It was early June 2010 and school was a month shy of being over. I had just turned 17 and was gearing up for a summer of mostly sleeping my days away and playing World of Warcraft with my friends. I have always been playing MMOs since I can remember and I still play them to this day. I have tried almost everything under the sun, but my preferred genre is Fantasy MMORPGs. I could never get into regular RPGs however because the feeling of trading and making money in an online game was always the main appeal. I loved the economic aspects and was usually always the rich one my friends would borrow money from.
The in game markets might have been fun to play with, but what always interested me more were the markets outside of the game, the secondary markets. I always found it crazy that people would pay thousands of US dollars for MMO gold and items but also how there was a fluctuating exchange rate. I would often look at the value of my items and see how much my account was worth. My parents and friends would laugh when I told them the value and would say things like “yeah right, nobody is going to pay that much for something that doesn’t exist” . I didn’t have any experience with selling or buying gold so I sort of just shrugged. However, I figured the market must be semi-profitable because I would always see people spamming the various gold selling sites, and there were A LOT of them.
So during the first couple days of my summer vacation I soon realized my bank account was almost near zero and I would need money for the summer. My friends were in similar situations, so they did the logical thing and geared up to get summer jobs. I have always been the outlier in these situations. I look for other ways to make money, preferably passive so I can enjoy my time doing stupid things like browsing internet forums or playing games.
One day while just browsing a random MMO forum I found a treasure trove of scripts and runescape bots. Everything from woodcutting to combat, there was a script that would bot tasks and make gold. I started thinking back to how much the gold could be worth and figured I would take a shot at trying it out. I had nothing to lose and all I had to do was leave my computer on while the bots did their thing. I started with five accounts and soon realized that it wouldn’t be enough for the amount I wanted to make. I ended up with 15-20 bots all doing different tasks and raking in the money. Once I week I would transfer them all over to one character and he would hold all the money. Eventually I figured out what bots to run for making me the most amount of gold and the area to have them bot in to avoid getting caught, but I ran into a snag. I needed to find buyers.
At first I would go to forums like the old bitcoin days and try to sell the gold through skype, but in about half the cases I would either get someone who would revoke a paypal charge and scam me. It wasn’t working out and I thought about stopping the whole thing. That was until I found a site called playerauctions which marketed itself as a gold site for players by players. There was a market and you could raise or lower the price of your gold like you were selling an item on ebay. They took a small cut, but in return players had ratings and sellers had protection from scammers. From around the 200-300 transactions I did on that site I never got scammed once.
Now I was golden, I had a business going, a way to get the gold, sell the gold and a way to transfer the money into my bank account. At the height I was making close to $500 a week. While my friends were slaving away at their minimum wage jobs, I was making more than them a week by just keeping my computer running.
This is where I learned about principal rule #1 in economics, “Anything has value as long as someone is willing to pay a certain price for it”. I would tell others of how much I was earning and they couldn’t believe that someone would pay for a currency that had no intrinsic value.
The way I would explain it was that grinding money in a game was considered work and someone who had a job and just wanted to play the fun parts of runescape and needed money, was willing to trade off 30 minutes of their real income for what would sometimes be hours of grinding in game. If you look at it that way it makes sense and you can see that there is an exchange going on. I would bot throughout the entire summer until September when a massive bot sweeping happened and nearly all my account were banned. For the next few months there were crackdowns on botting and gold sellers. Even when I tried to startup again in November all my accounts got banned a second time. I decided to hang up my hat and quit the botting business, but the lessons I learned were invaluable.
I learned how to run a business, how to talk and meet with customers and buyers, but most importantly the value that something many might see as “worthless” could have. Which is why nearly 2 years later when I discovered bitcoin and other virtual currencies in 2012, I was quick to believe. I saw many of the same arguments people made against runescape gold being made against bitcoin and I remembered the golden rule. From then on I have been involved and I will continue to be involved in the future. I have gone down the rabbit hole at this point and I look forward to seeing how much deeper it can go.
-Calaber24p
omg man....botting and running guilds in mmo's is precisely what made me see bitcoin and say "holy shit....this is going to be paradigm changing"
Then i purchased 1000btc @.30 (never recieved)
then I mined 2 on my CPU in 4 days (which i thought was too little and stopped!) :D
Damn man that's rough! Yeah but I totally relate with you. People don't understand how much money some of these botters are making. I wish i had more experience with code or else I'd write bots. I see some Chinese botters doing 100 bots at once are making thousands a day.
nice post @calaber24p
Amazing story! You must have learned a lot through that. I also made a (small ) fortune on runescape as merchant, not a bot. Then one day my friends at school got really into it and wanted to buy gold. £1 got them 100k gold coins with me. I felt so rich by the time the game became unpopular and they blocked big one sided trades
I made a decent amount but I learned a lot more, I actually would merchant as well but I wasn't that great at it. My money was made mostly from grinding before I started botting. I always found grinding to be calming.
Hey calaber24p,
you story proves what am convinced of. Success comes to those who seek it. There is always a way we can earn money. It's just how hard we want it.
Best wishes mate and stay successful my friend
Definitely. People think that I'm just avoiding a job but I'm trying to find an alternative job that will make me more and let me be my own boss.
cool story @calebar24p
i am playing marketglory ,but that was 3 years ago ..all changed since there is his bitcoin
Never seen this, it looks cool I'm gonna check it out.
Terrific story @calaber24p
Amazing how history sometimes finds a way to repeat itself. You were indeed very smart to have caught the same patterns that had played in the runescape days were reappearing when you learned about Bitcoin.
Great post!
"I saw many of the same arguments people made against runescape gold being made against bitcoin and I remembered the golden rule."
Couldn't have said it better, and the arguments against bitcoin will be used against steem...etc, etc.
I played a fair amount of runescape back in the day, along with WoW, guildwars/2 and other MMO's. I don't get into straight RPG's either. Great story and thanks for bringing back memories.
Very good story..
Damn, while you were botting I was wondering how people got so much money in the bank.
Great article I have learned a lot for this even I have a great confidence on virtual currencies.
Interesting information. Thanks for sharing!
Man you are a cheater. People like you are the reason i dont play free to play rpg/strategy games. I remember back then it was worse, even the subscription games had people botting and selling power. That is why all the modern crowd went to Counterstrike and moba.
Anyway good on you for getting in bitcoin early. You had good foresight.
I only botted for money on alts never my main account but I get how you could be pissed. Also I may have invested early in btc but I did not have that much to invest since I was so young.
Two tumbs for you..
I was less lucky with this trick - came too late, but approach you described was of help with BTC and ETH. To Steem I came a bit too late bu who knows.. Thank you!
Somehow this post wanted me to read on!
very interesting article, I voted in favor of your article, please vote for my article
Awesome! I wish I would've known this when I was playing runescape. I spent so much fucking time mining... lol
Mining was the worst. So many semi afk hours there
The IGN looks familiar. Definitely must up vote!
I'll give you my upvote.
Please reciprocate in my post https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@gustavopasquini/hello-steemers-new-member-introduced-in-steemit-community-video
I made more than a million out of mmorpg called entropia-universe with a real cash economy pegged to the dollar. The irony of it was that I was one of the best miner ingame. I wish I invested some profit early into bitcoin mining, instead of mining virtual ressources ;).
Wow that's so crazy. I've gone back to entropia universe a bunch of times because I liked the economy idea, but it was definitely a money sink for new players and a huuuuuge learning curve. I can't believe you made a million off it that's crazy. I know that a bunch of people profited off of in game real estate which is a cool idea. I was always just sweating animals for eternity though.
I had a different type of Bot experience through a different game - Magic the Gathering Online (MTGO). Back in 2003, I'd use bots to buy rare cards at 3 or 4 per "Ticket" (which you'd purchase for a dollar). I sold one of those cards on ebay for $30 at the time. It was a nice summer bonus from when I wasn't working (Music Teacher ).
Later on, bots would evolve and I made a decent amount over the years - I haven't played in a few years tho. However, those "tix" were my first real knowledge of the value of virtual currencies. I even remember trading some for Pokerstars $$ back before 'Black Friday'...
Awesome article!! I 'UFC'd (Upvoted, Followed, Commented)
-bigedude
You are the real deal. I love this. But as someone else said I only play MOBAs.
man your describing my own life.. ^^
que post tan genial! ni pensar que muchos en mi país viven de WoW y RS... incluyéndome, nunca me imagine estar viviendo del farming en un MMO y mas de RS que siempre ha sido de mis favoritos lol
Are you still doing rwt as a job!?