Andrew Phelps has dug up an absolutely astonishing story: "[...] the thing that blew me away was a fairly recent development on the Stormhammer Server of Sony's Everquest Legends. The names here are removed to protect the innocent, and most of the threads I read on this have now been deleted which is why I [almost] think its ok to talk about. It seems that one of the "guilds" on the Stormhammer server has recently had a moment of crises with it's guild leadership. The group of RL (real life) friends that formed the guild apparently had a very different purpose than those intended by Verant and Sony Online Entertainment. After months of leading the guild on several high-end raids and gaining all kinds of in-game items and loot, this group of friends took those items from the guild vault and sold them on Ebay, and then vanished from the server. Online identity and trust issues abound. But before you dismiss this as 'oh, well, who really cares about some gold pieces and magic swords that are really just numbers in a database', take a good look at what's happening in online communities of this size. One economic study by California State University at Northridge Professor Edward Castronova placed Norrath (the virtual world of Everquest) as the 77th richest world economy, based on the value of the items in the world adjusted to their value in then-current Ebay auctions. This was reported in WIRED and several other sources. So the folks that perpetrated this virtual heist won out with what could have amounted to thousands of dollars in US currency. Now, this is devious, I suppose, but I personally know people who make money starting new characters, powerlevelling them up to god-like status, and then selling them off and starting again. Any cheat program or automated levelling system is just an advantage to reduce the time between character creation and profit on investment. So what makes this different? In a word, trust. What's interesting as a social phenomenon is the idea that people are willing to sell "virtual relationships" and/or reputation for real world currency. [...]" In my opinion it's even more interesting, that there are people who are willing to BUY "virtual relationships" and/or reputation! Now where has the difference between "real and virtual" gone? :o via Got Game?

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