I suppose you could say it is a waste, but this entire story essentially started out as a fun side project. It would also "be a waste" to sit at your computer for 12 hours a day playing D3 and flipping items on the Auction House, but that's just the way some people play the game. Do all of your side projects really add that much value to society?

What I mean is some question whether hedge funds and the like add value to the economy - botting in MMO has the added characteristic of the economy not even being real (I know it involves real money but you know what I mean).

I'm all up for reading books, playing games, watching films etc.. I question the need for high frequency trading in those leisure pursuits ;)

Actually, some parts of the economy are pretty much the same, do you know that people create fake scarcity all the time? Colanta, one of the big milk companies in the world actually throws tons of milk when it suits them, why? to avoid lowering the price of milk thanks to too much offer. And Market Manipulation is a very common practice in all industries, and even if it's illegal in most parts that's not enought to stop them, you can throw away a bunch of milk and say it was spoiled, who is going to say or proof otherwise?

The exact same thing happens with value; value is created itself by offer and demand, you can say that mining gold doesn't create any value for society, or you can say that it does, it completely depends on your definition of "value for society". Some may say that finding golp helps thousands of jewelries and jewelry makers, that it brings money in to multinational companies and so forth. But at the end of the day you could say the same about this kind of bots, you are moving money from people that have resources to spend on digital goods transfer to third world countries like Bulgaria. That it also helps to the entertainment, where a lot of trades happens all the time giving entropy to the ecosystem.

I know it's awfully arbitrary. I make terrible analogies but indulge me.

I ask you to dig a hole and pay you 10$. I then pay you 10$ (or better still you pay me) to fill the whole. Was 20$ dollars worth of value created?

Company makes MMO that is only fun if you grind to level 60. Guy pays third world country citizen to play the game for him until he reaches level 60. You claim that is a good thing because it gave a job to someone in the third world. I put it to you that is madness akin to digging and filling holes over and over. The company could sell you a level 60 character at no cost to them (changing a few bits on a server) and give the money to the third world citizen in aid (obviously not going to happen) and nothing would change except he could do something productive rather than slave away at a PC 12 hours a day (like we do).

That's where the definition of "value" gets blurry. If in your analogy you use the hole I dug for raising plants, does that mean you created 20 dollars worth of value? It's uncertain, neither "yes" or "no". Maybe the plants bring unwanted insects to the yard. Maybe the plant has to be removed just 2 months later because you need to build a new room. Maybe you forget to feed the plant and it dies two weeks later.

The concept of value is completely related to what you value and absolutely nothing else; if you value having a 60 level character you are willing to pay for that, if the game company does not offer that deal you are going to look another way to pay for it. Is like when someone give you apples in exchange for oranges, is not about creating value, is about exchanging. If you value more the oranges that's completely up to you. Therefore, charity (non-exchange) is a whole different subject.

Exactly. We know whether a virtual item is worth $20 by whether someone is willing to pay $20 for it.

I'd suggest that to make the hole-digging analogy work, we'd need to assume that there are people willing to pay $20 for the privilege of seeing a hole dug and then refilled (or something similar). And if that's the case, then who's to say the digging and refilling didn't create $20 of value?

Value isn't the right word here. "Global utility" would be better, but how do you define that? Take heavy drugs for instance. They can have a high positive value but most definitions of utility would assign them a low negative one, I figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_decision#Formal_mathema...

The relationships between actions are so complex that "global utility" is just as blurry, maybe the ones overdosing are mostly criminals; maybe the company that creates the chemical products for the distilling process of the heavy drugs is actually owned by some guy that is going to find the cure for cancer thanks to the funds earned from his chemical company. Or maybe experiencing reality is not better than your experience on drugs. Yeah, those are very controversial statements but is mostly because it falls under the field of psychology, sociology and philosophy, which arguably are even more blurry.

Well, the definition itself isn't blurry I'd say, since it's pretty much universal: the examples you cited should be encompassed as possibilities by the model. It's just hard to define because it involves the complexities and oddities of morality, happiness and the like -- our objective knowledge of those is so restricted and sparse that we're better off just "winging" judgements from our legacy of humanities study.

Although I know what you mean, Bulgaria is not a Third World Country. I think a better term would be Developing Country [0]. Third world means that it wasn't allied with either the USA/UK (First World) or Russia/China (Second World) during the Cold War [1]. Bulgaria was part of the Eastern Bloc [2].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Bloc#Bulgaria

I've been botting a trading market in a different game for several years now. I haven't made any actual money off of because the game doesn't allow that.

But it has been very enjoyable and educational. When I started I had essentially no programming experience and taught myself as I went along. I find it much easier to learn programming when I have an interesting project to directly apply it to.

Which market are you using your bots on? You communicate with an API? I'm interested in doing something similar!

Eve Online, I'd say - it doesn't allow you to get your space money out, but you can pay for your subscription with it and its marketplace and economy is second to none. Oh and it has APIs and third-party APIs to get market data - although I don't think you can actually trade via an API, which is probably a good thing because high-volume automated traders would probably break the server / economy.

It's not Eve or any very popular game. I've told about 5 people and only 1 had ever heard of it.

It's really interesting to know what game it is. If I don't know it, I will look it up.

I was always averse to trying out botting in the games where it is against the Terms of Use, that is, every game I know (I guess I'm goody two shoes like that.) The closest I know is Magic Online where trade bots are tolerated by the administration, but I just couldn't stand to play the game itself, even though it sounded fascinating in theory.

Sorry I can't give too many details because the game doesn't like bots and I don't want to give them any tools to use against me. For that reason there's also no public API.

But the trading system is web-based so it's not too hard to bot it.

Making millions on the stock market could be seen as a waste of time to somebody who's more interested in doing well on the Second Life game or whatever.

If you look at things in terms of making money and contributing to the 'real world' then almost every hobby is a waste of time.

I mean, does it really matter if it's real life or not? Money might be completely unimportant to somebody... if they already make enough from their day job they're free to do whatever's fun for them in their spare time.

> I question the need for high frequency trading in those leisure pursuits ;)

It's worth noting, though, that botting tends to flourish in any multiplayer game that allows it to, regardless of the potential for real money profit. Hell, MUDs used to have botting issues when I played them 20+ years ago. [0]

As for why, I'd say that automating a game is a game in and of itself, and depending on the particulars it can be both challenging and rewarding. (Sometimes moreso than the actual game!) So in implementing the RMAH, I think Blizzard made a playable meta-game, and the result was that people played it. The author of this article simply played it competitively. ;)

[0] Probably still do..

> As for why, I'd say that automating a game is a game in and of itself, and depending on the particulars it can be both challenging and rewarding.

speaking from experience, yes, it is much more enjoyable playing the meta-botting game than the actual game!

I used to play Ragnarok Online circa 2000 (on a private server - not the official one). This particular private server is a donation server, meaning if you paid real money, you can buy items from the admins/owners which is impossible to get otherwise. Think pay-to-win style items.

i was in high school at the time, and didn't have money to pay a "donation" to get these powerful items. Now, it's possible to buy these donation only items from player auctions in the game, but i didn't have enough gold to do so. But i did have some programming experience, and found an opensource bot (http://www.openkore.com/index.php/Main_Page) to use. Being a private server meant you can create unlimited free accounts, and so i decided to start a bot army, where banning a character don't mean anything, as the work to create the character is also automated.

Botting in Rag required your character to have a certain level, otherwise, it's not efficient, so the first task is to write a script to automatically level up your botting character, with the right skills and automatically collect the required armour, spells etc. This was the hardest part - full custom scripts needed to be written for each separate requirement. once a large number of bots are created, they are then spread out evenly across profitable maps to farm items to sell to NPCs. Some tricks include auto-teleporting when another player comes into view, which makes it difficult for anyone to spot you (as max view distance is lower than the distance at which your bot receives notice from the server of player entities coming into view).

The second part of botting involve item laundering, which involve rapidly dropping and picking up items from the floor, instead of making a normal player-to-player trade (or bot-to-bot trade in this case). Because this is suppose to be agnostic to bans, i cannot afford to keep any large amount of items/gold on any account being botted. I also cannot afford to have a transaction history linking my main playing account (which i don't bot, but play for real with). So i had to create automated money laundering scripts.

But after having botted for approx 3-4 months, after which i had enough money to buy one of the donation items (which is approx $40 in donation), and it made me one of the most powerful characters that didn't actually pay for donation items in the server, i no longer had interest in playing the game, but the botting kept being really interesting. The the code for the bot was a bit buggy, so sometimes bots would stop responding. But there is a way to reset it from another bot. So i devised a heart-beat into each bot, so that every bot monitors several other bots with redunancy, and restarted each other when failure is detected - this failure is done by sending in game private messages. Eventually, this became an army of 50-80 bots, all running together, cooperating to farm the map the most efficient manner, and heart-beat check each other so that there's very little down time. Ahh, those were the days.

"And I thought hedge fund managers were not adding value to society"...

Its always weird to me when people in the tech industry say that hedge fund managers/quants "add no value to society". The presumption that any individual's job "adds value to society" is really arrogant...do you really think that all the software engineers working at Google or FB or Twitter to make people click advertisement "add value to society"? Does my local grocer "add value to society"? Its such a vacuous statement.

I apologize in advance if this is harsh, so I would offer you to read more about finance before you make blanket statements like "hedge funds do not add value to society"

Worse case scenario: making people click google ads is just as mindlessly financially driven as eking out more alpha from an algo, in which case the googlers still win, because at least some of that money generated goes toward moonshot projects that may very well benefit society.

I respect Google, Facebook, and Twitter because of their ability to connect people and their genuine intellectual contributions to fields like information retrieval and AI, and sure, their moonshots. But I think its arrogant to say whether someone adds value to society because its an extremely complicated philosophical question (judging the guy playing the game saying he's wasting his time). I'm not sure its fair to characterize all hedge funds as simply trying to squeeze out alpha though either, there are many prominent activist investors who've pushed for greater corporate governance and transparency, in cases like MBIA, Lehman, Herbalife most recently, etc. And if you wanted to consider Google's moonshots, it should be only fair to consider the billions most of the hedge fund managers have given away in a dick-measuring contest to various charities and research initiatives. But I understand your argument and agree that a lot of financialization provides no benefit to anyone.

i think when someone laments that a high-frequency-trader/hedge fund managers don't add value, they really mean that they get an unfair amount of money for little visible work, and little visible benefit to somebody else in the world. I emphasis visible.

I do believe that having arbitrage evens out the pricing of long term assets, and having traders do this continuously does indeed make the prices of things reflect reality.

That they make a lot of money doing this seems unfair, but the world isn't fair.

He also seems to get very much joy out of people accidentally losing money to him. It's like those ebay sellers who sell empty packaging.

Thats a terrible analogy. Ebay sellers are scamming. Hes taking advantages of mispriced items and arbitrage opportunities of others' ignorances. The real currency -> gold mistake is, granted, crushing for the seller making the mistake, but part of the game.

There are also people who just don't care enough to put in the time to sell items for their real value. I never sold much on the RMA, but when I sold stuff on the GAH I would eyeball the item and just throw a price on it that I think would get it to sell fast, but still get me decent gold. I didn't play Diablo to make money, I was there to have fun.

The author seemed pretty convinced that many of the prices he was spotting were probably supposed to be real-money prices -- e.g, an item that was supposed to sell for $100 would instead be sold for 100 gold. (Which is a trivial amount, even in game.)

this happens more often than you think in games that have two systems that can be confused with each other. EVE online is a good example (except instead of real currency, it's just mis-typed zeros and bad UI queues)

It's more like ebay sellers accidentally mistyping their initial price / buyout value and still be required to send their item for that price. Actually that happens from time to time in for example webshops, accidentally listing items for $1 instead of $300.

People are having fun and enjoying the game != massive waste of time.

I've been poking at the open source hearthstone bot. And there's no market in hearthstone so there's no financial reason to running a bot (you can get like colored portraits or something if you win enough games I guess). But the idea of making the best AI for a wildly played competitive card game seems like a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the Google AI challenge one year and seeing if I could hit legendary with a bot would be even better.

except that he lives in bulgaria and he gives the average wage price 250/350 euros per month.

That's add a little flavor on the whole thing for me :)