Adventures in MMORPGs: Tales of Corruption, Greed, Theft, and Scams as a Microcosm of the Real World

This blog post is about my time in MMORPGs, particularly Lineage ][ and World of Warcraft. These two games are very similar, but also very different, due to the mechanics present in each game. I’ll start the half-sordid tale.

I’ve been on computers since I was 4 years old. My parents read some book that I cannot remember, but the advice given in the late 70s was to get your kid(s) on computers ASAP because they were the future. Few get predictions right, but this one was. My parents went and bought a Texas Instruments computer where I learned how to program in Turtle Geometry. I was programming little Turtle scripts to draw stars and other shapes in patterns. I also made a little game with my father who helped me build a Space Invaders type game. I also played a lot of arcade games in Eugene, OR which had a business where you pay for time and don’t need quarters. My father took me there about once a week for about 2 hours at a time, where time melted away while I was smashing buttons as a 5-year-old, trying to beat whatever was in front of me.

As I went through the 80s, I was on a Commodore 64, Apple ][e, the original Macintosh, to an IBM 386 with an Amber monochrome monitor. Games from Sierra like King’s Quest seduced me into a world of gaming where solving puzzles was the norm. I also played Dark Castle on the Mac religiously. Beating video games was something I specialized in. Bard’s Tale on the 386 was great fun, as I learned to use a Hex Editor to change the stats on my characters. So, I also learned how to break games, too. A little story on that later appears in this post.

When I was at Cornell in 1993 as a 17-year-old kid, Doom and Castle Wolfenstein made their appearances. I was one of the only students in the dorm that had a 486 computer that could run it. So, I had my own little arcade. Other people showed up and there was an informal line mechanism. They’d take turns. But then, more students were getting their own PC’s. And, guess what? We had ethernet, not that shitty dialup at the time, which was at best 28.8Kbps.

In short order, I had set up other student’s computers to play network Doom. There was PvP functionality and we would waste hours of our lives smashing each other in Doom. I think I was responsible partially for some people failing classes…

That was really the beginning of the end. Ha! I say that because something strange happens to people when they play online games. It’s as if they become an entirely different person. After Doom, it was Warcraft II that consumed our time. But, we would form teams in a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game such as WC2. We couldn’t hear each other in our dorms, so we set up LAN parties so we could coordinate our efforts. It was friendly competition, and this was long before Real Money Trading (RMT) became a thing. More on that later.

I also played on consoles in my younger years and in college. Alex Kid in Miracle World was my favorite Sega Master System game along with Starfox and Super Ghouls and Ghosts on the Super NES. Years later I found emulator software and could play these games on my PC. I played consoles, but they were not my favorite. Desktop gaming was where it was at.

After College, Diablo was released by Blizzard in late 1996. That was really my first foray into true online gaming, as I encountered other souls from across the globe. I even remember my old Battle.net ID#: 10631. Months later, Battle.net ID numbers were in the millions. I also ended up building a website on strategies for Diablo, which later got pinched by an author who wrote an actual book on the game. This guy credited me for my content, but he just copied and pasted what I wrote. Blizzard even had my site number 1 for Diablo strategy on their own site back in the late 90s. So that was the beginning of my foray into gaming on a global scale.

Diablo 2 arrived in 2000. That game was a descent into madness. I had played manually for years until I found a Diablo 2 bot, D2jsp. I modified the bot code, spent $500 on gear for my toons from eBay, made Hardcore characters (you die once, your character is gone forever). I had set up three characters: A Sorcerer, a Barbarian, and a Necromancer. I had modified the code so that they would focus the same target so there was no split Damage Per Second (DPS). These characters would start games all day long, follow a route, collect valuable loot, and then store in a warehouse or have “mule” toons hold the gear.

I made these toons with the intent of gathering gear and selling it on eBay. But, I did something to make the RMT market mad: I undercut all the top sellers by 20% and had excellent customer service. Charms on Hardcore Diablo 2 were easily selling for $75-$100 a pop. I made $5000 in one month doing this.

Then, it became cloak and dagger. I had people buy items from me and then once they knew who my toon was, they would hack into my games and try to kill my toons. This market was largely dominated by entire sweatshops in China and in other parts of Asia. These people lived to play video games but it was not for fun. News stories from years ago would pop up as to how they lived. Barely ate, worked in 12-hour shifts, and slept in bunk beds. So, the RMT market emerged mostly from players in the West who didn’t want to “grind” all day long to get gear to be powerful. (Side note: I also built websites for gold sellers in WoW.)

But, luckily I had modified my code so that if someone turned on Player versus Player (PvP), the bot programs would automatically leave the game. Eventually, they gave up. But one time, someone tried to kill my characters and they lost their toon with all their gear. The focused DPS applied to any target, including players if I wanted it on. Later on, I figured out that when it came time to deliver items, I would do it on my mule characters so that I wouldn’t get hunted down.

Then 2004 hit…

And that was sort of the beginning of the lunacy I found myself in…

In 2004, I stumbled across my first real MMORPG: Lineage ][ (L2) from NCSoft.

This game is visually beautiful. The characters, especially the Dark Elves were my favorite. I always enjoyed ranged classes, so I started off with an archer. L2 is a “grindy” game, meaning you have to do the same stuff over and over and over and over to progress and level up. One has to kill a lot of monsters in the game in order to level up.

My first character in Lineage ][, 2004.

L2 had what were called “farmers.” Farmer characters hunted in the same zones over and over to get gold and item drops which they would later sell on eBay and other RMT websites. I fell into this trap as I spent $100 to buy Adena to buy stuff in the game to make my toon level faster. But it didn’t stop at $100... (effort minimization).

Lineage ][, unlike WoW, did not have “soulbound” items. Soulbound items made it impossible to trade to other players at all. L2 also had a PvP system where the world was open PvP. If you attacked someone and they did not attack back, you would “go red” and your character’s name would be in blood red to indicate to other players you basically bullied someone. If you died to a monster or another player while red, you had a chance to drop gear of yours that someone else could pick up. It was designed to force players to really think before acting. But, this often didn’t matter, and in later iterations of L2, going red had no consequences.

These farmers were vicious. They would kill any character that attacked Raid Bosses so that when the Raid Boss died, they would get all the loot and then convert it all into a product to be sold online. Entire clans would engage in wars with these farmers. But what really made people mad about farmers?

They were using bot programs to automate gameplay. Even legitimate players, even myself, eventually succumbed to the effort minimization that these bot programs provided. What was hilarious to watch were trains of bots attacking guards in town so that they would die and de-level, allowing them to keep farming. It takes on average about 10 seconds for a MOB to respawn and each MOB had a loot table with probabilities of what could drop. Adena was almost guaranteed on every MOB. So if MOBs are respawning every 10 seconds and each die in 3, you can see how that all adds up over time. With good MOB density, it was straightforward to "farm" adena like any other crop.

In Chronicle 3, my friend had made friends with the farmers in L2 on the Kain server. They controlled the Tower of Insolence, which was needed to do the necessary class change. If you didn’t pay them, they would kill you until you offered up Adena or cash to progress.

I also learned the hard way not to lend out gear to anyone unless you want to lose it. I had made a very nice bow in game. The clan leader asked to see it to see his stats, so I said fine. But, as soon as we traded, he kicked me from the clan and Ventrillo. That was a mistake on his part. Justice was served but I didn’t like who I was back then. I was ruthless and made sure he paid in ways that were more painful than any loss of a game. He lost his girlfriend and his job. My dad calls my alter ego Darth Vader, so when that happened, I summoned up the whole Imperial Army and he paid the price for his immorality.

People in these sorts of games justify bad behavior by saying, “It’s just a game, man.” But they use that as a license to act badly and treat others terribly. I never bought into this mindset. I have always had the idea it’s better to get along with people in games like these so everyone wins. But, when you have a population of people, most of whom justify griefing, stealing, scamming, and other nasty behavior, you come to realize that games such as these bring out the dark side, all while relatively safe behind a computer screen. Engaging in the same behavior in the real world they would have been arrested or seriously hurt.

Artwork inspired from the game and "Underworld." Adobe Illustrator and 3DSMAX

Lineage ][ also had a very lively community in that it was common to insult people in chat. This would happen all day long. Bad language and taunting people. It was all very ugly and I found myself embroiled in it many times. But what was hilarious was that I once posted this photo on a messaging board for L2:

The infamous photograph...

I had people I did not know message me out of the blue and asked if I was a male escort or a hitman. I often answered both. And then I’d get a slew of questions about what my work life was like. It’s amazing what people will assume based on a photograph.

Fast forward to 2011, after many years of not playing L2. Goddess of Destruction launched which was a whole revamp of the game mechanics. This was also the time that NCSoft implemented an in-game store where people could buy character power-ups and cosmetic items. Think of the Candy Crush store but on steroids…

So…

I started playing again and a certain weapon dropped that was “blessed,” meaning if you enchanted it, it would be much stronger than a normal weapon. Enchantment was like gambling because there was always a chance that if you tried to make your weapon a +4 and beyond weapon, each step had a lower probability of success.

BUT!

I found a workaround for all that. NCSoft sold Dragon Scrolls so that if you failed to enchant your weapon, it would stay at the same level and not “blow up” into crystals. So, as a mage in this game, magic critical hits always hurt really bad, even with normal weapons. So what do I do? I spent $4500 to make a +15 nuker weapon. I could just about one-shot anyone on the server. As a result, NCSoft took those scrolls out of the store because of my insane quest to basically police the server. If people acted badly, they would pay the price by getting smashed. The clan I was in, when there were castle sieges, I had people literally make macros just to target my nuker, named SaintAnastasia, because I could cast a spell that acted like a vortex, sucked in a bunch of players, then  cast an Area of Effect spell, and kill them all at once in-game on the siege field. I had many upset people after me because getting one-shotted is demoralizing, and that was the point. It was effective in that many reformed their behavior in game.

Also, during all this time, I actually wrote papers about the economics that governed behavior in game, covering topics as to why people sought to engage in RMT in the first place. “The Mathematics Behind the Grind in Lineage ][“ was a whole statistical analysis of trends in the game. I published it online and it was regularly copied by people who wanted to pass their statistics classes. They altered the paper a little bit and submitted it as a final project for their class. Well, life goes on. Effort minimization is real, let me tell you – not only in games but in real life, too.

Later on, I would also do research as to why people chose to allocate their time into World of Warcraft, another game I spent a lot of time in. The paper is here if you are so interested:

WoW, Work, and Sleep - Time Allocation Decisions

But I wish to accentuate a very important point about online worlds, whether they be video games or social media: people act badly when they realize there are no consequences to their bad behavior. There is no police, no jail, no prison, nothing. Companies like NCSoft and Blizzard would regularly bring out the “Ban Hammer” to ban numerous players at a time for cheating (botting) or using their IP to make money. But that’s as far as enforcement went. And yes, I admit, I botted and did RMT in the past.

I had fun during those times but let me tell you that it cost me dearly in terms of mental health. I was not in a good spot at all while devoting my time to these games. Why? Because in my case, it was better than the real world. At least with those games, I could put in the time and turn it off when I wanted. Many players, including me, had a desire to be powerful and wealthy in these games. While I never scammed anyone or sought to exploit them, being around these types of people triggered me because I fundamentally hate bad behavior. Lying, cheating, and stealing towards others was a no-no in my book. But there is a bit of hypocrisy lying below the surface of this digital existentialism.

I don’t play video games nearly as much. What is hilarious, however, is NCSoft gave into the botters with Lineage ][ Essence, which has a built-in bot system. So after nearly 17 years of fighting corruption with botters, they put one in. Now, their model is to use the NCSoft store to cater to “whales” (very rich players) as they realized there is a group of people with so much disposable income, that they might as well get a slice of that. Some players in L2 Aden retail spend 10’s of thousands of dollars to make themselves too strong (like I did many moons ago) to be defeated. They form clans to control all the high-value drops which they then sell online for real money, then take the proceeds, and launder it through the NCSoft Store by buying NCoins. NCSoft turns a blind eye because all they care about are decimal points and where they rest.

I play Lineage ][ here and there when I get bored and it’s fun now with the built-in botter. Now, I don’t care about being at the top of the dog pile. I am content leveling slowly and helping other players along the way.

I had to go through a lot of evil stuff to reach this point where I don’t need a video game to prove I am worth something. Gaming can be just as addictive as drugs, especially when there is little hope for the future.