That’s a lot of gold pieces. Gold pieces deleted from UO, that is. Apparently some sort of exploit involving large checks.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the economy with this action. The currency was presumably being hoarded for some reason (else it’d be in smaller denominations than 1,000,000 checks? Or not… see below), so it was largely illiquid. But presumably some amount of this cash was then getting broken up for use on the in-game markets.

It looks like 10,000,000 goes for around $14 these days on eBay. So this was a police action removing $1.5m dollars. Edit: I forgot to multiply by $14. Oops. I guess that puts it at $21,000,000. Good catch, Amaranthar!

And a quick scan of the top auctions seems to show that 10m is the smallest typical amount purchased — all of a sudden checks for 1,000,000gp don’t seem extravagant — they seem like dollar bills.

My kids would flip. Actually, so would I. But it’s up in San Jose. Silicon Valley folks, let me know how it was. 🙂

mmplay – Massively Multiplayer Online Games asked me to do an interview, so I did.

They have it up in German too.

You might start seeing new sigs cropping up. Playerep is a new service that is in beta. Tiny still, but a good idea.