There weren’t established rules in the ye olden days of MMORPGs. No company yet knew the lengths they had to go through to increase and maintain a large population of their games. Few MMOs now allow you to kill and steal items from other players. Most people just aren’t up to dealing with the level of paranoia you have to maintain to keep your belongings in a game where people can take your valuables you worked so hard to get. But, there is a unique satifation that comes from robbing the shit out of people in a game. My introduction to the Wild West of MMOs was UO, Ultima Online. I have more fond memories from UO than all other MMOs combined since.
So, I never played any of the Ultima series. UO was my first jump into this universe. I remember the first day we played UO. Iceman(you only get online handles suckas) just got finished installing it on his computer, and we hurried and started it up. Oh god, the login screen is burnt into my memories forever. Enjoy that shit:
We created his character and loaded into the world. We were in a building. That was it. No instructions. Why don’t more games throw you into the deep end and let you figure out how to swim? Anyways, we found out that we started in an inn. A place where you can log out instantly. Cool. Walking around town we see a doe. We attack and start punching the doe. The combat music kicks in and the punching continues. Turns out our character had zero skill in Wrestling, unarmed combat, so we weren’t really hurting the deer, but unknown to us because we didn’t know how to get life bars to show or that the even existed, we hear “UURRGGGG!!!” while the screen faded to black. We died. Bambi done wooped our ass.
Click to Enlarge
We had some shit to learn. It was amazing. Games need to stop holding your hand in an attempt to get more players. I got to play some time later after my parents bought me a PC, Sony Vaio. I knew I liked the game, but I feel in love with it when I was running outside of the main town, Britain, out pasted the graveyard after I had spent several hours in town learning the game and buying stuff I needed when I see a red player name, Lord Yoda, pop up on my screen. Red? What the fuck does that mean. So far everyone’s name was blue. Lord Yoda runs up to me and stops. He clearly sees that my newbie no-horse-ridin’ ass is brand new. “Corp Por” he says. I lightning arc shoots from his hands to me and explodes. “UURRGGGG!!”, I’m dead, and he loots what little I had on me and runs off. I knew at that moment what I wanted to do. I was going to kill and take shit from other people. And, I think I did pretty well.
None of the “Soulbound” crap that plagues MMOs today. Hell, you can’t even give items away anymore much less take them from people. I didn’t have to farm 4th level Hythloth’s Daemon room for hours and hours for profit. I could just run up on and kill the person that farmed it for hours and take their stuff. A kill like that could feed my ass with reagents for a month. Plenty of UO violence to blog if I need to post something. UO is a sandbox game though, and I didn’t have to kill for profit. Today’s story is on request.
The lengths I would go through to not have to earn shit myself in UO was limitless. On my original shard, Sonoma, I was what was known as a noto-pk. I would skirt the lines on becoming a wanted murderer so that I would still go into towns without the guards killing me. This really isn’t that important to this story other than the fact that it establishes that I’m an asshole in video games. What’s important about Sonoma is this is where I meet Novas. She was some lady that played the game in Canada. At least, that’s what I was told.
Regardless of who she was in real life, her avatar in the game was loaded. I’m talking multiple houses and shit. I was always poor. Murdered people that I thought had valuables on their character when I killed them. I would live off of my plunder until I was poor once again. I wanted a taste of the easy life. So, I tried and tried to get Novas to marry me in game. I was gold diggin’ every time I saw her in game. I was offering myself up as a virtual boy toy on a silver platter. To Novas credit, she sniffed my true intentions from a mile away. She never would marry me in game. I was destined to always be penniless. Novas did however invite me into her guild on the Siege Perilous shard.
To sum up Siege Perilous, it was a shard with a much harder ruleset. NPC vendors would not buy from you, and they sold their goods at 10x the normal shard pricing. Skills would get much slower when you hit a certain point compared to other shards. Simply put, Siege Perilous was a much hard shard than regular ones. The harshness of the server created the best play run community compared to any other shard. I might write about this later. Today we talk about the guild Blood Clan, BLD, on Siege Perilous. It’s an old site so most of the links are broken, but the screenshot page seems to be fine. What’s important about this guild that Novas invited me into was that they were considered one of the “good guys” on Siege Perilous. Well, I could tell from the start that I didn’t jive well with these people, but we’ve already established that I’m an in game ass-hat that was looking for a free ride. Siege Perilous was a hard shard to break into especially without the support of a guild.
So I got accepted into the BLD made friends with one of the members named Laird Bane. I never really knew the guild master. Glendor or something. I wanted to keep myself small. Just another faceless member of the guild. Because, they were all nice people. Too nice. Laird showed me around and got me setup with the guild. The problem was members had to contribute to the guild to get resources from the guild. But, I’m not about to “work” for breadcrumbs from the leadership. Fuck that. I was going to rob these very nice people who were helping me.
Click to Enlarge
BLD had a large two-story house just east of Vesper. Also, they had a small one room house right next to the large two-story. As nice as these people were, they were no fools. The large house with all the resources was locked down tight. Lower members of the guild had no access to the large house without an officer, or any other member with access, to escort them; however, the small house was open to all. This is the house where recruits could put their contributions to the guild. See, houses in UO allowed you to lock-down and secure a limited number of items from being taken or even moved by non-owners of the house. You could secure a container like a box for example. Players set as friends to the house had access to the container, but couldn’t move it. Anyone who was not a friend of owner couldn’t even open secured containers. So the small house was basically a couple of containers that recruits could access to drop their contributions, and one chest that only officers could access for a key to the large house.
So I had the lay of the land. I needed more info though. So, I decided my “contribution” would be lumber jacking. The guild houses had trees all around them. I could chop some trees and drop the wood in the small house. This allowed me to always be near the houses … and watch. Memorize the people with access to the large house, and how those people entered the house. All the while, I was working up Hiding and Stealthing along with my combat skills. Now, this was not a quick process. I get bored easily. I played on Sonoma still, and I had other games I played. You never really can know when a player might be on that wanted to go into the large house. After about two months of dicking around with these people, I was ready to attempt the heist. BLD did some cool events that were fun during this time. It was the type of guild you could stay in for your time in that game. It’s just, my need for laziness was just that much more important. I needed my free shit, and I needed it now. I was god damn tired of lumber jacking. It was time.
Click to Enlarge
I can’t remember the players name. His routine for getting into the large house was to stop at the front door, detect hidden, wait a moment and detect hidden a second time, then quickly unlock, open the door, take one step, quickly shut, and then re-lock the door. I was waiting on the side of the house for a while until he showed up. I was quiet a distance away from the front door hoping that the detect hiddens wouldn’t reveal me. He uses his second detect hidden and I kick into gear. I can’t get caught at this point. If I do, there would be no other reason other than I was trying to rob them. I stealthed as fast as I could to get right next to him and wait for him to take the one step into the house, literally on the same tile as the door. His avatar begins to take a step forward and I have to stealth two tiles to be standing right on top of him. I did it. He and I are on the same tile as the door. I took the stamina hit, meaning he didn’t so he didn’t walk over a stealthed person. I quickly stealthed to a far corner of the house away from the door. I didn’t know if he detect hidden a third time when in the house. He moves around the house and doesn’t whatever he does and then leaves.
I did it. I’m in the house and no one is the wiser. With containers and Gate Travel scrolls in my bag ready to go, I stole mostly everything that wasn’t bolted down that I had access to take. I ended up with hundreds of thousands of reagents, bolts and arrows, ingots, etc. My bank was overflowing with resources. I never needed anything on Siege Perilous ever again after that. What did I do with my new found wealth? I went back to lumber jacking and depositing wood in the small house like normal. It didn’t take long before I saw an officer in the two-story. Continuing my lumber jacking, there were more and more players showing up in the large house. Eventually, like 20-30 people were in the house including Laird Bane. The doors were pretty much a revolving door with all those people there. I go in the house and I ask Laird “What’s going on?” He tells me the house was looted, and the person that did it was Rivan or Grimm or something from Sinner’s Among Saints, SAS. First, all I really knew about SAS was that they were also from Sonoma and were like frenemies or something with BLD. Second, I took what I could in a hurry so I didn’t take stuff like 50,000 bread and shit. This SAS dude went in the house and took something small that I’m sure was reasonable and insignificant, but a BLD officer was hiding in the house and saw him take this little thing. He basically took the full blame for my crime. Frenemies, remember. It couldn’t have worked out better for me. I told Laird “If I see that sombitch I’m going to kill him!”
I never intended to even look for that SAS dude. As far as I’m concerned, he was on my team, Team Scumbag. And, he was probably like 50 times better than me anyways. I was decent at UO. Never top tier. I was going to avoid that motherfucker like the plague. Speaking of plague, I quit BLD and immediately joined a PK guild named Plague of Terathans Keep, PTK, shortly after I procured my new belongings. I got PTK’s attention that I wanted to join their guild by going in the Terathan Keep, a dungeon, and killing one of their members. I died to all the damn strong monsters in the dungeon right after. The ghost of the guy I killed asked why I did that. I told him “I want in the guild.”
“Cool.” he says. Just like that, I was back in familiar territory with the shitheads of the world. But, today was about how I never had a single want on Siege Perilous thanks to the kind donation from BLD all because I wanted a Sugar Mama on Sonoma. The PTK story time will come later … maybe. Deal.