I want his gold! :(

This gives new meaning to the weight of one fuckton...

what a random ass number.

More like one metric failureton...

That comes to about $9,660 according to IGE.

Wait . . . WoW money can translate into real actual money?

I'm not being sarcastic here . . . I honestly have no idea.

@La Sepultura:

SELL DUDE SELL!

Nah, not in favor of gold farming ... but that is a lot of gold. WoW!!! Literally!

@EvoAnubis: You can buy wow gold, so I guess it can convert to real money.

Makes sense - it's exactly 2^31 copper, which is the limit of a signed 32-bit integer.

Why they didn't make it unsigned, I have no idea...

That guy/girl should sell it and partner.....since they obviously haven't been doing anything for quite some time...

@EvoAnubis: Yeah, some people pay REAL money for digital money to buy digital itmes with, if only the same worked with Monopoly money, I'd be rich, I've been hoarding that stuff for years.

@mishakoz: That number is hardly random. It's 2^32 / 2, which is 2,147,483,648... the maximum value a signed integer can hold (actually, it's that minus 1). I'm just surprised they didn't use an unsigned integer... is it really possible to have negative gold?

@Spallywag: Pay real money for fake money to buy fake shit? Man . . . no wonder I heard about people laundering money in MMOs . . . I laughed when I read about that, but I guess they were actually serious.

@psycoking: That's . . . interesting. Um, really . . . wow. Using real money to buy fake money.

Must be the biggest shut-in ever. I have a friend that plays 24/7 it seems since it came out and he doesn't leave his house now.

@mishakoz:

It's not random!

214748g 36s 48c
2147483648 = 2^31

Did anyone else check out his armory page? Or am I the only one that bored?

1G=100S
1S=100C
214748*100
21474800
21474800+36
21474836
21474836*100
2147483600
2147483600+48
2147483648

2147483648=0x80000000

tl;dr=Max Gold in WoW is half of the max permited by 4-bytes of data.

@Yoshi3gg: Odd that they would use a signed int when you can't actually have negative money... can you?

It's not a random number.
They're storing the gold value as a 32-bit signed integer.

Some guilds have bank characters (which is most likely what the two players who reached the limit are.) Basically, anything that couldn't be distributed to the guild would go to the bank character to store or sell. Then if a guild member needed materials, items or gold, they could just go to the bank character.

I haven't played WoW in over a yeaer, but I remember one of the top guilds had a bank player go awol and sell his character along with all the guild's savings. For real moneys that is. Around the time I quit they were talking about adding actual guild banks, dunno if they got around to it.

Impressive number but I am saddened by the fact this was achieved from somebody destroying their life, well at least few years of it..

@EvoAnubis:

Is it any different that buying DLable content for console games now?

Other than the unethical and against games rules aside, but in general of buying virtual content.

@bluecell: There are guild banks nows. They just added them last month.

@doing: Someone already mentioned it was probably a guild bank character, so it's more likely that the effort was split up between 8-64 people.

Uh, actually, the gold limit is 213748 gold, 36 sil and 47 copper.

The largest number that can be held in a x bit number is (2^x) - 1. The largest 4 bit number is 2^4 - 1 = 15, for example.

They use a signed integer number probably because they figured "Hey, no one's going to get 200k gold on one character, and using a signed int will make coding this a little bit simpler". I use signed ints in places where I probably should use unsigned ints or shorts. It's a stylistic choice when it doesn't affect anything.

@Wraithfighter: "using a signed int will make coding this a little bit simpler"

is typing "unsigned" really that hard?

they most likely store the data in a 32 bit signed integer, which has a maximum size of 2147483647. So the actual cap could potentially be 214748 gold, 36 silver and 47 copper, or they use that last byte for something else

@psycoking: Cool.

@EnigmaNemesis: The difference is that DLC is a provided extra. When buying things for WoW and other MMOs, you're purchasing things that are completely accessible to you already. You're not spending money on something to add to the game, you're spending money to save time and effort in attaining something that is already made available for free.
You're just lazy.
And presumably rich.

@bluecell:

True!

This is old. The limit was reached by someone last year (I forget when abouts, but was at least 4 months ago), guess not alot of people noticed it.

Not to take away from this story, but the max amount of silver and copper you can have is actually 99 (obviously). It just so happens that richest you can ever be has 36 silver and 47 copper at the end (ie, the most silver/copper you can hold while simultaneously holding the most gold). Semantics, I suppose.

The limit is to be expected, since it's a typical programmer's choice. But what's ridiculous is that someone accomplished the maximum. Insane.

Can I have your gear?

WoW! What a rich loser...

Another good example of how one can be a loser and a winner at the same time.

If you buy gold (real money for fake money) you are, in fact, buying time: the time you spend in daylies, or time in farming... it's a shortcut to get something (items, mounts, profession lvl...).

I'm against gold sellers/buyers, btw.

@bluecell: It's their money, let them spend it how they like

If you give this dude 2 cents. his gold will result on -1 pennys.

2147483647 + 2 = -1

I could finally get my mongoose enchants with cash like that... two even! Wouldn't have much left though...

@bluecell: erm spending money on fake stuff you can readly get by working for it in the game = EA new Pay for Cheat Code and pretend to be DLC plan

So I'm wondering, did this guy play WoW 24/7 to rake in such amounts or did he go about it in a much more efficient way?
I'm guessing the latter but does anyone have an idea?

Seriously, how are some of you people completely unaware that people use real money to buy in game money? It's been going on for years and sure as hell didn't start in WoW.

Geez and I would have thought that it would be closer to a mil....

But I some of highly doubt that this person grinded all that money.

I'm definitely curious as to why they made it a long as opposed to an unsigned long (if they did it in oldskool c++).

@EvoAnubis: In a word, yes. It takes time to cultivate the gold and we all know that time is money. In this game gold can actually buy items that are incredibly hard to obtain in the game and because of this are worth more than just the powers or whatever that it gives you. If it took me 10 hours to get something and I make 8 dollars an hour that item could potentially have a real world value of around 80 dollars. Now, that isn't exactly how it works (and I should mention that I have never played WoW) but that is the idea.

I recommend reading "Play Money" which really delves into these things. Its a good read.

@pepote: Are you against rich people too? Just because I can buy a Ferrari doesn't mean I have the skill to operate one. Same goes for gaming. Just because you can buy something, doesn't mean it will have any real value to you if you don't know how to master it.

By keeping it as a signed int doing calculations becomes easier as you can deal with negative numbers. For example, if I had 4000 copper (really money is being stored as how much copper you have) and I want to buy something worth 4200 copper, you can test that as if (4000-4200 > 0) {} or if (4000-4200 < 0) {}, etc. If that was an unsigned than the result would be 4294967096 copper, as it would overflow. Yes you could use an unsigned int and have a max twice as large, but by using an int you are covered in all cases. No need to worry about overflow. Besides, 214748 gold is an exceedingly large amount of gold.

Galewind: c++ isn't old school. It's what just about every video game out there is currently being coded in. It is fast, it is stable, and just about every developer worth hiring knows it. And yes, WoW is written in C++, both server and client.

@galewind: If you have ever played WoW, you wouldn't put it passed them. They had reimplemented the same bug on a boss at least 7 times that I can recall through new patches. (Shade of Aran flame wreath triggering on pets.) Horrible oversights in coding is common place for WoW programmers.
Properly planning which variables to use was something I learned in my third semester of being a computer science major. I was an avid WoW player and have turned in to just a casual player. It's really pathetic and amazes me how much WoW players put up with..

@Bleentastic: Actually I'd liken it more to the DLC Need for Speed cars in the PSN store

this toon should stop hoarding the gold, and start pwning the horde on bg...

@pocketcowboy: He is horde: An Undead priest on the Illidan server.

He's also the guild leader of one of the top 10 WoW guilds in the world and they routinely sell runs for loot, making 1000's of gold week.

Wow.. and I thought I had no life..

@Yoshi3gg: Damn, beat me to it. To explain...in games, the limits are generally powers of two because of the way binary works.

It's a pretty simple concept, the highest possible value for a 32 bit integer is 2147483647, it's also the problem with the Y2K38 problem when the epoch oversteps this bound.

Man, I could definitely buy all the primal fire I need for my spellfire/spellstrike set if I had that much gold...I'd even give some to Whoneversleeps for his mongoose enchants.

Why is this 2147483648 instead of 2147483647? Zero is one of the 2^31 'positive' values that a number can take on, and therefore the actual number 2^31 should not be included in the range of values ( [0,2^31-1] ). Did they use the representation 0x8000 as the limit and do away with hex representation after that, as there are no negative g/s/c values in this game?

Since there are no negative money values in this game, the programmers should have used a unsigned value instead, giving the game a hard limit of 2^32-1 instead, but I don't think they ever expected anyone to even reach 2^31.

Well that's a sight better than the max 255 rupees in Zelda.

I remember waiting in the Wii line in front of Best Buy. The guy that had the fire (I called him "fire guy Brian") was all into WoW and he was talking about how he'd play the auction house to make the monies. Blizzard emailed him making sure that his abundant sum was not bought from gold farmers.

I guess it means something when you have the dedication to make that much fake money in a game. Probably something to do with how little you go outside. (Course fire guy Brian had a girlfriend and I don't. Shows how much one can gain by staying away from MMOs...)

@WhiteTree: My guess is that this is to make it so it could be used in conjunction with other signed ints. In addition, unsigned ints are actually troublesome for certain programming tasks, such as a loop which decrements the variable and checks if it's >= 0 (will always be true), even worse if you're not decrementing by 1. Also, if used in conjunction with signed ints, I believe the default C behavior is to cast the unsigned int to a signed int, which causes a horrible mess because it keeps the bits the same, which means for numbers with the most significant bit set, the result will be negative.
I actually had a professor tell us just yesterday that "just because a number doesn't need to be signed doesn't mean that it should be unsigned. In this case, it seems like the gold cap is high enough either way, so there's no real reason to use a signed int, but many not to.

precisely 80 million in hex. (just used silver and copper as additional numbers since each additional is 100 of the previous)

an addendum to the previous, I know it's not really million, I just used that to give an idea of the 0's I'd left off.