Monday, September 19, 2005

Multi-boxing (your e-mail)

After the post about multi-boxing Everquest, I received this e-mail from someone who wishes to remain anonymous (remember, I said multi-boxing was probably "useless"):

Not useless. A guy I know runs a 6-box setup and farms platinum and items from EQ and WoW. He grosses over $4000 a month just selling the things on playerauctions.com or wholesaling the gold. It's a bit of a hassle to set up the different macros and bots but it can be done and provides a decent income. My roomate runs a 2-box setup and makes an extra $500 a month just letting his computers run. They have plenty of sweatshops (if you can call sitting at computer playing a mmorpg sweating) in China and the like. But there are plenty of Americans doing this too.

That's an excellent point. Anything like this that can be automated to make a profit on a large-scale basis is going to be used on a smaller scale by entrepeneurs.

Ten years ago, how many of us thought that people would "work" by farming in a virtual world and selling the proceeds in the real world? And what does that say about our ability to guess what the world will be like ten years for now?

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