You can definitely make some money. There's a market for WoW gold or whatever, and I'm sure you could scrounge up some cash with an hour or two per night.

The problem you'll encounter is that in most games, there's a positive feedback loop where you get more powerful, and you can earn more per hour, which lets you get more powerful. In other words, while you're tinkering around gathering 20 gold nuggets per RL hour, the "expert" and his level 45723 character are raiding the Dungeon of Horrible Death for 10,000 gold nuggets per RL Hour. (People go to the DoHD because the rewards are high. If they weren't, they'd just farm the same place you're at and skip the danger.)

The wall you're going to hit is that the "expert" might value his time at $100/hour (a comfy salary for any job), which means he can sell nuggets for $0.01 each. This devalues your nuggets enough to make your profit $0.20/hour, which will just about pay for the electricity and bandwidth needed to farm gold nuggets for a living.

I think you could make a living as a casual farmer if you were once an expert, and had a "super" character sitting around who could most efficiently farm a game. Along the way, you'd probably acquire enough expertise to know where the best stuff is, etc. But otherwise, you're probably talking about such meager amounts of money that you should just kick back and enjoy the time.

Well, look at the anecdotal evidence: I'm not aware of any significant gold farming operations where the means of production reside in the West. Almost all the big ones are located in China or Malaysia where prevailing wages make it profitable to arbitrage the difference between what is a decent wage in those countries and the disposable cash that rich Westerners and Koreans have to spend on these items.

You could make money, but it'll be a trivial amount unless you find a bug to exploit.
--matt

I bumped into a player I hadn't seen for well over a year on msn. I asked what he'd been up to recently and he told me how he was busy making money from playing some other mud and that's why he hadn't been around. I was interested to hear how he was making money and how much he was actualy able to gain from it. After hearing more and actually working out the hourly rate he was managing to make I decided that really it seemed far more efficient in terms of time/financial gain to become a fries cook at McDonalds.

But I guess he enjoys it and some people just can't get past the OMG I'm getting paid to play games all day long thing. I think some peopel just try to justify their gaming addictions. It's sad that games can become commercialised in this way, it really does create a whole new kind of atmosphere within a mud.

I think the_logos is correct: If you could outpace a McDonald's fry cook without doing anything difficult, why would any teenagers (who can afford 'Net access) still be signing up to cook fries? You'd need either of:

1) Ridiculously specialized knowledge. If you have to play a game for two years in order to get skilled enough to get your hourly rate to an acceptable level, you have to include two years of zero-to-low-income time. This is also true if you're only making money because most people don't realize how profitable X is. Sooner or later, they'll figure it out, and you'll need a Plan B handy.

2) A bug exploit. Risky, hard to come by, subject to sudden termination, and on most games a good way to get your account closed.

One possibility would be to pick on games that are simple enough to be botted. This is especially true if you can run multiple bots without breaking your game's rules. Even if you can't, a bot that could earn $10/day through repetitive tedium is probably worth the effort to set one up.

The caveat is that if you can write a bot, lots of other people probably can as well, and prices will be driven down as the bot armies flood the supply. So it comes back to the specialized knowledge argument left above, since you need to write bots that other people can't write or wouldn't think of writing. Many games forbid botting as well, and any method that breaks your game's rules isn't a good choice for continued income.

If only that were true. IGE makes the vast majority of its money by breaking the rules of the games whose currency it trades in, or at least that is the allegation. They claim that nobody directly working for them breaks a TOS he/she agreed to by engaging in currency trading, but I have a somewhat difficult time believing that, as do, I think, most outside observers.

--matt

They also claim that they don't employ farmers, if I recall. Don't they hold themselves out as basically a broker for buyers and sellers? They "make the market" for gold and items?

By that I mean, at any time, they are buying gold on a certain game/server for some amount like $10 per 100 gold, and selling it for $20 per 100 gold, and making their profit on the difference?

If that is the case, they can easily say they don't employ farmers and they can easily say their employees don't break the TOS. They would only be employing people to manage their own web site and take/make transfers of gold in game.

Threshold, I do believe that's the official party line.

"IGE takes the role of advocate, steward and community member seriously. Building on relationships with publishers and players alike, IGE advocates healthy, secure and responsible secondary market practices. IGE does not farm or use bots or macros of any kind to create or collect virtual assets, and the company leverages its market presence and distribution power to avoid practices that have a negative impact on game play."

That is indeed the company line, but I'm not sure I buy it, and I know a whole bunch of other observers flat out don't buy it. On the other hand, I've dealt with their upper management and found them to be pretty reasonable people, so perhaps I'm just being overly suspicious.

--matt

Yeah, I honestly don't know what to believe regarding their claims. On the one hand, I don't see why they WOULDN'T just go ahead and employ farmers. On the other hand, maybe it is easier and more efficient to just make their profit on the difference between buying and selling. I can imagine that would avoid a lot of headaches.

Of course, it still doesn't change the fact that all of their "We don't support any violation of game TOSes" is still a pile. They know darn well what they are doing is an integral and crucial part of mass TOS violation. To say they are innocent of this since they do not directly employ farmers is a specious argument.

But then, every time I start to turn my nose down at them, I cannot help but shift some of the blame back onto the graphical MMOs who keep churning out nothing but "Gah... Another Grind Game?" (or my acronym: GAGG).

I've never heard of people paying $ for MUD currency or items. It seems pretty popular for all the graphical games, but I've never seen a website claiming to sell MUD assets.

On which MUDs do people actually do this? It seems like an odd concept to me.

It is probably not wide-spread and given the limited amount of users per MUD in most MUDs I doubt it is worth it trying to endlessly farm to sell things on eBay. But I have this personal experience.

In a MUD I used to play like 8 yrs ago, multiplaying was allowed, there was an option to "remort" your warrior into a "paladin" but you would require 10 times more experience to level your new paladin. In this MUD, paladin's made great tanks and were a must-have. Now, I had a great set of characters and with the 3 characters I was allowed to have online I could "finish" a character rather quickly. So, I told a friend that I would trade him a finished Paladin for 2 6-packs of beer, he agreed, and well, there you go, MUD trade.

Forget $. If I could sell my MUD characters on E-Bay for a sixer of Molson Canadian or Saranac Black Forest I'd do it in a heart beat.

The first formal secondary market site for MUDs (text or graphical) was, I believe, for Gemstone, and began somewhere in the mid 90s. It's still going at:

This is in no way an official Simutronics site, and just like with any other MUD, Simutronics has no way to know whether money is affecting their game or not. They weren't even aware of the site's existing initially.

Think about it this way: It's only an odd concept if you believe that items in a MUD are worthless to people. If that were a case, why would people spend time bashing, roleplaying, PKing, etc to get them? If someone is worth lifting a finger for, it has value.

--matt

Graphics definitely make a difference in value simply because of the sheer number in the population. They are called "massively multiplayer" for a reason after all.

I think it was an odd concept simply because the majority of MUDs are free, or have priviledges if you donate. It's no suprise there's an auction site for Gemstone, even though I had not known about it. Gemstone costs about $15 a month, and I'd believe any item there automatically could have value.

Where as the free MUD, I can see items/gold potentially having value, but it won't be much. It would also raise concerns over the virtual economy. This idea seems much less likely, and odd to me.

There is no way in telling whether or not this harms an economy for sure, but in games like Secondlife and Project Entropia where real money is incorporated right into the game... much like real life, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Looking at other games like World of Warcraft where such a thing is forbidden by terms of service, it's hard to tell what is happening with their economy.

OK, what if..IF we did pay you to play? It obviously wouldn't be enough to live on, since the pbase, and business model just can't support paying out thousands of dollars to thousands of people. But what if, you earned real money by playing a MUD? Would you? Would you sacrifice gameplay, or demad more gameplay? Would you be bothered by auto advertisements, or website ads for products or services in the MUD world that reflect real world? Where would the majority of playeres draw the line?

Some MUDs are focused on getting money FROM the player, what if a MUD was focused on GIVING money to the player? I have often thought about this. The problem is, you either have to first get the players to agree to a certain level of advertising then try to find companies willing to advertise in that way, or find companies willing to advertise, and then try to get your pbase to accept it. The advertising numbers for a mud aren't that hot. It's hard to convince anyone to shell out money to advertise to a few hundred people.

If I had the time to go after advertisement dollars I would. I would love to pay people $1 per level to play. or $10 for completing a hard quest etc etc. My MUD is already completely free to play, anything else would just be cake! At least I think so, I don't know tho, I imagine other people would be thuroughly disgusted with playing a Virtual fantasy world, where the town's blacksmith's shop name is the name of a real Smithy with his URL or phone number in the room's description.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I could do it. I know enough people in the medieval/fantasy business that would shell out just because they know me, and I could raise a few thousand in no time, but realistically how long would that last? And I of course have no projection for the return I could quote the businesses.

Tank
ww.timesmud.com

In-game advertising in a text MUD would be pointless. The friction costs involved in ad sales, ad delivery, and ad tracking make it unfeasible.

Further, the amount of money that can be attributed to a single player also makes it extremely unlikely you could afford to pay individual players much at all. For instance, I was in the room last week when announced its new WildCoins system, which makes it easier for casual games developers to get money from advertisers, both for ads around the game and for ads in the game. It allows advertisers to basically pay for a players' play time by giving away these WildCoins, which can be used to play the games accessed via Wild Tangent's game server software (bundled on Dell, HP, and Toshiba OEM computers).

Judging by the numbers that Alex St. John, their CEO, threw around, paying a player $10 is very, very, very unlikely, even with CPM rates for graphical in-game ads being multiples of what people will pay for text ads. What Wild Tangent's system does is allow people to watch a 30 second commercial (which is magnitudes more valuable than a single text ad to an advertiser) and then basically pull a slot machine lever to maybe get some WildCoins or, more likely, not. Most of the time, not. Someone in the audience asked if it would then be possible to not just play a single casual game for free, but if it'd be possible for someone to watch enough ads to get to download and fully unlock the casual game (vs a one-time play arcade-style). He replied that it's theoretically possibly but that the economics of advertising mean that the player would have to watch a simply enormous amount of these 30 second commercials to even come close.

Assuming that advertisers would buy into ads in text games (unlikely given the small populations of most text games), a player would have to view literally thousands and thousands of ads to generate $10 in revenue.

--matt

I'm replying here, but please don't take this as a personal response, just more thought in general about the type of reply you posted. I'm not starting a flame war here about what you think vs what others think, I just want more input....

Yeah I agree, but I was not soley proposing that kind of advertising scheme. There are many other ways to advertise with minor sales effort, simplistic delivery, and no-nonsense tracking othat than, what I assume, is your one minded post about having the user forced to bear some external information outside of the game. I was not targeting porn sites or gambling halls or other mortgage lenders and all that other penny banner advertiment programs. Try to think outside of the computer box. In the real world there are real businesses who sell real things who aren't so much interested in generating virtual coins to spend on products.

Say for example if you are a SW MUD. There are tons of places that sell merchandise and tons of artifacts. It would be quite simple to setup virtual shops in your MUD where players would be forced to frequent due to gameplay. These would serve as advertisements and you would gather money on an annual or semi-annual basis. It won't be tens of thousands as I clearly stated in my previous post. But $50, $100 to some players who are the best or who do certain quests is better than getting no money at all, no??

I spend a ****ton of time coding new skills and features for my MUD for the players, I don't do it for the money. I assume most of us here are like me, since most of the muds here are completely free to play in it's entirety, as in free to achieve the most powerful status in the game. So why would one not spend some time drumming up revenue? If ti increases gameplay as much as a new skill, why not?

I would think that players might like to also be able to aquire real cash besides virtual items, but my questions IS ..and focus on this one instead of trying to tell me how it just doesn't work, is what are players willing to put up with? And thats directed at players, not GMs, because honestly we all don't know ####. It's a simple emic vs edic perspective.

Tank

Ok. I look forward to the announcement that Medieval Times is regularly paying people to play out of advertising revenue derived from in-game advertisements.

--matt

A more viable solution for pay-for-perks muds might be to "pay" the players with whatever currency is normally purchased for cash. Assuming this special currency was transferrable, the player could then sell it to other players for real cash if they wished, but otherwise it would be rather like paying people in gift vouchers - the "money" has to be funnelled back into your game.

Yep. We've done that for years. Paying in virtual currency avoids all sorts of problems. That's easy though. You can just pay someone in gold or whatever your in-game currency is. It has value whether you sell it for cash or not. The point was that the potential advertising revenue to be gained from a few hundred (or even a few thousand) players is trivial and not worth either the set-up cost or the friction costs that I can see. We'd be doing it if I thought it was.

--matt

Really? What sort of advertising do you pay them for? Banner clicks? Bringing new players into the game? Something else?

I play avalaon legends where I pay a bit under 30 bucks a month for unlimitted play. I'm a working adult ant thats a pretty cheap hobby. A skii ticket costs over $40 a day , I don't want to think about the cost of owning a boat etc. A theater ticke would be $60.

I dont' particularly like the idea of pay for perks in that the money starts shaping the play. I could see paying for perks in terms of coding help or trouble shooting that was parrellel to things earned with in world accomplishments or achievments. Maybe the quid pro quo wouldn't be exactly spelled out, but I'd pay more to have a new pair of skiis, why not offsett some internal costs for coding in a some new terain squares in a region where my in game efforts had allowed me to conquer.

Now, if you had a bigger game with hunderds of players I could see like offering to pay someone elses subscrition for a few months for their help or something.

One thing I dislike is spending my recreation time helping new players. Some of it is necesarry for political well being of cities in Avalon and general Role playying experience yet, I should think that the people running the games should find a way to waive fees or reward the folks that spend their time doing what I regard as tedious but which is vital to having a good game experience. Sort of like paid moderators on some chat boards during the bubble years?

I guess this thread is an ok place.

With all the skilled programmers playing games like avalon and with their efforts put into optomizing the fighting interface in zmud etc, it occured to me that a Mud like game that could interface with other web sites and somehow drive traffic might be a thought.

I might not be able to express it, but lets say the items and attributes are run and arbitrated by a given mud, but the "rooms" or perhaps *some* rooms were web based where mud content could reside via rss or something on a html php web url (and ip address) and so like you might take the fiight via a path or entries and exits to a Vacation rental spot, or a myspace page or a clothing store.

Now I use dual screen s at 1600 x 1200 a page with a 200 by 200 pixel mud content box or something would be legible and I coudl still have room for my zmud to be up as well as any editor I might be using for "real life work" while I had the mud up and playing .. grin I like to blend reality and fantasy.

Basically, the idea might be to reward folks for creating content in game, and both they and you would profit from traffic in their pages and pointers from thier pages to other pages the mud operator might have. We're talking page rank, and google adword income etc.