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Gamer juggles over 30 Warcraft characters

Rated E

Rated E

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Gamer juggles over 30 Warcraft characters
Meet the mad king of Azeroth.

By Ben Silverman

Think you play too much World of Warcraft?

Compared to "Prepared," you don't.

In a case of game addiction gone officially bananas, gaming blog Joystiq reports on what is surely the biggest Warcraft fan of them all. Known only under the moniker "Prepared," the gamer plays a stunning 36 World of Warcraft accounts on 11 different computers...simultaneously.

Stemming from a desire to manage raids -- large-scale gameplay sessions that typically require the teamwork of multiple players -- all by himself, the die-hard gamer seems undaunted by both the financial and lifestyle commitments to such a geeky endeavor.

"It costs me exactly $5711 in subscription costs per year with 36 accounts on the 6 month pay schedule," he writes. "Not bad considering I'm looking at it like it's a hobby and there are more expensive hobbies out there than World of Warcraft."

Like yachting, perhaps. And despite the downturn in the economy, Prepared can't wait to get his hands on the upcoming Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

"I plan to be at the store when it opens and will purchase 36 copies of it. With tax, it should be about $1500 for all of them."

Word of Prepared's over-the-top addiction comes on the heels of the annual Blizzcon Convention, a fan-oriented celebration of the games created by Warcraft publisher Blizzard.
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Link

Woah.
 
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Been there, done that. My accounts play themselves though and make more than they cost.

This guy is hardly the king of Azeroth. I've had over 200 accounts logged in at once and over 1,000 active at a time. I know someone who has a data center in Singapore setup and had over 1,500 logged in and 10,000 active.

The above picture was before we reverse engineered the client/server communications and created bots that don't need to load any graphics. They just send/process packets to/from the server. Server hardware is no longer a limitation and it's all an issue of bandwidth and hiding that many connections from Blizzard. There are people who specialize in providing the connection splitting to multiple legitimate looking IPs for a fee.

I don't do it anymore though. Like any black market it's extremely competitive and cut throat. People stealing software I worked on and selling it to the Chinese piss me the fuck off. Totally ruined the profitability in it for everyone and now only the Chinese and huge sellers like IGE make enough for it to be worth doing. I could still earn a shitload more than any kind of job working for someone else but there are better businesses for the investment.

I specifically wrote software to handle other players, anti-detection. After awhile the AI work I was doing seemed kind of stupid to be investing in a video game. Lately I've been working on real world AI problems instead which are a lot more challenging and potentially rewarding.
 
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Kul69 said:
Been there, done that. My accounts play themselves though and make more than they cost.
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How did you make money out of it?

(I haven't actually played WoW, I just found the article interesting and thought there was a high chance people here would.)
 
Rated E said:
How did you make money out of it?

(I haven't actually played WoW, I just found the article interesting and thought there was a high chance people here would.)
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Selling the levelled accounts to people.

Say for example, you want to play WoW, but don't want to level up a character from the beginning. You could just buy one on ebay that's say, level 70.

Sorry Kul I didn't mean to answer the question for you, but that's one way you can make money, right?
 
Ah I see.

Then again, maybe he was dealing drugs to the Orcs in crack valley.
 
It would be hilarious if the police busted down your door to raid your place thinking it was a methlab with all that power consumption - only to find 20 computers botting WoW. LOL.
 
Wow, WoW. I hope you didn't get any power outages, would've been chaos.
 
sound like the guy in the original post isn't that tech savvy and does all those account manually. what a nerd.

kul, wow, dude. just wow. ;) :D
 
I think of WoW kinda like heroin. It's just one of those things I don't really want to pick up for fear of liking it and my life being ruined as a result ;)

Out of interest's sake, how much do people pay for these pre-leveled characters, as in, right at the top end?
 
I don't get it though. You're just hitting your number keys over and over to do attacks. No skill involved. Maybe I just don't get it.
 
Rated E said:
How did you make money out of it?
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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?
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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.

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Staying in corpse after death. All kinds of weird shit you could do with this.


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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.

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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
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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.

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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.
 
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DoctorShop said:
I don't get it though. You're just hitting your number keys over and over to do attacks. No skill involved. Maybe I just don't get it.
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No, you get it. The thing is you have to think of an MMO like a big chat room with graphics. People want to be the popular person in the chat room and in an MMO that means being better at the game. To be better in an MMO is hugely dependent on equipment.

This is why people buy fake money. They'd rather spend $50 to buy enough gold to buy that sword or whatever instead of having to spend a solid week pressing buttons.

They enjoy mindlessly pressing those buttons and winning though. They just don't enjoy the "work" aspect that goes into building up a character.

I can't blame them. If you make enough money in 2 hours at a real job to buy a piece of equipment in a game that you'd spend 20 hours working for which is just as boring, is that really so dumb?

Usually only the people with no life who live in MMOs are the ones who hate gold purchasers and such because it undermines their "achievements." I've never been one to enjoy uneven fights in games so I can't relate to how they get off on having invested 80 hours over the next guy so they get a 50% skill handicap or whatever. Most of these people DON'T have any skill and that's why they're playing MMOs and buying equipment in the first place.
 
Thanks for posting this kul. I find all of this so interesting. It's like being God in another world :D
 
Really interesting post, thanks for the info Kul. Used to be into Wow but kicked the habit some years ago, and this has definitely been an eye opener.. :D
 
Kul, thanks for that post. You have exposed me to a mode of existence that I will probably never, ever experience :).

Do you think that the MMORPG genre will eventually die out because of its exportability?
 
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