Cheating or Exploit?Follow

I would like to ask your sites opinion (since I value your and the gamers, input)to define what is or isnt (typically)called Cheating or Exploiting the game.

I ask this because I was accused of cheating this weekend by a fellow player and I do not believe what I did is cheating but just being a prudent crafter/merchant.

First thing:
I play these games for fun not to make real money.
I do not "out-of-game-macro", program, camp or look for ways to cheat the system.

Here is what happened:
On Everquest ll I took advantage of a crafting opportunity that had a pay back of 1silver 25copper for an outlay of approx. 25copper per item (profit of 1silver per item)I crafted for almost 2 days playing time but due to the fact I had to go harvest or buy the resource to make the item I came out with a profit of about 70s for my efforts. This is less than what my counterparts made in the same time levelling up and questing.
How can this be considered cheating? isn't part of being a merchant/crafter finding the right item to sell at the right time to make the most profit? I only did what the game allowed me to do, I did not set the prices and had no idea that the prices were wrong (how could I).

The Devs shut down the crafting of this item(thread)and put a halt to all the crafting of furniture, weapons and armor that used it. When this happened I guess everyone relalized that there must be something wrong with the pricing. many were upset that crafting had been halted on a lot of items.

I also ask you why crafters cannot make money, we have to sit long hours with little or no profit to gain xp while fighters and magic users go out and loot items that sometimes sell for large amounts of money. I understand that these games are geared for fighting but there are many of us that like owning large houses, well decorated and comfortable for us and our pets. Are we to be condemed because we can make a profit? and why can't we have a "RARE" crafting item.

Thank you

So what you are saying is, you made an item and sold it to an npc. You still did the work and as long as you did'nt know that they were going to change the sell value of this item I would'nt go so far as to say you were exploiting anything. You saw something you could make and sell for a profit.

Edited, Mon Nov 15 14:16:18 2004 by Kouranx

There is a fundemental problem with what you were doing. I know it wasn't cheating. I agree crafting should be able to make a profit.

Caveat: In eqlive there were similar "bugs" as the Dev put them that gave the same profit margins to crafters. The plat sellers got ahole of it and total jacked the economies for all the servers. They made macros and did this over and over again to flood the markets with fake plat. So it destroyed the economies on many servers. Stuff that used to sell for 1k plat were selling in the 10k plat range.

So stopping it ASAP the devs are proving to me they want these infant economies to stay infants. They'll fix the thread bug and you can move on.

I dont think you cheated . I make game money killing stuff because thats what I enjoy . I also appreciate the option of buying some gear/spells/items that is made by players, I am sure they spend their time making stuff because thats what they enjoy. I am paid in a sense by the mobs I kill , and I see nothing wrong with someone making money selling the items they spend their time making . If you never made any money crafting then not only would you have to stop from lack of resources , but player made items would be so rare .

Also like any new online game or expansion of a game there is always adjusting after release. Some quests get changed , mobs get reworked to hit less or more , exp gets altered ,trade skill items get redone , things change as people play and discover things that the game makers did not intend . Anyone remember the fishing issue in EQ1 with the GOD expansion , or the 3pp inv potion issue , hehe didnt take Sony long to change those issues , not because people were cheating but because Sony never ment for those things to do what they did .

When the latest expansion came out for FFXI, there was an NPC in one of the new zones that bought something back it sold for more money than it sold it for...

Now that was fun. hehe (I didn't take advantage of it... Never got access to said zone.)

If you're off the island and crafting, you should've already joined one. They're the people who let you use their equipment. Talk to the guy in the same zone as the one you tradeskill in. He should give you a quest to fill for the guild.

Ahh, so that's why I wasn't able to craft any Thread. I decided to make some Threadbare equipment and suddenly found that I couldn't make or buy any thread to start it up.

I hope that this doesn't happen to everything else, having decent sell rates dropped to nothings. I love the fact that I actually made money leveling my crafting to 11, even with keeping a few choice items (Backpacks ^^) for my own use.

In FFXI they screwed the NPC sell-back rate up so much that you had to spend hundreds of thousands of gil just to level your craft of choice high enough to make any decent items.

Please keep EQ2 away from that nonsense!

Cheat NO!
Exploit NO!

Something the developers decided they did not want in game .. YES!


While as a crafter having person myself I do wish profit was possible (come one refined materials should sell for more then it cost to refine them).

Now I could live with a few copper profit and do agree that threads were over priced... NO WAY threads should sell for more then something made with threads sell for :-)

To me, I wish at 'perfect' craft rate (I.E no failures always pristine) a 10-20% profit over cost would be fine. Yes that means that once you get your starting money, if you want to craft almost trivial items, then you could go all the way for on your starting money, (not 10-20% profit presumes harvesting all but fuel) but who is going ('realistically') do something that the end product sells for less than it cost to make...

Ok obviously your not going to tell me what mobs your killing for fear of getting them nerfed, but at least let me know if they are closer to qeynos of freeport so I'm not looking around my starting city zones in vein.

Hhhmmm. Interesting, this economy establishment thing. I had no idea about the situation such as a previous poster mentioned in Thailand. That's just wrong.