When I played Everquest I did a very similar thing, except without the ship component. We found an obscure item that was not in any of the well-known databases, which is fairly difficult considering how far reaching they were.
Then we advertised a 'want to sell' considerably lower than the 'want to buy' we advertised in a different zone, both very high prices. Someone decided to make a quick arbitrage sell and found out I didn't want that item at all.
I'm sure some have learned the risks of arbitrage the hard way through these games, among other things.
I made a boatload of money on EverQuest (and WoW) with a similar arbitrage "scam."
In older versions of EQ there was a Bazaar zone where you could see the price of all the goods around.
For this scam I would find some item that is fairly rare for two reasons:
A) so most users don't know its true price, and
B) because rare items would be more likely to have a particular price spread: A couple items for sale for around their true price, and a couple items for sale for far above that. I don't know why there were always people trying to sell items for 10 or 20 times the item's actual value, but it was common.
I would buy up all instances of the item at its normal, lower price, so now the market looked like the item was legitimately valued at this much larger price. Then I would loudly try to sell it for multiples of what I bought it for. People would see that I'm trying to sell for ~half of what the rest of the market is selling it for, so it must be a good deal!
edit: I don't believe this was illegal according to Sony or Blizzard, and besides, how would they prove I was doing this maliciously?
That's not really arbitrage as much as it is cornering the market (since you can ignore the outlandishly-priced items as a part of the viable market volume) and using a price pin to manipulate player psychology. I frequently did it with my own auctions - post 10x of something, then post 1x at +30% cost, so people see "a deal" and grab it. It reliably works in MMOs and in real-life retail - people are manipulable.
It's basically what JC Penny does when they jack prices up and give you coupons - by pinning the price high, but giving you a lower price (which is what they actually want to sell at) by issuing coupons, they manage to twist consumer psychology in their favor, and get people to think that they're getting a deal on what's actually a market-price item.
The reason that people posted inflated (high-volume) items in WoW, by the way, is that once upon a time, addons kept moving averages of item costs, then suggested purchase/sale prices to players. Posting a bunch of outliers could move the average upwards (since you couldn't see sales prices, just posted prices). The outlandish prices on low-volume items are because people are bad at economics and value their item far above the market's value. These are usually people with very little gold who got a lucky drop; they price the item so high because they believe that it "cost" them many, many hours of gameplay, and likely misgauge that cost.
MMO economies are a great example of Econ 101 in action.
My theory on why there were always clusters of overvalued items is that people wouldn't know what to price items at all. They'd watch the item for a couple of days and drop it there, but before they had a clear idea they'd post it at a far higher price on the complete off-chance that someone would somehow buy it.
I eventually lost most of my EQ money by forgetting a 0 when I posted an item, so it all balanced out.
Well, people price things at the price they want to sell them for, not the price that people will buy them for. Many players fail to grasp the concept that an item's value is whatever someone will pay for it, and not a copper more.
Er, it's a big stretch to say that sort of thing works in the stock market.
When people are going to buy a certain stock, they don't usually look at the whole order book and say "oh, the highest ask is 200, so this best ask at 100 is really good". They look primarily at recent prices and the best ask and bid, and secondarily at the top 5 or so bids and asks. If you put an order that's double of the last price, it will be far away from those top 5. And it's very unlikely that your order is going to be matched any time soon even if the stock moves up (some exchanges actually suspend trading of a symbol before its price can rise by 100% in one day).
Theoretically, it could work for illiquid stocks, but even then it's not trivial to do since 1) people will still look at historical prices, 2) it's risky, since it costs money to setup and you have no guarantee anyone will fall into your trap; because the stock is illiquid, it might cost you money to undo the setup 3) it's considered illegal market manipulation in some (most?) places, and you can easily get caught.
I believe both you and parent are correct.
What about 1 off situations that remove the standard options for gauging value. The situations I have in mind are IPOs and one-off strange happenings. The particular instances I have in mind are the Facebook IPO and the situations where the markets wake up in the AM to a so-called new world. Situations such as when something big has happened. Companies hit by natural disaster, countries governments disintegrating or wars starting etc. These result in sudden big changes in company fortunes that are reflected in stock markets.
There is a common scam in EVE using buy orders that have a minimum quantity greater than what you're selling in your inflated contract deal so even when the mark buys your 4 cubes of refined ore for 1bil ISK, they can't sell it to your buy order because your minimum quantity is 5.
There is also a variant on it using the Margin Trading skill that lets you put up less money on a buy order than the total buy order is worth. So you can place a reasonable buy order with a minimum quantity that you are selling in your inflated contract and the buy order will never execute fully because you don't have enough money to purchase the item from the mark.
The latter is a bit more devious and harder to spot, although both are well known.
In most cases, the items they are using as the vehicle for the scam are 1. Large and hard to transport and 2. Used for only one or two purposes and thus are not commonly traded so the scammer get to set the market price.
It is not a scam in that it is arbitrage in name only, but it plays on people's greed to get them to purchase a rare item only to turn around and pull the rug out from underneath them and leave them holding this worthless item.
Personally, I am of the "buyer beware" mindset. More power to the scammers and thieves; they keep EVE interesting.
To expand: just because someone is doing something that entails risk, doesn't mean taking advantage of that is not a scam. In fact, it's the essence of most scams.
Silverstorm said, "Hardly sounds like a scam to me. Arbitrage is inherently risky."
I am having trouble interpreting that like you suggest.
My understanding is that the behavior that was originally called a scam was making it look like there was an opportunity for arbitrage that did not actually exist. That is not just someone bearing the usual risk of arbitrage (second trade happens to be unavailable), but specifically injecting yourself into that window by making sure their second trade will be unavailable by posting an offer you know can't fill.
I've always found arbitrage to be the best way to earn money in mmo's. I used to buy up all levels of cheap green items in the wow auction house, according to exact limits i came up with and stored in a spreadsheet. then i would disenchant them and sell the byproduct.
It was time consuming, but i made a lot of money and it took a long time before anyone else figured it out and joined in. the problem was it only took a few people on a server to skew the prices of the masses. but by then i had a lordship and manor in every city in the eastern kingdoms.
The definitive version of that which printed vast bucketloads of internet money was the JC Shuffle.
buy ore (direct from farmers aka botters) -> prospect ore -> craft green rings (I think? been a while) -> disenchant -> sell enchanting scrolls and cut rare gems left over from prospecting
In Guild Wars 2 I found some other interesting arbitrage opportunities - for example, Mystic Coins (available from monthly and daily tasks) had very predictable price cycles due to supply spikes on the first few days when it became possible to complete the monthly task.
The place where I enjoyed marketing the most was on Atlantica Online. I played several other MMOs, including that awesome EVE (which I'd still be playing having the time). Yet, I had more fun with the market on Atlantica Online (that was before they got bought by Nexon).
I would simply talk to people, make deal with them in chat, and work through different market medium to make more money. I started with only a few thousands and finished with almost 4 billions only from trading. I'd use people in the hurry buying from the real money market and trying to sell quickly. For instance, this one time someone said "Selling X quick, for cheap" or something along those lines. He actually wanted 180M for it but I convinced him that was the big price, and I got it from him at 120M. But then, literally 10 minutes later, I sold it for over 200M.
One other thing we would do is play with the amount 0 after the prices. Most of the big items where going at a few tens of billions, but the prices wouldn't be shorten. Therefore, it was easy to forget a 0 or two, or to add some. By keeping a close eye on the market, we'd get some people selling at 5M something worth 500M because they did a typo. The same happened the other way. When an item usually sold a 30K would ran out, we'd put a lot of it at 250K, which would appear to be lower than it's usual price because of the 25, yet it had an extra 0 which messed up things.
We used to train players who pissed us off. In everquest creatures had a tendency to switch who they were attacking pretty easily. So you just anger a bunch and dump them on the offending player. They call it "training" because you have a train of creatures chasing you.
Training generally wasn't punished because it happened a lot on accident.
Similar used to (and I assume still does) happen fairly often in FFXI as well, thanks to the Auction House system, where someone "corners" the market for a short period by buying up the entire stock and then placing them back, incrementally marking up the price. But by driving up the price, it'd attract more sellers and good ol' supply & demand would correct the price back down.
So why did they not think about this possibility in the first place? If they had some simple checks that made sure for instance that the standard deviation was not too high then this kind of problem should have been avoided, right?
Kudos to the players who exploited the loophole. I mean that's how a lot of individuals make money in real life.
“Oh, absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”
This alone is reason enough to respect these guys. Blizzard would have confiscated anything you won by being clever, which is a much more asstarded strategy in my opinion.
I recall a certain mage who realized he could spellsteal a certain boss buff after a certain patch and who ended up soloing the instance for a while and winning a lot of loot. Blizzard closed the hole and confiscated everything and may have even banned the player. Dumb.
Cleverness should remain rewarded even if you must close the hole to preserve the good of the game.
It's not clear that the players actually got to keep the stuff. Several articles state that they were stripped of their ill gotten gains, including this one by the devs themselves: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972
As far as I recall, these guys also confiscated all of the benefits from the exploit, although all of it was conducted on rather friendly terms. The team that had devised the scheme actually disclosed it to the game devs but the policy on loopholes was clear: even if you disclose, you don't get to keep the loot.
"It’s worth noting that nothing happened to those players, and they were allowed to keep the fortunes they had amassed while the exploit worked. “Oh, absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”"
That statement doesn't jive with several other articles about this exploit, and this post from the devs themselves. The players weren't banned, but they weren't allowed to keep their loot. http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/72972
At some point in every development shop's existence, they must ask themselves a question.
"Do I want to make games for gamers, or do I want to make a fortune for myself?"
It's not Blizzard's fault that the majority of gamers don't like hardcore PVP. Every time a new PVP oriented MMO launches, it either fails immediately or quickly transitions to a more PVE-centric philosophy.
They must have gotten it all out of their system with Diablo II, because they rewarded the hell out of hackers there. The only players who suffered were the ones who tried to play legitimately.
The difference is Wall Street affects us al.
The other difference: I can choice not to play EVE, but I cannot not choice not to play with the real economy...
I love stories about EVE. Though I couldn't give any minute to play it, I'm pretty sure this is the closest to a "hacker" game.
Sure, there are big factions, and ship-blowing and warfare and stuff, but all the stories we read about it, are about human interaction, and how it can be gamed: how VileRat made his way to the opposing faction as a mole, how he started a diplomacy corps, how this user found a loophole in the economy, how other users are playing the market everyday,... And EVE is rewarding: you "win" by thinking outside-the-box, you get points for being creative, the whole system WANTS you to think of something new.
Yep. The major alliances have numerous people that essentially have full time jobs running logistics operations (there is no instant travel, you actually have to move goods through often-dangerous space. Also the mechanism for controlling space, "sovereignty," is complex and requires constant maintenance), commanding fleets of hundreds of ships, and performing IT/security for their forum communities.
One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on.
The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.
I wrote an API trawler for Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion when the API key functionality got released. We tried catching alts and spies that way (applying required giving us their full API key).
Another way to get more info on people was putting images in forum posts and hosting those images on your own server.
Although it actually ruins the game for the majority of players? And usually because of extremely poor coding by the eve devs?
I remember when the BoB/Goon war was going on and Goon exploited the terrible design of the alliance/corp system and shut BoB down. No rollback from CCP. A massive war between thousands of players, perhaps even 10s of thousands of players over in seconds not because of any skill or battles but meta gaming completely outside the game by 1 player.
How much fun would 'legalized' aim-botting be?
That is Eve Online.
Eve is a game full of potential that it consistently fails to deliver on. And the 'stories' you hear are usually down to allowed griefing executed through exploiting poorly thought out game mechanics. It is hacking at its essence, but Sony Playstation password type of hacking, not the kind it's fun to be on the receiving end of.
Um, what? How did they exploit terrible design? They got a really high up guy to defect, and he happened to have the keys to a lot of stuff. Why would CCP roll that back? That's exactly the kind of metagaming they whole-heartedly encourage. You must have ties to BoB if you're going on about this "fair fight," e-honor stuff; this is how the game is played.
But really, what's most confusing is that you say a massive war was ended in seconds. BoB was highly entrenched in Delve and things had basically stagnated, there was less of a massive war going on than trifling skirmishes on the outskirts of their fortress. This singular event created a massive, chaotic free-for-all that injected a ton of life and activity into the region, and got a lot of people excited about the game again. Sorry for your loss.
the design is bad in that there's not good granularity of controls. You have to have someone holding pretty much all of the keys so there's not a way to even try to protect yourself against such actions.
One of the most solid news sources for EVE lately is http://themittani.com/ -- it's actually more than just EVE, but they have a large number of EVE related articles.
If you're not a player it can be hard to figure out what's going on, though, as many of the articles target people who are pretty familiar with the game.
Emergent gameplay requires quite complex game systems to happen. The tendency in modern gaming is to make games linear or "streamline" them. Another game that supports my point is Dwarf Fortress.
Big game publishers don't value (new) systems and mechanics. That's one reason why Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin and Sui Generis got funded on Kickstarter.
Silly. they just distorted the balance when they inserted a God figure giving out prizes to entice war. (maybe they wanted more wars happening?)
if they left the real world analogy (you blow up a ship with an item, you get that item) then it would never have happened. but since they've added 'reward points' for the value of items in the ships you destroy, that offseted the balance because, well, it's silly.
The real problem was that they had a fixed exchange rate between the ingame currency and loyalty points. If the loyalty point formula asymptotically approached a max, this would have been a non-issue.
The real lesson is about the naive approach to forex.
You could also take a lesson about "optimizing the wrong thing". In machine learning it comes from telling the learning system to optimize a means rather than an end, frequently with hilarious consequences. See also paperclip maximizer.
My slickest move in LOTRO was to buy scroll cases -- which give random recipes -- on the auction house when they became available at the prices one could sell them to vendors at. Then I waited until an update introduced new recipes (most notably Coffee), opened cases, and sold some of the new recipes for scarcity value.
Before that, I built up a relative in-game fortune by buying low and selling high in all sorts of items, as well as picking my targets in crafting. My initial grubstake came from people who'd make items to practice crafting, then offer them on the auction house for the same price they could sell to vendors. I bought them, held on until no other copies were for sale, then sold them for prices that reflected their usefulness.
The player didn't really "drive up the price by cornering the market." This was just an exploit of an edge case in the game's "average market price" algorithm, and didn't really have anything to do with cornering the market.
I wasn't aware of the negative turnout of this until now. I hadn't seen an article since porsche was in a power position. For those who are in that boat:
In the 1991 multiplayer AD&D RPG on AOL, Neverwinter Nights, you used to be able to buy packs of +1 arrows in a far off town in the game called Red Larch, split the arrows up, sell them at the shop, and make more money than they cost.
You could basically make as much money as your character could hold. If you then traveled to a jeweler or the vaults you could stash the money, convert it to lighter gems, and do it again. Not many people knew this and you could generally trade for most items that came as treasure with these gems. So you could buy +3 plate mail or whatever. Usually obtained from hours of work killing drocoliches or whatever.
I guess if everybody had been doing it, the in game money would have been worthless, though.
Sounds more like a poorly implemented game mechanic more than cleverness on the players part. They basically let their users set the price then distribute rewards based on that.
The game mechanic itself is not actually the problem here but the way it was implemented left it open to easy exploitation. It can be implemented in a way that is not easy to exploitation though. Basically their algorithm for deciding on the worth of an item based off of market transactions was not good.
When they say one player did this they mean a group of well coordinated players did this. It was done by a group inside goonswarm federation which is the something awful forums in game guild. They are one of the largest and most organized groups in the game and the regularly do stupid shit that tries to break the game. The figured this out almost immediately and racked up enough in game currency that they controlled a sizable portion of the liquid assets in the game. enough that they would be able to bank roll their in game operations for years without worry. This is when they finally publicly revealed what they were doing and the game devs had to step and tell them they could not keep the money. They devs did not figure out what was going on until the guys doing the exploit publicly described how they were doing it on the game forums.
Other shit goonswarm is known for doing is destroying ships in the games safe zones. The game mechanic is that in the safe zones there is NPC police that will kill anyone who attacks another player without consent. But the catch is that the NPC police have a response time that can be gamed. The response time is only a few seconds but a well coordinated attack can destroy a ship within that time. The attacking player still gets killed by the NPC police but they accomplish their suicide kill anyway. The goonswarm offers rewards to players to make it worthwhile to do these suicide attacks on players who sit in the safe zones and just mine resources in expensive ships. Making the safe zones no longer safe. They do this just because they can and they want to watch everything burn.
There is this man who owns more than 1000 Warhols. how now goes to auctions, and bids lots of money on Warhols that are for sale. This affects the value of the ones he owns.
Heh, that's something that happens in the Kingdom of Loathing too, though it doesn't impact any built-in gameplay.
There are third party sites that get a feed of all in-game transactions, and track whether prices are rising or falling on items. Of course, this can be manipulated in exactly the same way described in the OP -- either for humorous reasons, or for some sort of trade scam.
Though KoL's economy is in general really fascinating. And it interacts in neat ways with the way they make money. They were way ahead of the curve in using a sort of free-to-play model. (And even doing it in a way that doesn't feel scummy!)
That's awesome. In most MMOs, you would be permanently banned for doing something like that. And EVE actually encourages it. In the world of MMOs, that's great publicity - it really sets them apart, I think
“It’s a fuzzy line, and we have to be very, very careful,” Lander admitted. “This had the potential to fundamentally destabilize the game, and that’s bad for all the players. Because it was very obviously something wrong, whilst we didn’t take any action against the players who were doing it, we did fix the problem.”
I had to check the date on the article. If this were from 2013, it would read, "These players gamed the system at the expense of everyone else. I think two years in prison barely scratches the surface of what they deserve."
Or have more accurate valuation techniques. "Last settlement price" is a really, really, bad way to ascertain "value". They should be looking at the market depth of demanded prices, etc.
Well, it wasn't last settlement price, it was average. It's just that nobody traded in these items so completing even a single transaction practically sets the price.
"It’s worth noting that nothing happened to those players, and they were allowed to keep the fortunes they had amassed while the exploit worked. “Oh, absolutely,” Lander said, laughing. “Good for them! Clever guys.”"
I very recently started playing Eve, and the marketplace is a fascinating piece of the game. Without it I feel like it would be a ho-hum space MMO. (FWIW, I haven't played any other MMO before).
Then we advertised a 'want to sell' considerably lower than the 'want to buy' we advertised in a different zone, both very high prices. Someone decided to make a quick arbitrage sell and found out I didn't want that item at all.
I'm sure some have learned the risks of arbitrage the hard way through these games, among other things.