Bleh, finally all moved in with internet set up, maybe now I’ll actually be able to post with some regularity!
So yeah, massively multiplayer RPG games always have their fair share of gold farmers and such. I wonder if anyone has ever had the thought to try a pyramid scheme of sorts. Has anyone here ever heard of one? Seems like it’d be pretty easy to start; “Join the CashScam Guild for 100 gold, once you get 10 other people to join, you get 200!”
Not that I condone that kind of thing; a scam’s a scam, whether it’s dealing with real money or not. Just curious what the repercussions would be. Would it be a bannable offense? How fast do you think it would grow? How long would it last before people got wise to it?
As I understand it, a lot of MMORPGs ban player-held gambling and raffles. My guess is this sort of scheme would fall under that, in spirit if not in practice. I never really looked into it, but I think it was because those kinds of events are easy to rig and thus scam other players. Most MMORPGs will have the repercussions defined in their terms of service or code of conduct somewhere. I think you’d probably be suspended for a short while as a first offense, then banned if you continue to do it.
This has happened in a big way on Second Life, which is more of a digital sandbox world than an RPG like WoW. There is a fairly established exchange rate between the online currency and $US. A bunch of “banks” opened up offering great returns, (almost?) all of which turned out to just be pyramid schemes.
I think Ponzi schemes are more common in Eve than pyramid schemes. Pyramid schemes are much more transparent. A well-executed Ponzi scheme can look legit for quite a while.
The infamous EIB (Eve Intergalactic Bank) scam in Eve netted the equivalant of $120,000 (the ability to buy game-time cards for ingame currency, the ISK and sell them for real money means that the ISK has a real world value). The scammer posed as a bank and after paying out interest for a few months had encouraged hundreds of people to deposit 700 billion ISK in the bank. It would have continued much longer but something caused the scammer to be away from their computer for a couple of days and they couldn’t maintain the scam.
