SW Galaxies Grief

I did a lot more of that sort of thing when I played pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies, but arguably it was less griefing and more fighting any way we could.

Back at that time in Star Wars Galaxies, PvP was handled through the Galactic Civil War (Imps vs Rebels). You could choose to be neutral and therefore not take part in PvP at all, but if you choose to join up you can either be a covert member (and therefore have to flag up by doing a biased action to be fair game) or overt (perma-flagged).

On my server, Imperials outnumbered Rebels roughly 2:1. That made the situation for Rebels worse than you might figure from sheer numbers, because over 95% of player resources, both equippable and consumable, were crafted by players. You needed a critical mass of crafters to support a larger infrastructure of fighters or when stuff broke - as it would, often, in the GCW - there would be no replacement and you'd be out of the war. The capacity of crafters goes up exponentially as you have more of them working together, so in terms of trained, equipped soldiers, the Imps could routinely field 3 or even 4 times as many people as the Rebels.

Being the thrill seeker I tend to be, it took me about 15 seconds to decide I was going to play Rebel. I found a guild, learning the ropes, and learned the political situation to some extent. We had a small player city on the edge of the map, some of the most remote areas you could be at. Our main rivals were a huge guild of Imperials that were homed as close to the planet's main starport as they could manage.

I hatched a plan to hit them and hit them hard, and recruited a handful of guys to help me out. I trained myself up to Master Artisan, a basic crafting profession that served as the springboard for all the high-level crafting that people actually wanted. I contacted a recruiter for the Imperial guild and basically told him that the Rebels were a pack of losers and were too scared to go harvest minerals to help me continue crafting. My story basically checked out - one can get to Master Artisan fairly quickly and easily, but any elite crafting requires thousands upon thousands upon thousands of materials and doing it on your own is about as comfortable as getting kicked in the dick (or taco) for about a month. He asked if I had dropped my Rebel affiliation yet, and I of course said yes (a lie). Before I went in, I bought a spare ticket off-planet from the spaceport and made sure I always had it, in case things went sour.

I was quickly incorporated into the crafting corp, who were really a pretty decent bunch of folks. I quickly grew to dislike the soldiers, though, who would go to insane lengths to grief Rebels they killed. I won't go into details because they're boring, but they'd do the local equivalent of corpse camping for 4 hours straight.

The crafting corp showed me their town, and they had a really nice setup. I quickly endeared myself to my new guildmates by volunteering to be the gopher to most of our extractors. Resource collection in SWG mostly involved finding a mineral you liked, dropping an automated collector on it, and walking away while it pulled what you wanted out of the ground. Resources could spawn anywhere, including on hostile mobs, and migrated about twice a week. Crafters generally hated doing it because they had to crawl over most of God's creation, risking life and limb when they'd rather be back in the hall, doing their jobs. The soldiers outright refused to do it because it was boring. So when I offered to do it, the officers practically jumped to accept.

I spent about a month doing low-level embezzlement, skimming a bunch of resources off the top when I collected them, and failing to turn on my 'training' mode when doing my grinding crafting. The 'training' mode while crafting would sacrifice the crafted item to give you a 10% XP bonus on the craft. I instead simply crafted the item, kept my product in my backpack, and met often with an old guildmate named Xiz to swap packs. He kept the backpacks in a secure Rebel dropoff - we couldn't sell them, because the item said who the creator was, and if some Imp saw a bunch of my stuff on a vendor they could get wise that I was a mole. We also had a strict communication protocol - NO contact whatsoever outside of secure personal emails (even tells were too risky) and face to face meetings no closer than 10 klicks from the nearest town. I kept getting asked why I wasn't going Imperial, but I claimed that I'd heard there was a price on my head so I was staying neutral for a bit until the heat was off.

I pretty quickly mastered out Armorsmith, and at that point it was no longer strange to see me in the big crafting hall. We were always trying to make better factory blueprints for more uber gear (mostly luck), so a lot of the officers stayed in there, chatting and trying to craft. I got lucky and all 5 of our overt Imperial crafters were in the hall one day, trying to make better Stormtrooper armor so the soldiers could feel more badass. I quickly emailed Xiz and told him to bring a guild doctor for a rendezvous, then excused myself saying I had to check the extractors.

I stole all the ingredients from the extractors, tore down the ones I could, stole the blueprints for them, met Xiz, got a fresh backpack, and got buffed by the Rebel doctor. Buffs, at that point in the game, were expensive medicines that very literally multiplied your combat potency by a degree of magnitude. They were all but required to wear the heaviest armor. Drinking two flasks of brandy for liquid courage (and Mind buffs), I picked up the last piece of the puzzle from Xiz before I went back.

You see, when you master out a profession, you get an achievement in your profile that never goes away. I had been flying Master Artisan and Master Scout, both very common, so there was no suspicion. However, there was a little thing they didn't know: I was also a fully trained Teras Kasi Artist (unarmed fighter), only missing my Master training. Xiz was a Teras Kasi Master.

I rolled back into the crafting hall and looted everything I could out of the material benches nearby. Then I donned my armor and a vibroknuckler (the best unarmed weapon), dropped guild, and announced: "Time to die, blackbloods."

Unbuffed, unarmed, and completely untrained, the crafters in the hall died almost instantly. Pretty quickly, they respawn and start shouting that I'm a traitor. I dashed in to the military repository and stole huge crates of weapons, armor, and food, enough to outfit over 100 soldiers. The first responders showed up while I was doing that, but they were also unbuffed so I was able to overwhelm them pretty easily. The cavalry would be along soon, though, so I hopped on my speederbike and started running my fucking ass off. They chased me for about 20 minutes before I realized some of the 4-hour corpse camping assholes were on my tail, and I knew I had to really lose them. I called Xiz and told him to go to the spaceport and tell me when a shuttle was about to land. He warned me at the 1 minute mark, and I zoomed in, activated my sprint, and was off planet in record time. The Imperials were slowed...because they had to buy tickets!

With the head start I got from their ticket escapade, I was able to make it to a huge Rebel installation that would automatically unmask covert Imperials, and logged out. Xiz met me the next day to offload our stolen loot and congratulated me on a job well done. For 3 months afterward, I couldn't show my face in the commercial hub of the game, Coronet City, without getting assailed by walls of profanity. I really DID have a 150,000 credit bounty on my head from then on, but nobody ever collected it. It was the most fun I ever had playing that game.

    Boru posted:
    I find it hard to believe that people would get THAT upset about it. I mean sure you pulled one over on them (maybe even technically a 'grief'), but it kind of plays to what the Rebels really would have done in the SW lore. Sore losers.

I should clarify: The crafters were pretty sore because I stole so many materials, and the finished products I stole comprised probably about 3 weeks of work, from beginning to end. But in the end they were rich as all fuck and I'd really only stolen surplus, so they got over it fairly quickly. They'd never given me access to the factories so I couldn't do any lasting damage to their production. I got a few pissed off private emails, but that was more or less the end of that.

The soldiers, on the other hand, took my infiltration and murder of their crafters and a few of their own number as a personal insult and never forgave me. But I already sort of touched on how they were about as cool, mature, and moderated as Ash fucking Ketchem. For months afterward, all you needed to do to get an angry response from one of their soldiers was say "Sir, you must buy a ticket to use the shuttle, sir." Bonus points if it was in Coronet City's starport.

I never really saw what I did as potentially griefing until I started telling stories in this thread, to be truthful. Lore aside, we were utterly fucking outnumbered on that server and trying to stand and fight the blackbloods the normal way was a great way to get murdered and clone-camped for hours. We were really just fighting any way we could.