Anyone Making Money In 'Second Life" (With Fortune Mag Link)

[Lucky]

Here's the link to article:
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/22/maga...tune/index.htm

Don't know too much about it, looks like software is difficult to operate, slowing growth. But some smart people like Ebay's founder Omidyar, jeff bezos and others are pretty high on it.

Idea is to own land, develop properties, start restaurants, basically buy and sell whatever you could in 'first' life. Question is how big will people go for it.

[Sniper]

Related recent discussion...

Virtual Worlds Lucrative?

Second life lottery/casino

[Ron_Mexico]

I downloaded this game, but gave up after 5 mins. Anyone have experience playing it.

[Lucky]

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Related recent discussion...

Virtual Worlds Lucrative?

Second life lottery/casino

[/ QUOTE ]

thanks sniper

[Shoe]

No, but I have made money in EQ, EQ2, and SWG. Could have in wow but decided not to. I don't do any of that anymore as the hourly rate was not enough to make it worth my time.

[KidLifeCrisis]

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I downloaded this game, but gave up after 5 mins. Anyone have experience playing it.

[/ QUOTE ]
Me too, it didn't seem very enticing. I gave it a couple hours too, just to try to reach the "meat" of the game/world/whatever, and I just didn't find it intriguing.

[BradleyT]

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No, but I have made money in EQ, EQ2, and SWG. Could have in wow but decided not to. I don't do any of that anymore as the hourly rate was not enough to make it worth my time.

[/ QUOTE ]

Same with UO, Diablo II, SWG, The Sims Online.

The only one that had a high hourly rate was the sims online. This was because I did all the programming for a site that had over 30,000 player profiles and we charged 8x what ebay prices were for simoleans. People absolutely loved our site (in fact probably 30% of all in game players put links to our site on their ingame profiles) so we had a huge amount of "trust" from buyers. I and my partner each made over $30,000 in 3-4 months. It took about 2-3 hours per day to make deliveries in game. At first we started off buying from other people at huge volume discounts. I'd pay a guy (who was cheating to get his money) $2,000 via paypal and be able to sell that for $5,000+. I remember buying $4,000 worth one time and thinking, this is the craziest thing ever. I just paypaled this guy $4,000 for silly in game items. Then we got a bot script that we bought for $100 that could make money 10x faster than anyone could in game lol. We stopped buying from our suppliers and just started using the bot. Eventually we got banned for it and the guy who owned the website sold it.

In UO they had dice cups and you could type /roll and it would show a random number from 1-12. So I wrote a quick php script to do some math and came up with a gambling game where I had about a 20% edge. I forget the exact details but was something like if you rolled 2 or 12 you got 3x your money, 3 or 11 was 2x money, 3,4,9,10 was your money back and 6,7,8 I won the money. At the time 1,000,000 gold went for $20 on ebay. I made lots of money as people were addicted to the game. Even when people tried copying me and offering the same game I'd have a line of 5-10 people wanting to play the entire time I was online. The hourly rate was pretty crappy though as people would want to gamble 5K and [censored].

In SWG I first discovered a resource dupe a bit after the game came out. This allowed me to dupe berylious copper (sp?) that I had saved which was extremely rare and hadn't spawned in like 3 weeks. I had duped over 500,000 of this and at the rates people were paying I would have had ridiculous amounts of credits (in game currency) probably 50x higher than any player on the server. Within 5 minutes of me selling the first batch I had over 10 weaponsmiths PM me wanting to buy. So I sold them all small quantities then destroyed the rest because everyone was like, "where'd you get this?" and the amount I had sold was greater than the amount the server had spawned.

So a while later there's a credit dupe. This one was pretty easy to do (I had two accounts on two computers at the time). You'd trade with a player, put the player who had given the money on a ship to another place (which took a while because of loading screens) and unplug your network cable while the loading screen was showing. This would then "roll back" the character about 2 minutes and he still had the credits he had just traded and the person who he traded with still had them also. I duped millions of credits on all servers (1,000,000 credits was the most any of the super hardcore players had at the time) and sold them on eBay for about $15,000. I had an AIM buddy at the time and he got stupid and duped BILLIONs of credits heh. Obviously there was no way possible for anyone in game to acquire a billion credits so sony banned him. Shortly after, word got out on how to do it and people started posting it on all kinds of message boards. I submitted it as a bug to sony and they fixed it shortly after - I wanted to keep my credits but prevent everyone else from doing it. So I quit the game a while later after having made about $15,000 from ebay. A year or two later they release some expansion pack and give me a free trial. I log in and am suprised that most of my characters still have like 50,000,000 credits on them. So I go to IGE and dump them all for a quick $750 heh. I guess this one was a pretty high hourly rate also.

In Diablo II I manually played a high level char with uber equipment and was able to farm items at a rate of about $15/hr but it was boring as [censored].

In EQ2 I wrote a script using the program AC Tools that would automatically craft for me. This was mainly to get my guy skilled up quickly without me having to grind for 8 hours but also to make a bit of profit. The game sucked though so I didn't make much money off of it, a few thousand.

Oh and for second life. Me and the guy who did the sims online website were in talks with the Linden Labs to do a similar player profile site for them. They were even going to give us incentives and let us sell in game currency (which they didn't allow anyone to do). We had a person who made a kickass design for it. Unfortunately I never finished programming it and me and the guy who I was partners with had stopped talking for no real reason. I had a beta account and paid $10 for a lifetime real account but haven't played it since beta. I didn't really care for it.



The key to making nice money in most of these games is to cheat/exploit/and dupe [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Sniper]

A+ Awesome post! Would read again... [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

Thanks for sharing

[d0nkaments]

I regularly play SecondLife and I have quite an amount of items and money. If you need help or anything let me know.

[KidLifeCrisis]

Very nice read Bradley, definitely inspiring for people who are into this type of thing. I like online games, but I don't think I really have the know-how to do what you did. I probably could learn, but I don't think it's where my heart would be. Inspiring nonetheless. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]