Rated E said:
How did you make money out of it?
Selling software and in game currency. Accounts are really only worth selling at certain times. Before an expansion, after an expansion, new servers, etc.
Out of interest's sake, how much do people pay for these pre-leveled characters, as in, right at the top end?
It really depends on several factors. Going by level alone a max level character would probably be around $200 right now. Expansions have a lot of impact on value. If a new expansion comes out and adds 10 levels and you get an account to the new highest level among the first "wave" of players the value increases by several hundred. Also, accounts are more in demand right before an expansion because people are coming back and want to play with high level friends or want to start the expansion right away or whatever.
People doing this for profit focus on in game currency sales though. At one time I had a contact in China who would lease accounts for $10 a day. This meant you could lease him 100 accounts and get $1,000 a day. Over time they'd get banned but that was no problem as more would be leveling up every day.
Everyone focuses on WoW but this extends to basically every MMO in existance. Even games like Diablo 2. I expect Diablo 3 to be out of control with bots and item/currency sales. It's a popular franchise that is easily going to be top 3 in terms of player base at launch.
Here's some pics from EQ when I was doing that. At this point in the "industry" people weren't automating thousands of accounts. The thing to do here was hack as much as you possibly could to either level accounts or create currency.
Map hack. You can see the collection of "snow cougars" behind me that I'm gathering to AE kite as I explain later. Also note the experience gain in the upper left window. Almost 50% of a level in a single AE run which took about 5-10 minutes. Something a player would spend 4+ hours on. Some warp text too.
Staying in corpse after death. All kinds of weird shit you could do with this.
This item was an epic quest item that most people would spend like 6 months getting. I was using a hack to allow me to transfer it to other characters. Was using it on a level 1 to kill stuff in a single hit.
Oh and here's an old simple macro. This macro and another that simply held forward and tapped left turn at specific intervals to do a perfect circle probably made me like $80,000.
#turbo
Sub Main
:Loop
/stopsong
/cast 8
/itemnotify offhand leftmouseup
/itemnotify 23 leftmouseup
/itemnotify 24 leftmouseup
/itemnotify offhand leftmouseup
/delay 33
/stopsong
/cast 5
/delay 33
/stopsong
/cast 6
/itemnotify offhand leftmouseup
/itemnotify 24 leftmouseup
/itemnotify 23 leftmouseup
/itemnotify offhand leftmouseup
/delay 33
/stopsong
/cast 7
/delay 33
/goto :Loop
/return
The Bard class had an area effect song that worked at just barely over melee range and did almost no damage. It also has a song that makes it run extremely fast. This meant you could gather up a bunch of monsters and run the "circle macro" and if you were running fast enough (had a good enough drum) the mobs would never reach you. They'd run the inside of the circle chasing you as you ran a lot faster along the outside. This kept them just in range of the AE song but too far to hit you.
I could get a character to max level doing this in about 2 days. Basically I'd run through an entire zone attacking every single monster I saw and then run giant circles around the mob I'd created getting smaller and smaller. This forces them into a tight group. Then it was /circle and /sing and I'd surf the internet for 10 minutes and come back to another 1/2 a level done and a shitload of money.
In this particular picture I was also on the bottom of the ocean using a hack that simply flipped if you were standing in the air or standing in water. This also allowed you to fly out of water as if you were swimming in air. I had to do this because if anyone saw what I was doing their mind probably would have melted and I'd be sued.
So many memories of exploiting EverQuest in various ways. It was like if you could imagine doing something in the game it was possible to do.
The absolute destruction of the economy in EverQuest came when someone figured out the simplest hack ever. If you went to a merchant and set the amount of an item you wanted to buy to 0 using a memory editor you could purchase 1 for free. Then they wrote a macro to buy a horse and sell it back for about $80 of in game currency. This could be done once every 3 seconds I believe.
EQ had absolutely zero cheat protection or specific personnel to handle cheating. It's not like this anymore at all.