Or RuneScape.

aj_icracked 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I just laughed out loud. My friends and I LOVED RuneScape in middle school. I'll meet yall in the wilderness to trade armor.

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JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe every generation feels this. But I really think ours lucked out. We were shielded by childhood from the worst of the early times and then bolstered with past success for the worst of the later times.

	▲	spaceribs 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was big into the WC3 custom maps community back in the day, the idea that you could make money doing any of this was silly. The point when I was growing up was two things: 1. Make something fun to play 2. Make something I could put into my college portfolio I did both things, but it was never about making money or being exploited, and I think I prefer that.

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hsuduebc2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I love the comeback of old school RuneScape! The good kind of nostalgia.

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Ameo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So true. A member of the clan I was in was operating a proper hedge fund, taking in investments from the clan and using it to flip on the Grand Exchange. Iirc he was even doing sorts of arbitrage, market making, and other advanced stuff.

Now he works at Google doing quantum computing research lol

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monster_truck 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Used to sell cooked lobbies to friends for cash back in the first few years of RuneScape. Good times

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Jabrov 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

RuneScape millionaires?

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jonasdegendt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There were dozens of ways to make money off of RuneScape back in the day. Selling bot scripts, running bot farms (this is still very lucrative to this day), running gambling rings, bulk buying gold and reselling, the list goes on.

The ecosystem was incredible and it was basically a crash course in Anarcho-capitalism, I'm pretty immune to any kind of scam because of having been in that environment.

I made close to 20 grand as a 16 year old through some bug abuse, over the course of 2 weeks if I recall. But alas, I blew it pretty quickly because easy come, easy go.

	▲	isolli 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I probably lack imagination, but how would gambling work in this game?

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draftsman 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

RuneScape private servers used to bring in tons of money. I helped manage one when I was in my early teens, and I can confirm the owner (who was only a few years older than I) was bringing in mid six-figures annually.

Then of course there was the rampant gambling. The founders of online casino Stake and streaming platform Kick both started their “careers” in RuneScape gambling. IIRC they invented “staking” which was a method of gambling gold against other players, before they were banned. But the gambling economy in RuneScape used to IRL mint millionaires for sure.

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quackware 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Staking was a built in feature of RuneScape in the duel arena before it was removed. They did not "invent" it themselves.

	▲	jonasdegendt 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They did run a dicing clan as well, FWIW, although I doubt they were the first to do it.

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JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I had swim teammates who made at least hundreds of thousands minting and selling autominers on eBay. I assume if I knew a couple who did that well some made millions.