Rich Thurman looks like your average American citizen. He is thirty years old, has a wife, and two young children. Rich also has a solid job working as a software engineer. He even plays video games. Yet many people would not know that Rich secretly has been running a successful business from the seemingly pointless games he plays.
Rich used to play Ultima Online, a popular MMO. “I played it two years straight, right from the start of the game back in '97,” Rich jokingly says, “until my wife started complaining that the only way she could socialize with me was to play UO.” Yet after a friend sold his account for a thousand dollars, Rich got to thinking. He realized that people would pay real-world money for online commodities. Rich became the leader of EasyUO Cartel, a gold farming company.
What exactly is gold farming? Gold Farming is the real-world sale of virtual goods and services produced in online games. Gold farming is a controversial subject in virtual worlds because many players feel as though it is cheating to buy from a gold farmer. Some games even ban gold farming or control bots/macroing, which is when characters are controlled by a code that makes them do repetitive tasks to gather items that can be sold or traded for in-game currency. There are three main things that gold farmers do, sell in-game currency, power-leveling and selling in-game items. In Rich’s case, he was more into selling in-game currency. Yet there is no way that Rich could make enough gold to profit on alone. Using his coding skills, Rich was able to control multiple bots. Yet gold farming is not as simple as just setting up a bot, in most virtual worlds players who bot get their accounts banned. Game moderators will ask players suspected of being a bot are asked questions that only a real user could answer (like the color of something). So Rich had to set up a system that allowed him to be notified when a macro was being questioned by a GM (game moderator) so he would be able to answer.
Yet Rich is not the only one with a gold farming business. Lee Cadwell is another big gold farmer in the Ultima Online community. He is the owner of Blacksnow and Ingotdude, the Cartels biggest competition when it comes to gold farming. Lee and Rich were brought together by a common foe. Both men were ripped off when they tried to purchase gold from the same Ebay seller. Lee showed interest in merging Blacksnow and the Cartel and the two exchanged conversations about going through with it.
After many long discussions, it seemed that both Rich and Lee had reached the agreement that they would join forces to become the leading power in Ultima Online gold farming. When suddenly, some of their accounts were banned. Lee became accusatory of Rich, claiming that he must have something to do with the account bans. When Rich attempted to calm Lee down, claiming that all of his accounts were also banned, but Lee lost it during an IM conversation with Rich.
[Lee goes by the name “Destiny” while in chats]
"Destiny: ok either you are lying to me about who has exevents, you are lying to me about what you guys are doing with it or there is something out there that can do the exact same thing. on eof those three are the possible answers and i am beginning to feel like i am being played and when it comes to my rent and my food being paid for i dont like to be played.”
“Destiny: no you motherfuckers are in for it, its fucking on."
Ever since that IM chat, Lee has sworn to get back at Rich. Rich tells us, "Lee is putting too much heat on me right now. Every bot I try to put in action, he finds it and gets it banned. I'm going to have to lay low for a while till things simmer down a little. And start looking for new bugs to work. With all this exposure going on, all the old ones are getting patched left and right by the designers. But it's always like this. Every time OSI goes in and fixes things, they pop a few stitches somewhere else. And you just gotta go and find them."
Will Lee and Rich ever settle their differences and work together like they had planned? Most likely not. So then what will happen with this war? Will the Cartel find a new bug that will allow them to enter the system unnoticed? Only time will tell and we will keep you updated as these events unfold.
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