How to make money playing an MMO: if the developers aren’t too bright

On April 23rd, players of popular browser game Dragon's Call noticed that the chat box present throughout the game was having issues. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it would disappear altogether and, being a key feature of the game, player complained about the inconvenience. It was annoying as hell, of course, but the developers went above and beyond to try and turn their player's attitude around.

Now if you've ever played a free-to-play MMO, you'll know how expensive it can be to buy just about anything in a game. Crystals, experience boosters: there's a reason many of these websites offer payment packages that cost in their hundreds, so offering a $10 compensation pack to every user is a big deal. This is where the "not so bright" comes in.

One user, it's said, created over 90 accounts and for each account, the $10 compensation pack was given. The user would then transfer everything in the compensation pack back into his main account and suddenly became an unstoppable killing machine. He was far from the only one taking advantage of the situation and, after complaints, the mods finally started checking (and more importantly, banning) IP addresses.

And they'd have gotten away with it as well, if it wasn't for those meddlesome kids!