After posting a picture on my last blog of the extremes that gold farmers go through to make there daily pay I ended up getting a call a day later from a man named, Jose who had quite a story to tell. The picture I posted in my last blog showed a basement containing 3000 computers all linked to Ultima Online (UO) with different characters mining for iron in the fields. This seemed odd to me that one person could be controlling all of these characters at once in a single basement. Once I got on the phone with Jose and got past him yelling at me for using what he calls his “intellectual property” I soon understood that he had a bigger story to tell, of man gold farming for his life.
He soon indulged me in his actions of which he makes around $35,000-a-week gold farming trying to make a living for his family. He started playing UO when he was in college casually dabbling with his main character, which was a Rouge mage, running around completing quests and very rarely getting into the economics of the game by power leveling other friends’ characters for some money in return. Once he graduated from college he quit playing on UO and ended up selling his own character to an eBay buyer. For a long time he was happy with his choice to stop playing but, one day a news report came out that the buyer who bought his character had committed several crimes. Taking multiple peoples lives because of in game problems which he had with other players.
This lit a fire of motivation in Jose who felt it was his fault that this man was using his character that propelled him to commit such crimes. After getting this news Jose went out the next day to set the UO world straight and create a movement in the game by letting these players know that actions in the game should not carry over to the real world. He created a new character, which was a Wizard, named Zeus. As he travelled through the game trying to recruit people for the game he came upon characters known as bots, which were macroed to mine all day without the presence of humans on the other side of the computer screen. He soon became fascinated by what these bots were doing. So one day he researched what these bots were doing and started realizing there was a profit to be made in UO.
From that point on Jose began his journey to change his life around and start making a profit off of playing this videogame. His mind state changed from just playing the game for fun, to making a business out of the game. He started out finding a macro program called “EasyUO” that allowed Jose to macro multiple characters that he made so that they could mine all day without him being there. He began making around 100,000 in game money a week which translated to him selling it on eBay for $35,000 real world money. His life was great until a month past and soon he went online and realized that all of his accounts had been banned. He began to panic as his source of money had gone out the window. He figured out that his characters had been questioned by the GM’s of the game and they came up with no answers so therefore, the GM’s had came to the conclusion these characters were being macroed without a person behind them to control them.
Jose needed to find another way to get by these GM’s questions so he started researching again and found a program called A.L.I.C.E. The program A.L.I.C.E. was set up to carry on convincingly human conversation and eventually trick the human on the other side of the computer that there was a human talking to them. Soon after Jose got his 3000 bots up to speed with the installation of the A.L.I.C.E. program he was virtually unstoppable force creating a cashflow for himself that was astronomical.
His downfall came when he started up a rogue team who he spilled out all of his secrets of his success. This team was built on the basis of five in game friends who he had come close with through his college raiding days. He expected everyone to jump on board but, soon realized he had a snitch in the group. The platform of UO soon realized what program he was using and started banning all of his characters. Jose just took this as a minor setback and set out to lay low for the next couple of days then start back up again. What Jose didn’t know the snitch in the group had joined forces with the GM’s of UO and he kept constant tabs on Jose’s next moves. Two years since Jose had last played he now lives in a dumpster outside of the UO offices trying everyday to get back on the platform. His legacy was known to all, as the first millionaire video gamer but now he can be known as the fastest fall from stardom to dumpsters.
