The Alphaville Herald

Interview with a Money Trader

by Alphaville Herald on 21/11/03 at 11:54 pm

In this post, I initiate what I hope to be the first of many interviews with a TSO player and money trader, who will remain anonymous for obvious reasons. Let’s just call him… “TSO Power Player” (or TPP for short).

Urizenus: First question: what is your occupation
TPP: TSO
TPP: no joke.
TPP: TSO IS my rl job.
Urizenus: but what do you do in TSO
TPP: alot of transfers and trades. and answering questions with my overwhelming amount of TSO knowledge.
Urizenus: I know you don’t get paid for answering questions and I know you don’t charge for transfers, so is the income coming from trades?
Urizenus: what I mean is, you sell simoleans. Is that your only source of income?
TPP: yes. i have no job in RL. medical prevents me currently. plus clients through my business pays alot more than any job i could get. it’s even better too because i get anywhere from 25-35% more on conversion from US dollar.
Urizenus: Can I ask you how much you make selling simoleans?
TPP: not as much as some of the long established really big players now. but i manage a few 100 US or so a week after splitting 50% with my equal partner
Urizenus: Any idea how much the big players make?
TPP: 1000′s of US per week for sure.
Urizenus: just working TSO?
TPP: oh yeah. it’s BIG business for some. some have lists with over 1000 customer names on them. and several high end PC’s churning out 100′s of millions of simoleans per week.
Urizenus: 100s of millions of simoleans. Do they do this by exploiting flaws in the programming or just by working standard money objects

TPP: it’s all done through auto mazing. it’s the preferred and best way.
Urizenus: does that mean it’s by exploiting flaws?
TPP: auto mazing is done by super fast maze bots, and no it’s not exploiting flaws, it’s just working something that is already there much faster than you could do it manually.
Urizenus: so high end maze bots are the principle simolean generators as far as you know.
TPP: yep. the occasional large exploits are not worth the risk. you are easily caught. but you do get a few who appear and try to make a few bucks as exploits come and go.
Urizenus: About how many customers have you supplied with simoleans?
TPP: no comment. it’s a fair size number that is steadily increasing tho. Urizenus: do you have one supply partner or several
TPP: just 1. seeking more possibly as demand continues to grow
Urizenus: and obviously your supply partner has mazing operations in several cities
TPP: obviously
Urizenus: I see you are selling exotic pets now too. Are there dedicated suppliers for those, or do you just buy them where you find them.
TPP: no dedicated suppliers for those. just get em where i find em. or off friends. but there are plans in progress to have a tool to automate the painful searching process for rare pets too. so you don’t get carpal tunnel or RSI from all the excessive clicking required and thus sue maxis for game related injuries. LOL
Urizenus: what are the rare breeds and what are the going prices for them?
TPP: breeds are St Bernards, Tigers, Cheetahs and Afghan Dogs. going prices are whatever you want. but Tigers have been seen on eBay for going for $US100 or more. They are super rare.
Urizenus: once the search process is automated should we expect the price of these animals to drop rapidly?
TPP: possibly. but not straight away. they would still take some time to find. as the odds would not change just the search rate would be a bit quicker
TPP: and would still require alot of simoleans to find them with.
Urizenus: True. Can you turn an ok profit on the rare breeds? Why don’t people just sell these on ebay
TPP: no, there is just not enough stock to turn a good profit from pets yet. and people do sell them on ebay. just look there. alot of listings.
Urizenus: Back to simoleans, it seems to me that the value of the simolean relative to the dollar is sinking like a rock. In the 80 days I’ve been on I’ve seen the price of a million simoleans go from 40 US to 8 US. Where does this bottom out?
TPP: back in the early days it used to be as high as $100US per million. of course this was more than 6-7 months ago or in the first few months of this year (it’s hard to remember now). i believe there is no bottoming out for it, but that $10 per single mill is the lowest before it just get’s insane and you make too little to matter. drastic undercutting only leads to short term gain and then nothing.
Urizenus: If you ran Maxis what would you do to control the monetary supply?
TPP: if i ran Maxis, TSO would be alot better. lol. and no comments on how to control the simolean overload. why would i put my industry outta business? lol
TPP: they pay some of their staff peanuts, and the rest bananas i think.
Urizenus: ahem, are you calling the Maxis staff a bunch of monkeys? LOL
TPP: well someone has been making bad decisions over there. lol.