Questing for a Quick Buck

No names have been changed, nobody is innocent.

The seventy seventh richest country in the
world.

The online multiplayer game Everquest has over 420,000 users. These
people lead strange double lives as wizards and warriors. They team up,
make friends, fall out, fight monsters, go on adventures, collect
treasures, and occasionally buy and sell these treasures in the real
world. According to a collected average of e-bay transactions the going
rate for one Everquest platinum piece is about 1 US cent.

The average Everquest player collects items to the value of 319
platinum pieces an hour. An equivalent wage of three bucks and nineteen
cents. The gross national product of EverQuest if over two thousand
dollars per capita. If it existed it would be the seventy seventh
richest country in the world.

My friends and I stumbled on these remarkable facts one afternoon
when we should have been working. None of us had ever played Everquest
but we were all keen computer game players, we were all keen computer
programmers, and we were all keen on making more money.

First we conducted a feasibility study, which meant two of us,
Stuart and myself, signed up for Everquest and played, whilst a third,
Alan, observed all the activity on e-bay. The first thing we discovered
was that as a low level novice player you suffer from extremely limited
abilities, the most fearsome monsters you slay are bunny rabits (the
pelts of which you can trade for cash), it took several hours of this
before we began to level up and face more exciting foes. This initial
slog to build up the characters was matched by a healthy trade in low
to medium level characters on e-bay, the earning potential of these
characters was strictly limited but they themselves commanded a high
premium.

Building up characters might have been profitable but it was far too
labour intensive an activity for any of us to consider. The problem was
how to make money out of the game whilst holding down a proper job and
having some free time left over, and, as Stuart and I knew to our
costs, getting any sleep at all. The tantalising solution lay in
scripted behaviour. Would it be possible to set up the game to repeat
some simple money making activity without human intervention. About
this point Antonio, who worked in a different department but lived with
Stuart, became interested, we had him play Ultima Online, another
equally popular, role-play game, but he ended up taking an Everquest
character as well so as not to be left out. Alan too, by this point,
was a keen player.

During this time Stuart and I playing avidly. I had my character,
Chingachook, a half elf monk, join with one party whilst Stuart had his
character, Uncas, a human Paladin, join another. We went on quests, we
slayed monsters, gathered equipment, climbed levels, interacted with
all sorts of people, and had a very good time.

Though the in built scripting behaviour is powerful we eventually
concluded, after a lot of playing around, that it was not suited to
money making activity. Even if you can persuade, say, a blacksmith to
continually make swords, you are left with a glut of bog-standard
swords which are time consuming to convert in to cash. Realising this I
got hold of my friend George, another computer programmer, and a past
master at cheating on online games. George has played Nokia Game since
it's inception and worked out increasingly devious methods to excel at
the various challenges, from programming the computer to click the
mouse in a pre-determined pattern faster than any human could, to
slowing down the system time and playing the games in slow motion. I
bought George a copy of Everquest and told him to look into automating
it somehow. Everquest, like a lot of games, disables task switching
preventing any other program from running alongside it, but these
things are like a red rag to a bull for George and we had a working
program in weeks.

With George our little team numbered five, Karl became the sixth,
and Richard the seventh. Richard joined simply because he lived and
worked with me and Alan, enjoyed computer games, and wanted in. Karl,
who sat next to me at work, was neither a great programmer or game
player, but he was doing night school in economics so joined to help
with the sums.

Sums.

The sums at this point did not add up so good, our best attempts at
scripted behaviour were not making much money. There were two problems,
like all artificial intelligence our AI was remarkably stupid, also the
low level characters at our disposal had far less than the average
earning potential. The advantage of the AI was that it could run
non-stop for twenty four hours a day. We could, in theory, set up as
many of the things as we needed to get rich, but even a bog standard
computer requires a significant outlay of cash as well as the fixed
membership price. Karl did the maths and worked out that we would not
turn a profit for over two years. Besides which none of us fancied
racks of noisy computers in our living rooms.

The answer was staring us in the face every day, our work PCs. One
Friday lunchtime we bought the network admin guy a pint and asked him
to get us past the firewall. He would not but suggested an alternative.
We were all given VPN accounts, and just as this allows you to tunnel
in from home to work, it allows you to tunnel back again, all we had to
do was set up a proxy server at home and we were off. For this we cut
him in for an eighth share.

This gave us seven computers (George could not arrange a similar
deal with his admin guy but our admin guy let us use his) running from
five thirty in the evening to eight thirty in the morning and all
weekend, a total of 123 hours a week. This, on average, netted us about
fifteen pounds each. We clearly were not going to get rich any time
soon.

There was another problem, the exchange rate, the low price of the
dollar combined with the fact that the overwhelming majority of our
potential customers were American meant we were reluctant to realise
our profit. Having no immediate need for the cash we stored it in game,
funnelling it back to our individual characters. Chingachook was around
level eight by this point but a lot richer than most level eight
characters. I had him quit the party he had joined so that we could
form our own, all business meetings now being carried out in game,
although he kept a relationship with a beautiful rogue called Ryoko.
She was played by a woman I only ever knew as TenchiFan2000, a school
teacher from Montana and, from the one photograph I saw, clinically
obese, but Ryoko was gorgeous. Chingachook's love life was vastly more
successful than my own, in that he actually had one, but I was living
it through proxy.

What we did not have in cash we made up for in expertise. Although
engineers to a man we had been uncharacteristically diligent about
documenting all our research and had a wealth of information,
especially from the numerous e-bay auctions. We monitored the buying
and selling trends closely and at any time knew exactly what were the
most profitable items to spend our platinum pieces on. We also became
increasingly proficient at the game, as well as conducting virtual
business meetings we went on quests, defeated monsters, fought bad
guys. Most of us owned, at any one time, at least ten different
characters. Because we had such luxuries of in game resources available
it was easy for us to quickly level up the characters and sell them on,
this netted us nearly three hundred pounds per month per person. Which
was not to be sniffed at.

What we discovered was that demand was extremely variable. Often you
would see that many people were trying to sell items that nobody
wanted. Fifty Swords Of The Panther might be for sale without any
interest, whilst the one Helm Of Cunning on offer was demanding a silly
price. Since we had such a glut of in-game resources we arranged swaps
for under priced items, we would build up a stockpile of Swords Of The
Panther and wait for the price to rise again. Storage costs were
negligible, we had a good sized castle for the purpose, and this form
of speculation proved very profitable.

This new methodology, buying and selling, suffered two major
problems. The first was that e-bay cannot arrange deals for Platinum
Pieces, and we were still reluctant to convert our earnings into the
undervalued dollar. All deals had to be negotiated on various message
boards and chat rooms. The second was that the transactions were
manpower intensive, each one required a character to traipse miles to
an agreed meeting point and make the exchange. We modified our original
AI script to do this but we simply did not have the computers to keep
up with demand. Plus we lost a large amount of merchandise through
robbery. Everquest is not a very safe place, it would not be much fun
if it was.

In order to solve the first problem we set up a website to handle
transactions where an automated system took orders to buy or sell. To
solve the second problem we started hiring. There was always a ready
supply of down-on-their-luck characters who needed a fast buck and
would do the legwork for a percentage. In order to protect them from
thieves, and to dissuade them from thieving themselves, we built up a
formidable party of warriors - our own private police force. We were
soon well known throughout the community and the community knew not to
mess with us or our couriers.

The Taxman Cometh.

This little business escalated fast and after six months we were
employing nearly five hundred couriers at any one time, plus maybe
forty hired muscle. At this time we decided that, weak dollar or not,
we wanted to realise more of our earnings than the beer money we
periodically allowed ourselves. We traded some valuable items and took
nearly one thousand pounds apiece. I bought a car, others bought cars,
stereos, computers, and holidays, Karl spent most of his on an
engagement ring.

None of us declared this on our tax forms, not out of any
dishonesty, it just never occurred to us. But when Alan got audited it
scared us bad, nothing came of it of course, but it scared us. We had a
rare offline meeting and decided that if we were going to take this
much further we needed to put the whole thing on a sound business
setting, we decided to start a company.

We called it Quest Sales, liquidated some more assets, rented a room
above a laundrette, installed broadband, and bought a bunch of second
hand computers. The company paid us no wages but a lot of stock
options, this was a tax dodge. On the day we started trading it was a
double celebration, Chingachook and Ryoko were married that night. We
had a party both on and off line.

Quest Sales went from strength to strength very quickly, within six
months we employed an average of two thousand and thirty couriers,
traded goods to the value of twelve thousand pounds a day, and made a
steady profit of four hundred pounds a week. This would have been
plenty for one person but divided equally between seven it meant we had
to keep the day jobs. This grew to be a problem and the quality of all
our work suffered, I think every one of us got bad performance reviews
that spring and we were all exhausted all the time. My own personal
routine was to work from eight till five, go home and have an early
dinner, catch an hours sleep if I could get to sleep, head to the
office around seven thirty and tackle the reams of routine drudge
necessary to keep two thousand couriers organised, often I did not make
it home till gone midnight. The others kept up similar hours.

That summer we took on our first employee, Fiona, she was somebody's
niece who needed a holiday job, we employed her for four hours in the
late evening (it was best to keep to American time) for a smidge above
minimum wage. She was marvellous and the rest of us finally got some
time to play the game again. Stuart had sold Uncas by this point to
help buy himself a plasma screen television but I would not be parted
from Chingachook, he was adventuring with Ryoko in the mountains and
kept well away from all business matters. Ryoko did not approve.

At the end of summer Fiona had to go back to school and could only
do one evening a week, something her parents were initially against but
we doubled her hourly rate and that persuaded them. Fortunately George
and I had automated much of the workings of the site, and most of the
drudge was taken out of her hands, all that remained was keeping the
couriers sweet and handling the occasional big deal.

However business was levelling out, a rough estimate said that forty
percent of all trades in the game went through us but it seemed that
this was a natural maximum. Though we treated ourselves to occasional
windfalls, and paid Fiona's wage, we ploughed the majority of the
profits back into stockpiling and speculating on items. If there was a
stop point where we were not going to be able to shift larger
quantities we were not going to get rich.

We tried speculating on characters again, buying other peoples and
selling them on at a profit, but the price for characters was
remarkably stable and most people only wanted to trade for real money.
In November that year we all got together late one night at the office,
ordered pizza, drank a lot of beer, and thrashed out what to do.

None of us wanted to continue on the same scale, we were all aware
that soon someone else was going to muscle in and halve our business at
a stroke. We considered simply winding it up and liquidating the
assets, but the dollar was still low and we were sure there was the
potential to get rich somehow. So we diversified.

The oldest profession in the world.

Buying and selling things for profit is perhaps the second oldest
profession in the world, so we turned to the oldest. Keeping the name
Quest Sales well out of it, we created several strategically placed
brothels. We researched chat-room sex and paid a lot of money to read
some rude words on the screen. If people paid for that we could not
fail. We would be adding the realism of 3D graphics and Everquest
characters to it, how could we loose.

The rule was we all had to do it (Fiona excepted). Create ourselves
a female character and false online persona, and work in the brothels.
I have never had the giggles so bad as I have sitting up at four in the
morning with maybe five other guys typing dirty for fifty platinum
pieces a minute. It was utterly ridiculous but boy did it make money.
Just the eight of us working intermittent hours were matching the
profits of the entire trading enterprise.

News spread fast and we soon started employing girls by the
truckload. Our service was simply to put the whole thing in one place
so the tricks knew were to come and meet the girls, who we employed on
an night by night basis, for this we took a percentage. We also had our
personal army protect our employees' honour, what happened in a brothel
stayed in a brothel and any trick caught gossiping on a chat-room soon
found his character beaten to a pulp and robbed of all his worldly
possessions. We were also happy to train any budding whore in the arts
of erotic writing, a subject we all soon became experts on.

We discovered two interesting facts, that false online personas are
not necessary, most people will just as happily read sex talk from a
boy playing a girl as a girl playing a girl, and that boys were just as
popular as girls. In fact the sheer range of gender permutations that
went on is baffling, I've listened in on two women having their two
male characters simulate gay sex, it broadens the mind I can tell
you.

After running this three months we were turning in goods to the
value of nearly a thousand pounds a week and it was getting bigger by
the day. Finally we were getting close to quitting the day jobs. I
never told Ryoko mind, Chingachook stayed well away from the whole
thing.

Then one morning we got an e-mail from the people who ran the game
asking us, rather politely considering, to stop. Well we were greedy I
guess, and I hasten to add that I was against this, both me and Antonio
argued not to do it, he was always a little prudish about the sex but I
just did not want to get on the wrong side of the game masters, but the
two of us were outvoted. As a group we replied specifying in exhaustive
detail the vast stockpiles of goods and cash we had in game, and
threatened to dump the lot. By selling everything we had at knock down
rates we would crash their economy, inflation would go through the roof
and all those paying gamers would suddenly find everything they owned
worth virtually nothing. There was not an area we did not touch, we had
potions, weapons, clothes, animals, equipment, food, everything. We had
the power to send Everquest into recession.

The following day they deleted all our accounts. We were out, Quest
Sales couldn't run without us, our vast inventory, worth nearly one and
half million platinum pieces, was seized, our e-mails were not
answered, we were froze out and there wasn't a thing we could do about
it.

We wound up the company. Its assets numbered two dozen bog standard
computers and a vast database of willing employees. Neither was of any
value whatsoever. We gave away the computers and I still have the
database on CD. We kept the day jobs, except for Karl who was never
really happy as a programmer and went on to become an accountant and
make lots of money. Alan started playing Ultima and met some girl
online who he sees regularly now. I lost all contact with Ryoko and her
player.

The entire exercise lasted eighteen months, we did not get rich but
most of us got cars, or widescreen televisions, or state of the art
surround sound systems. But hour for hour, the person who came out
best, by an overwhelming margin, was Fiona.