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Gamers Behaving Badly - Hacks, Cheats, and Griefs on a Grand Scale - Page 4
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It's been three years, but Dentara Rast / Cally still has quite a bounty on his head. |
And no help was forthcoming when the head of EIB decided to cut and run. In a painfully rambling video, Cally a.k.a. Dentara Rast owns up to his lightning-fast extortion of the alleged 790 billion ISK in deposits EIB had accumulated. If the total held up (and CCP believed it was somewhat less [source]), it equates to over $100k in real money, and that’s just using the CCP-approved channels. Selling ISK through direct sales websites, a.k.a. goldsellers, could net much more.
“Banks offer nothing to anyone in EVE.” The Mittani adds. “They offer crap returns compared to other ways one could make money in EVE... In the real world, you need a bank because cash can be robbed or lost, and is unwieldy. In EVE, you have a wallet that can only be taken from through your own gullibility.”
Nor are EVE’s banking problems completely in the past. As recently as this January, Dynasty Banking lost some 80 billion of its equity balance when a key officer decided to pull a runner. Surely the community would learn its lesson and turn its back on the concept of an EVE bank, right? Wrong. EVE’s largest player-run bank, EBank, reports that it's currently holding nearly 8.5 trillion (with a ‘t’) in deposits from some 5,800 depositors [source]. Dynasty Banking is still alive and kicking, as well.
But, for better or worse, the EVE banking industry continues to grow. Are player trust and bank trustworthiness on the rise too? The Mittani has a different outlook: “There's an investor born every minute.”
Glider Takes Flight, Then Crashes
World of Warcraft - March 10th, 2009
If there were a Fortune 500 list for third-party types who could live very comfortable off of their virtual world earnings, the aforementioned Ailin Graef would probably be near the top of the list. But MDY Industries and Michael Donnelly would have soared like dancing dildos above even Anshe Graef in early 2009. Court documents disclosed that the developer of WoW Glider, a WoW botting program designed to farm reputation and experience while you wait, has made an estimated $2.8 million from the illicit product.
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Glider wasn't the first botting program, nor will it be the last. But at $6.5 million, it's the priciest. |
Bots, programs that play a game for you, are as old as the first attempts at artificial intelligence, which is to say Pong. It’s hard to imagine an MMO developers that wouldn’t use player-emulating bots extensively for testing purposes as part of a “simulation layer” to measure performance and balance of content when it’s impractical or undesirable to involve actual players. But, like GM items, such tools were never meant for players' hands, and in the “carefully balanced competitive environment” that is the MMORPG, one legitimized cheat could break the game for everyone.
Donnelly amassed a fortune from Glider because it not only beat Blizzard’s most strident attempts to detect and eliminate it, it served its purpose as well as could be expected. "I used it," admitted one anonymous source. "After a guild split, we were long on tanks and short on healing. I volunteered to level up an alt priest, but I was really sick of the pre-BC [Burning Crusade] areas. Combat is pretty long, simple, and boring for level-up priests, so I tried Glider. The glides I set up worked, but it felt way too noticeable. Someone rides past on a quest and you're killing dozens of murlocs with, you know, an inhuman passion, then they ride back 15 minutes later and you're still in the same place doing the same thing, either you're botting or you're having sh*t luck with a random loot quest. On a PvP server some players hate botters so much they'll report you either way and let Blizzard sort it out, like its its own game," he noted. "I didn't want to fall prey to the witch hunt types."