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 **********, 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 ********** 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 ********** 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. ********** 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, ********** 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.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

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Just BAN AND DELETE the accounts! Do it in public with great announcements and posts of names, guilds, guild leaders, etc. Make it difficult for peeps to support these jerks in the game. How many guild leaders would want the constant harrassment from the general public about a game exploiter in thier midst? They are ruining our game, so ruin thiers 1st.

First off, you are indirectly targeting people who have no knowledge of what is going on in this statement. That is a bad thing.

Secondly, If you steal from me, and I cut off your hand - as you are suggesting, where does that leave us?

-Fenier

When I hear of this activity I get serious. I wonder why SoE doesn't simply ban these accounts? Strip out the plat? Then go after these peeps in the REAL WORLD with lawyers...lets them try to justify the high cost of REAL money to defend themselves.


Banning accounts is fairly simply, if SOE can confirm that an account is in breach of the EULA. Stripping out the plat is more complicated, but probably can be done.

Going after them in the real work with lawyers? Not really feasible. It would cost SOE real money...lots of real money...to do so. And for what? A breach of contract claim where the most likely remedy would be to allow SOE to terminate the contract (which SOE can do much more easily and directly by banning the account). Damages? What damages can SOE prove? About the only damages I can conceive of would be the arguable loss of income from accounts that quit due to the macroing/duping, but how would you trace that loss to a particular account? One macroer/duper is unlikely to cause even one other account to leave. And keep in mind that someone allegedly quitting the game because of macroing probably was on the verge of quitting for a number of other reasons, making the causation issue even more problematic.

For much commercial litigation, even a victory is Pyrrhic.

I've always wondered where the damn demand for platnium come from. If your buying 100k, it'll cost you what - about $50? 100k just overall won't get you all that much in the game today. What a waste of $50.

--

While I'm not saying I agree with people doing that, there's 2 things I wish to point out. It's very possible to make plat at a very fast rate in legit ways nowadays. You also have to consider, inflation of plat goes both ways. Usually when I (ie) by parts to make a crafted OOW aug, it's not with diamond money, it's with money I've made off of stuff I won rolls on in groups. If the cost of everything goes up because of what you mentioned, that means when I go to sell something I'll be getting more plat for it.

Selling/Buying items has been around since EQ started. This includes Platinum sales. Years ago it was Ebay, these days its Playerauctions. Nothing NEW.

There aren't a lot of ways to catch people that do this. Checking logs of platinum income is about the only way I can see that Sony can find people who are macroing. Honestly, if the macroer were being smart about it, they could tone it down and make less plat in order to appear legit. In short, it's hard to catch people without scanning background programs outside of EQ, which is something Sony has stated they will not do due to the invasion of privacy that comes out of it.

I'm completely against all of it, of course. I don't get the concept of that sort of cheating, why play the game?

My curiosity, I suppose, is what prompted this person to start an account not only here, but on other class boards, to post this. They aren't letting anything "out of the bag"; most of the EQ community has been aware of these things for some time.

I fully support banning and any other actions that can be taken against people that are duping and macroing to generate platinum at a faster rate than a human could--IF in fact this is happening.

However, this time around I'm skeptical.
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.
Well, it is happening again.

I'm just not seeing the impact on the economy that was seen last time. For example, on my server fungi tunics are holding steady at around 60k, which from what I understand has been the standard price on my server for at least a year.

Now, it could be that there are people duping and macroing but showing restraint this time (or perhaps just avoiding my server) but those possibilities seem unlikely. If people are going to cheat in ways that put them at significant risk (items and platinum levels are trackable) they're not going to settle for a "small" gain.

And this statement makes me question the poster's knowledge of the high end game...
At the high level a group member might come away with 1000 platinum in sellables after an evening of fighting.
I could do better just by doing a single DoN mission and then selling the crystals at half the going rate in the bazaar. A good night would result in more like 50k to 100k, if loot was a priority for that night.

/sarcasm
HELP SAVE EQ!
Donate plat to the Save EQ fund and help us combat the plat dupers, macroers and scam artists that plaque the game! Any donation will help, 5pp to 500k pp!

And this statement makes me question the poster's knowledge of the high end game...

I could do better just by doing a single DoN mission and then selling the crystals at half the going rate in the bazaar. A good night would result in more like 50k to 100k, if loot was a priority for that night.

Not to sound like an ass, but he wasn't referring to the plat you could make from other players, rather the plat you can get out of NPC merchants... ie new plat being introduced to the game.

Although I admit, 1k per player seems a little light - given the price of some items dropping in the current expansion, stackable and over 200pp each, you might be talking about maybe 10k for a group, in a couple of hours.

As to Grenoble's question "why cheat?"... the answer of course is RL money. This scale of cheating has only one purpose, and that's to screw RL dollars out of people who genuinely play the game.

And then it comes down to a simple supply and demand question. The players of the EQ community have as much power as SOE here. Stop buying stuff from the hackers, take away the demand and prevent the cash from rolling into their pockets, and they'll stop cheating.

Not that I think it should be down to the players - SOE should be on to this, and banning accounts summarily.

Some folks MUST buy Plat since they dont have the real life time to accrue it due to jobs/school. But they still wish to enjoy the game. That is why it is done.
Also...folks will buy a lvl 70 account so they dont have to wait years to get that level. For some folks with full schedules, it could take years. Instead a person with money to burn drops 300 bucks and instantly gets a lvl 70 character.
Only problem is what I hear......buyers are getting ripped off since the original owner of the accounts have been changing the password and stealing back the account.

I urge you, please send feedback and post making your voice known
Forgive me, but what's the point of this post again?

You want us to do what? /feedback Hey SOE cheating is bad, please ban people who macro!

Seems like a total waste of the space in the feedback system to me. If you have specific information on who is cheating or how they are cheating (and circumstantial evidence like platinum reserves, while it might be telling, does not count), then by all means send that in. But just /feedback'ing hey, I don't support cheating, that sounds like a waste to me.

I thought there was going to be big some expose here. But this is all stuff that SOE already knows. :p

About 4 years ago I was in a group when someone in the group who i knew but didnt like looted Golden Efreeiti Boots. I then saw him selling the Boots on Playerauctions. He was using the same email he registered with EQ. All the playerauctions/EQ names and emails matched.
I petitioned GM's over and over telling them when he looted it, with copies of links to the auction.
Nothing was ever done.
My peititions were ignored.
I even went as far as sending in-game tells to the GM's and that got ignored.
It basically showed that SOE has no interest in enforcing the rules against selling items for real life cash.

Just BAN AND DELETE the accounts! Do it in public with great announcements and posts of names, guilds, guild leaders, etc. Make it difficult for peeps to support these jerks in the game. How many guild leaders would want the constant harrassment from the general public about a game exploiter in thier midst? They are ruining our game, so ruin thiers 1st.

Why should a Guild or Guild Leader have thier name posted because a member is doing something wrong? It's quite possible the guild and guild leader had no idea the person was doing anything wrong. You take a guild with 100 members and expect the guild leader to personally check on each member to be sure they are not doing anything wrong? How would the guild leader even know? They can't access their member's bank account. Neither can the rest of the guild. So unless a person was bragging about doing this in guild chat or such, how would anyone know?

I decided a long time ago that this game is more fun if I worry about what I do and how I conduct myself ingame. Because in reality, that is the only thing I have control over anyway.

100 members and expect the guild leader to personally check on each member
Nope! Guild Leader has a lot of responsibility as it is.. but if someone is reported to that Guild Leader; that Guild Leader must take the responsibility of investigating that Guild Member and deciding what to do if their is truth to the allegation. It does reflect on the image of the Guild itself and that is important. You can do 100 Goods but 1 Bad Apple is what sticks out the most.

I also censored the offending sites/words which is within policy of TDG Rules. TDG has always had the policy not to allow promoting plat/item selling companies in anyway. IMO this is a Good Conversation and should continue; just removing the "Potential Advertisements” for the Sites/Words themselves. Why? Because as a community and my personal income that I donate to this community and the fact that they are not paying for the Bandwidth, Software etc.. That our right as a community to refuse and censor those "potential advertisements" and is a violation of TDG Posting Rules. If I get any further valid compliants I will have to remove the thread. Judgement at this point tells me to allow it to continue.

but if someone is reported to that Guild Leader; that Guild Leader must take the responsibility of investigating that Guild Member and deciding what to do if their is truth to the allegation.

Honestly the policing of cheats/hacks should not be up to friends/associates or guilds.
The responsibility for locating and preventing cheating or hacks is all SoE. They made the code they created the possibility and they are taking our money to provide a structured world in which to play.
To expect a guild leader to "investigate" is just silly as they do not have the tools available to do the job properly.
Yes a guild leader should be responsible for the "behavior" of their members but in most situations there is a way to discuss with everyone involved the concern. Talking to witnesses is not enough to prove the use of a hack or other programming abuse.

IMO SoE should take a strong proactive approach as they did after the last patch and keep after those wishing to take the easy way

Some folks MUST buy Plat since they dont have the real life time to accrue it due to jobs/school. But they still wish to enjoy the game. That is why it is done.
Also...folks will buy a lvl 70 account so they dont have to wait years to get that level. For some folks with full schedules, it could take years. Instead a person with money to burn drops 300 bucks and instantly gets a lvl 70 character.
Only problem is what I hear......buyers are getting ripped off since the original owner of the accounts have been changing the password and stealing back the account.

I have 2 accounts now and I just bought my friend an account cause she is just starting out and wants to jon us on some of the fun stuff that we do in groups and in raids. My other account a friend stopped playing to play WoW and gave it to me. All you have to do is change the password to something else. When I bought my friend the account I changed the password on it also. Not many people know how to hack and account for password and for those that go through the effort its kind of bad and considered to be stealing.

At one time I was going to school and working 16 hours out of the day not leaving much time for family and homework (not to mention sleep). I had to buy plat. to buy upgrades cause I could not farm it myself, so i am not totally against it. I just don't think they should be allowed to ruin the game cause now I farm for what I want. Takes longer but its fun to earn something and means more to me.

I am against the Hacks like the ghost program where ppl can ninja loot from other guilds hard work.

To expect a guild leader to "investigate" is just silly as they do not have the tools available to do the job properly.
To report it.. you would probably have evidence to back it up; making an allegation such as hey I think such and such is duping.. then they probably have evidence of that action. To outright accuse someone of something improper w/o evidence and reporting it to your guild leader would make you pretty much a moron.

Hi Guild Leader, just wanted you to know that Blank Guild member.. insert ebay/player auc link is selling guild acquired items (of course these people r the stupid ones and trying to sell something that only our guild had obtained on the server and that person was the only person to actual get that item). Or possibly I was just not exposed to it enough when Afterlife was on MM Server and I just never saw it. Or this whole thing is just a cut and paste rumor and their isn't much truth to it; so the question is the hacks or programming abuses actual a rumor/conjecture.. IE: is there actual Truth to it? Of course there has been problems and I seen SoE fix those problems (sometimes it took them WAY too much time to do it); I am just stating currently.. is this actual going on.. do you have proof of it?

.. back in the day a guild leader could talk to a GM that was assigned to the server those days of course are gone.

Forgive me, but what's the point of this post again?

You want us to do what? /feedback Hey SOE cheating is bad, please ban people who macro!

Seems like a total waste of the space in the feedback system to me. If you have specific information on who is cheating or how they are cheating (and circumstantial evidence like platinum reserves, while it might be telling, does not count), then by all means send that in. But just /feedback'ing hey, I don't support cheating, that sounds like a waste to me.

I thought there was going to be big some expose here. But this is all stuff that SOE already knows. :p

Sometimes even when SOE knows about it they do not take any action unless there is public outcry.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It seems like something fishy is going on and I hope SOE does something about it but I do not have my hopes up. Last night a long long quest bugged and I did not get my quest reward. NP I petitioned SOE and got a prompt "We show you did not finish the quest - sorry" and that was it. Of course it was bugged. IN fact several members of my guild said they had the same issue. SOE has to know about it yet they say sorry and do nothing.

At this point in the game, IMHO, SOE is just milking EQ1 for $$$ and anything that costs real $$$ is not going to happen unless it will make them more $$$ in the future. I would not put it past SOE as supplying some of the plat for sale themselves. Heck the Chicago Cubs scalp their own tickets why not SOE :)

-Cass

I find it totally amazing some people can be so negative =(

Well, it doesn't matter anymore cause here comes EQ1 Exchange!

linkie 1: Sony Station Exchange to be Part of all SOE Games (http://www.gamergod.com/article.php?article_id=2663&category_id=30)

linkie 2: Eqlive post (http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Veterans&message.id=146928)


Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It seems like something fishy is going on and I hope SOE does something about it but I do not have my hopes up. Last night a long long quest bugged and I did not get my quest reward. NP I petitioned SOE and got a prompt "We show you did not finish the quest - sorry" and that was it. Of course it was bugged. IN fact several members of my guild said they had the same issue. SOE has to know about it yet they say sorry and do nothing.


GM's have nothing to do and know nothing of in-game issues. The Devs fix these, and there is virtually no communication between the two entities.

I did cross post this to all the class boards I was able to. It's not an advertisment for any of those sites, but rather a warning to people that this is going on, and that is the reason I cross posted it to so many different areas. It's an important issue that needs coverage. I certainly do NOT want people going to those sites and buying platinum from them. Number one, they are selling "dirty" platinum that could get them banned if SOE goes into a crack down, and number two, those companies are pushing the ruin of the economy in the game that is providing them income, by knowingly selling what is essentially counterfeit. They care not about the game itself, only making a quick buck.

I also am the same person who posted similar information 2 years back. I was correct then, and I am 100% sure I am correct now.

The 6 plat profit combine has been reported to SOE. If you know of any others please let one of the developers know, or PM Kythera and I am sure she will get it to the appropriate individuals. (She's mod for the Sony boards, I believe.)

The reason it is very easy to tell when something is not right in the EQ world is due to the limited market on a per server basis for plat for cash sales. This is fairly static, thus if a person is selling / buying and able to watch the stock levels of the major players, they know when there is a large scale influx of plat. Prices can't drop across the board several times in rapid succession without an exploit, either. And resellers can't have a full stock on every server, every single day. There are no sure fire ways to make plat at a rate of 2 million a day, every day, in EQ. A savvy bazaar trader might even notice this in game, and pick up on when items sell from their traders at an increased rate. Those who play the bazaar often will know when something odd is going on.

Let's hope this is fixed in tomorrow's patch, though. I'd fully expect the 6 plat per combine TS recipe to be fixed. It's been public since May of this year on some websites, so I was shocked enough to find it is still that way in game.

Tomorrow's patch is rumored to also include whatever this server side cheat checker is, as well. I have high hopes for that, but I'm not sure if it would be enough to catch everything.

At this point in the game, IMHO, SOE is just milking EQ1 for $$$ and anything that costs real $$$ is not going to happen unless it will make them more $$$ in the future.

Um, lemme see if I got this straight.
Are you trying to say that Sony is running EQ for the purpose of making money and not for spiritual fulfullment?

I mean come on!! OF COURSE they are in it for the money. No $$ = No EQ and go jump in a lake you gamers.

It's time we all come to the reality that EQ is a business. It's all about the mighty dollar. Sorry if thats harsh but its reality.

No Sildan....NOOOOOOOO.

Um, lemme see if I got this straight.
Are you trying to say that Sony is running EQ for the purpose of making money and not for spiritual fulfullment?

I mean come on!! OF COURSE they are in it for the money. No $$ = No EQ and go jump in a lake you gamers.

It's time we all come to the reality that EQ is a business. It's all about the mighty dollar. Sorry if thats harsh but its reality.

Not what I meant.... What I meant was that there was a time in which SOE put a "much" higher percent of the profits back into the game. At this stage of the game SOE is running EQ on a skeleton crew in order to maximize profits with the very barest of upkeep. Not saying that this is a poor "business" decision but it most certainly affect the game for the players.

Paychecks are one od their highest costs and it costs big $$$ to pay real people to look into scams and/or act as GM's for the players. We once had server GM's and now we have some form of roving band of GM's that go from server to server. Want to bet they prob have less than half the GM's per paying customer that they did a few years ago?

Of course I expect SOE to make $$$ but this is a perfect example of SOE cutting corners to save $$$ and to heck with the cheaters in the game.

-Cass

Not what I meant.... What I meant was that there was a time in which SOE put a "much" higher percent of the profits back into the game. At this stage of the game SOE is running EQ on a skeleton crew in order to maximize profits with the very barest of upkeep. Not saying that this is a poor "business" decision but it most certainly affect the game for the players.

Paychecks are one od their highest costs and it costs big $$$ to pay real people to look into scams and/or act as GM's for the players. We once had server GM's and now we have some form of roving band of GM's that go from server to server. Want to bet they prob have less than half the GM's per paying customer that they did a few years ago?

Of course I expect SOE to make $$$ but this is a perfect example of SOE cutting corners to save $$$ and to heck with the cheaters in the game.

-Cass

It's a natural business decision, just like it's natural for a big pharmaceutical company to lay off a chunk of its employees and outsource to India. Even though I liked server GMs (hi, Grog!) the reality is that the mayority of the problems players have can and IS being solved by an automated process and some random out-of-the-country GMs. This is equivalent to your local car company replacing workers for robots, which will make cars degrade in that personal made-by-hand touch, but are faster, cheaper, better.

SOE isn't cutting corners, it's doing what any business might do if it was facing in that same situation. EQ is slowly dying and they know it and we know it... very very slowly but it is. Players will still leave the game whether there is Station Exchange or not, whether they make good decisions or bad decisions, whether they run the game with 1000 developer teams behind it or 5.

Quite frankly if someone is going to leave the game because of this Station Exchange, they were just looking for an excuse to leave to begin with.

concentrateing all the ebay/yantis numbnuts on a couple of servers sounds like a good idea to me.

Keeps them out of my way :moon:

Quite frankly if someone is going to leave the game because of this Station Exchange, they were just looking for an excuse to leave to begin with.

Could not agree with you more on that.

-Cass

Creating isolated servers for selling plat isn't necessarily a good idea. It will just mean that plat being sold on other servers is a rarer commodity therefore it is able to be sold for more real dollars.

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.

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.

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?


Not really. Or, at least, less so than a plat duping problem, because someone duping plat can cause the prices of things many other people buy to rise. Someone getting level 70 and 400 AA? Not the same sort of impact at all. It doesn't take away the fact that I obtained level 70 or 400 AA myself. I still have those, I know how I got those, I can still use those, and I would have those regardless of how some other person got to level 70 or 400 AAs.

How does it diminish your accomplishment if someone else does as you describe? This isn't the Olympics, nor the Superbowl, nor a contest, nor anything else of any real significance. It is a relatively meaningless video game where satisfaction, if any, is derived from what you do or accomplish in the game.

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?


Not really. Or, at least, less so than a plat duping problem, because someone duping plat can cause the prices of things many other people buy to rise. Someone getting level 70 and 400 AA? Not the same sort of impact at all. It doesn't take away the fact that I obtained level 70 or 400 AA myself. I still have those, I know how I got those, I can still use those, and I would have those regardless of how some other person got to level 70 or 400 AAs.

How does it diminish your accomplishment if someone else does as you describe? This isn't the Olympics, nor the Superbowl, nor a contest, nor anything else of any real significance. It is a relatively meaningless video game where satisfaction, if any, is derived from what you do or accomplish in the game.

It does if you have to compete for spots LFG and cannot compete because someone "cheated" but I do see your point.

Now if you never use LFG (I've not used LFG for a long time since I got into this great guild but the other night I popped up LFG and sat for 2 hours while I foraged epic 1.5 stuff without a single call for a group so the issue is still there) I can see why it would not matter.

If Druids only get healing spots when no clerics are available and people can cheat their way to high level clerics then this does hurt us.

-Cass

Also hurts us if a PL'd druid can't hack healing somewhere because they don't know the class well enough and in the process they perpetuate myths about where druids can and cannot heal.

If Druids only get healing spots when no clerics are available and people can cheat their way to high level clerics then this does hurt us.


Druids get healing spots when people perfer druids. It in my experiance has little to do with a cleric, unless the content is fairly difficult.

Granted I have been around a very long time, but I seriously doubt the average player on CT looks up my magelo profile or checks my post count / content on TDG every time I am asked to a group as a healer.

Nor are all the times I am asked, only druids are looking for a group.

It has alot to do with player preferance, and what people have learned about druids and their previous experiances with druids that shape that preferance.

I find it nearly impossiable to think that high level people would think a Druid can't heal something basic like Creator or WoS, or even some of the easier spell arc missions. For harder content, you may have to prove your worth.

I know alot of people think EQ is a very cleric centeric game, but honestly when I raid with my gf's guild Druids outnumber the clerics almost every time. The Bulk of healing for that guild is done by druids, and this has been true in the majority of guilds I have been a part of in Everquest.

-Fenier

About the PLing and as an RO, what would stop anyone from PLing a wanted class (Cleric/Druid, Rog, Bard) and jumping into raiding? What sort of uber-noobs would we be seeing? Pay couple of hundred dollars, get a Qvic geared lvl 70 500AAs toon?

What about newcomers to the game? There is as many people LFG on the 65+ range as there is in 10-65. At least at my server.

If you can't find groups because every one in 70, it puts anyone off. Image EQ all the way solo... *Brr* The merge of all European servers seems to have improved things, but the PLing service will make things worse for new comers.

Eventually SOE will have to do like in the test server and let new users level a lot quicker to ~46. The fact is that there is a demand for this, and this people have beaten SOE to it, I just hope the VET AAs are worth the difference or they come up with something along those lines to reward "old" accounts.

One assumes that all this pp & exp traders work on new accounts (the 30 day trial type).

If Druids only get healing spots when no clerics are available and people can cheat their way to high level clerics then this does hurt us.

I prefer druids to clerics probably 90% of the time. Even with harder content, I'd prefer a druid / shaman in my group to a cleric. I have grouped with so many clerics who have no clue what they are doing, to deal with it continiously.

Those that are duping high level clerics, I am certain will be grouped with once and then popped onto that person's <Do Not Group With> list. You can't level a toon in a week and magically know what your doing... So, if that is the case, they aren't taking anything from druids. The more PL clerics popping up, will IMO make druids even more valuable as players who actually know how to play thier toons.

Also hurts us if a PL'd druid can't hack healing somewhere because they don't know the class well enough and in the process they perpetuate myths about where druids can and cannot heal.

I'd me more worried about that, honestly, than a PLed Cleric stealing my glory.

Hope I didn't derail too much... =-x

Druids get healing spots when people perfer druids. It in my experiance has little to do with a cleric, unless the content is fairly difficult.

Granted I have been around a very long time, but I seriously doubt the average player on CT looks up my magelo profile or checks my post count / content on TDG every time I am asked to a group as a healer.

Nor are all the times I am asked, only druids are looking for a group.

It has alot to do with player preferance, and what people have learned about druids and their previous experiances with druids that shape that preferance.

I find it nearly impossiable to think that high level people would think a Druid can't heal something basic like Creator or WoS, or even some of the easier spell arc missions. For harder content, you may have to prove your worth.

I know alot of people think EQ is a very cleric centeric game, but honestly when I raid with my gf's guild Druids outnumber the clerics almost every time. The Bulk of healing for that guild is done by druids, and this has been true in the majority of guilds I have been a part of in Everquest.

-Fenier

I've seen the very same thing. As many of you are aware I used to b-tch up a storm far more than I do now. It seems that when I switched guilds I moved to a "Druid Friendly" guild from a group that only thought clerics could heal.

In my guild it's about 50/50 Cleric/Druid and they treat druids with respect. I'm sure the aa's have helped but being with a good group of people can make all the difference in the world.

-Cass

Hmm, emergency server maintainance....Commonly that means exploit discovered, wonder if they found a duping or other coin issue.

Actually, that patch was to fix all the server crashes that were happening I believe.

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.

Happy New Year, and another update for you all.
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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.
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A second exploit was discovered and fixed since my posting, 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.
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This required a level 46 rogue and ornate pants with poison skill. Something which could be made up in a couple of days.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Minor note onthe previous post.

The rogue would have to of been at least level 55.

Honestly the policing of cheats/hacks should not be up to friends/associates or guilds.
The responsibility for locating and preventing cheating or hacks is all SoE. They made the code they created the possibility and they are taking our money to provide a structured world in which to play.
To expect a guild leader to "investigate" is just silly as they do not have the tools available to do the job properly.
Yes a guild leader should be responsible for the "behavior" of their members but in most situations there is a way to discuss with everyone involved the concern. Talking to witnesses is not enough to prove the use of a hack or other programming abuse.

IMO SoE should take a strong proactive approach as they did after the last patch and keep after those wishing to take the easy way


I would have to agree. The person will no longer be in the guild if their account gets banned. The only responsibility I would put on the guild leader might be not to knowingly allowing the person back into the guild with another account. There is no way for a guild leader to effectively investigate a cheating or plat sales allegation.

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.
Add moving augments to the list.

They are a huge plat drain on us honest players.

Frankly, I get tired of hearing how Sony is always looking for ways to make me broke.

I'm supposed to be a hero, not a merchant. Worrying about getting plats so I can move augments around is not something I find 'fun'.

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.

You sellers are disgusting. Back in 1999 to 2001 you folks also sold tons of high end items for lots of real life cash. You all farmed and took over camps utilizing your "employees". Lots of us folks wanted to camp these items for fun and not profit. But the camps were not available since you sellers took them over 24/7. You sellers have been a thorn in the side of us players since EQ began. I hope SOE finds a way to ban you folks forever!!!!!

Concernedeq, you are a low-life hypocrite!

You come in here and tell your tale of woe, how EQ is in 'danger' from marco's and dupers and exploiters...when you yourself are a shining example of all that is wrong in the game. You two faced, twit, greedy, immature wholescale asshat dip**** moron. YOU are the reason the EQ player economy tanked!

You have the unmitigated gall to come here and whine about plat sellers, and you are a plat seller. You whine for the loss of your cushy 'job'. A 'job' that RUINED the game for many, many honest players.

You worthless toad. You greedy hypocrite. You two faced liar. People like you make me sick. You made big bucks for messing up other's fun. You deserve NOTHING! Are NOTHING! You will never be NOTHING but a waste of human flash...the very air you breath contains oxygen that could be used to sustain a mass-murderer rapist terrorist.

Take your 'concerns' elsewhere. Go cry on some other place. Go get a REAL JOB and WORK you lazy bastard!

I think the IRS needs to investigate your sorry ass. I will HAPPILY report you once I learn your real identity. Enjoy spend your thousands of REAL dollars on legal defense! I hope the Feds shove it up your ass and light you on fire.

Rot in hell for all eternity.

Thank you for the explaination but I have to agree with the above. Even before these "cheaters" were in the game you, and others like you, either by direct or indirect action caused grief for other players by making select items unavavilable for the common player who wanted to just play the game and not pay.

While the "degree" or cheating may be different it is still cheating all the same in my eyes. By your own admission you were doing something that SOE said was against the rules. The rules seem to have been loosened up some because of SOE caving in but you still broke them.

As I said, while I appreciate your explaination you will get no sympothy from me. I still remember years ago not being able to camp a ton of places because they were camped 24/7 by farmers and while they may not have been direct employees of yours, your activities most certainly encouraged them to do so.

-Cass

If you came looking for sympathy and concern and understanding, I hope you have a dictionary.

I promise you I did not come here looking for sympathy. How foolish would that be? Seriously :)

I promise you as well that I never griefed anyone in game, ever. I never had to deal with a GM because of an issue with another player, I never stole a camp, I never trained anyone, and I never monopolized a spawn. I also made sure it was very clear to those I worked with that such behavior was not going to be tolerated, and I kept a close eye on the server boards for the servers I was handling to be sure that was the case. Generally, plat farmers and the like get a bad rep after an incident or two. We did, through farming, tend to drive prices down on anything we acquired. More supply in the market will do that. So I guess we did have a negative effect on those who wished to get higher prices for items they were farming and not sell for real life money.

And Megn, wow. I'm sorry to have upset you so badly that you feel I am worse than a "mass-murderer rapist terrorist". I know opinions are strong on this topic. I guess... that I just didn't understand how strong in some cases. Regardless of that, I am sorry.

Let's be fair. People like concernedeq may have diappointed other players in the old days, but that's like 5 years ago? I won't hate a person for that long, FOR A GAME. Let's just move on, shall we?

I am not going to quote everyone becuase its simply way way to much stuff to sort through. I don't sell, and I don't support it but I do have this to say.

Muldari, I really don't think he was looking for support. He wanted to explain what he did, and give his insights on how a server monatary system works.

Tejaye and Cassesa, You can believe him or not, and that is your choice. However, I would like to point out rather large sums of cash can be made without impacting people's camps or denying them access to things. There are several zones that are low use, but offer one or two items (or several tradeskill items) which spend the vast majority of the time empty. A single player, or even a boxed group could spend a good portion of the day there and not be interupted.

Now, as he has kindly explained to us, he did, from my understanding, some akin to farming spiderling silk and selling it in the bazaar. This is a basic example, but Hopper Hides (which come from *many* places) and other things which are not commonly camped (Ice Burrower Silk) could provide vast revenue if the right server supported a demand for such items.

As such, I propose we:

1: Move on, this was years ago and we honestly can not verify either way if he did or did not camp items and bar other players from obtaining them.

And

2: If you believe his words, what he did would not have impacted the server dyamnics in a way to drive the price of items up, becuase they would have flooded the market which overall, would drive the price down. So I suggest, that even if he is guilty of selling, to realize how little his mentined method would have worked against the player base becuase he is simply moving plat around, not adding it.

Finally, to Miss Megn, reguardless of how You personally feel, that was totally uncalled for. If you really have such an issue with him, or myself, take it to PMs.

I want to make it clear again, I am not defending him (there would be no point in it as he has admitted his own guilt) However, lets be realisitc. If what he says is true, then the only thing he did wrong was sell the plat he generated from selling into cash, as such - and we have no way to prove otherwise, I am going to take his word for it.

So, to Concernedeq: Thank you for sharing, and good luck in ending your business.

-Fenier

I personaly don't care what people do as long as it doesn't effect me.

Though i do not approve of active hacks during raid times.....it's never been an issue.

Active hacks would take the fun and challange out of EQ.

Selling plat drives up the prices of in game items. Those who play by the rules are directly affected (still are due to plat sellers) because they now have to work alot harder to afford things because they are playing by the rules.

This person is still selling plat by his own admission. While he is but one of many doing so he is still contributing to the problem and causing present day grief to players who do not cheat.

Now if this was some "I stopped selling plat years ago" then I would understand more and say it was in the past and lets move on but he is going to sell out his inventory and then stop and do not forget this "very" important fact:

If this person could still make alot of $$$ cheating then he would still do it. I sense no remorse, no sorrow but rather a "I'm quitting cause I can't make enough $$$"

Why did they not post the inner workings of the plat farming system years ago? Why not expose what was going on when he was making the fat bucks? It's only now, when he is quitting because he can't make enough $$$, that he wants to expose the system.

I will take him on his word that he obtained plat by farming and not hacking but selling plat is against the rules then and now. I will not, however, assume that this great quantity of $$$ this person made was due to farming silks in empty zones :)

I'm ready to move on but keep in mind that this person is being driven out of business and is not leaving because he has found some new form of appreciation of the players who want to play the game by the rules.

-Cass

Farming pp would have been easy in the last 6 months from crystals alone. I know that I went from somewhere around 400-500k to 1.3-1.4 million pp from just doing nest runs and selling my crystals undercutting most the people selling. The price has dropped off considerably now and I don't exp as much, but I know that I would put anywhere from 500-1000 crystals ebon and radiants (ebons were my favorite always selling higher than radiants) and sell them over night.

This guy is just telling the story as it is, no more and no less. If there is a hack that only a few people are aware of then there is a problem. What is the pp sink now? The AAAA, to get a tinkerer to 300 tinkering is going to cost quite a bit of pp. I have heard that some of the vendor bought items for this get to be quite pricey too and then other parts are semi rare meaning they are selling for more pp in the bazaar.

One thing I did find to be kind of true was the price of items. I remember when I didn't have a lot of pp, I thought to myself I would possibly like an amulet of necropotance (sp?) or some other item that is more or less just a trinket for fun. At the time I was looking they were anywhere from 150k to 250k, the last time I looked it was being sold for 500k.

Basically EQ seemed to have its own treasury department more or less, and when a treasury department decides to just print more money than the economy can hold that currency will tank. I don't know if the amt of pp is dropping because the game is older and there is just more money floating around or if sony has kept artificial checks in game to make sure it didn't get out of hand.

I don't know enough about the ins and outs of selling in game items for RL cash, I did like the story though it gives insight to a part of the game I am very in the dark about. To those who are saying they hate this guy and wish death upon his whole family in a ball of fire or whatever, if it wasn't him it would have been the next guy. Whenver RL $$ is involved someone is going to find a way to get it. The buyers are just as guilty as the sellers because without the demand there is no reason to have supply.

Loosen up and take it for what it is, watch your in game economies and if you can't survive on whatever it is you do in game I don't know what to tell you.

Laterz

Platt isn't that hard to get..... I don't see how people using hacks are really able to make much more money than your average platt farmer. Smithers can make a **** load of plat from cultural armor.....druids can make a **** load of plat.... well i'm not gonna tell you how I do that :P


Though platt isn't nearly as important as it used to be, most gear can be achieved through LDoN, DoN, DoDh missions. Leaving spells, and food/drink....and um....potions.

Plat dupes, plat farming, plat selling... no clue how I feel about the subject really. Just seems wrong though.

The thing that really gets me going is the perma-campers who sell loot rights. Right after the Prexus TT merger a single guy botting 6 toons would perma-camp the Mshas in Qvic and sell the loot rights for 300k an armor piece. That really was BS. Didn't impact me or my guild personally - we had moved beyond Qvic at that point, but I know it impacted guilds up and coming thru GoD.

After a few months of this I heard he was banned for using a hack because a GM was in the zone when a Msha busted lose on his bot group and the cleric camped out immediately while being beat on.

That's kinda retarded, I woulda started bringing in teams to gank his goats then link him the gear we were deleting just for the fun of it. People like that annoy me.

The perma camping of the M'Sha in Qvic is a pretty big problem across many servers. The ones we operated on did not have this issue, but I know from talking to other sellers that the issue of 6 man teams farming them to sell loot rights is a huge problem, especially since they are a gear up point for up and coming guilds. Many sellers use them for their income. I don't approve of this activity, and would not allow anyone I was affiliated with to do that, but I didn't operate on all servers either.

As supporting information to what I am trying to get across, I offer you the following :

Since it's fairly easy to do if you know what to look at, I have been monitoring sales of some of the sellers throughout the last month on a single server.

The time span for this is from December 15th 2005 Noon pacific time until January 14th 2006 Noon pacific time.

I've omitted names of the sellers due to certain board wishes. Note all figures are rounded down if above 10 million, to the nearest million.
Seller number, followed by amount sold :

1.) 98 Million
2.) 30 Million
3.) 13 Million
4.) 13 Million

These were the 4 I was able to monitor. On top of this sold by what I would consider "legit" sales, add another 2.7 million.

These are trackable sales, and this does not include the multitude of sellers I am not able to track. It also does not include direct sales from vendors 2 3 and 4, nor does it include direct sales from the "legit" sellers.

Total here is 153,700,000 platinum sold in a 1 month period, or roughly 5,125,000 platinum per day for this server. This figure is low, and the actual figure when accounting for direct sales, and other sellers I am not able to track, is most definitely considerably higher.

For simplicity sake though, let's assume 5 million platinum is sold on the secondary market per day per server, just keep in mind throughout this that the actual figure is much higher.

Now since the above suppliers rely mainly on a single supplier for all their platinum needs, we need to find a way to make 5 million platinum per day in game.

Let's start with the basic way of making money. Farming. This is by going out and getting items to sell in the bazaar, putting them on a trader, and selling them. You will need to make 5 million a day, and you have 24 hours to do so.

Where are you going to go?

Take 6 people and AOE places for gem drops to make money from vendors? Go try that and see if you can make 60 platinum per second, which is the figure you would need to make. Not possible, at least I have never known an AOE group to pull in 200,000+ platinum in an hour in droppable gems.

Dragons of Norrath crystals? 6 people, 24 hours, about 32 missions. 40 crystals per person per mission (high). And let's say they sell for a very high amount on your server, a whopping 150 plat each. 7680 crystals, 1.152 million platinum per day. You are about 1/5 of the way there, and that's assuming that people buy, reliably, 7680 crystals per day of the flavor you choose. I can tell you we dealt with many crystals in order to make platinum, and there is not that much market for them even with severe undercutting.

You can't farm 3 and 7 day spawns reliably, and those are contested. Plus Avatar of War doesn't drop 35 million platinum in gear each week, that is for sure.

Are you going to go farm 500 runes a day at 10k a pop to make that 5 million figure? No. And even if you could you might sell 30-50 a day in the bazaar.

Are you going to farm Walls of Slaughter all day at an average of 5k per item and a 1/3 drop rate on runes and even make a million plat in 24 hours? Nope. You won't even pull in a million platinum worth of items let alone sell them all in the bazaar, even if you include killing Shadowhunter and Discordling warfiend every single time it spawns.

Are you going to farm Ruined City of Dranik all day at an average of 7k per item and a 1/3 drop rate on runes and even make a million plat in 24 hours? Nope. Same situation as is walls of slaughter.

What about farming the new zones? That stuff is expensive, sure. But items which sell for 100k and up do not sell very fast. You won't get a million a day reliably let alone 5 million a day.

If you think you are going to trade skill you way up to 5 million a day, forget it. Even the Dragons of Norrath cultural, while expensive, to make 5 million a day would require extensive farming and an extremely vast number of different grandmaster smiths and tailors to make all the different races.

The simple answer to this is you can't do it. 5 people might be able to pull it off if all 5 had 6 accounts but it would require controlling virtually all of the mid to high end market in the bazaar, and that means controlling all radiant and ebon sales.

The only way that an individual or individuals who had this kind of power would be able to pull this off would also expose them to the server, and they would have to be very very aggressive when dealing with other groups in game in order to accomplish it.

If it was Chinese farmers, they'd have to be doing something repeatable, which would leave them with Dragons of Norrath missions as their only choice.

The smoking gun on all of this is the bazaar, really. The bazaar and the fact that you can't make lots of money in EQ through selling drops to vendors.

It ALL has to go through the bazaar. 5 Million plat a day would be noticed. It is quite obvious when someone has a trader up that makes more than a couple hundred k a day. You would need at least 10 traders to hold the amount of items and such you would need to sell in order to make that 5 million a day as well. And quite frankly, there is not enough trade in the bazaar to support 10 traders loaded with top end gear making that 5 million a day, plus sales from the other 450 to 500 traders kicking around.
The only conclusion one can come to is that this platinum does not come through the bazaar for the most part. Thus it can be concluded that this platinum is acquired in some exploitive fashion.

A couple of other bits of information for you to chew on. On a message board where sellers talk to each other, there was a discussion going on, albeit brief. Of note what follows are two quotes from two of the trafficers of this, what is assumed, exploited or duped platinum :

While two of them were arguing about the undercutting of prices going on one of them said in comment on how he gets his plat "guy farming for me and has millions on each server always"

The same seller later in their argument about the price undercutting "Don't want to face other sellers at $35 per 100k? ok well face them at $25 per 100k" threatening the other seller with "I can sell it for whatever I want and still make money"

And one more comment, perhaps the most important, from seller number 2 above, who has had access to this dupe or been supplied by someone with it since July or earlier :

"You're all getting sidetracked from the point and attacking eachother for no reason.

Is there a dupe out? Yes! It appears so!

Many of the names in this thread have been selling EQ1 platinum for years. The people who've been selling that long obviously earn their platinum legitimately as they have continuously sold for many expansions. Any EQ1 seller who holds stock obviously cannot afford to hold duped stock as a ban would cost them an absurd amount of money / characters for the little profit they were making.

The reason you can tell a dupe is out is several sellers recently went from selling 0 or 1 or 2 servers to selling every single server."

Sellers fighting among each other might be funny and amusing, but these guys are ruining your game in the process trafficing this duped coin.

The guy running the macro makes $15,000 a day, the delivery companies make $12,000 a day, and the EQ player clamors for a new coin at the high end, oblivious in general to what is going on and assuming that item prices nearing a million on the high end is just due to standard inflation and the selling of droppables that a normal group gets in a few hours of playing each day.

Platt isn't that hard to get..... I don't see how people using hacks are really able to make much more money than your average platt farmer. Smithers can make a **** load of plat from cultural armor.....druids can make a **** load of plat.... well i'm not gonna tell you how I do that :P


Though platt isn't nearly as important as it used to be, most gear can be achieved through LDoN, DoN, DoDh missions. Leaving spells, and food/drink....and um....potions.

Well, anything that requires you to sell things to -players- can earn you a lot of money (as long as there are players left who want to buy anything) because there will allways be those who want to go the easy way and buying 100 million allows them to buy anything in the bazaar in a far shorter time (and thus cheaper!) than when they would have to spend the months actually questiong for those items (or to earn the money legimately).

On the other hand, if you want to get rich -selling- currency you either have to have lots of people working for a pittance selling the stuff to you cheap, letting you deal with the hassle of reselling it. Or you need access to your very own money printing press.
While neither is exactly healthy for the game economy in the long run (they drive prices up), the second causes a lot more damage a lot quicker. And the second way makes another strategy to milk even more money out of the game a lot more viable that is -really- damaging to the game and the game economy.
If you can more or less instantly generate a couple of hundred million platinum you can pretty much buy up those highly prized but fairly rare items and mark them up considerably before putting them back on the bazaar. If those items are considered a 'must have' then this pretty much forces the players who need them to come to you for the platinum they need to match your own prices. It does not even matter if you have to destroy a couple of hundred of those items to create an artificial scarcity. After all, you pretty much print your own money so you do not really lose anything by destroying items.
There is no evidence that this is already happening, but as more and more money enters the economy it is inevitable that somebody who has access to a money generating hack or exploit will start doing something like this.


Eri

To update, tonight the buy price went from $20 per 100k down to $10 per 100k.

That's not far off from my $5 per 100k estimate that sounded really hard to believe a couple of weeks back. Even I did not expect it to get down to $10 per 100k this fast, but here we are.

And even at that price point, most of the sellers are not buying and listed as "overstocked" (over 10 million in stock), and the only one that is is only accepting very small quantities.

I have to say that I admire your explanation of the entire process. I am sure my feelings about the whole issue fall in line with everyone else's that I think plat selling is wrong no matter what. But I do now have a better understanding of the entire thing. I am a totally casual player, was in a hard core RP guild for nearly 6 years and never really cared about loot, gear, or plat. So, it never even occurred to me how people came about the plat they were selling or what it did the economy of the game.

What terrifies me is the part that most people seem to be missing. There is some sort of exploit happening that SOE is not figuring out. I currently have just about 40k plat in the bank, the most I have ever had. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was reading another board, where a retired vet showed a screen shot of her first million plat. I was floored! I didnt even know you could have that much plat. (yeah I am a n00b in that way)

What I think needs to be talked about is how can we get these current plat sellers to stop!?! As everyone has agreed, it hurts all players and it is becomming a gigantic problem. Like I said, I have 40k in the bank (combined assests of all 8 chars) and I cannot even afford to buy spells for my other chars because of the inflated prices.

Concernedeq, if you know how we, as a general playing public, can help find out what this "dupe" is or how to stop it (other than not buying the plat, which I think you can tell most of us wouldn't do) please let us know.

You can't really stop plat selling. That's the wrong thing to focus on. As much as I agree with you that it is detrimental to the game, to some degree, it is not something which can be effectively stopped without throwing money at the problem in hiring one or more full time individuals devoted to the cracking down on sales and purchases.

One full time person devoted to this that knows what they are looking for, could tear up the sale of plat and items and powerleveling that goes on outside of the game to the point it would be a very risky venture for any one to get into.

But I assure you this would never happen. Secondary market sales are actually something which holds more people to the game than it takes away. Arguably those involved in secondary market sells and buys are not necessarily the players that MMORPGs seek to attract, but they do comprise a very large percentage of the player base. My customer list is massive over the years for just four servers, and it likely pales in comparison to what these other reseller sites have. I'd guess that more than 1 out of 3 players has participated in purchase or sale of platinum, items, or powerleveling. That's my own estimate, and it certainly can be argued. Though, keep in mind, some of the people posting on these various boards fervently against the sale of plat and items and against me, I know as customers. It's amusing on one end and frustrating on the other, as they are clouding the issue and pushing the point to the back burner in favor of moving the issue of plat for cash trade to the front, which really should not be the focus.

It is far more detrimental to the player to have platinum entering the economy through exploit or dupe. The energy should be focused first on eliminating this problem, and then afterwards going on to find the plat sellers and farmers on your server and getting Sony customer service to deal with them. That is not always an easy task, though. You have to prove that they are selling platinum for real life money, which means you are probably going to have to get them to admit it in game and report the text. There are ways of doing this that some might fall for, but the typical seller is cautious, very cautious, about anything they say within the game.

To find an exploit to get unlimited plat? Well, if it were something that could be explained how, I assure you I'd have found it and reported it long before now. It's not something your average player or even your well versed and experienced player will likely be able to pursue, and the way it is done probably has to do with the manipulation of the EQ data coming to and from your PC to the SOE servers, and thus would require knowledge of how the game works behind the scenes and what would need to be done to benefit from this.

The only way this very same issue was solved back in 2003 was due to a couple of factors. Number one, I posted about it and informed the community, and received a similar response to the response I have received in my recent posts, but people back then seemed to understand what I was saying a bit more. Number two, and this may have contributed to people's greater understanding back then, the exploit in 2003 was in the hands of a few different individuals. As more become aware of it they compete and argue with each other and prices fly down extremely fast (which is where we are now with the 2005/06 problem) but also back then one or more of these guys decided it would be a good idea to start buying up all the stuff in the bazaars in order to provide a safety cushion for them in case the dupe was fixed. This way they would have a ton of items to sell and could profit from that.

The result of all of that was massive and rapid inflation in the bazaar. Anything high end doubled, tripled, quintupled in price in a very short time frame. Players complained, it was extremely obvious to the average player there was a problem, and SOE put a very large number of staff on the issue and it was resolved very quickly.

The problem with right now is none of these guys are going to be stupid enough to pull the bazaar stunt again. So the average player sees rapid inflation but not the doubling and tripling of prices in a few days. Rather the player sees what is inflation on the high end items over a long enough time to not appear to be too wild. When you look and see that the price of the high end has skyrocketed up to a million plat on some servers from 100k-200k this time last year, you can see the effects of such massive amounts of platinum entering the game over a 6 to 8 month span. A 100% increase might be normal for a year. A 1000% increase should set off alarms and bells and whistles and all that loud annoying stuff in the player's heads and alert them that there is a problem.

So what can the players do? Complain, but only if you believe me and think there is a problem. Let SOE know. Post it on the boards, send in feedback, and let them know you want it fixed.

SOE has their hands full at the moment with the issue created by the most recent patch, but I am sure that will fade and things will be semi normal after this weekend. Now is as good a time as any to press on this issue a bit. After all, the longer it is allowed to continue, the longer that duplicated coin enters the game. These sites are currently in a very large scale price war with each other, and prices are dropping on at least one of them every couple of days. It's not really something you want to put off for a few weeks if you feel there is an issue.

I can't be putting as much time into this as I was before, either. This will reduce the attention I can put to it, as well as my emails to SOE CS and my postings on the community sites (I know I know, that probably makes some people happy who are tired of reading my posts that nobody is forcing them to read ). I'll still keep an eye on it, because it interests me and I'd love to see it fixed, but it can't be a focus anymore. Besides, I feel it is time wasted, and that it needs to reach critical levels, whatever they may be, before SOE devotes the resources needed to end it.

By the way, I may find some time to post about how some of these powerlevel services work. Most of them run off of macros, if people were not aware of that. The well intentioned task system and shroud system is being exploited along with warp hacking to make unattended level 1 to 70 quite real, along with the ability to macro yourself tons of AA points. I came across the info for this while looking around for how the plat was being made. Perhaps there's a conneciton there, perhaps not. I don't think any tasks offer much coin, though.

Hi Guys, I just wanted to give an update here that this is still going on and going strong. I don't have nearly as much time to spend on the issue as I'd like but as I get time I'd like to keep everyone updated.

I feel as though I have been brushed off by SOE and this issue has been tossed in the can until it rears its ugly head in a severely destructive way, instead of being gradually destructive over time.

I'd also like to mention, what I find most surprising about how this is being handled is the entire mess that the whole EQ population had to go through in the past few weeks. The bugged vendors, which were in game for only a couple of hours and probably had less influence on the overall game economy than a single days worth of this duped plat entering the game, caused thousands upon thousands of people's characters to get rolled back, massive amounts of customer service time devoted to it, and huge headaches for the playerbase of which many still remain unresolved.

You have to wonder why SOE has chosen to not pursue something which is working to much much greater effect and detriment to the game than a few hours of bugged vendors. Why SOE chose to take such drastic action on players, many of whom were unwitting and innocent, for a simple mistake and oversight on their part, but they choose to completely ignore the fact that there is something dumping as much unintended platinum into the game on a daily basis. It's also a bit scary as a player... what if this does get out of hand and blow up because someone gets ahold of it and goes hog wild in the bazaars like a couple years back? How many people get rolled back then that are completely innocent?

I have noticed some unusual changes in prices in the Bazaar on 7th recently. Just prior to the patch/rollback fiasco, I had been buying runes for 68 spells, and they were regularly selling for 3-6Kpp. From that weekend on, I noticed the price immediately moved up to 7-10Kpp, and has pretty much stayed there.

Another example, radiant crystals. Up til this past weekend, they were selling in the Bazaar for 90-110pp each. All of a sudden, they are 135-180pp each. I'm still trying to get a handle on why things such as these go through such sudded and extreme price changes. I don't know if the plat selling stuff talked about in this thread has anything to do with it, but if it does, it's pretty interesting to follow.

Tat

I'll echo Tat's comments about strange things being afoot at the Circle K.

On Cazic, Radiant Crystals were 100-110p a week ago, and available in bulk. Thousands for sale. Right now, as I post this, the first crystals I have seen in several hours have just come on the market. 300p. And for a short while prior to this there were just NONE available.

Exp Weekend:

People Farm Missions - get crystals in Bulk.
Crystals go for sale.
People who leveled drastically (such as in MMs) reach 70 and ar enow in need of crystals for Augments / armor fitting their new level.
People purchase crystals.

I would bet the amount of people needing crystals exceeded the amount on the market easily.

-Fenier

Rune spells have been steadily going up in price and that has nothing to do with availability or an exp weekend. Crystal prices have stayed the same or gone up, and while a 1 or 2 day flux is normal, a steady rise over time is not unless every player were suddenly pulling a blue diamond or two off of every monster.

Runes hit a floor of about 4 or 5 k each after the server merges early last year. They are about 9 to 15 k now and steadily rising. This is with a decrease in demand since a lot of the market for them now is people buying them for twinks, but with a much higher supply. Those two factors being the opposite of what should happen to make pricing goes up, is a good example of inflation, or the decrease in value of the platinum piece. This rapid inflation is not due to normal in game mechanics, but because of this massive amount of platinum entering the global platinum pool, through an exploit and then sold into the economy by third party plat for cash websites.

The effect you will see from what I have explained is just that, steadily increasing prices on in demand items, and the trends in game illustrate what I am saying perfectly. When looking at it, try not to focus on a short term increase or decrease over a few days or a week, but rather look at the big picture from about the release of Dragons of Norrath, to now.

Rune spells have been steadily going up in price and that has nothing to do with availability or an exp weekend.
Runes hit a floor of about 4 or 5 k each after the server merges early last year. They are about 9 to 15 k now and steadily rising. This is with a decrease in demand since a lot of the market for them now is people buying them for twinks, but with a much higher supply.

I am now with the above quote really wondering about your information and sources.
Runes on CT have been 8-10k for level 66 runes 8-15k for level 67 runes and level 68 runes are selling for 5-7k.
I should know I've bought watch and shopped for them for 3 characters Now.
Want to know why I think the pricing is the way it is?
I'm going to tell you anyway
EVERYONE seems to have a cleric bot/alt or toon
You require 6 66 runes to get symbol and 6 67 runes for Conv.
Demand is greater and they don't seem to drop as often as the 68 runes do (while I farmed them anyway)
There is my mind is the reason for the rune pricing.
There has been NO increases that I've seen, the pricing on runes has stayed steady with minor fluctuation when there are pricing/bazaar wars have happened. With patience I've paid about 8k for the 66, 67 runes and 5k for the 68 runes that I've needed.

Give me proof and prove my personal experience wrong but this time your information SUCKS.

Pricing and effect are going to be different on every server. No need to get so angry about it.

If rune prices have remained stagnant as you say, then you've illustrated my point perfectly. With the introduction of mass amounts of shadowspine runes, in addition to the already steady influx of muramite runes, then rune prices should have fallen since the release of Depths of Darkhollow.

I try to stay away from specific examples for this very reason. It's not going to be the same on every server. Someone is going to get all bent out of shape because the information does not quite match up for their server, and then they are going to make a post based on a very narrow view.

I do wish you only the best and do wish that you would turn your crusade to something that might make a difference in the world.
Talk to women about breast examinations and mamograms.
Talk to people about aids/hiv.
Talk to people about homeless and the needy where we live.
Talk to us about something that matters.

Enjoy your tilt at this windmill and we will see you in the history books Don.

Lowerth

Enjoy your tilt at this windmill and we will see you in the history books Don.


That was uncalled for and needlesly rude Lowerth.

Even if you do not agree with the person, or his cause, that is still no excuse to be snide.


Eri

In this case with his incorrect information in the prior posts and his "inability" to "effect change".
I strongly believe that this topic of concern within eq will never be fixed and he like the literary figure is tilting at windmills.

Actually in consideration
"Talk to us about something that matters."
I will apologise for as this is his thread and topic and he should be allowed to voice his opinion without people like me questioning his beliefs.

Best wishes Don
Lowerth

Lowerth I don't know anything about those subjects so I really can't talk to you about them. The inaccurate information I did post such as calling Qvic armor the wrong name, really does not detract from the extensive amount of good information. If my crusade of sorts has you so upset, you do not have to read this thread at all.

This is still going on. To show the impact this type of activity has on the out of game economy, I'm going to list up what the price points were at various times in the past 5 years. You can see the dips in prices due to exploitation and the rapid decline in the "value" of the platinum piece. You can also see where this value returns to after an exploit is fixed. Since that value after it is fixed corresponds with how much items cost in game, you can see the effect in game from these as well (lower prices out of game indicate higher prices in game). Unfortunately if you do not buy platinum, then you are regulated by the in game mechanics and merely stuck with higher prices for things without any way of getting platinum at a faster rate, while those who wish to "cheat" and buy plat now have an enormous advantage.

09/2001 $1500
09/2002 $450 <--- cheese macro and others
10/2002 $400
12/2002 $350
06/2003 $195 <---- bow macro and others
08/2003 $279
09/2003 $250
11/2003 $65 <---- infamous dupe
01/2004 $90 <---- dupe fix
02/2004 $95
05/2004 $89
08/2004 $59 <---- another exploit
11/2004 $62 <---- exploit fix
02/2005 $55
06/2005 $40 <---- ********** unlimited plat
09/2005 $35 <---- more sellers unlimited plat
10/2005 $30 <---- more sellers unlimited plat
11/2005 $27 <---- more sellers unlimited plat
12/2005 $27 <---- lots of reseller banning
01/2006 $25 <---- reseller banning ceased, all sites massive amounts of plat for sale
02/2006 $20 <---- current low price, exploit still in use

OP,

I'm oso glad you've decided what you were originally doing by selling plat 'legitimately' was wrong and you've stopped doing it.

Alternatively, I'm almost sorry someone more greedy than yourself is beating you out at your own game. :bs:

Oh wait, I think this was more eloquently stated (despite the long-windedness) here:

http://eqforums.station.sony.com/eq/board/message?board.id=Trade&message.id=9139&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

By your own admission, you'd be the 'Nobler' cheater.

Oh, I'm also sorry you have to re-enter the regular workforce. Welcome back to the real world.

Congratulations on losing and splitting hairs, respectively. :clap:

Crusade, indeed.

~Tar'Kaiden

How is selling plat legitimately generated "cheating". I don't get that. I haven't ever spent $$ on anything in EQ (other than EQ itself, obviously), but I have no problem with those that do. EQ is a hobby, a pastime. They are meant to be fun. If you have more money than time, and buying some plat or items adds to your pleasure, then go for it. Who the he** cares?

Now if exploits or macros are used to generate the plat, well that's different.

Tat

Exactly, I'm not too hot on that he was selling plat. But, making plat within the legal framework of the game mechanics is very different than macro'ing it / dupe'ing it. The former brings plat into the game a little bit faster than it would otherwise, but, certainly nothing outside what the developers planned for and nothing beyond what the in-game economy can handle. The latter....not so much.

How is selling plat legitimately generated "cheating".

(02-12-2006 12:03 PM) while those who wish to "cheat" and buy plat now have an enormous advantage.

Ask the OP, I'm sure he has another ton of material to write about it.

(01-21-2006, 05:53 AM) You can't really stop plat selling. That's the wrong thing to focus on. As much as I agree with you that it is detrimental to the game, to some degree, *snip*.

(01-12-2006, 01:20 AM) 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. *snip*

I'm sorry, which is it again?

(02-05-2006, 04:29 AM)That was uncalled for and needlesly rude Lowerth.

Even if you do not agree with the person, or his cause, that is still no excuse to be snide.

I respectfully disagree here. Concernedeq is not here to save the day for us... He's here to insult our intelligence because now, even though he admits his guilt about selling plat and/or items in game for out of game IRL USD, his business is being so undercut as to shut down not only his business but others' as well. He's in this for his own self-serving purposes. (/GASP!!one1!) Just like before:

(01-12-2006, 01:20 AM) 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

(01-21-2006, 05:53 AM) *snip* it is not something which can be effectively stopped without throwing money at the problem in hiring one or more full time individuals devoted to the cracking down on sales and purchases.

And so he's finally asking for SoE to shut plat sellers down. After he quits selling plat/items for USD. Legitimately or not. Whether or not he 'permacamped' high interest spots or 'stole someone else's camp' all the way back from 2000 on.

OP, I'm in the camp with Megn Summer, however you'll get no namecalling from me. But I will ask you politely to not insult my intelligence again.

(01-12-2006, 06:59 PM) Let's just move on, shall we?

I wholeheartedly agree. /brushes shoulder off.

~Tar'Kaiden of Leviathan