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Diablo 2 Items Bringing Home the Bacon
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Sep 10, 2001 05:11 PM
from the moo-moo-oink-oink dept.
from the moo-moo-oink-oink dept.
||Plazm|| writes: "I read an update over at Diabloii.net that talks about how some items in the game are producing sizeable income for some people. It points to an article at the San Francisco Chronicle describing some of these money makers. One banker claims he's made $25000 since he started with Diablo 2 and Ultima Online! Who are the people paying real money for this stuff? A few bucks is one thing, but a few hundred? I believe this has been talked about on /. before, but is the 'problem' getting worse? Is it a 'problem' at all?"
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Diablo 2 Items Bringing Home the Bacon
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Infoceptor had great coverage (Score:5, Informative)
Free Market (Score:3, Insightful)
Buying this stuff is not for me, but I'm not one to stand in the way of capitalism.
Free Market vs. A Game (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of a game is to pit players against one another and let the best player win, not to sell the victory to the player with the most disposable income and least scruples.
Re:Free Market vs. A Game (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to stretch my analogy to apply to people who can kick your ass in Diablo II not because they are more skilled but because they do nothing but play. Random Dude 1, who works a full time job, can never possibly keep up with Random Dude 2, who is in school and plays Diablo for 30 hours a week. As devil's advocate, I ask why shouldn't Dude 1 be able to level the playing field with money? 1 has money, 2 has time. Why is time considered to be the more acceptable currency with which to purchase online prowess?
There are games out there that wrote this into their business model- the ability to outright purchase, from the game company directly, items and status. For people who have more of the currency "money" than the currency "time". Either way, you're buying it.
Re:Free Market (Score:5, Insightful)
There are already enough lowlifes to worry about in normal online games (take Counterstrike as an example). However, when there's the possibility to win real cash in a game is where the bottom feeders really begin to show up and ruin everyones fun.
In Everquest, this has lead on some servers to a total cornering of the item market by ebay-sale-guilds. If you wanted a rare item, you had no choice other than to buy it for cash, since all the important places in the game had been occupied by them.
This had such a profound impact on most people's gaming experience that (as mentioned in the article) sony's lawyers approached ebay and were able to shut down the sales.
In Diablo 2, real-cash sales have lead to a staggering surge in cheats and scams. Whole game accounts were cracked by brute force and all their contents sold away on ebay.
Other people used exploits to allow them to loot duel players, often leaving more unexperienced players without a single dime while all their stuff was sold away by the looter.
There have also been numerous hacks to steal and duplicate items, mostly with the intention of selling them away for hard cash.
All in all, the ability of making cash has severely damaged the playing communities of the affected games.
I definitely hope that any future online games forbid the sale of items. And the final statement from Paul Sams gives me a little bit of hope that it will at least be so in Blizzard's future game World of Warcraft...
Re:Free Market (Score:4, Insightful)
But even before UO, there was that obscure trading card game called "Magic" where rich nerds, the same that buy items in Diablo, shelled out big bucks for the Black Lotus.
And before Magic, there were all the kids who collected baseball cards. Some lucky kid got a Mickey Mantle rookie and he sells it to the rich nerd across the street.
Real money for unsubstantial things (electrons or paper card) has been with us for awhile.
At any price (Score:5, Insightful)
At least this time it is costing them something in real money to get these kind of advantages. I tip my hat to blizzards work that they have locked their game down tight enough that people are going to extremes outside the game to get these kinds of advantages.
Re:At any price (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it seem as if there's some real-world morality issue here. Remember it's just a game.
The people who are buying items, services, or characters for games like Diablo, Ultima, Asheron's Call, Everquest, etc. are doing it because it's their way of having fun; it's their way of enjoying the game. As long as it doesn't interfere with others' ability to enjoy the game (and if it does, it's arguably a fault of the game's design, not of the purchaser), why should it matter to you?
The fact is, these people are just playing a sort of game within the game: pushing the limits of the system within the parameters allowed (or at least, not explicitly disallowed) by the game's designers. Think Kobayashi Maru (sp?) and Captain Kirk (though there the "unfair" advantage was brains, not cash).
Morality is kind of irrelevant here. If you're upset because people can buy the best items in role-playing games online, then you are just role-playing a victim yourself :-)
I heard someone spent $400... (Score:5, Funny)
To each, his own.
Script Kiddies (Score:4, Funny)
The Script Kiddies have to do _something_ with the credit card numbers they steal.
Make Money Fast! (Score:4, Interesting)
Get a Sorceress, put some diamonds in a helm, and wait. Your odds of finding magic items goes up.
As you fight on Battle.net, have a really good Telekenesis skill, so that you can steal every dropped item. Have a goodly stock of identify scrolls/books so that you don't need to Town Portal to check the items as you grab em.
Do this for 4 hours a day for 3 weeks and you'll have enough items to start eBaying. Happy hunting.
Re:Make Money Fast! (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, that's perfect topazes, not diamonds. Current reports suggest that a magic find percentage over 200 doesn't do much good, so there's no need to go overboard.
And they 'balanced' telekenesis so that you can only pick up minor items (like potions). This is very annoying in single player mode, where there is no one to steal drops from...
As for the economy aspect, I think it's kinda dumb to spend real money on Diablo II items. However, some people want uber-characters than can walk into any game and kill other players. Or maybe they're not good enough to take on Hell mode without help.
Dunno. Spending money on Diablo II items isn't any worse than spending it on an astrologer or the lottery.
At any rate, the economy associated with Diablo II has been interesting. There's been a lot of shifts in the marketplace in response to bugs allowing duplication of items, and the changes to gambling rules. Some moderately valuable items (like the Stone of Jordan ring or perfect skulls) became the new currency for a while. SoJs have become much more rare these days, and aren't used as currency as much. Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up.
Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!
I've also seen people auctioning off fully equipped high-level characters on eBay. However, with the balance changes in Lord of Destruction, some of these characters (which might have sold for hundreds of dollars) are now nearly worthless.
All in all, it's not too easy to base your economy on factors (like rarity) that can be changed at the whim of some programmers.
More clarifications (Score:5, Informative)
In the most recent patch (v1.09) Blizzard implemented a Diminishing returns formula for items that added a % chance to find magic items (magic find). A full explanation of magic find is here at Blizzard's official strategy site. [battle.net] Items can drop normal (white colored), magical (blue), rare (yellow), part of an item set (green) or unique (gold). The diminishing returns formula is not posted on that site, but basically diminishing returns kick in bigtime for unique items around 200% increased MF, kick in later for set items and even later for rare items. If you're wearing items that give you a 400% increased chance to find a magical item, you only get like, a 220-230% increased chance of getting a unique.
Blizzard probably implemented this because with the previous patch (1.08), magic find worked on all monsters, including bosses (who always drop at least magical items), so characters were loading themselves down with MF gear and "farming" the bosses over and over to get rares, sets and uniques to drop. (Normal monsters don't always drop, so it's simply more reliable to farm bosses for drops). So since people were abusing magic find, it was decreased in potency ("nerfed").
"And they 'balanced' telekenesis so that you can only pick up minor items (like potions). This is very annoying in single player mode, where there is no one to steal drops from..."
Actually, telekinesis (TK) was changed because someone (or a group of someones) wrote an "item-grabber" hack. The hack basically was a packet sniffer/sender, and when it registered that a rare, set, or unique item had dropped on the ground, it send a packet to the server saying "I picked that item up." Of course, the program could be configured to also grab gold, potions, scrolls, runes, anything. I don't recall if Blizzard broke the functionality of the hack in a patch before deciding to kill Telekinesis to solve the problem...but if they did it most likely took about two days for the people writing the hack to figure out the new packets and re-write the program. The program still works, but since TK is broken it only lets characters pick items up if they are right next to it (I think, there were rumors that players could send packets to make the server think they walked over to an item and picked it up when they didn't move, but that sounds fishy).
"Some moderately valuable items (like the Stone of Jordan ring or perfect skulls) became the new currency for a while. SoJs have become much more rare these days, and aren't used as currency as much."
The Stone of Jordan (SOJ) became a currency because it was a useful item, took up one inventory slot, and was relatively easy to get if you had enough gold (prior to patch 1.08 you could "gamble" for items. The Stone of Jordan is a unique ring. There are two other unique rings, but since before 1.08 uniques couldn't generate if one was already in the game, you could hold the other two rings and spend lots of easily obtainable gold gambling on rings and makes lots of SOJ's).
"Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up"
PSkulls used to be currency before patch 1.08. PSkulls could be used to "re-roll" the stats on a rare item (rare items have up to 6 modifiers, magic items only 2), and this reroll could produce ANY stat available, with better stats possible than any drop you could get from a monster. PSkulls were also rare, since gems dropped *very* infrequently from monsters, and the highest quality gem that could drop was a normal (3 normals make a flawless, 3 flawless make a perfect, or a gem shrine makes 1 normal go to 1 flawless, etc. there are also chipped and flawed under normal). Now, in 1.09, flawless gems (skulls are gems, technically) can drop, and do drop quite frequently, so they are much more common. Also, the main reason PSkulls plummeted in price was that the way to use 6 PSkulls and a Rare to reroll the rare had it's power decreased GREATLY. It can now produce items with stats 40% as powerful as the previous max (item level of 100 previously possible, max level of 40 available now).
Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!
That's because you lose a set percentage of your gold when you die, and you can only carry a certain amount of gold. There are other smaller reasons, but those are the main ones.
All in all, it's not too easy to base your economy on factors (like rarity) that can be changed at the whim of some programmers.
Then the programmers deliberately try to affect the economy. Right now new SOJ's are going up because no new ones are coming into the game, and all other items are being produced at an alarming rate. A few more weeks of this and the SOJ currency *might* break, but I doubt it, it's too ingrained in people's minds.
That's about all I can think of about the subject. Hope it helped.
~Moller
It sort of reminds me of Magic (Score:4, Insightful)
Karma for sale... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, that's right. If you want to be influential in the
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This has been tried (Score:5, Informative)
Somebody with a high-hundreds/low thousands karma (i.e. a student with *far* too much time on their hands) (was it FascDotKilledMyPR? apologies if I'm wrong.) tried to flog their account on ebay. Apparently, there were some ridiculously high bids (some valued karma more than dollars)
In one of his rare moments of creative lucidity, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda aranged for the karma for this individual to vary (at random) between a cap value and zero, with the cap value reducing at a rate that would bring it to zero at the moment the ebay auction closed.
The whole debacle is best recorded in an IRC log where the
This ends your "Boring And Useless" slashdot history lesson.
{ps - no URLs, because I have better things to do than look them up}
Personal Choice (Score:4, Interesting)
The only problem I see is the fact that you can win at something because you have lots of money. But you know what, isn't that what the real world is anyway? I think Microsoft used this tactic, and someone by the name of my favorite breakfast juice...
And when the programmers sell the items... (Score:3, Interesting)
It could turn into an extra revenue stream for the developers if used very carefully, but such a thing would eventually destroy the game for average players. And here is another question for you to consider. Is it illegal for a hacker to create these items using a bug or hack, and then sell them for cash? And of course, I mean outside of the legality issues of hacking onto the servers in the first place.
END COMMUNICATION
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wake up guys, MONEY IS NO MORE REAL THAN THESE GAME ITEMS.
What is the value of a $20 bill? The paper and ink (and metal threads, and whatever else they throw in these days) aren't worth very much. The value of a $20 bill is *whatever people will give you for it*.
I think the people who are trading hundreds of dollars for these game items are paying far too much, but there is no inherent reason why such transactions are wrong.
Re:Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Similarly, when you go in to a fast food place like Burger King, and they refuse any bill larger than $20 or a whole pile of change. How is that legal? If I show up with $100, its real US money, why don't they have to take it?
Or are they required to take it, but will give you a real hard time about it?
legal tender (Score:4, Informative)
read the full explanation [snopes2.com]
here's the problem (Score:3, Informative)
When this happens it takes away from the people who need that item for game play. There are whole guilds that just farm, and camp the monster with the items and don't allow anyone else to fight that monster, even if its neccesary for the continuation of the game.
of course I have no sympathy for the makers of these game since they insist on not solving these problems programatically.
Its really not that hard.
Parents Were Wrong! (Score:5, Funny)
What the hell -- people auction off domain names. Isn't that the same thing? It isn't "real", either.
The wife... (Score:5, Interesting)
This sort of thing is no worse than the Beanie Baby craze. If you can make good money playing games (or buying and selling stuffed dolls for hundreds more than the 50 cents worth of material they're made of), more power to you. I'm not into gaming as much as I used to be, but if I was I'd be more than happy to harvest items and sell them for cash. Talk about the ultimate job.
Legitimate but lame (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, you can probably find someone to sell it to you. Sure, you can pick it up and start using it in game. Sure, it'll help you survive (probably by a large margin). But then where's the fun?
The game
If you leapfrog that whole phase and jump right into the uber-powered elite, then you've just skipped over all the enjoyment. It's just like when I was playing AD&D all the time and constantly encountering players who didn't want to play mages below 5th level "because it was just too hard". Phtt. Rodents.
Sure, I'll accept that the overwhelming majority of players out there don't appreciate the pleasure of struggling at the low power levels. These guys just hate that low level crap and want to get over to wailing on critters so large that only its ankle appears on their monitors.
Let these guys waste their money robbing themselves of the true pleasure of the game. It doesn't do anything to reduce my pleasure, and it removes these weenies from my immediate surroundings.
They're doing what they want and giving me a reason to call them lamers. I like that. Everyone wins.
The problems of virtual scarcity... (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple examples of what could go wrong:
1) Somebody buys an item for $1000 figuring that it's going to go up in value. A few days later, the game designers decide to make that item very common. Can the game designers be held liable for financial losses incurred by that person's failed speculation?
2) In a permutation on item 1, what if the developers had made that change intentionally to destroy the market for those items?
3) What if a game designer adds a powerful item so that they can corner the market, selling them off for a handsome profit?
4) What if a bug in the system accidentally causes a fluctuation in the scarcity of a particular item (making it much easier to come by)?
Re:The problems of virtual scarcity... (Score:4, Informative)
Problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
It can be a problem for those who spend more money than they have, and end up going into debt or denying themselves food and the like for weapons.
It's the same as any other hobby, y'know? Why single it out as a "problem" because it's with video games instead of baseball cards or something?
recent ebay sales (Score:4, Interesting)
See for yourself. [ebay.com] Recently closed items w/ "Diablo II" in the title, sorted by closing price.
This story is (probably) BS (Score:4, Interesting)
4397 of the items were priced less than $10.
456 of the items were priced between $11-25.
227 of the items were priced between $26-$50.
95 items were priced between $51-$100.
38 items were priced between $101-$200.
and 14 were priced higher than $201 (and one of those 14 isn't related to the game, it's a windsurfing sail).
Eyeballing the lists, it appears that more than half of the auctions at all level have no bids. This is just a guesstimate (I don't have time to count up the number of bids on the 5,080 items less than $50, it is true for the items over $51)
I'm highly skeptical that anyone could routinely make >$5000 month, easy, as is claimed by the guy in the article.
Item cost VS. time (Score:3, Interesting)
I play EverQuest in my free time. In EverQuest, there is a very cool item I wanted called A Flowing Black Silk Sash. The sash is a rather powerful item, is always in demand, and is somewhat rare. This has created conditions that make getting the sash take anywhere from a few hours with help from some friends, to a few days with a bit of luck. Given my character's status on her server, it probably would have taken me six to twelve hours to get this item. That works out to $150-$300 US of my time.
Instead, I tracked down someone selling his EverQuest account on ebay. I emailed him to see if he had said sash for sale on one of his characters, and sure enough he did. Within 24 hours we had exchanged the money via paypal and the item in game. Total cost to me = $100 and about ten minutes of free time, and I actually did the work while on the job. I was then able to use those extra hours study new things to do as a sysadmin, thus increasing my marketability, and in the long run, my overall salary.
Some people call me a cheater, I think of myself as economically minded.
Consider the following... (Score:4, Interesting)
He's already got some real kick-ass gear, chief among those a war club capable of basically insta-gibbing Andariel on normal difficulty and a set of ancient plate providing 700+ in defense.
Now, I've had some folks lambast my character due to the fact that he uses this big old hammer without the use of a shield, but I figure that's okay: It's within his character to get hit a bunch by the boogerheads, and I accept that outcome during a normal gaming session.
Now, with the expansion pack, I see on Diabloii.net that there is this new item set that seems for all intents and purposes to be genetically designed for my character: big honkin' hammer, plate, belt, boots, gauntlets, and helmet -- all way more better than what he's currently packing.
Now that he's passed all the trials before him, I see no better way for him as a character to wile away the days than to search for that complete item set.
However, in all honesty, it would me/him YEARS to collect them.
I myself would pay a premium for the complete set from some other D2 player, but certainly not in triple-digits. I would do so because the D2 character I run in question is ready to ascend to NPC status, I have no interest whatsoever in playing him other than to have him help out other folks finish the necessary quests.
Maybe I might be interested in getting him to clvl 99, but not nearly as much as I'd like to see him get that set.
I'm ready to retire him to being a secondary character to someone else's adventure, I'd just like to get him 100% complete in the process.
If the game itself would only drop *one* of those items, I'd forego the monetary route, but in all sad honesty, it's not gonna happen.
Does this make sense?
IF.cmg