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While wandering the net one fine evening (actually on the shitter at work while on my PDA) I discovered "The Great Scam". A story about achievements, greed, deception and a little game called Eve-Online. In other words a great little story.
This story has nothing to do with me (wirm) or any one i know for that matter. Was just something I found, liked, and figured what the fuck might as well buy a cool domain (update 4/14/09 shutdown the domain mirror it here now wirm.net/nightfreeze) and mirror it. So I did.
I changed nothing cept for adding a ">>Next" to the bottom of the pages to help navigate.
So here it is.. The Great Scam.
________________________________________________________
This is a
story of deception, intrigue, and doublecrossing. It is a
story of liars, bandits, and greed. It is a story of the worst
of the human condition, and how the motive for profit will
drive a normally nice guy to the deepest depths of evil and
betrayal.
This is the story of my life in Eve Online.
Eve Online is a space-based MMORPG with a level of depth and
breadth that blows games like Shadowbane and City of Heroes
out of the water. It is also a beautiful game, with glaring
suns, shining stars, and exorbitant ship detail. Beneath its
gilded beauty, though, there lies a poorly designed game which
rewards the greedy and violent, and punishes the hardworking
and honest; and if you think about it, that's a good
representation of capitalism. I first started playing Eve a
few weeks before it came out, in April 2003, and quickly
picked up the essentials of the game. This would prove
invaluable later on, since Eve was released with a
money-making loophole that gave me the opportunity to make the
starting capital I would need to successfully pull off what
was probably the biggest scam in the game.
Unfortunately, in order to reach the point where you can revel
in a deep and absorbing level of gameplay, you need to have
credits. Lots and lots of credits. And you couldn't easily get
credits by killing NPC enemies, or "pirates" as the game
designers labeled them, because these pirates would either
spawn in huge overpowered groups capable of ganking even the
best equipped mid-level ships in under a second, or they would
spawn so far apart and drop such shitty loot that the idea of
killing them for profit was ridiculous.
Since crafting was never really my style, building ships and
then selling them was out of the question. This left me with
two options: I could run trade routes, or I could mine
asteroids.
The entire concept of mining in Eve consists of pressing Ctrl
+ F, finding an asteroid, then auto piloting your ship over to
it and watching little pebbles of rock float into your ship
from the asteroid; you would then wait 5-10 minutes for the
asteroid to dissolve, and do the same thing, over and over,
for hours on end, until your ship was full of space pebbles.
You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same
price that an illiterate slave would have received for an
ounce of cotton. In case you haven't deduced by now, mining in
Eve Online is about as fun as fucking a fat chick's festering
corpse.
Running trade routes, unlike mining, actually involved a
degree of intelligence and acumen. The basic premise of a
trade route was to bring low priced materials from one sector
of the galaxy to another sector where they would sell for a
high price. Buy low, sell high. With a big ship, the right
kinds of goods, and the knowledge of which routes were
profitable and which were dry, a person could make tens of
millions of credits in a night's work. For a short while, I
was one of those people.
My first few weeks after the release of Eve were boring ones.
I would log on after school, mine pebbles for hours with my
best friend Trazir, and then sell those pebbles to NPC vendors
for scant amounts of money. My labors were not without a goal,
however; after talking to some extremely successful people in
the game, and doing research on the various ship types, Trazir
and I set a goal for ourselves: To collectively possess two
million credits by the end of our second week. We would use
this money to buy an industrial ship, cargo expanders, and two
of the ever-essential micro warp drives, or MWDs. The
industrial ships in Eve, or "indies", were huge. They could
carry a gargantuan amount of cargo, made even larger by cargo
expanders, and were relatively inexpensive to buy. This big
cargo space made it possible to transport ample quantities of
goods and make a large profit.
There was just one problem: Indies were slower than fucking
hell when they weren't in warp drive, and therefore they were
prone to destruction at the hands of pricks who camped at warp
gates and PKed innocent traders. This was where the MWDs came
in; if you came upon some unsavory characters upon leaving
warp drive near the warp gate, you would turn on the MWDs and
blast away to safety. I cannot even begin to recall the number
of times that my life was saved thanks to my trusty MWDs. By
this point, I had a pimped out indy with cargo expanders and
several MWDs. The only problem was that I was broke again; I
sure as fuck wasn't gonna make much money as a trader if I
didn't have any credits to buy trading goods in the first
place. So, I did what any business major would do when looking
to start an intergalactic enterprise:
I took out a loan.
Over the course of my short-lived mining career, I met a guy
named "HardHead" who frequented the same asteroid field that I
did each night. After a few hours of in-game chatting, I got
his ICQ number and talked to him on a semi-regular basis. His
real name was Vinnie, and he was one of those uber-nerds with
4 computers running the same game at once; he told me about
how he set up mining macros on his other 3 computers and made
about 250,000 credits of pure profit each night by simply
leaving his computers running. This intrigued me, and he even
sent me the program he used called "EZmacro", but alas, I was
far too lazy to ever record a macro and make sure it ran
perfectly. HardHead's masochism paid off in generous dividends
though; while Trazir and I were dumpster-shit broke, HH had
close to 6 million credits. I told him about my trade route
ideas, about how if he invested in me I would make him into a
virtual Donald Trump. I fed him the finest bullshit cuisine on
this side of the Atlantic, spooning it down his throat one
gentle swallow at a time. By the end of the night, my credit
count read "3,000,017". I went to sleep contented, fully
intending to pay back HardHead's money with a healthy
spattering of interest.
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