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Comment by methoddk | Hacker News Reader

I've only ever played WoW, but jacked up economy on servers wasn't fun. And I mean JACKED up. It does add an element of realism though, nothing comes for free in this world.

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WoW is extremely easy to exploit, because there are so few players in the market and so many important items. I made artificial scarcities before raids started, it did this over a few months or so until somebody made bets against me and from this point we attacked each others strategies. It was just fun for me, i had no financial involvement. It was probably similar to old days on the wall street, when you get too many savvy players it get's difficult. I thought about trading algorithms, but feared Blizzard will close my account if they find out.

I wrote an Auction House bot and ran it for most of a year without any interference from Blizzard. It was a simple poll/buy/sell script against a price database that I maintained.

When Blizzard launched the web interface to the auction house, they also exposed a bunch of JSON accepting/returning URLs that implemented searching, buying, and selling. The URLs and their parameters were easily reverse-engineerable from the web Auction House's javascript.

I had to log in to that account once or twice a week to manage inventory space, but other than that it was autonomous. My trading account was flagged only twice - once because I mailed a large amount of gold to my main character, and once because I intercepted some items that a gold seller was using to launder hacked gold.

In short, Blizzard's involvement with their economy is entirely focused on policing RMT. They don't care how players manipulate markets.

Thats pretty cool.

Did you hit the gold cap, and do you still run the programs?

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