Entry 13: Pets and Profits
Tuesday, July 15, 2003, 3:51:10 AM (ScreenShot0272)
On the way out of Nosun’s door, I was presented with a something I’d never see again. A baby dalyrake was just standing there, all by itself. It’s highly unusual to come across a baby in the wild without a pack of the same species surrounding it… but this lil’ girl, for some reason, was just sitting there in the bushes. I decided to adopt her, named her “Lain,” and had her forever. Don’t ask me how I knew it was a girl… CH’s just know these things. Kind of like Homer, Lain wasn’t much of a fighter, but she was cool to leave on my front doorstep to let people know I was home.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003, 3:51:10 AM (ScreenShot0273)
Ahh, the “Battleground,” I believe it was called? I can’t remember because the devs never even friggin turned them on to my recollection. These things were borked from day one. The PVP community was super pissed, but eventually let the gripe go because, as we would all learn, the SOE dev team had a lot to tackle. But on top of them not working, the turrets would sporadically fire off rounds at passersby. Warbucks was notorious for getting laid out by this anomaly, which is possibly the reason why he’s only made one screenshot in the story so far.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003, 3:59:12 AM (ScreenShot0275)
Ballrog, almost fully grown by this point, overlooks Coronet from a distance. The Rebellion used this city (along with Anchorhead) as a general base of operations. We’d run Rebel terminal missions in groups, or solo. What that meant was, although the Imperials could shuttle in and siege the major player populated areas of Coro, they would have a hard time regrouping because of so many Rebels nearby in the field. On top of that, once they did take the city, the Rebels would organize via private comm channels, and attempt to repel the attack. The same can be said of Theed & Bestine for the Imperials. You could take those cities, but they had a lot of stragglers running missions, so if they had someone to coordinate them, they’d eventually send you packing.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003, 4:11:21 AM (ScreenShot0276)
As I arrived in Coronet, I met my first Bio-Engineer. To be honest, I didn’t, and still don’t know all of their capabilities. What I did know was this guy would most likely benefit from my wheeling and dealing. I’m not sure if he stuck around or not, but as you can see from the chat spam, I was always offering a hand to fledgling entrepreneurs. I asked him what he was able to do, and then I passed that info on to everyone I know who I thought might be interested. I would do this a dozen times a day. If I saw someone with an interesting title, I’d ask him what he did. If I saw someone griding a mob that I knew was dropping quality harvestables, I’d ask him if he wanted to make a deal. Most of these guys were just throwing it up on the bazaar anyway. Why not get them involved in the bigger money, or just buy it from them and resell it if they were lazy or didn’t “get” the concept of networking.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003, 4:11:21 AM (ScreenShot0277)
Entertainers were now Dancers and Musicians. Some even mastered their professions by this time. I was still a low level Entertainer myself, but I was slowly dropping skill boxes because I was approaching both Master Pistoleer and Master CH. It never stopped me from hitting up any cantina that had people in it though. Cantinas were where the real information was. These people heard everything. They knew about everyone’s travels. I would group up with them, and sometimes just keep quiet and read the group chat, extracting valuable nuggets of interest. A high-quality meat spawn on Rori? An awesome spawn of copper on Yavin? Imperial movements in Talus? And the biggest one of all… Baz Nitch missions on Dathomir were bugged, letting you hit their nest a few times, and paying you the credits without ever having to engage any of the mobs. All this information would show up on my chat and then get filtered to Flo or Ramp or whoever else could keep a secret and profit off it. And the entertainers? I tipped the shit out of them.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003, 6:00:32 PM (ScreenShot0278)
I actually remember this conversation really well. Chat was bugged and people were coming up as “SOMEBODY” instead of their real name. Needless to say, it made my business life an effin nightmare. I was trying to hook up Darkghosty and Florian for a while, but it wasn’t easy. Alistea was no fan of the Imperial cause, but Flo knew Darkghosty was a good guy, and a personal friend of mine, so they had to find a way to interact without drawing attention. I’m sure poor Nosun did a lot of running around that day.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003, 12:43:09 AM (ScreenShot0281)
Darkghosty’s “brother,” Evilghosty wanted help getting some XP. His “brother” turned out to be an alt. DG was the first person I knew that had multiple SWG accounts. He didn’t tell me for a good couple of months, but when I found out I was kind of floored. I never even thought about having two subscriptions. In my mind, I loved what I did, so I didn’t want to do anything different. But it made sense, because other than playing on two servers, the only way you could craft and be a good combatant was to have alt accounts. If you wanted to gear your combatant with your crafter, then playing on two servers would be of no help to you.
Wednesday, July 16, 2003, 12:59:59 AM (ScreenShot0283)
Yes the ground rumbled wherever I went. Yes, I lagged out people with crappy rigs. No, I do not feel bad!
Wednesday, July 16, 2003, 1:40:51 AM (ScreenShot0285)
Is it starting to look repetitive? By now, I could grab a few random guys at the starport, they would pay me to bring them on a kimo hunt, and I would just stand off in the distance and let Ballrog & Rain screw around in the fight. It was almost disrespectful to the kimogilas to be honest. What was once something that shook fear and inspired awe now was something of a casual dealing for me. It was almost like I owned all of Lok sometimes. I was making cash just by standing on the damn planet. It started going to my head. In my mind, Nym was going to be answering to Vroflus soon. Things were escalating, we were about to be the first official guild on Lok, yet another reputational triumph to lord over the noobs.
But it didn’t happen like that what so ever…