Saturday, May 28, 2011

Gold farming

By bot. Seriously. The news item about Chinese prisoners gold farming led Charlie Stross to post on it (natch) and one of his commenters dropped a link to a pretty fascinating how-to article (NSFW illustrations).

Point being: one node can earn (right now) something like $2/hour. I don't know how much of that requires any human input at all; responding to chat requests seems to be a bot test. Let's assume that with good programming you could get that to essentially no human input. The article asks, what if you play 12 hours a day every day: $700/month. How about ten nodes? Now you've just built a money machine that you can live off of.

The point being, it would be a good programming project, and I have a hard time thinking that the skills and code you develop for it couldn't be repurposed - and you'd be earning money for free. I feel the same way about pokerbots. Worth thinking about, anyway.

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