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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

There was an MMO game called "Kingdom of Loathing" I played back in 2006.

The right way to get more money in the game is to improve your skills/equipment and gain access to the higher level areas that have bigger monsters/better loot. (hard work)

What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).

Eventually I figured out how to create an "autoit" script that automated the process of creating a new account, completing the tutorial, and then sending the goods over to the main account. The main account was getting very wealthy, but I should have known I needed to launder the ill-gotten gains somehow because an admin (Multi Czar) eventually caught on and all the accounts (including the main one) got banned.

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> What we did instead was manually create hundreds of new accounts, complete the tutorial level and then send the tutorial prize to the main account for selling on the open market (long work).

Haha, this reminds me of the Forum war days of Punchme.com [1], someone on our forum found out a bug to exploit in the gambling game that would 2x your money. After a while raiding on other forums got boring with all the best equipment maxed out, so we realized that selling the upgrades was a way more interesting use of our time, so like 5 of us decided to start marketing the in-game weapons to other forums/gangs for half of what the game charged.

The devs eventually found the bug and patched it, but for those of use that still had valid accounts (I opened 10, but most got shutdown due to the scheme) this turned out even better as the demand for weapons just kept going up and I was making over $100/day in passive income at its peak until the interest for the game dropped.

The thing that sticks out the most was some kid from Slovakia I sold weapons to him on credit; he 'promised' me he'd send the money once his mom set him up with a bank account and got his paypal account verified--it was all free to me so I did it not thinking much if he didn't follow up.

I completely forgot about it for weeks after I lost interest in the scheme due to school and work, so I logged into to my paypal account to buy something online and I saw he actually did send me the funds like a month later. It's one of those few times were no expectations placed but trust and faith are lived up to anyway.

1: https://www.rpg.sg/profile/179/PunchMe

Reminds me of a high-speed trading empire I built once in EVE Online. I got bored of the long work way of earning ISK, so I hacked the game client and built a network of accounts running in VMs, proxying their traffic through AWS to get unique IPs, all orchestrated carefully and cooperating to pull off the overall trading strategy by my central server. (hard work)

It got to the point where I had $200 billion ISK and my fortune was doubling every week. At black market conversion rates that was probably worth $20K a month if you could sell it all somehow.

However, at this point I was probably about 10% of the trading volume in all of Jita, so the game mods noticed me and banned me.

They didn't get all my accounts, just the main one, proving that my techniques for laundering game currency and using isolated VMs with their own IP was enough to prevent them from being connected.

However, at this point I didn't have the patience to do that all again, I went and got a job instead. (back to the long work)

So does coding bots to do the long work for you count as hard work or long work? Because that's the kind of work I've always preferred.

Hard work takes over and replaces long work when innovation, new skills and modalities are center stage and repetitive tasks take a back seat. I'd consider any form of automation hard work.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1319/

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