Video games have progressed and changed a lot since the first real large scale online experiences for console games in 2002. Now days most game lobbies, match making, chats, friend lists, and other online features are automated and included from the get go. It started off way simpler and inner game relationships played the largest role in your online gaming experience. My experience in online gaming started when I was 13 playing Final Fantasy XI and SOCOM 1 on the PS2.
This was very new and raw but I was hooked from the start. In SOCOM it was necessary to play in the same server everyday to meet the same players, there were no friends list, and chances are you had to disconnect your computer to connect your PS2. Clans were formed organically by forming real relationships over time. Once the game heated up and clans were formed the competition was also organic often sparked from shit talking in another clans lobby until each squad had 8 guys to go. The game played with each map being played in best of 11 rounds with no respawn in the rounds, winner of the best of 11 won the map. Sometimes games would go to 7,8 or even 9 maps with different players logging in and out and the shit talking evolving, most of the time for bragging rights within a certain server. Here is where I made my first online relationships and clan mates with friends I would play games with on and off with to this day, 17 years later. (And later played a large role in FFXI and WOW doings)
The other game I loaded up was Final Fantasy XI. A large scale MMO that is considered the last real MMO 1.0 if you will. The game was hard as fuck. No joke. Kids these days wouldn’t fuck with FFXI for a minute. It required extreme patience and time. Not balanced at all. It took hundreds of hours of grinding to reach the end game. You couldn’t do anything by yourself everything required a group. The areas were very large and took an extremely long time to travel through. They were also very dangerous and took a lot of skill and team work to get through. The end game notorious monster gameplay was server wide, meaning you weren’t guaranteed those awesome boss fights with the best loot. You had to hunt that guy everyday as most would only spawn every few days (for the entire server) and some took 18-32 players fighting for an hour or longer to bring down. If you didn’t get the claim you came back the next day to try again. The real end game weapons took an entire linkshell of 60+ members working 3-4 nights a week for years just to get one for ONE PERSON. Very few people ever got to see one of these, even on someone else. Like really fucking rare and hard to get. Saying this game required patience is a gross understatement.
Okay, so why am I geeking out about old school video games like a total old dude nerd? Well, for one millions and millions of people played both of these games for the decade I was active, and I managed to make it to the top in every aspect of play. In the process I’ve noticed a ton of learning points and similarities to my journey as an entrepreneur and my roots are deeply seeded in online gaming. Seeing as how the landscape of gaming is so different today and how my professional career has lead me into crypto currency and token economics this story feels very relevant and I have better been able to fit it into my perspective only recently. Until then I often looked back at this experience and time spent as mostly a waste of time. Only now do I see the true value in the thousands off hours I invested into playing these games the way I did and understand the value it has brought me in the “real world”.
When I started SOCOM in 2002 it was my first real online game where I was on the mics with people all over the world all night long. The first year or so I played primarily with one other squeaky kid on the mic since a lot of clans didn’t let little kids join (unless it was a little kid clan… but we actually liked to compete). So we played on the 2v2 ladder and eventually became so familiar with each other that we got to the #1 rank. This got us some attention and eventually the best clans realized there was room for one or two squeakers per clan. After joining my first clan and getting to experience the competitive side I realized it was about specializing on a skill that fits in with the team play to make everyone else better. I was able to get good enough at a niche skill that was needed at the highest ranks that allowed me entry into very advanced clans of much more mature players. I got to go from playing around with other 9-14 year old high pitched kids on the mic yelling about nonsense to dudes that understood the game to eventually crazy organized strategically run practiced and rehearsed gameplay with the most elite and skilled players out of millions. Just seeing that exist was a huge eye opener for me — No matter what you are doing or interested in there is always a top 0.5% and its not by accident why those people are there. I was the high pitched kid that everyone was very skeptical about until they got me in clutch game situations and I was able to prove my ability to play and keep my spot on the team for a long time. I also used strategies in top viewed clan wars that spread throughout the entire game being credited with creating entire metas.
During this time I was also experimenting with a game called FFXI. (My 2v2 partner retired here when I left him for the big time clans). FFXI, like previously stated is arguably one of the most difficult online games ever. Early on I saw how the end game was structured and how important it was to develop a core group of 20-30 people as you grind. With my experience being the roll player on my SOCOM clan I learned enough to run my FFXI linkshell like a well oiled machine. I played all the characters and roles to learn each jobs role in the end game. I took crazy long notes on gameplay and even made how to guides that were widely viewed on the Internet on forums and other niche gathering areas for gamers. I studied which crafts were most useful and would produce the most gold return later on. I created second and third characters only to do these crafts so I could have multiple ways to earn gold in game. I got super engaged in the MMO experience and my competitiveness started to focus here.
At the same time I was able to grow our linkshell community to over 120 players. This in itself was no easy task as members rely on the linkshell leader to be there to answer their questions and guide them throughout the game. Keep in mind most end game events required 18-32 players at minimum. This required a lot of planning and organization. There were a lot of moving parts in game such as three different monsters spawning at once and trying to organize and strategize a way to get 18 of the correct people situated at each location of the giant world. All while playing my character which was a high skill character at that. There was a ton of important decisions that had to happen during prime time game play hours in a bustling server with thousands and thousands of players. If you were able to get to, fight, and kill, the monsters before other linkshells you only received 2 or 3 out of of 50+ possible drops that everyone in the linkshell wanted. I was in charge of the process and ranking system that kept people happy with reward distribution — this got extremely tricky, people put thousands of hours of time into this game.
What other duties did I do while running the linkshell? Well, I spent at least 2 hours a day monitoring the forums online, managing our reputation, looking for new skilled players, keeping our threads and websites updated with our latest news (we had a huge following of 140,000+ people interested and it grew as we progressed — if you got the server’s first kill for instance the views were insane!) We eventually even made tutorials on boss fights and what not — This was my first introduction into branding and marketing as well as PR even.
Why was I good at managing our image on FFXI forums? Well from SOCOM of course! The SOCOM community started a website called socombattles dot com to organize clan wars and keep track of records, rank and stats. This evolved into socom2battles and eventually game battles dot com. SOCOM 2 was the first game that was featured on game battles. Not only was I in the #1 clan out of 2700 ranked clans at one point - but I also was a forum moderator and had my own personal brand that had the most post views and comments for 10+ years on the gamebattles SOCOM forums. (3m+ views) — Side note: They just disabled the Game Battles Forums and left a lot of old guys that still gathered there out cold on the streets on the Internet. Was very sad to see the oldest account I still used with 5,000,000+ views just wipe out just like that.
But back to FFXI as this game took priority once our linkshell started blowing up and getting big. It took a lot of effort managing it all. Naturally it started to effect school and social life big time. I spent a ton if not most of my time in school writing strategies for fights in my notebook. I would bring our linkshell roster to school to count hours contributed and review notes that officers would take when I wasn’t around. This is how I managed distributing in game items and choosing team members for big time fights, etc. I’d also go over server schedule as times of spawns and certain world events would change and we were constantly battling linkshells in Japan to keep them on our time zone. I would make the plan for the weekend where 80-100 people would be online. Which of course required me to be online most weekends. Which I enjoyed most of the time, however, at one point I wasn’t playing a game at all. I was just organizing and training 100 people many of which were adults with full-time jobs and children to be next level great at a hobby they had. Most people that played this game just followed the story and did whatever their linkshell leader and officers are telling them too in the chat. My squad had a different mindset and perspective, we were the best. I was able to motivate people in their outside life with the way I ran our linkshell. Yeah, this seems like a lot and it was.
I was done and ready to delete my account and move on when something game changing happened.
You see, the game play was extremely hard and forced each server to have its own in game currency and micro economy. The crazy part? There was a real world market for this currency. Real online websites existed where you could buy FFXI gold (and accounts) for USD. This blew my fucking teenage mind. There are linkshells of hundreds of Chinese players (& bots) that grind 24/7 in the areas with the most expensive loot only to jack up the prices on the server, make more gold, and actually sell that gold back to the players for USD $$$$. This was absolutely bonkers. Why was it bonkers? Well. As leader of a linkshell that was top 0.5% on the server as well as max Craft skill in the 4 most sought after skills (was actually hard and people had to pay high gold prices to craft for high end items) I had a lot of gold to say the least. At one point I had three characters at max gold (99,999,999) as well as a linkshell bank with all the items we accumulated over the years (valued in game ~600,000,000g) At the time on very sketchy run Chinese websites 2,500,000 gold was going for USD$ 80. Player accounts with half the skills and equipment as mine had were auctioning to players in Japan for $7,500+.
I was blown away. Time to double down on this MMO thing and turn it into a business. The server thought we were the big dogs but after realizing this mood blowing news I was just getting started. I studied every monster in game and all their drops and the value of each drop. I networked with all the other linkshells and found out what items they valued the most. My focus was all about what would produce the most in game assets for the linkshell. Lucky I Aced tests in school because no homework would get done from this point on, and my entire focus in class was on my numbers in my notebook, and how I was going to turn this gold into dollars.
Example: For a period of time I would logon and stay in the cities crafting rings to sell on the auction house
Materials 400,000 gold
Makes 12 rings each sell for 80,000 gold
17-25% chance to make a +1 version of the ring which sold for 1,800,000g (or whatever I wanted to sell it for — no one else had my skill cap or amount of gold to sit and make them over and over)
Also people needed things made I would charge 200,000g for the 18 seconds it took me to create it for them.
I could make 4,000,000~6,000,000 per day just chilling in game talking to other people crafting. That’s like $200.
All this while managing rosters and strategies of the linkshell and what areas of the world they were at and what monsters they were fighting. I eventually set up a captain system for things to run a little more smoothly with me off (for a SOCOM commitment, school or whatever reason). This involved putting a lot of trust into two key people that then choose and operated 10 field captains that lead the smaller fights that newer members and lower ranked members needed — this also made a ton of gold for the linkshell bank.
Next was the behind the scenes real nitty gritty part. The dealings and workings with the Chinese underground gold buyers. You see, this is very against the player terms and really any noticed interaction with these Chinese accounts could lead to permanent banning. Most of their supply came from hundreds pf players playing the game for little to no pay for long hours grinding dozens of accounts to end game accumulating gold and assets in the process then selling that at a jacked up price, then selling the end game level account as well, as its hard and time consuming to do all that work and some people opted for a leveled account. As far as my knowledge there wasn’t any other linkshell owner dealing with the gold buyers and supplying them with gold directly.
This was a two step process. First contacting these websites outside of the game and finding someone that could even understand me at all. Then developing trust to even make the first deal. The second step was how we would do the in game transfer without being noticed and banned or deleted. The first step went just as you would think. It took many tries but eventually I found a MMO gold site that sold gold from every MMO website and server.
Oh yeah I thought! There’s 50 other FFXI servers each with its own micro economy and gold worth. Some of which were very behind our growth, some were very ahead. 2.5g was $80 on my server but $116 on another? Hmm. How do I get gold to that server? The plot thickens. Well you have to have a character with decent game progression and you have to pay the game to move your character data to another server. Okay cool, next step was creating a character on every single server and journeying a basic level 1 character to the high level cities where I could access the Auction House and analyze server prices. There I took notes and analyzed prices so I could plan the character transfer to the server with the highest prices for items I could send over. I had some items that didn’t even exist on some servers yet. This research process took the help of 5 buddies and several weeks of planning.
Eventually we were ready for our first transfer. We leveled up and built a respectable alt character. Loaded him with some priceless rings and rare drops as well as 99,999,999g and apply for a server transfer to the most under inflated economy we could. From there we would join a guild and slowly sell off our items without rising any suspicion of how we attained them. After that it was back to the gold seller website to spend days on chat rooms and fielding weird ass phone numbers on my house phone, without raising suspicion from my parents. Eventually we were ready for our first deal of 20,000,000g for $1,200. I made another alt character as was a normal process for people with end game accounts - send over the 20,000,000 - and set up a meet in a very far out low level area that no one would see us make the trade at - the website sent payment via PayPal 10 minutes after I made the trade in game. Mind blown. I took those profits and paid the 19.99 monthly subscription for my 5 officers that helped for the entire year. We were just getting started.
Side note here. Before dev team got wind of the scheme I took advantage of the following for 3-4 months for hours a day: This is where my in server “fame” was created. What I would do here is log on to an alt character that I had made and traveled all the way to the main city where all players would gather. While here they would organize groups, browse the auction house, make deals, craft, and buy/sell/trade on the busy chat. I was a level 1 with one item equipped (the rarest most sought after item of legend — Kraken Club for you that know FFXI) This item was worth far more than the max gold a character could have (99,999,999) so it was basically priceless. For a time only the Japanese linkshell owners or some certain known “gold sellers” had. — So I guess I was figured out at this point.. However I did this anonymously. —— Anyway here’s what I would do. There was a function in the game where you could type “/random” and your character would roll a dice to a number from 1-999. I typed a super long sales pitch and offered any user free gold for rolling numbers. 1-549 was nothing, 550-699 won double, 700-949 was triple, and 950-998 was quadruple, 999 being 5 times their gold in return. Something like that. I tested and changed the exact terms everyday. I was talking with everyone in game and for the first few weeks lost almost 50,000,000 but all the while establishing a name for myself and credibility for people to start betting more and more. Eventually I got ahead and at one point had an entire operation of 4-5 other characters accepting and paying out bets. Shit was absolutely bonkers thinking back knowing this gold had real world value, we were operating a $5,000 a day online casino inside a smal digital FFXI city. It eventually lead to us spending some time in the in game “jail” where a dev with some crazy gear would come chat with you. They were actually impressed and let me keep the gold I had but took the alt accounts of gold I had accumulated from other players. Let’s face it I was the economy at that point in time, the server was buzzing and my linkshell was cruising.
Back to the operation. The linkshell was busy knocking off server firsts and gearing up the bottom ranks and making a name for ourselves in terms off efficiency and being manned deep enough to have a presence at every camp all over the world. We owned the big game for a solid 8 month stretch at one point. We had players from other servers applying to be in our linkshell by the dozen (per day). During this time we were able to run the servers Auction House for the high end crafted items as well as the high end NM drops from our linkshell — Along with the casino mentioned above we were clearing close to 25,000,000 gold per week — Eventually got to know most if not all of the main players from the Chinese gold farming operations, as well as the owners of the largest Japanese linkshells, it was a pretty crazy introduction into International business, which I do a lot of nowadays. Most of our customers were from the Japan server side which added to the equation. (They took the game as serious as us, some players spent thousands of dollars per month on FFXI gold.)
While in our height of operations one of our officers couldn’t help himself and disappeared with two alt accounts and a large sum of gold. We did what we could to recover the accounts but had lost about 1/2 the contents. While not ball bustlingly bad definitely took us by surprise and was a wake up call. At the same time a few our of key players were getting burnt out because there wasn’t much of a challenge left in the game — While at the some time World of Warcraft was coming up strong and pulling more time and attention from our best guys. It didn’t take long for us to realize that this was going to be as big as or bigger than FFXI and we decided to recruit a vast majority of our FFXI crew to WOW and go all-in for a 3 month period, while letting our FFXI attention die down. This is also where voice chat was introduced and used heavily in game play. We started a WOW guild with the same officers in charge, minus our backstabber, and got to work. We studied which classes would play best into end game as the top 5 players, which classes we could carry and play best with our group at the end as leaders going into raids. WOW was a different beast. It was way less open world oriented and more large progression based raid play with up to 40 players at a time, time to truly test my leadership abilities.
Our guild was made up of the most diverse interesting characters you could imagine. Yeah we had a large share of your typical 17-24 year old stoners — they made up the bulk of the squad. But we had some squeakers as well. The coolest part was the 15-20 men that played very reasonable hours but were very good at the harder fights that required skill and focus. We had a police sergeant, a successful real estate agent, two house wives, two firefighters, three college girl roommates, a top scientist from UCLA, a father/son duo, 4 rednecks from Texas (the best guys we had), the craziest person being a brain surgeon from another University in California.
Being at the center of this madness with all 40 people plus 10-15 more members in the channel listening and learning made running raids a very stressful and real situation. The preparation starts hours before we enter the raid with laying out the strategy, getting notes ready, making sure new players will be available and online, making sure everyone new has read appropriate strategies and know what the fuck they will be doing, and choosing which players will be attending. With 100+ total guild members sometimes choosing who got to attend “first team” raids could get dicey. The raids themselves lasted hours and hours usually until the wee hours of the night. We loved the challenge and the ability to do fights at our own pace versus the slower pace of Final Fantasy. There were definitely moments when the game got real and managing those situations were crazy similar to operating in a start up culture. Imagine being in your 6th hour playing on your 10th attempt of a long night to kill a monster that takes the work of 40 players and finally getting it to 1% about to die and your mistake makes the entire team wipe and die. Causing half the guild to logoff in complete shock, anger, and disbelief. Depending on the person this could be incredibly stressful in real life for some people — managing this was what I remember most from running MMO guilds. Some people took this shit way too serious and there were dozens of weirdly serious conversations I had with people to keep them playing and trying. I mean I treated it like a business and still didn’t lose any real sleep at night, but some people really took shit shit serious.
Getting to know each person and their level of interest and commitment along with their personal approach to the game was important for making everyone feel good with their position. This came from implementing very good systems. We had class leaders and ranks, everyone had a sub class, and we alternated groups primarily having myself and the top officers running with the new guys and allowing our main squad to get stronger doing runs without normal leadership.
Most of my playtime was spent sitting in a major city in game doing nothing but typing in the chat answering questions, developing strategies, setting members ranks, briefing new players, interviewing new prospects, and on the microphone talking in chatrooms. This was 6-12+ hours per day, everyday. At the peak of guild play I would be logged in 80-100 hours a week and actually “played” the game maybe 8-12 hours total - the rest of the time was all business.
It took close to three years of grinding but finally during the first major expansion release, our guild was able to take over the title as “#1 Guild on the Server”. The guild bank was loaded, and it was time to start reaching out to our connections in the gold selling world. Yeah you better believe the gold selling bots were back, they seemed even more widespread in WOW. The server system, economy, and auction house systems worked very similar to FFXI as well — with less of a value put on the crafting abilities. Keep in mind WOW had over 11,000,000 monthly users at this time, I was a senior in High School at this time about to graduate.