Entry 7: Enter the Middleman
Saturday, July 05, 2003, 4:20:11 AM (ScreenShot0100)
Later that night, I found myself alone, camped in the middle of Lok. Every CH remembers this day. You didn’t have any pets yet because you didn’t break into the CH elite profession, so you still found yourself in the middle of nowhere, harvesting mobs. For me, it was a no brainer… langlatch nests. Oldschool CH’s know what I’m talking about. In the first few weeks of launch, langlatches were borked. It was the ultimate jackpot for anyone going the route of Scout/CH/Ranger. The langlatches, because of a coding error, were incredibly slow. It would take them over a minute to get to you. To take advantage, you’d shoot a wild nest once, and a few Langs would pour out. When you picked them off, you’d repeat the process. One nest would yield maybe around 20-30 Langs if you hit it right. The Combat XP (when it was working) was decent, but the real steal was the harvesting XP and the wooly hide.
This is where everything came together for me. It all clicked while I was sitting by myself in that camp that night. I didn’t know it yet, but that harvested wooly hide enabled me to put a price tag on my networking abilities. I now had a commodity that many crafters needed to grind with. And I had an overwhelming abundance of it. I remembered back to the last time I put the stuff on the Theed bazaar… it completely sold before I even got back to the starport. At first, I saw dollar signs in my head… and then the reality hit me. Why sell to random people? I needed to work out a deal with a crafter. And that’s exactly what I did.
Saturday, July 05, 2003, 5:05:27AM (ScreenShot0107)
Darkghosty. Man, I miss that guy. He was the one that was buying my hide the second I dropped it on the Bazaar. He made contact and we made a pact. I’d only sell to him, and we’d agree on a price that was worth my while. And then we made a much better pact as far as I’d concerned. Instead of him giving me credits, he’d pay me in crafted items. And this is how I would tend to operate forever. I rarely had credits on me, but I had everything I ever needed using this method. Darkghosty pretty much made everything I ever wore, all the furniture in my house, harvesters… anything I needed in the early days came from DG.
But there was a catch. He was in (what would one day be) a strict Imperial guild… it was located along the Theed River behind the starport. Me on the other hand… I had already gone Rebel (I wanted Hutt, but that faction didn’t exist). We never met in public after that first meeting. We always met in his lab, away from prying eyes. It was a pain in the ass too, because I was the type of player that was overt 24/7. Overt people of opposing factions couldn’t trade with one another, so I’d have to go covert first… it was probably for the best, showing up in Theed as an overt Rebel in those days was a suicidal concept anyway.
Saturday, July 05, 2003, 6:20:27AM (ScreenShot0115)
A little while later, I got a call from Zox. He was somehow more excited than usual. He mailed me a waypoint and told me to get there as fast I possibly could. He told me to fly into Bestine, an Imperial held city first of all, and then run to the waypoint. So… I flew into Bestine, and when I spawned in the starport the red dots were already coming my way. I mashed the burst run button into a sea of Imperial blaster fire, but it wasn’t aimed at me… the Rebels were attacking from Anchorhead. It was total chaos. I finally made it out of the city, and thanks to my scout modifiers, I was able to get over that first hill without getting noticed. After a minute, I came across a good 20 houses, one of Tatooine’s first player cities. Jarnis, the server’s premiere weapons dealer operated out of this city. I assumed Zox wanted me to meet him at Jarnis’ place to show me a new gun or something. Then I looked at the map… and the waypoint was right outside Wayfar!
Long walks to popular places are interesting when you’re an overt noob. Everyone is pretty much on the same path, meaning that I periodically ran into people on my long walk. And if I die, well I end up back in Bestine, uncloned… so I had to decide to take a longer route and not run in a straight line, or take my changes on the traveled path. I took my chances. So far, no Imperials coming my way. I wanted to hit burst run, but I figured I’d hold onto it in case things looked bad. And they did immediately. Three Imperials emerged in the distance, running right towards me. No big deal, I planned for this, and would burst run off the path and go around. Too bad I didn’t account for the drop spawn of Tusken Raiders that just landed on me. I got some of the burst run off, but the raiders incapped me pretty quickly. You all know what happens next… the Tusken slowly walks over to DB you and send you on a quick ride back to the nearest cloner.
Now you guys are probably thinking “how the hell does he remember this one walk from back in 2003?” Well just as the Sandpeople were about to DB me, they were engaged by the three Imperials I saw. It was a fair fight, but the Imps won. Well, it’s not really a win for me, because it just changes who’s going to DB me, right? Well almost. They gathered around me, and one of them says “what’s the matter Vro, cant hack life off Lok?” I look up, and it was friggin Kastore. He had two Stormtrooper pets with him, and those were the three red dots on my radar. I was never so glad to see that dude, he totally saved me another half hour of running. “Zox is looking for you at the Tusken Camp near Wayfar,” he told me. WTF was the Tusken Camp? Who cares, after what just went down, I was in the mood to dish out some payback. Kastore was going back to his house (same town as Zox, Jarnis, Fuxu, Khan, Rudd… they all lived outside of Bestine), so again I was on my own.
When I arrived, I heard a lot of commotion going on in the distance. I didn’t even get to check out Wayfar, I just ran in, cloned, and ran out the other side. Right down the hill, about 100m away, was the picture above. There were about 20 guys brawling it out with a continuous spawn of Tuskens. It wasn’t very organized, but it was fun as hell, so I jumped right in. Grouping was bugged, so it was every man for himself with harvesting XP… which was all I cared about, because I was like 2000xp away from getting Novice CH. Tusken Banthas were spawning in the mix, so that’s what I was looking out for. By hook or by crook I got my XP, and just as I did, Zox told me that he couldn’t find me in the chaos, and asked me to meet him back up the hill in Wayfar.
Saturday, July 05, 2003, 6:44:27AM (ScreenShot0116)
Zox hit CH before I did. There, I said it. Now my memory is a lil’ foggy, I’m not sure if players were allowed to train one another in Novice Boxes or not… if they were, then Zox trained me in CH, and that Cu Pa was my first pet. If it wasn’t the case, then I had to go back to town to train, and promptly got myself a Cu Pa of my very own. Anyway, back to Zox. He was a CH, but he also had his own methods of getting what he needed… case in point, that droid. I didn’t even know DE’s had grinded that high yet (I think he bought it from Zannex actually)… but Zox knew, and he got himself some muscle when he bought that thing. We were all starting to push into our elite profession boxes, but having pets of any kind was a big help while on hunts.
Saturday, July 05, 2003, 7:27:14PM (ScreenShot0125)
After hitting CH, I (of course) decided to head back to Lok… but not before a quick stop to hang out with my real-life buddies on Rori. Nosun and I were the entertainment of course, Zannex was grinding away having finally broken into DE, and Junon was just about to hit Novice Pistoleer. You can see that I tamed a baby ikopi, but I ended up letting him go on my way back to Restuss because I saw a giant leviasquall that I just had to have (this will make sense a lil later).
But through this picture, you can start to see the number of cliques that I was a part of. You had these guys, my real-life friends who were a lil’ less obsessive, a lil’ more content just hanging out and enjoying the scenery. You had the Transcendents, an established gaming guild that would eventually pass SWG (like most people) in favor of WoW. You had Darkghosty, my personal Architect/Armorsmith/Tailor/whatever else he dabbled in, and of course you had “my guild,” which was Zox, Ciale, Rampage, Kastore, and maybe Fuxu if he was still on Eclipse (he ended up on Scyllia I think). And there were even more than that on top of it.
I was a pretty social fish. Anywhere I ended up, I added the people who seemed cool to my friends list and kept in touch. If I came across an item, or a circumstance, and none of my friends could make use of it, I’d dial up one of these acquaintances and pass it off it to them. Everyone appreciated the gesture, and in doing so I ended up building a network of potential buyers and sellers that I would introduce to one another if the circumstances (and price) were right. That’s right… I’d sell information to people I didn’t know that well (never charged friends of course). If I knew a guy who needed meat, and I knew a guy who was harvesting meat, I’d talk to them both separately, work out the details, and then offer them a chance to have the same kind of relationship that I had with Darkghosty. Now of course, this falls somewhat into the category of role playing, and some people didn’t know what the frig I was talking about. But most people thought it was really cool to use the game like this.
People became business partners this way, they got to meet new people, see one another’s houses, it was a cool way to operate in general. And people were thankful! My name got thrown around even more, and people were now coming to me frequently for pretty much anything. Mostly asking about Lok hunts, but also asking if I knew of anyone who wanted to buy this or that, or know anyone that had a good pistol for sale. And this was the legitimate start of my “Middleman” career. I wasn’t a Droid Engineer, or an Armorsmith, or a Weaponsmith… but I knew who they were and I could direct you to them (remember, no global vendor search… hell some of these guys didn’t even have vendors). And those guys all thanked me for the referrals. If anything, I was an “information broker.” And soon, I’d blend it all, involve all the cliques, both factions, all the people I met, and create a giant web of transactions that actually had curriers deliver items to the doorstep of anyone that had just about any request. All you needed was to know my name. I wasn’t great at anything, but I was “good” at everything, and the one thing I could depend on was that I had great people around me, and if I planned it, they could make it happen. It wasn’t about making credits, it was about helping the fledgling economy get rooted, before the impending credit dupe inflation hit and threw the economy out of balance forever.