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