How I helped destroy Star Wars Galaxies

I was 14 years old when Galaxies was first announced, two years prior to its release. Like the author of this article, I too was crazy excited about this game when I first heard about it. My friends and I did all the same things that the author said he did, such as fantasizing about being a bounty hunter, or chillin' with Luke, etc. The idea of the game excited me more than actually wanting to play it, though. I've never been much of a gamer but games were how I learned to program. So, my approach to Galaxies took me to similar places as the author, but I got there a different way.<p>When Galaxies was announced, I was in my peak of reverse engineering Blizzard games. I had been reverse engineering the Battle.net client protocol since Diablo 1 and StarCraft. Battle.net had a community full of people who reverse engineered the Blizzard games and there was somewhat of a competition as to who could write the coolest bots, as we called them. Bots were apps that emulated the official clients and could completely sign into Battle.net without using the actual game. Most of mine were just console apps, because I enjoyed the reverse engineering more than the coding.<p>So, when Galaxies finally came out in beta, a friend of mine luckily got a copy. The computer that I used at that time, which was a shared family computer, was terrible so I didn't expect to play the game, but I did ask him for a copy of the game's directory so that I could start writing Galaxies bots. I focused all of my time on reverse engineering the Galaxies client protocol. I would stay up until the sun came up, staring at the game in a debugger. When a family member need to computer or I had to go to school, I'd hit print on IDA and print out an entire dll - tons of paper. I'd basically annotate the printed out assembly with what I thought was happening and then I'd get home and confirm or deny it with the debugger at run-time. I'd borrow my friends account so that I could see the sign in process in real-time and get packet dumps. I did this for months straight and it never got old.<p>The end result was a console application that could emulate the official client and sign in to Galaxies, select your character and respond to various events. My friends would level up new character's professions and I'd run them on my terrible computer while we were at school, and over night. I could run many at once with no problem.<p>While we did not have the in-game success with making tons of money, I did save a lot of money up front on a lot of new computers and tons of copies of Galaxies. :)

I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by programming one.<p>The irony is staggering.

I used to make some money selling pixels as well, mainly from UO ('real estate' mainly since land in that game was very limited), City of Heroes, SWG and WoW. If you got in at the start (when selling on eBay was still 'legal') you made a pretty penny.<p>But it was unsustainable due to new MMOs, new tech and the rise of professional farmers. You had to constantly adapt, see where the game is going, and jump ship before the game collapses. I remember getting calls in the middle of the night from the west coast, asking about my auctions and how it all works and if there was more. And getting interrogated by my mum since I'm getting all these calls from strangers.<p>Farming by hand, or playing the auction house no longer is the optimal way to go. Now people offer full blown services to play your toon for you, using VM, to mask/hide your IP incase you/they get caught (so you can claim you got hacked), with really good players charging up to thousands of dollars to play your character.<p>Good times.<p>EDIT: Now that I thought about it some more, I noticed my pattern at the beginning was doing everything myself, whether is scouring for bargains, farming gold, flipping properties – then I moved on to hiring people within the game and paying them in-game gold for them to farm for me (in SWG, I would provide locations of mineral fields to my 'employee's and set a price ahead of time how much I'd pay per unit, and I'd buy all they have) – then I moved on to automatic botting/scripting in WoW. Interestingly, this aligns somewhat closely to real life industries and how they improve output.<p>Then I also realized first there was the emergence of sellers (the farmers), then came the companies that has its own farming team in addition to buying pixels from farmers and flipping them for profit. And finally, the arrival of platforms – connecting direct buyers with direct sellers while taking a cut (similar to eBay) – and it's these guys are making the real money – taking zero risks (not worrying about getting caught), providing minimal support and very scalable.<p>And now the gaming companies wants to keep everything to themselves and take a cut. Blizzard's D3 will be paid close attention to how its Auction House system works out – it will be very, very interesting to see where it all leads.

An interesting insight into how bits of the modern world actually work.<p>The most significant thing for me was the romanticization. How the guy ascribes emotional significance to a shitty MMO. He's gaming the shitty MMO, just like he is being gamed by the shitty MMO's designers. And it has all this importance to him. Sad, poignant, alarming, eerie.

Was anyone else reminded of Catch-22?<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder</a><p>"At the beginning of the novel, it [Milo's syndicate] is merely a system that gets fresh eggs to his mess hall by buying them in Sicily for one cent, selling them to Malta for four and a half cents, buying them back for seven cents, and finally selling them to the mess halls for five cents."

I really enjoyed this article, but the interesting thing to me is the need to rationalize why things like MMOs fade away. It seems like they have a natural life cycle. This guy didn't bring Star Wars Galaxies down. The developers adding New Game Experience (NGE) or the Combat Update (CU) didn't destroy the game. The world went on.<p>The game was released in 2001. In 2003 it had 400,000 subscribers. They released the controversial NGE/CU changes in 2005. It wasn't until 2009 that they shut down about half the servers. And they didn't shut down the game until a new Star Wars MMO was imminent.*<p>I can't image that most of the market for a Star Wars MMO hadn't tried it, maybe played it quite a bit, and then moved on in the space of 10 years. I understand the desire for things to last forever, but I don't know that most things will.<p>* Numbers to be taken with a grain of salt, they were culled from wikipedia.

I was buying and selling virtual weapons in text MUDs almost 20 years ago. This offline market for virtual game items predates the MMORPG genre itself.<p><a href="http://realmsofdespair.org/" rel="nofollow">http://realmsofdespair.org/</a> was my MUD of choice as a kid.

Did I miss something in the article? I clicked on a title promising the ruination of SWG and all I found was a guy contributing significant revenue to Sony while providing their players with a service they obviously desired. I understand there is an argument that virtual currency sales may decrease buyers' CLV but in the absence of an argument or evidence along those lines all I read was a story about an MMO players inflated self image and his tragic love affair with his game.

I really loved playing SWG - not so much for the game, but for the ‘business’ aspects of it. Whilst not as successful as the OP, I made thousands of $US from the game by being part of a oligopoly.<p>One of the game mechanics was the concept of ‘buffs’ - basically chemical stimulants your character could consume to temporarily boost critical stats which aided in combat. They were an essential item in PvP (player vs player) combat if you wanted to have that edge and so were in high demand. Buffs could only be made by the ‘doctor’ class and only by the top level doctors. Another critical game mechanic was that the quality of the buff affected how much of a boost you could receive to your stats, and the quality of the buffs was affected by the quality of the raw materials you sourced to make the buff (every resource had a variety of stats - this game was a real minmax-ers delight). The highest quality buffs were the only one that people were interested in buying.<p>Most of the resources required for the buffs were reasonably easy to find - but there was one which was rare - avian meat. The highest quality avian meat, harvested by killing particular birds, only appeared (real-time) once a month for a few days. Without this avian meat, you could not produce the highest quality buffs.<p>The first time I made buffs - I happened to time it during the HQ (high quality) avian meat period. I spent hours killing the birds to collect meat. I made my buffs, had a shop near Coronet (the main trading city in the game) and sold out within a few days. And I noticed that all the doctors sold out within days too - and that the last few that had some stock could request extortion prices for their stock. That gave me an idea …<p>The next month when the avian meat spawned, I parked my character in the main spaceport and keyed up a macro (the game had an in-game macro system). All my macro did was cause my character to shout out every minute “Buying avian meat @ Z credits/piece - sell to my vendor at coords X,Y”. I basically bankrupted myself buying up as much avian meat as I could whilst it was available.<p>I made up a batch of buffs and started selling them - I ran out after 20 days - but I was now substantially more wealthy! I figured - heck I’m on a good thing - let’s do that the next month. Of course, no good thing goes unnoticed …<p>The next month, there were three other doctors in the spaceport shouting out that they were buying avian meat. Well this simply would not do! So I basically upped the price I was offering to purchase avian meat above theirs - heck - I was flush with funds from last month so I figured I could out buy them. It turns out I was right - I was able to purchase even more avian meat than the last month and I was able to produce enough HQ buffs to just last the month. Then the third month - this is when the market dynamics got interesting …<p>By now, several people had noticed that avian meat was in hot demand once a month. In the third month, there were several ‘shouters’ when the HQ avian meat started spawning. Like last month, I upped the price I was willing to offer to price them out of the market - a bidding war erupted, but with my bankroll, I could outbid anyone (although I was cringing how fast I was going through my credits). Like any market, with the prices rising so quick, it changed behaviours - suddenly many of the ‘hunters’ in the game were out killing birds to collect meat. I effectively had my own contractor workforce out hunting avian meat!<p>By the end of the third HQ avian meat season, I had more meat than I ever had before. I realised I almost had complete control of the buff market on my server so I changed my selling tactics. I made my batch of buffs and started selling them, but I jacked the price up (100% increase) - this time I wanted to be able to continuously sell my buffs to last the full month. Other buff sellers kept selling them at the going rate … so I did the rounds of the cities each night and bought up any HQ buffs which were under my price and added them to my stockpile. By the end of the first week, I was bankrupt although I had a huge stockpile of HQ buffs - but most importantly, virtually every buff vendor was empty … except mine. I jacked my price up even further and did a roaring trade.<p>Over the next few cycles I cemented my reputation as one of the few reliable buff vendors who could consistently offer the highest quality buffs month-round. With the constant trade and monopoly prices, I was able to further entrench my dominant position each month by continuing to out bid any other doctor who tried to purchase avian meat. There were two other doctors on the server who managed to offer buffs for most of the month, and whilst I never talked to them, I noticed that they never went below whatever price I set. Our little oligopoly had a total lock on the buff market - it was a golden age!<p>When I quit the game a couple of months later, I had millions in credits which I sold for a few thousand $US. SWG let me play out my monopolistic capitalistic fantasies - how I loved that game :D

If you enjoyed this article you might like to give "For the Win" by Cory Doctorow a read, it's a pretty fun book that asks questions with regards to game economies and how they might affect the real world.

I've never really played a lot of MMOs (though I had friends who were very into SWG and still lament its changes and eventual demise) but the crazy stuff that goes on in virtual economies like this has always interested me.<p>Reminds me of Julian Dibbell's "Play Money" [1], where he spends a year trying to make Ultima Online his main source of income.<p>[1]<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Money-Millions-Trading-Virtual/dp/0465015360/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&#38;ie=UTF8&#38;qid=1331120748&#38;sr=1-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Money-Millions-Trading-Virtual/...</a>

The big question is: Do game economies make sense at all, do they benefit the game enjoyment for all users?<p>This story sounds very common today, i tried similar things in WoW but never to earn real money. Common players don't care much about game money, that makes it so easy to exploit the system. In the end it is was fun for myself, but the common player was forced to grind a little more because of people like me.

I was a Master Armorsmith on Lowca I would bring in 20mil credits/week that had a value of around $200 on Ebay. I made thousands selling credits from SWG on eBay which was great for a teenager (I was 17 - now I'm 27) They killed the game in 2005 trying to make it "assessable" and that's the last time I played SWG or any MMO. I have fond memories of the economy and learned a lot that has helped me in the real business world (taking care of customers etc..) I actually had been thinking about writing something similar to this about SWG for a while now glad someone took the time to write it.

Good interview from a couple of years ago along the same lines: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I&#38;feature=player_embedded" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I&#38;feature=play...</a><p>+1 for Julian Dibbel's book Play Money also. Great read if your into virtual economies, along with Castronova's Synthetic Worlds.

This sounds similar to what happened with WoW, at first things are really hard to obtain, going after the real hardcore gamers and those that want to spend the time to know the economy well, work together well and master professions.<p>As the game goes on they try more and more to appeal to the casual gamer which either doesn't have the skills or the time to master the game in the same way. Meaning it becomes hard to really differentiate yourself from others playing the game as most of everyone has pretty good items and didn't have to work hard to acquire them.<p>Even though I have nowhere near enough time to be a hardcore gamer at anything these days, I still don't think I'd really enjoy playing something causally and having it all handed to me.

I love the last paragraph in his post.<p>"Because it wasn’t the game I loved. That game died in 2005 with the NGE/CU. It died when developers turned their backs on the gamers who had spent the effort and instead listened to the lazy, whining voices who wanted it all given to them."<p>Sounds a lot like the government of today.

Exploiting computer games for temporary cash seems like an incredibly pathetic way to earn a living. Surely those with the intelligence to accomplish such things could contribute their time to something more productive?

Good for the OP to have made money doing something he loved, however time spent gaming (or writing useless SAAS apps or mobile applications for that matter) is a waste of good brain cells. Unless something helps our future generations either by providing an example for how to love and care for each other or by furthering humanity's development, it is waste of time.

<i>[In summer 2001] We talked constantly, speculated, made suggestions, argued about how Jedi should work; we were two years from ever even playing and we already had deep and powerful opinions about a game that didn’t exist yet. It was unprecedented.</i><p>It was at least a year late for being unprecedented :). I was doing exactly the same in mid-late 2000 with Eve Online.

I played Star Wars Galaxies for 7 years and met a lot of cool people. At times it didn't feel like a Star Wars game but I made the most of it. I didn't agree with some of the changes (both major and minor) but now I appreciate that I was part something great. I miss it from time to time and regret 0 time I spent playing Star Wars Galaxies.

This is terrifying on so many levels.

Sounds like our beloved banking system tbh. Say you take a loan out. You give it to someone to buy a house. They put it into a bank. Then another guy takes a loan out from that bank, and gets twice loaned money to buy a house of his own. The guy he buys it from puts it into a bank. That bank then loans out the money to another guy who gets thrice loaned money for his house. All the while the banks are placing interest on the money they lend out (which BTW was widely considered illegal/immoral until ~1600) which ends up with the modern banking system literally creating money.<p>A hypothetical economy has $10,000 in total currency, a bank has all $10,000 in cash reserves to begin with. There are 40 members of society, each of them with a different occupation but together they form a basic economy.<p>Pete is loaned $9,000 from the bank.<p>Pete pays Bill that money for an old car.<p>Bill puts $9,000 in the bank.<p>The banking system has $10,000 cash.<p>Jane is loaned $9,000 from the bank.<p>Jane pays Matt that money for renovations to her house.<p>Matt puts $9,000 in the bank.<p>The bank has $10,000 cash.<p>The bank charges interest on these loans.<p>The bank is owed $10,000 from Pete<p>The bank is owed $10,000 from Jane<p>The bank owes $9,000 to Bill<p>The bank owes $9,000 to Matt<p>Pete and Jane pay back $10,000 each, $20,000 collectively, but wait, that can't happen, because there is only $10,000 in the entire economy and Bill and Matt each have a net worth of $9,000, accounting for 90% of the wealth of the economy (as far as they think, anyways). Lets step back.<p>The bank has $10,000 cash<p>The bank owes Matt $9,000<p>The bank owes Bill $9,000<p>Jane owes the bank $10,000<p>Pete owes the bank $10,000<p>## The Bank's Assets<p>Pete $10,000<p>Jane $10,000<p>Cash $10,000<p>---<p>Total $30,000<p>## Liabilities<p>Bill $9,000<p>Matt $9,000<p>---<p>Total $18,000<p>The Bank's Net worth $12,000<p>Pete's net worth -$10,000<p>Jane's net worth -$10,000<p>Bill's net worth $9,000<p>Matt's net worth $9,000<p>Total currency in the system $10,000<p>The total currency in the system is still $10,000, but the bank's accountant says it is worth $12,000. What? Not only that, but if the bank were to be found in the wrong, it would not just crumble the bank, but the entire economic system -- because everyone is involved and has a stake in what the bank is doing here.<p>Now, there are plenty of businesses in the world that, more or less, have a license to "print money" so to speak. People who offer their time for money have this to a certain extent, if I give you 10 hours of my day and you have to pay $1000 for it, I have basically created a debt in the system for $1000, without having first put $1000 of actual currency into the system.<p>The banking system is remarkable in this context however, because it uses money itself to create more money, while simultaneously making everyone a stakeholder in their being right -- increasing the danger to the system far more than any other existing entity. Bank's also vest rich people into their system by making them little lender's themselves (when our money makes interest by way of our banks investing/loaning it to others)<p>If I dont get paid my $1000 that I say you owe then too bad for me and I may sue you. But if the bank doesn't get paid it's $18,000 in the scenario above the whole economy is coming down with them. The banking system of borrowing and lending money that is not backed by anything tangible is a house of cards. It is a similar system to the OP's article that feeds itself. The guy who wrote this article I think got a first-hand perspective in how extraordinary it is when you see all of the working parts at once.<p>So, what happens when the bank does get found in the wrong in the above scenario? Let's walk through that.<p>Pete and Jane can't find the money to pay back their debt. They may have thought they had it in their sights, but for some reason they just can't seem to get enough money to pay back the bank (obviously, the money necessary just doesn't exist unless they can find a way to print money faster than the bank, but more on that later...) and so they both decide the bank is a sham and take up legal claims, suing the bank in their society's courts for usury and fraud.<p>The bank is (quite hypothetically) found guilty of both usury and fraud, since the extent of the economy is easily defined in this society it is easily reasoned that the bank is corrupting the system. A single entity cannot claim to have more currency than is in existence. It's loans are voided ab initio.<p>## The Bank's Assets<p>Cash $10,000<p>---<p>Total $10,000<p>## Liabilities<p>Bill $9,000<p>Matt $9,000<p>---<p>Total $18,000<p>Pete's net worth $0<p>Jane's net worth $0<p>Bill's net worth $9,000<p>Matt's net worth $9,000<p>The Bank's Net worth -$8,000<p>Total currency in the system $10,000<p>Bill and Matt hear of this debacle, and quickly go to the bank to withdraw their money. But it's a race to the counter, the bank only has $10,000 and they are both owed $9,000. It is worth noting at this point that the bank has literally no legal measures to take to prevent it from being liable for it's debts to Bill and Matt.<p>Bill gets to the counter first and withdraws all of his $9,000. The bank is legally obligated to pay Bill his $9,000 and does so. Matt gets to the counter but there is only $1,000 left, he withdraws the $1,000 that he can.<p>Matt sues the bank for not paying him back his money (he gave them his cold hard earned cash, afterall). The courts find Matt in the right and the bank owes him $9,000 that they do not have. The bank goes bankrupt, the economy goes bankrupt (funny that word) -- Matt and everyone else in the society refuse to use money as currency because it is not reliable.<p>But was it the currency that made the system collapse? No. It was the failed predictions of those in the banking system, who have more stakeholders than any other business ever has or should have. It is indeed true that once a stakeholder was made out of the richest few (themselves and those who produced the most in this scenario), every single person who relies on money subsequently became stakeholders, which is everyone in society.<p>System's that are similar to that described in the OP's article quickly fail, unless accurate predictions can be made about what the "economy" can "absorb" or rather, what can be skimmed off the top while not bringing the house of cards down. In OP's case there was little pre-planned organization and he had no insight into too many other things affecting his process so it was not really possible.