Being in the market as we were, it was quite an obvious move to make when a seller would get some sort of single source supplier who could meet all their needs. This is something which happens in games like World of Warcraft, where one supplier might cover all servers with 400 Chinese employees paid low wages to play the game and farm coin for hours and days at a time at a steady rate. EQ has never had that "problem" and even if so, they would be limited to making platinum in the bazaar, as EQ is not modeled as such that you can make money by farming monster kills and getting plat from NPC vendors. This was not a possibility, as a mass influx of chinese farmers would also be noticed within game, unless they were doing Dragons of Norrath crystals, in which case there is not sufficient market for crystals only, in order to supply what this seller needed.

Besides, crystals were a big part of what we sold, and nobody was selling close to as many as we did, not even 10% of as many as we did. As a matter of fact, being in this business we were required out of necessity to know the best places and items to sell for money, and not one of those areas had anyone or anything that could come close to what we were doing.

The general consensus was that this supplier got ahold of a dupe somehow, or they had a supplier who had one. When I say dupe I mean any hack, or macro or any way for someone to get money for nothing in game, and certainly something which is not "available to everyone."

We didn't fuss too much about it, though. We adjusted to the prices, kept a watchful eye out for any other issues, and kept up business as usual.

Until September / October. This is when the major problems started. Two new sellers appeared on the auction sites. These sellers were unknowns, new accounts who had millions upon millions of platinum for sale across any and all servers at crazy pricing. Their price? $25 per 100k if you haggled a bit with them, and they could give you as much as you wanted. 10 million wasn't an issue. 20 million? not a problem. In addition to these two sellers, old time sellers who had been gone since the last dupe era in 2003, and had not sold platinum since then, suddenly re-opened shop with millions per server. The amount available per server shot up from a typical million or 2 million listed at a time, to nearly 30 million platinum listed at a time. This all happened within a week. Resellers dropped their buy prices by 30%.

And it stopped again within 3 or 4 weeks. They disappeared, dried up, gone overnight. We honestly figured it had been fixed. But sure enough within the week the "G" named seller had millions per server for sale, and even more of it than they had before. They still denied all sales TO them but they had as much as you wanted to buy from them, and they had a new low price. After a couple weeks the other sellers started reappearing with similar pricing, and it has remained that way to this day. At times they get banned, then they come back. They formed a sort of conglomerate, and they keep in contact and fix prices so they are not competing too much with each other or completely killing off the market, which as they like to point out, they could if anyone wanted to mess with them, as "we can sell it for $1 per 100k and make money, just keep that in mind" which was mentioned to me when I tried to list up at a price less than theirs.

This has been going on for 3 months now, for the most part unchecked. SOE is aware of an issue, but seems unable to find out what it is and put a stop to it. They do ban the seller accounts from time to time (although it appears they have not since before Christmas) but it is really fruitless to do so as the sellers are back up again the next day with tens of millions available for sale. They can't ban an account which these guys have not yet created, and if it's some sort of hack that SOE has not yet found, all these guys have to do is fire up an account, dupe up 20 million, and they are good for a week until SOE gets back around to catching that account. At like $10? per account, plus a game card, I doubt they care other than a minor nuisance when one gets banned.

I find it absolutely amazing that SOE does not know what this is and how to stop it. I can't imagine they don't want to stop it. But I also have to wonder if they are taking it as seriously as it really is. No it's not a case of a bunch of kids running around buying up all the ornate armors and high end items with duped plat, pushing prices through the roof, but it is and will continue to speed inflation within the game, as the platinum entering the game in this fashion is not gotten by killing monsters or trading in the bazaar. The higher the amount of plat in the game is, the more they will need to design more plat sinks in the game be they tradeskills which cost huge amounts to skill up, or armor pieces which require you buy expensive components from NPC vendors.