actually, it
was monster missions that folks were using for AAXP. The Guk ``train them out'' mission was being scripted so that it was completely automated, hence the reason they altered how it worked in a recent patch.
Quote
So it sounds like some good news, that Sony is banning these accounts. But it doesn't appear that they have fixed whatever it is that is causing the problem. If the people are able to just buy up another 20 or so accounts and be up and running duping plat again within 24 hours, or powerleveling folks up to 70 with hundreds of AA in two days, that doesn't really fix the problem. Yeah it puts them out some time and about $400, but they are sure to make that back within an hour or two.
It's not that they don't have problems fixed, it's that new ones keep popping up. Money is a powerful motivator, and as long as they are making money, they'll keep finding ways to exploit the game in their favor.
Quote
It's the exact same situation as was going on two years back, and it will continue to go on. As time wears onwards it will likely get much worse, too. As they figure ways to optimize and streamline whatever it is they are doing, we may see 1 to 70 with 400 AA for a hundred bucks and done in 18 hours, or plat for $50 per million. Price is the limiting factor for most. If it gets that 'cheap' then you can expect to see many more people running around at the top level and maxed out on AA. When something like that costs a couple grand, people think twice. When it costs less than the cost of EQ itself, lots more will be able to 'justify' purchasing their level 70 maxed out character. And yes, it will have impact within the game. Sony needs to put a stop to this as soon as possible. Simply banning the offenders once a month is not working. They need to fix whatever it is that these individuals are using to exploit. Make your voice heard, if you feel this is a problem. Feel free to copy this and send it in to SOE. The more people that do, the better. Coverage on the SOE boards would help as well.
Why would you think Sony
doesn't wan't to stop this? It certainly doesn't work in their favor, that's for sure.
While many of your points are basically right, you fall short everywhere else. It's definately an issue, it's actively being worked on, and it's never going to be resolved as long as the game remains as dynamic as it has been; with so much new content, people will continue to find exploits.
Jillie, It wouldn't be in my best interest to disclose my server or character name as I've stated I have sold plat. If you wish I'll not post on these boards if you have a no anon poster rule. If there are other reasons you wish to know feel free to email me and we can talk.
I wanted to add
I know some have been shrugging this off saying "well I don't twink out in the bazaar or I just raid so this doesn't affect me at all." But it affects the raider eventually, just like it affects almost every other player.
For instance, if the rate of plat entering the game triples over 6 months because of a dupe, and development determines that plat must be drained out of the game in some fashion, then it is usually through higher level quests that this is done. Two excellent examples are POP Ornate and Elemental armor, as well as OOW armor. Notice to complete a piece of OOW armor, after the dupe 2 years back, costs around 10k per piece. Compare this with elemental armor completion which was, I think, 500 plat each piece? Huge difference, and you can thank the macroing and duping done 2 years ago for such a massive increase.
It affects everyone eventually, when individuals are allowed to counterfeit money for so long and push it into the system. When things are put in place to try to remedy the situation (and once the money has changed hands beyond the seller / buyer and into the bazaar stream, it is impossible to just yank the duped plat) everyone will feel the pinch. When the next armor pieces cost 50k per piece, or the next item required for raid progressions or high end tradeskills costs exhorbitant amounts of money, you are paying the price for these exploiters. Something to chew on a bit, if you don't think the effects of such activity will reach you. I can almost guarantee you, they will.
Quotewouldn't be in my best interest
QuoteI've sold plat
So what you're saying is that you're whining because your business model doesnt work anymore? Seems like you're part of the problem...
Personally, I really only use plat for fixed game-imposed costs, like moving augs around or buying that 10K component for qvic armor. It's been a long time since I've had less than 100K sitting around for that sort of thing.
Otherwise, as a general rule, if I don't win and loot it myself, I do without. So the real-world value of plat and what's happening in the bazaar really doesn't matter to me.
Since it has now been fixed, the combine I was talking about was :
Tinkered Catapult
To make this required an investment of around 30 platinum and sold back to vendors for over 36 platinum.
http://www.rpgexpert.com/4078.html
This worked as of last week, but in one of the patches this week past, it was fixed thanks to one of the class board moderators (one of your community correspondents) passing on the information I gave to them to the dev in charge of tradeskills. Thank you Saroc of eqclerics.
The patch after this was fixed, the platinum has started drying up. We'll see if this fixes the problem, but for now it appears it has. It may not be because of the tradeskill combine but also may be due to other things within SOE I certainly am not privy to. I did forward what information I had to the current EQ Producer as well as the head of SOE CS, and will continue investigating the issue as far as is possible on my end.
I appreciate the mods allowing me to voice my concern on these boards, and I also appreciate those who have kept an open mind about this and not merely brushed me off with a "go away spammer" post. Spam was certainly not my intention. I love this game as much as any of you do, despite that we may have differences in opinion on the sale of coin, items and or services for real life money, and my concern for the game is as real as my concern for my income.
Seems to me that the easiest way to bring attention to an exploit is to let the world know about it. Otherwise the developers are apt to give it a lower priority. If this is indeed the exploit that was being used for what you suggested, then it's a trivial fix. Five minutes, perhaps, yet you have been moaning about it for how long?
Regardless, I'm glad to hear it's been fixed and you may once again sell your platinum.
lol Oiingo :mrgreen:
The next time you find an exploit like this... simply copy and paste a How-to on all the class boards... should get it fixed pretty quick.
Simply sending a few PMs/e-mails to the right people will get it some attention really fast as well. I'd been following the issue and knew sar was being talked with about it. By posting it on the boards you open it up to more people doing it. Sometimes people think that will get it fixed quicker, but it also means more damage is done prior to it being fixed. Either way it's good this was taken care of and overall I think it was handled pretty well.
You know and sometimes the best way to cover your tracks .. is to let the cat out of the bag. It's a lot easier for SOE to ban 5 people who are using a secret exploit, than it is for SOE to ban 500 people that are using one that is more well known.
Quote from: Tastian on December 21, 2005, 06:31:38 PM
Simply sending a few PMs/e-mails to the right people will get it some attention really fast as well. I'd been following the issue and knew sar was being talked with about it. By posting it on the boards you open it up to more people doing it. Sometimes people think that will get it fixed quicker, but it also means more damage is done prior to it being fixed. Either way it's good this was taken care of and overall I think it was handled pretty well.
I think you will find then when something is being exploited, most folks don't care if accounts are banned as a result unless it was malicious, e.g. crashing a zone when people are in it, causing people to die, etc.
If someone is farming plat or XP, then all we want to see is that it's shut down and resolved. It certainly didn't take them long to remove Circle of Drakes from the game, but the one mentioned took much longer, and I'd guess that it was infantly easier to fix.
As for sending private messages and tells, this isn't an option for most of us. If I ever did figure out how to send a cross-server tell to Prathun, Zajeer, Absor, etc, they'd probably wonder a) who the heck I am, and b) why the heck I was telling them directly instead of using the ``proper channels.''
Say it loud and get the word out there. The more it spreads, the more people know about it, including SOE staff.
If y'all want to use this resource (http://eq.nitrous.org/eq/bugs.php), the information is automagically sent to SOE's customer service e-mail address every week and I will use this same information to ask questions during dev chat and the weekly question and answer posts on the official EQ forums.
Oddly enough I found one of my accounts banned a few weeks ago.
I'll admit I had cheated. I found I was able to summon poison on my Rogue for free with his ornate pants and then combine it using my grand masters seal and sell a 10 stack back to the vendors for 209 plat. (Granted, with the casting times on summoning 10 poisons at 15 seconds per cast, and 30 seconds for the poison bottle (Lore) it took WAY longer to make 209 platinum than it would for my 70 Mage to simply farm it, but it allowed me to watch some TV and mindlessly poke buttons.
Anyway, I know it was wrong, it's my issue to deal with. What I found myself wondering during these two weeks (Completely devoid of a reply from Customer Service to my Email other than the Auto reply when I submitted a request to discuss it with them.) was what happens to the tradeskill exploiters? Are they insta-banned as well? The potential for cash earnings (Especially with macros) is easily in the 7-8 digit range, certainly more than the 12k I was able to summon...
Anyway, has anyone ever had the luxury of being banned and actually gotten a reply from Sony about it? Or gotten the ban removed after a certain period of time?
I hadn't thought much of it at the time, but obviously I had underestimated the severity of it.
Anyway, thanks.
There was a bug on brewing around 2002. I don't remember the item but it cost about 1pp to make and it returned 10 upon success that each sold back to the vendor for 5gp or 1pp I forget. I heard about it on the eqdruid forum and checked it out. I found out that I could make about 500-600pp an hour from buying vendor purchased gear in Rivervale and Misty Thicket, the zone directly outside. I will admit that I made several thousand platinum on it before my wrist began to hurt. No one ever got banned or had platinum removed from the game over it.
It wasn't a tradeskill bug it was just that they priced the final combine for way more then the original cost. Back then I think devs checked message boards regularly as within 2 weeks it was fixed. I imagine with the new tradeskill setup it would be much faster, and no wrist pain, as I would not have to add 4 or 5 ingredients every single time to finish a combine I would just need to hit combine and auto inventory. With the PoK, didn't exist at time of this bug, it would be even faster as I could have purchased every item in one zone instead of having to zone back and forth.
If this bug still existed I assume you could make 1-2k an hour and possibly 20-40k a day or 200k a week if you were extremely patient or had a macro. I don't know how to use macros and I am definetely not that patient. Of course if all I wanted was plat I could easily farm more then 1-2k an hour in several different zones and get experience for it as well.
Quote from: Gojix on December 27, 2005, 06:15:10 PM
Oddly enough I found one of my accounts banned a few weeks ago.
I'll admit I had cheated. I found I was able to summon poison on my Rogue for free with his ornate pants and then combine it using my grand masters seal and sell a 10 stack back to the vendors for 209 plat. (Granted, with the casting times on summoning 10 poisons at 15 seconds per cast, and 30 seconds for the poison bottle (Lore) it took WAY longer to make 209 platinum than it would for my 70 Mage to simply farm it, but it allowed me to watch some TV and mindlessly poke buttons.
Anyway, I know it was wrong, it's my issue to deal with. What I found myself wondering during these two weeks (Completely devoid of a reply from Customer Service to my Email other than the Auto reply when I submitted a request to discuss it with them.) was what happens to the tradeskill exploiters? Are they insta-banned as well? The potential for cash earnings (Especially with macros) is easily in the 7-8 digit range, certainly more than the 12k I was able to summon...
Anyway, has anyone ever had the luxury of being banned and actually gotten a reply from Sony about it? Or gotten the ban removed after a certain period of time?
I hadn't thought much of it at the time, but obviously I had underestimated the severity of it.
Anyway, thanks.
While I don't like cheating, I also believe even stronger that Sony is *wrong* in banning people over SONYS bugs. These are bugs that SONY put into the game and its 100% unfair to ban people over it. But Sony/Verant always has been a bunch of thugs (kinda like the RIAA/MPAA). Then they wonder why so few people are playing the game anymore. The whole thing is Sony/Verants fault, not the player. What they did to you was totally uncalled for, and I know from personal experience about the banning power trip Sony has. A few years ago I had an account banned once, and it wasn't even for cheating, it was for posting on a message board complaining about Verant.... so much for living in America.
I should also add that you most likely will get little support on this Pro-Sony/Verant message board.
:?
QuoteI should also add that you most likely will get little support on this Pro-Sony/Verant message board.
Oh yes. If i had a plat for every time the phrase "Long live Sony for we love it so much!" has been posted on these boards id be banned for exploiting too :p
Ahhhhh, Cheeseflation!
I feel that if SOE have issues with these things then they only have to change the coding to correct it. If they leave the loophole in place they have no right to punish people for their errors which is effectively what they do.
If an author gets things wrong in a book he/she could be sued through the courts. It seems that in the case of Sony they can sue their customers ?????
If you discover a bug (which may involve actually doing it once or twice to discover and/or confirm its existance) you should report it. If you continue to use the bug (whether you reported it or not) to benefit yourself, it is exploiting and you should be banned or given another appropriate sanction. Its not very hard to understand.
i'm not pro sony... infact i think sony does alot of stupid stuff... but come on... use your common since... you know it was a bug you know what you was doing was wrong... did you not expect to get in trouble? don't complain to me that you screwed up and don't know why your account got banned... common sense is great... try and use it
Happy New Year, and another update for you all.
I've obviously been keeping after this issue and I'm sad to say that it has not stopped, but gotten increasingly worse since I last posted.
A second exploit was discovered and fixed since my posting (confirmed here as well in a post above), which involved ornate rogue pants, summon poison (no drop no sale) combine with tradeskill seal, and get back a poison that sold to vendors for around 275 plat. Since this could be summoned per 15 seconds, that's 275 plat x 4 per minute, or about 1.5 million platinum per day. This is when run with a macro of course.
This required a level 46 rogue and ornate pants with poison skill. Something which could be made up in a couple of days.
Though this fix seemed to stop the problems for a few days, they resurfaced which lends credibility to the fact that there is indeed another exploit out there not yet discovered and fixed.
Price dropped again at the beginning of January, marking now the seventh price drop in 3 months. Buy prices for the main player in the market dropped down to $13 per 100k on most servers and they are the ONLY reseller who buys platinum, and sell prices have dropped an average of $5 per 100k over the past two weeks. This is a 20% drop in just two weeks. 100% drop over a 6 week timeframe.
From some of these guys you can now purchase platinum for $150 per million with a small amount of haggling. If it continues to drop at the rate it is going, $50 per million is about two months away at the worst case, four I'd guess at best. Also the amount of platinum for sale has skyrocketed, going from suppliers having totals of about 4 million, to most servers having 20 to 30 million for sale at a time just since my last posting.
It takes time for the effects of this to be felt in game, but each expansion there usually are more and more platinum drains put into the game because of activity such as this. Who pays? The players do, not the exploiters. The exploiters walk off to the bank with a $25,000 weekly check, while the players have to dig up more and more plat for their tradeskills or quest armor, or, as the exploiters would love, have to buy from the exploiters as it becomes the only reasonable source of platinum.
This is turning into a pretty good ad for plat buying :evil:
It's not an ad for plat buying, I assure you. If anything I'd think that talk of exploits and banning related to such activity would deter people away from buying platinum.
I guess I should mention, as I failed to in my last post, that I have been in the process of dismantling my "business" since Christmas. You may wonder why I do not just fold it up completely and immediately, but that lies in needing to make sure that those I am responsible for, are taken care of. I expect to be completely done within the month.
This is going to be long, but I'd like to explain what my business essentially was, and my views on things in general and why what is currently going on is quite serious for EQ. Not just for the plat sellers like I was, or just those who rely on bazaar gears and trading to equip their character, but also those at the raiding level. While it certainly impacts raiders the least, it does eventually.
I started selling about 7 years ago. I started on my home server, amongst a few other sellers. At the time EQ was EQ, no expansions, fairly new, and you could sell 1,000 platinum for $500. I got into selling because of a GM at the time who I spoke to on occasion who was selling platinum and other items from places like mistmoore, guk, and solusek b. This was at a time a GM was an unpaid volunteer player, and the kinks hadn't been worked out as far as the EULA which forbid the buying and selling of intellectual property.
My tax return for that year which has salary from 2 months of my job which I quit to make this my full time business, showed $150,623.78 after expenses. By this time I had made another character on another server and bought myself another computer and was playing on two. I killed guards in everfrost and sold the weapons to vendors and then bought items from players, or sold the platinum. That's the entirety of what I did to make that income.
There was more and more competition coming in on a weekly basis, and I never made so much as I did the first year, even though I had to work more and more. Like any business if you are one of the only places around for that product, you'll make a killing compared to being in the face of extreme competition.
Fast forward a bit, I started to look for employees who were already selling platinum and items, who wanted a bit more security in what they did and the advantage of things like health care, a more steady paycheck, and the advantage of information exchange on where and how to make the best money in EQ.
Over the years I eventually had 16 employees on 7 servers, and the business was approaching $800,000 a year in income with hardly any costs associated with it beyond paying those 16 people, and health care.
I always operated the business in a strict manner that if I were to ever find out an individual cheated or exploited, or macroed, or duped, or scammed or acquired their coin or items in any other way than fully legitimate means within game, that they would be fired on the spot. I am happy to say that I never had to terminate anyone for this, but sad to say I did lose a husband and wife pair who quit to run the cheese tradeskill exploit as they felt they could make more doing it. It was fixed within two weeks after they quit, and had already been extensively reported.
We weathered various exploits which came and went, and prices which were steadily falling. It's what happens as more and more platinum enters the game, or more and more get into buying and selling. We always kept up, though, until some time into Gates Of Discord, at the end of 2003, when the first major major problem to hit, happened.
Back then prices on platinum had been near $200, per 100k, at the beginning of that year. Within two months, the price fell on the secondary market from $200 per 100k, to $25 per 100k. The problem? There were many guesses and many claims, but it was a combination of many issues. For one there were tradeskills which could be run under a macro for profit. There were many people doing this and using offset hacks to warp around or use combiners like the forges from somewhere outside the zone boundaries so you could not see them. Ever run up to a forge back then and find it was in use but nobody was standing there? Well, now you know what was probably going on. With a macro you could make a few hundred k a day per server per character you had doing it. 40 + servers at the time, times $100 a day per server, and you'd be fairly rich in short order at a steady diet of $120,000 a month. At these prices, at the time, there was room for about 5 times this business in the overall market, at about $500,000 per month. The income on the secondary market was a large percent of what Everquest took in in subscription fees, and this was right about the peak of EQ subscription.
Not only were there macros, but there were rumors of a "banker dupe" which were probably untrue, and there were also rumors of an offset hack to make the server think you dropped to a negative amount of money, which would put your character at a very very large positive amount of money. I believe the latter more, because the banker would require inside help, and while it's possible I don't think it's probable.
I lost 10 employees at that time. 100k platinum was a large amount back then, still, and to make that consistently on a daily basis with a couple of people was difficult. Since many of my employees were husband / wife teams of players with families to support, they could not afford to remain in a situation where their income was cut down to about $25 a day.
It was fixed, of course, but it is interesting to note that once it was fixed prices never returned to $200 per 100k, but rather went to $75 per 100k at the most. Enough platinum had entered Everquest to drop prices by more than half outside of the game. The effects were very very noticeable in game as well. While the issue was still present, ornate armors and the like which were top end droppables at the time, were reaching wild prices of 200k platinum and up, and they were selling. After it was fixed, top end items which had gone for 25k to 40k each, were now near 75k to 100k each and remained there for quite some time (before the top end item price went up again, and not down).
If you look back, this time period also marks the beginning of the decline of Everquest subscriptions. To be fair this was also in the midst of Gates Of Discord, but I can't help but believe the tidal wave that ripped through the bazaar may have contributed to that happening. It certainly would be frustrating to be saving up for some gear as a casual player, only to find the things you were saving up for nearly doubled or tripled in price within weeks, while your platinum didn't come to you any faster. Part of what my business was, was understanding what my customer's needs were. And many were just your average casual player who bought a bit of plat, 10k or 20k, here and there, to work on some tradeskills or to pick up a new hat or pair of boots in the bazaar. I dealt with a sea of emails at the time, from such customers, who were extremely frustrated at the whole mess, and many who outright quit as they were then almost forced to buy platinum to keep up their level of playing that was fun for them, and that made the game no longer a game to them.
My other customers consisted of the stereotypical plat buyer that people seem to dislike. The guy who goes out and spends $2000 on platinum (which gets you about 15 million platinum right now, or which got you 4 million platinum a couple months ago). These were the people with lots of money or who just had EQ as their main hobby (we all have one of those money sink hobbies to an extent) and had no qualms about spending such money on a videogame as it was fun for them to do so. Then there were the guilds, or guild officers and leaders who would buy platinum to pay for their guild's armor pieces, or high end players who would buy platinum for rare items like amulet of necropotence, mask of tinkering, blade of carnage, or other things their guild did not actively kill, or which were almost required for individuals to make it in a high end guild as they needed a "taunt weapon" or the like.
So anyways, after this great decline, things were very stable for the next year and a half. Prices in and out of game were stable, increasing and decreasing on the order of between 10 and 15 percent per year, which is normal. Prices on platinum dropped from $75 per 100k in late 2003 to $50 per 100k in mid 2005. I spent more time speaking with other sellers, and more time diversifying how we obtained platinum until the point where we, 8 people, were the sole supplier on 4 post merge servers, for everquest platinum to the big three sellers. There was no reason for them to lie to us about this, of course. They did have other sources of platinum at a rate of about 50k per day from people selling bits and pieces here and there, or they'd get a million from someone now and again, but they did not have the steady flow on the 4 servers from anyone else at all other than us. This was about $500 a day per server, or about $180,000 a year, divided amongst 8 people. It was barely manageable when you factor in health insurance and taxes.
In July of this year, one of the big sellers we dealt with, with a name starting with "G" (as I'd rather not mention them here lest people think I am trying to get them more business) told us and their other suppliers that they no longer had any need for platinum from us. They closed off any buys from people, and dropped their price from $50 to $40 per 100k on the market, and instead of having varying amounts for sale per server, they had millions on every server.
Being in the market as we were, it was quite an obvious move to make when a seller would get some sort of single source supplier who could meet all their needs. This is something which happens in games like World of Warcraft, where one supplier might cover all servers with 400 Chinese employees paid low wages to play the game and farm coin for hours and days at a time at a steady rate. EQ has never had that "problem" and even if so, they would be limited to making platinum in the bazaar, as EQ is not modeled as such that you can make money by farming monster kills and getting plat from NPC vendors. This was not a possibility, as a mass influx of chinese farmers would also be noticed within game, unless they were doing Dragons of Norrath crystals, in which case there is not sufficient market for crystals only, in order to supply what this seller needed.
Besides, crystals were a big part of what we sold, and nobody was selling close to as many as we did, not even 10% of as many as we did. As a matter of fact, being in this business we were required out of necessity to know the best places and items to sell for money, and not one of those areas had anyone or anything that could come close to what we were doing.
The general consensus was that this supplier got ahold of a dupe somehow, or they had a supplier who had one. When I say dupe I mean any hack, or macro or any way for someone to get money for nothing in game, and certainly something which is not "available to everyone."
We didn't fuss too much about it, though. We adjusted to the prices, kept a watchful eye out for any other issues, and kept up business as usual.
Until September / October. This is when the major problems started. Two new sellers appeared on the auction sites. These sellers were unknowns, new accounts who had millions upon millions of platinum for sale across any and all servers at crazy pricing. Their price? $25 per 100k if you haggled a bit with them, and they could give you as much as you wanted. 10 million wasn't an issue. 20 million? not a problem. In addition to these two sellers, old time sellers who had been gone since the last dupe era in 2003, and had not sold platinum since then, suddenly re-opened shop with millions per server. The amount available per server shot up from a typical million or 2 million listed at a time, to nearly 30 million platinum listed at a time. This all happened within a week. Resellers dropped their buy prices by 30%.
And it stopped again within 3 or 4 weeks. They disappeared, dried up, gone overnight. We honestly figured it had been fixed. But sure enough within the week the "G" named seller had millions per server for sale, and even more of it than they had before. They still denied all sales TO them but they had as much as you wanted to buy from them, and they had a new low price. After a couple weeks the other sellers started reappearing with similar pricing, and it has remained that way to this day. At times they get banned, then they come back. They formed a sort of conglomerate, and they keep in contact and fix prices so they are not competing too much with each other or completely killing off the market, which as they like to point out, they could if anyone wanted to mess with them, as "we can sell it for $1 per 100k and make money, just keep that in mind" which was mentioned to me when I tried to list up at a price less than theirs.
This has been going on for 3 months now, for the most part unchecked. SOE is aware of an issue, but seems unable to find out what it is and put a stop to it. They do ban the seller accounts from time to time (although it appears they have not since before Christmas) but it is really fruitless to do so as the sellers are back up again the next day with tens of millions available for sale. They can't ban an account which these guys have not yet created, and if it's some sort of hack that SOE has not yet found, all these guys have to do is fire up an account, dupe up 20 million, and they are good for a week until SOE gets back around to catching that account. At like $10? per account, plus a game card, I doubt they care other than a minor nuisance when one gets banned.
I find it absolutely amazing that SOE does not know what this is and how to stop it. I can't imagine they don't want to stop it. But I also have to wonder if they are taking it as seriously as it really is. No it's not a case of a bunch of kids running around buying up all the ornate armors and high end items with duped plat, pushing prices through the roof, but it is and will continue to speed inflation within the game, as the platinum entering the game in this fashion is not gotten by killing monsters or trading in the bazaar. The higher the amount of plat in the game is, the more they will need to design more plat sinks in the game be they tradeskills which cost huge amounts to skill up, or armor pieces which require you buy expensive components from NPC vendors.
The conglomerate of sellers, which just lowered pricing yet again, is arguing amongst themselves and and likely will drop prices again soon due to a new seller with millions per server, who obviously has access to the same exploit or something similar, who is selling for less than them that they now must compete with. $5 per 100k is a very real estimate of what this could get to. With the out of game market being roughly $600 per day per server, or about $4 million per year, if prices reach $50 per million that's looking at 4.3 billion platinum entering the game on a per server basis per year. Already at current pricing about 1.5 billion illegitimate platinum will be entering the EQ world this year. If you do not think this will have far reaching impact in game, it most certainly will.
To explain, since many do not understand the difference between someone who sells plat they make in game legitimately, and someone who sells exploited platinum, there is a very large difference on the server economies between the two. A seller who sells plat they make in game legitimately removes platinum that is already in the market, sells it for real life money, and this platinum then enters the market again. The net effect is zero, and the market is completely unaffected. A seller who sells duped plat, never removes money from the economy, he just adds money to it. So if a duper sells 1 million, there is now 1 million more platinum within the global economy.
Everquest is actually fairly well designed to ensure that money entering the game is only slightly more than money exiting the game through things like tradeskills, reagents, coffins, potions, soulstones, gems, high price armor completions, etc etc etc. With a little bit more money entering the game than exiting, you encourage mild inflation, which since EQ has no real banks or reliable investments which give a return over time, this encourages spending rather than hoarding of money. This increases trade and player interaction and is very good for the overall health of the game.
Double or tripling or more, the rate of platinum entering the economy without a matching increase in the rate it exits the economy, would and will have a huge effect on inflation within the game. For instance if we say every day that 5,000 people play EQ on a server all who make an average of 1,000 platinum, and spend an average of 750 platinum, the net result is about 1,250,000 platinum which enters the game per day per server. If on top of that a duper is injecting 5,000,000 platinum into the game, that platinum is not checked against normal costs. The 5,000,000 does not have the normal 3,750,000 drain the other players are faced with, thus instead of the normal amount of 1,250,000 platinum entering the game per day, there is 6,250,000 platinum entering the game per day. Also since this 5,000,000 platinum likely enters the bazaar immediately spread among a few people, while the 1,250,000 is spread among the 5,000 players and trickles in, the effect is multiplied to extremes. While the normal intended inflation might be 5% per 6 months, you get much much higher inflation rates. As little as 1 year ago, the "best" items cost 100k or so barring any oddities, on average. Now you find the best items are approacing 400k, to 500k. You can't take a look and say "well I can get an earring of solstice cheap now! there is no inflation!" because an earring of solstice is an old low demand item, and there are a multitude of better alternatives for that same slot. When golden tickets are running 1 million on some servers, and only because that is the most people can charge for one on a trader, there is inflation because these were 200k a year ago on the high end. When a mask of tinkering is 1 million platinum when they were 250k a year ago on the high end, there is inflation.
You can also see the effects here if you wish to read some other threads. Expect to see more and more of these types of requests for "another coin type" in the near future.
http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Veterans&message.id=160977
http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Veterans&message.id=160791
While many psts deal with Firiona Vie, there are listings in there of many items which are selling for 1 million plus on other normal servers as well. It is interesting to note, also, that due to the "all droppable" nature of Firiona Vie, that the out of game platinum market for that server is over 5 times what it is on a normal server, with thousands of dollars a day in activity. Also notice which server is hardest hit by inflation and which server has the most platinum flying around, with a population relative to other servers which is much smaller. If you know what you are looking at, you can see problems with exploitation, and their effects on trading, on Firiona Vie first. It's the smoking gun when it comes to these things, a virtual crystal ball that players on other servers can take a look at and see a bit of their future when it comes to the bazaar.
And this all certainly does effect every player. The time it takes to do so and the degrees to which it does, are all different. For the legitimate plat seller, it affects them the most, to be honest with you. With gradual inflation of up to 15% it does not, but with drastic inflation they can't keep up because inflation in game is a bit slower than deflation out of game. Thus while that item that sold for 100k last month might get 105k this month on average, out of game that 100k is worth 50% less. Working at McDonalds becomes more profitable, and it becomes non sensical to sell platinum.
For the casual player who does a bit of buying and selling the the bazaar, selling low end common items to save up for higher end nice items, they are impacted as the low end common items which are not high demand to begin with, sell for less and less or remain stagnant, or at very best inflate very very slowly, while the good and better items inflate at a pace which they can't keep up with unless they play more, or spend more time "farming." For some this is how they play and this is how they have fun, and such outpacing and inability to keep up can push them to quit.
For the new player, they have a few options. They do not have the pool of players to group with, and the game at their level beyond the very early stages, in the void of 15 to 60, is designed around early EQ. It's designed around an influx of coin and items which is old and pre 2003 exploit and pre today's current exploit. To a seasoned EQ player it may seem trivial to save up 1000 platinum if you work at it in an evening, but to a new guy, that figure is astronomic and daunting. Pretend you are level 25, give yourself 1000 platinum, go to the bazaar, and try to equip up to a level of gear you could solo / duo with (because it is highly unlikely to find people to group with at that level to make out a group). I doubt you will be able to do it, and where is a new level 25 guy going to get 1000 platinum anyways? If they have knowledge of the game to the extent that that is possible they are not new to EQ or have inside help anyways. This limits, more and more, the introduction of new players into the game. Of course, there's always the option for these players to go buy some platinum, but should that be almost required? Exploitation drives the new player away, and reduces the attractivness of the game to them.
For the average player in a guild, with some raid gear, and who plays a few nights a week, trades in the bazaar a bit, does a few tradeskills, has some twinks, and on and on and on, it's just standard inflation. You are the beginning of the plat drain. The coffins, the high cost tradeskill components that must be purchased from NPCs, the soulstones, the gems, the portal fragments, the gate potions, the 500 plat for ornate armor on turn in, the 10,000 plat for qvic armor on turn in. These things are here and at higher and higher costs in order to remove first and foremost, the normal player injection of platinum into the game through legitimate means, but they are also there in order to remove the platinum from past and current exploits from the game. You pay a premium on this stuff because Joe Macro over there exploited the game to make his $200 a day back in 2003, or because that duper over there exploited the game for $25,000 a week for the last 3 months and is continuing to do so.
For the raider, you pay like the average player, though you have access to the high end droppable gear in order to offset that cost. You can get stuff that is worth hundreds of thousands of platinum, and you can easily cough up the 10K for a piece of Qvic armor. It doesn't affect you as much because you buy and sell on the high end, and the high end is the most inflated and the plat sinks to counter it have not yet been introduced, and when they are they won't be too difficult to deal with for you, the top end raider. There is some effect, not monetary, from less new players sticking with EQ, and average players getting frustrated with inflation on their way up to your guild and quitting before they reach that level of play. The downsizing of eq associated with less accounts (I do not claim exploitation to be the ONLY reason for this) and it being more and more difficult to find good players to fill your ranks.
But it does affect everyone. Turning a blind eye to it does fine in the short term, but the effects do reach everyone eventually, and the longer it is left unchecked the worse that effect will be.
As I said earlier I am getting out of "the business" and won't be selling platinum and items for real life money anymore as soon as next month. I am still concerned with the state of the situation, though. It has nothing to do with my own income, as it has teetered on low profit and a waste of time for over a half a year now. I've more concern as a player. While I could write another novel about how I think in a proper system, the out of game trade of items and coin for real life money helps a game more than hurts it, it's not the issue here. As a long time player of EQ, who will remain playing for fun only and not as an income, it is in my best interest to get exploitation stopped for how it may affect me as a player and not how it may affect how I feed my family or pay my mortgage.
I hope this discussion will remain civil and that the mods allow people to discuss the topic. I look forward to any questions people may have and will happily answer them as I have time.
Healthcare ... lol .. nice fiction bro!
Pot... kettle. Ketlle... pot.
So is this bitterness over your buisness going south? Because you clearly don't have a problem with buying/selling plat, it only seems that you lost your corner in the market. Listen there will always be people who cheat, and find ways to. Either let it affect you or not. I don't dupe, macro (any time spent learning the "language" would be better spent experiencing), or buy plat. Some people do... who cares? Is it gonna make me get a group more or less often? Are my AAs going to come any slower solo? BFD... some stupid kid who is good at it makes some cash, good for him... better than designing a virus for my puter to catch and not be able to boot EQ. And I would also like to comment that it is in very poor taste to claim that the dupers/macro'ers are taking away from dental plans of children of people whom you employ to break the EULA. Gimme an F'ing break.
My point is this: people cheat, can't stop that. SOE has they're interests in letting it go, or stopping it. Bazaar prices are inflated, the economy is crashing, and so is the sky. I just play to have fun with friends and guildmates, and I'm sure thats the case with most.
I hate these guys in the bazaar. They're the ones that have a /buyer trying to get all the high-end tradeskill items for cheap. Then they also have a seller at the same time, selling the items for just a bit over what they bought it for. You can see this in the Crystal market. They buy them for say 96pp each, then resell for maybe 102-105pp. You might think that's not a biggie, but think of how many crystals they sell every day. 1k, 20k? They do it with hot tradeskill items like Glossy Drake Hides, or Metallic Drake scales too. And god forbid you want to set up a /buyer and get 3-4 for a combine. They will always beat your offer by a few plat. Thus raising the price you pay for them, and the price they will be selling for in bazaar.
It's just aggravating to me. They are on there for one reason, to make real life money. Not to get a few k plat and go spend it on stuff. Or to buy up tradeskill stuff to make something for you or a guildy. I would burn everyone of these frickin' $$%^$ to the ground if i could. So damn blatant what they are doing. And these are the semi-honest ones, using the current EQ system to make plat. Just imagine how i feel about the dupers/hackers out there. Bah, probably make this go to rants now, but this dang thread won't die anyway lol.
I couldn't read all of that well, crap you posted. I got through about half or so. Basically, you are complaining because you made a couple million or something and now can't make as much? Two words for you: Bite me. I work my ass off with two jobs and still dont make very much money at all. I'm on call 24/7 for both, etc. I have zero sympathy for you because you can't make the same amount of money you did before while you sit back and do next to nothing. You whine and complain that people ruined the game & ruined the market while you admit you were one of the first sellers. So if you and others like you hadn't started the market, the game woudl be different now.
Quote from: DontPetBear on January 12, 2006, 04:07:23 PM
I hate these guys in the bazaar. They're the ones that have a /buyer trying to get all the high-end tradeskill items for cheap. Then they also have a seller at the same time, selling the items for just a bit over what they bought it for. You can see this in the Crystal market. They buy them for say 96pp each, then resell for maybe 102-105pp. You might think that's not a biggie, but think of how many crystals they sell every day. 1k, 20k? They do it with hot tradeskill items like Glossy Drake Hides, or Metallic Drake scales too. And god forbid you want to set up a /buyer and get 3-4 for a combine. They will always beat your offer by a few plat. Thus raising the price you pay for them, and the price they will be selling for in bazaar.
It's just aggravating to me. They are on there for one reason, to make real life money. Not to get a few k plat and go spend it on stuff. Or to buy up tradeskill stuff to make something for you or a guildy. I would burn everyone of these frickin' $$%^$ to the ground if i could. So damn blatant what they are doing. And these are the semi-honest ones, using the current EQ system to make plat. Just imagine how i feel about the dupers/hackers out there. Bah, probably make this go to rants now, but this dang thread won't die anyway lol.
Economics 101, need money to make money, buy low, sell high
Notice how he says that he is a "legitimate" plat seller?
I wouldnt mind if someone were to lock this thread *nudge nudge*.
The last thing we need is some dev who might on an off chance see crap like this on our forum and have that fact potentially prevent them from reading something about the serious bugs our class is facing.
Ok ok i know its unlikely but *shrug* its just a spam post this guy posted on every class forum.
I do the same thing with crystals... but not to seell the plat. I usually help out guildies and friends and stuff. That is part of the bazaar game, and don't see anything wrong with making plat legitamitely. This guy is pissed because he can't kill Halas guards and sell the FSW for enough plat to make $500 anymore.
You may call his motivations into question, but there is a real inflation problem out there. I've been dabbling in EQ for almost 5 years, and only in the last 8 months have I really started playing more seriously. While I've got a bad case of alt-itis, my BL is my main, and I've managed to get her up to 43. I've been looking to upgrade my h2h weapon (currently a Fireclaw Talon http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=7156 (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?item=7156)), and the bazaar prices have been outrageous. Things that were 2k pp have now gone up to 10k pp in a few months, which does make it very difficult for the semi-casual mid-level non-twinked player. It's also hard for BLs because, unless someone can point me to a quest or mob I haven't heard about, none of the items that are dropped at my level are at all useful, except for the occasional piece of MM armor.
It is true that there has been/ is an inflation, but at the same time it's the same just the numbers have changed. Most of the OOW drops, and other attunable gear can be gotten by anybody in a group, and the prices of those 1 groupable drops has gone up... because the stats are better than what was dropping two or three years ago. The best of the best sellable drops are still the highest, and with enough normal one groupable drops and a little patience it really isn't that hard to save up 2 or 300 K anymore. There is a camp in CC that is easily soloable at 70 that drops a bunch of evolving stuff, and decent gear to be sold on trader... nothing crazy for 100K... but 20K each and they do sell... thats 15 drops, only a few days of farming for 300K.
At 47 the cash won't be flying in... but over the course of EQ when has the cash rolled in for anybody that is just about 70% of the way to being maxed levels? The game has changed, yes, but there has always been inflation, and there always will be... plat sellers or not. I just get rubbed the wrong way when one of the claimed to be first plat sellers is pissed because he's not making the dumb money he once was. Plat selling probably is impacting the inflation rates some... but it is not the soul cause of it. The OP is a self incriminating ass concerning plat selling, but the evolution of the game and tradable gear drops is also most of the cause for the inflation. When in luclin could you buy inbazaar 200hp gear with focuses?
I think people are just spoiled hehe. You know what i used for weapons at level 43? a Polished Steel Ulak and a claw i quested for in Twilight Sea. The highest +hp mod on any of my gear was probably 20. I personally find it funny when i hear people complain about low level gear being not good enough or too expensive :evil:
Quote from: hakaaba on January 19, 2006, 08:57:56 PM
I think people are just spoiled hehe. You know what i used for weapons at level 43? a Polished Steel Ulak and a claw i quested for in Twilight Sea. The highest +hp mod on any of my gear was probably 20. I personally find it funny when i hear people complain about low level gear being not good enough or too expensive :evil:
I agree, I was lvl 40+ when I finaly upgraded my lvl 5 rec. lvl chest armor from the tutorial because a friend gave it to me. Most of my stuff my guild has very generously given to when I go with them to do stuff. I say they are generous because they are mostly 70, with at least 200 AAs and me being much lower at the time I didn't really feel I was pulling my weight.
If it wasn't for my guild I'd be stuck in the 40's- 50's in lvl and still have mostly gear from the tutorial or the newbie armor quests, but that would not bother me at all.
Something that would really stop these plat sellers is getting rid of player merchants. Make them stand there all day buying and selling in person if they want to make a living that way, just like the days in EC. Its just to easy to buy something then set it 50k, or whatever, higher. This would help build a better community ,too, something that has gone downhill.
Quote from: hakaaba on January 19, 2006, 08:57:56 PM
I think people are just spoiled hehe. You know what i used for weapons at level 43? a Polished Steel Ulak and a claw i quested for in Twilight Sea. The highest +hp mod on any of my gear was probably 20. I personally find it funny when i hear people complain about low level gear being not good enough or too expensive :evil:
Play old school people I mean don't any of you remember when if your lvl 20 sk had a full set of bronze armor and was encumbered just wearing it you were teh s@*#. I mean I didn't upgrade from my tutorial chest piece until I was 54. Yes lvl 54 and then I was sad because I thought it would be funny to be lvl 70 with that on. Anyways I come across plat not by selling but by farming vendor drops or just regular pp granted I dont have 100k+ but I do have about 30k regularly and I can save up for better stuff so why do people complain about inflation?
If you want to complain about inflation run for govenor and send it to congress, I'm sure they hear plenty about it.