A little background for those in the Dark (you lost souls you), I spend a hell of a lot of time on Ultima Online – UO – an online game which has been around for two years.

Somewhen ago, it became news when a UO account was auctioned off and sold on eBay for US$2000. This figure has popped up a few more times, with cosmic regularity, and eBay now has a category devoted to Ultima Online.

Yes, people pay real money for virtual money. A lot of real money if you throw in virtual realty, since having a castle/keep/house on the limited real estate space on the limited UO servers is a major draw.

In fact, so much real money goes out for its virtual equivalent that, more recently, an Origin (the company behind UO) employee was fired for creating virtual items and selling them off on eBay. $7000 worth of virtual items. In a month.

Now, events in UO have convinced me to sell of my account, and start afresh with a new one. I intend to do this in October, and tonight made a preliminary reconnaissance mission into the dark waters of ignorance by diving straight into eBay.

The main page announced “2,456,342 items for sale in 1,627 categories now! Over 1.5 billion page views per month!”. A search gave me 248 items currently on auction for “ultima online”.

Whoa. Big business.

I went through the motions of creating an account, then I set up an auction for some virtual gold I happened to have lying around the virtual bankbox.

So how does this work ?

eBay serves as a middle man, making money off the sellers, charging $0.25 – $2 to insert an auction, more if you want “highlights” that make your item stand out from the 2.4 million others, and a percentage off your final sale price. Shopping on eBay is free.

The seller can set the auction time at between three to ten days, and, once the auction is concluded, the buyer and seller are to finish business between themselves. The seller can also set the item title, a wordy description, and even a picture.

One of the more interesting aspects of this is “profiles”. When I finished setting up my auction, I found an icon of a pair of shades next to my name, meaning that I am, literally, a shady character, since I have not been using that account name for more than thirty days (and here I was thinking that it meant I was cool).

Besides the shades, you have stars. You earn your first star if you get 10 points worth of comments, posted by other registered users. A positive comment gets you a point, while a negative remark negates a point.

The whole idea of this, taken – I assume – from Usenet’s practice of inserting “references” when trading online, is to give one a trustworthy persona. Would you rather buy something from someone you don’t know, or from someone you don’t know whom five thousand people have said can be trusted?

Obviously, I have distilled advice from this experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Go to eBay, and get your account NOW. You never know when you might want to sell something, and you really do not need the cool shades.

Get all your friends with eBay accounts to say nice things about you, like “Great to deal with. A++++++++++”.

Before you sell anything, check the eBay fee structure, make the most of your money.

And after you create your account, you can go say nice things in my feedback.