Author Archives: Foton

O The Things I’ve Seen!

Posted on by

I was chatting with some gaming buds (ya, we were supposed to be working, SO?), and the noobus amongus was aghast about some SWG hosebag that had passed around some of her personal porn (and by personal, I mean of the aforementioned hosebag) a few months back.

O please. That is so five years ago and has been done to death.

Not that I blame him for being shocked; the first time I heard of such a thing, I was shocked as well. SWG is his first MMOG so it’s understandable that the seamy underbelly of MMOG society is repulsive and nauseating to him. To experienced gaming hags like me, it’s just business as usual.

It’s been my observation that in any online gaming society, there are at most five, maybe six normal people. I AM NOT BEING CONSERVATIVE HERE. We work, we interact with real, live people every day (with a certain amount of enjoyment), we have other interests besides catassing our way to gaming riches, we think cheating other players, even if it’s JUST A GAME, is wrong, etc.

Everyone else, all 1,995 of them on each gaming shard, server, et al, is the solid waste at the bottom of the septic tank. I know this to be true, and you would too if you’d stop hanging onto the delusion that human beings are inherently virtuous.

Still don’t believe me? Want examples? Hell, I could give you AT LEAST a month’s worth of examples, but since I’m inherently lazy (and virtuous), I’ll give you four days’ worth of examples. Tuesday through Friday … it’s story time.

And I’ve got some doozies.

Gaming Dream Jobs!!!

Posted on by

What could be more fun than farming virtual money for real life cash?!?! (ok, besides almost anything).

I ran across this site as a banner ad on a gaming info site. As an example, I could sell these yokels 4,000,000 credits on my Star Wars server for $48. Purchasing two lots of 2,000,000 credits each would cost me $70. Not a bad markup (for them).

For EverQuest, on my old EQ server, 1,000,000 platinum pieces could be had for the low, low price of $730. (!!!) I once held 1,000,000 platinum pieces, for about five minutes, while my bud switched over to his alt to take back the platinum.

Other than that one time, such riches have always eluded me in virtual life — I’m one of those rare types that play the game to have fun. (Ya, I’m a moron. I can see that now.)

Curiously, these yokels that buy and sell all this virtual money and items are available everywhere online 24/7/365 (366 in leap years!).

They’re available more hours than Sony’s CSR team. (Oh bitter irony, why must you torture me so!)

Thank You, Come Again

Posted on by

A while ago, a rumor was circulating around the SWG boards that Sony had outsourced its CSR program to India. I never saw any official word on this (as in … That is a bald-faced lie, Love, Sony Online Entertainment), but just between you, me and the doorknob, I would not be surprised.

An example of my latter day experiences with Live and In Virtual Person CSRs:

Some assbangers were feign+training my SWG guild in the toughest dungeon in the game (Death Watch Bunker .. this noob pissroom can’t come close to the craziness of old world Guk, but, yanno, this is Bore Wars). So, naturally, my guild (FOOLISHLY) thought that notifying the CSRs in live chat might elicit some response, as this was a sleepy, uneventful evening during the week. What the hell else do they have to do with all servers up and the chat room just has a few “how do I change my eye color at the initial character select screen?” people in attendance?

I should point out, in all fairness, that if my guild (and more specifically if *I*) had access to a master smuggler also, I would have feign+trained their asses so hard, they would still be cloning. I’m that kind of an “eye for an eye” guy.

CSRApu tells our guild rep that a CSR will be there shortly to investigate. (Holy shit, maybe that India thing is just a rumor.)

About a dozen feign+trains later, and an additional 9 Super Battle Droids dropped into our camp, no CSRApu. (O where o where can he be?) Eventually, cooler heads prevailed … wait, scratch that … a more pragmatic head prevailed (me), and I decided that I wasn’t going down without taking most of the assbangers with me.

Which I did. Shame that.

Here’s the happy ending, though … we did receive a partially-coherent response to our CSR tickets — thanking us for playing SWG and assuring us that “someone” was investigating our report and there would be repercussions for such assbangery.

O yes, there most certainly would be repercussions for assbangery. Not in my lifetime, but possibly in my next lifetime.

So I have that going for me.