Smoka's Ramblings

Part 3 of 6 in the My quest for extra income series will be discussing our dabbling in the market for online gaming resources. What started out as a passtime at night turned into a bit of a lucrative adventure for us halfway through,only to burn us in the end when we ran the numbers.

Follow up:

For history purposes, my wife and I had been together a few years and had just recently been married. My boss at work was explaining to me how this 'really cool game' called Everquest was out and he and his friend from another state were playing it together. I told the story to my wife and she thought it sounded ok, but not worth the time playing. So, I went and bought the game and started playing. Initially I Was on for a few hours a night. By the end of the week I was severly hooked and talked my wife into playing. I went and bought the game for her and got her hooked as well. Six long years that game dragged us along with it. We were like heroin junkies getting a daily fix. I not so fondly remember doing a 32 hour marathon one time, but that's a story for another time. About 3 years into the game we had become bored and we had heard people were selling in game currency, items, or characters themselves. This is where the money comes into play.

The wife and I decide to sell some items on Ebay, as back then it was allowed to be listed there. We made a few hundred dollars and were happy that the 9.99 x 2 we were paying to play each month was starting to be recouped. After a few months, my wife hears about some guy that made over ten thousand dollars selling a well equipped character. Yes, $10,000.00USD. TEN GRAND, for a computer generated image. That sold my wife on the spot and she put her character on ebay for sale. Believe it or not, I think it was around two thousand dollars she got for it. It was a fairly well equipped character, and it was a sought after cleric class.

After seeing her get that much, I put my character up for sale. He was better equipped, but was a Shaman class. Well, let's just say back then the Shaman wasn't the most sought after class and I wold him off for $200.00. Yeah, wasn't much but our initial investment was covered and we made extra out of the deal. We're done, right? Wrong.

Six months later we've purchased new copies of the games, along with the new expansions that had come out and blew about $250.00 on it all. The monthly fee had gone up as well and we were paying I think $12.00 per month for each character. I had friends that quit playing so I took over their characters as well. All in all, we payed for 4 accounts. I was back into it REAL bad. I bought the new expansions x 4 everytime they put out a new one, which cost around $30.00 and they released a couple per year. Finally, they upped the monthly fee to $14.99.

When our child was born, our playtime started to go down, and finally it stopped for my wife, with me following about a month or two after her giving it up for good. We decided to sell our characters and we got $500 for hers ( better character than the first time, but not much demand anymore, the game's over 7 years old then ) and I got nothing. I gave mine away to a friend.

There are some people that play the game and collect money to sell. They are known as farmers and play a variety of games, mainly using cheats to get as much cash or items as possible, then selling them off to people for real cash. It has become a business for some. We didn't go down that road.

I am happy to say we are clean and heroin, errr Everquest free for over 2 and a half years now. I would estimate we made about $250.00 out of the deal, if you don't count the hours played. If you count the time spent and what we made off of it, we are in the hole for about 75 thousand, roughly.

This is one extra income maker I definately would NOT recommend!