My friend at school playes Everquest. He is the only person that I know of that does. He said that he put some sword of his on Ebay and somebody already put 50 bucks up for it. This seems very profitable. What does everybody know about this subject?
Matt
P.S. He said that some guy sold his account for 2grand!!
Well, from what I understand, it causes a big whole in the ozone layer. You might want to look into that.
Well, if you mean the subject of selling stuff on eBay, here’s the proverbial Straight Dope (are non-staffers allowed to use that phrase?)
Everquest is a fantasy game played online in a multi-player 3D environment. I’d like the pretend that you roleplay a lot in it, but basically most people play it like Doom with swords. At any rate, as you advance in levels, you get the chance to fight bigger and nastier things and get niftier stuff. There’s a few problems in this though:
(1) Pretty soon, the stuff you need to kill can’t be killed by just you. You need a group of people working together to kill it which means that everyone needs to decide who gets the nifty stuff it drops.
(2) The things that drop nifty stuff spawn at predetermined rates in predetermined areas. Groups of people “camp” the spot, just sitting there, waiting for the creature to spawn so they can kill it. If the thing they want is a rare treasure on the creature, they might have to kill it a bunch of times before they get what they want. People can literally spend days in real time camping an area waiting for that ultra-rare item to drop off of a creature.
So… a market has sprung up for these treasures that the creatures drop. Back in the day, if you had something you didn’t want anymore, you simply sold it in game. “Selling my Sword of Divine Might for 50,000 platinum pieces.” that sort of thing. But then, some enterprising young person decided that instead of selling his Sword of Divine Might for more in-game money that his character didn’t need anyway, he’s sell it for hard cold cash on eBay. You pay him $150 and he meets you in game and gives you the sword. Then someone decided that if people didn’t want to camp for these things so much that they’re willing to part with real money for it, those people probably don’t like spending the time it takes to get up in levels, collect money and everything else. So what to do? Take that level 55 (out of 60) wizard you’ve been playing and sell the entire account to someone! Yes! You too can pay $2500 for a pre-played account with a level 55 wizard on it and play a mighty character your first time in Everquest!
Verant/Sony (the folks behind EQ) frown upon this and it says in the license agreement that they can ban you for doing selling items/accounts or buying items/accounts. People on eBay make a lame attempt around this by claiming to be selling the “time” it took to get the item or level the character. Sounds much like selling Playstation game copies as “back-ups only - you must have the original game to buy this.” But I’ve yet to hear of anyone getting in real trouble for it.
If you’re interested in what sort of idiotic prices people are paying for things, hop on over to eBay and type Everquest in the search box.
People do that in about all MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). I play Asheron’s Call, which is a skill-based fantasy game which doesn’t try to imitate D&D like EQ does (no elves, dwarves, or dragons to be found) and people sell items for real cash on that a lot too. There was a unique item that only one person per sever could get, and most people who got it sold it, one guy for over $3000.
People will pay absurd, exorbitant amounts for characters and stuff in Everquest, but it’s not profitable if you have a life. To get to level 50 takes an ENORMOUS amount of time. I’ve played for months and months and I’m at level 12 and already getting sick of it.
I have to disagree with this a little. For instance, let’s pretend there’s a fairly cool weapon on some giant troll. The giant troll is level 40, and the item in question is mainly useful for people level 25-35 (that’s the way it always seems to be; the things you kill drop stuff you can no longer use). If you have a level 50+ character, you can now spend days doing nothing except waiting for the creature to spawn, kill it, take the item and sell it on eBay. Verant does make some items “Lore” meaning you can only own one at a time, but with 8 slots open per server, you can just make extra characters and give each of them an item to hold thus allowing you to have eight “lore” Weapon of Godly Bashing For 25-36 Level Characters. Even if you only sell them for $50 each, that’s a fair chunk of change when you multiply it by eight.
Incidentally, in EQ terms, using a high level character to gain lower level items repeatedly for later sale (in game or out of game) is called “farming”.