Link
RPG Townie
Ya well, you know what? Go suck a lime.
Posts: 702
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Post by Link on Jul 11, 2004 10:06:46 GMT -5
d**n, couldn't post the whole thing. Stupid no more than 10 000 characters rule. Anyway, this is better. I'll put it in readable chunks instead. ---------------------------------------------------
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 nutsty 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 f**king 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 f**king 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 f**k 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-nuts 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 bullnuts cuisine on this side of the Atlantic, sthingying 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. --------------------------------------------------------------- There's more. Oh so much more. But I'll post it later. Maybe after I get 4 or 5 replies.
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Post by Shiguru Wazzat on Jul 11, 2004 12:30:49 GMT -5
Hard to tell whats going on as, you've only posted a bit of it. Post the rest!
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The Omen
RPG Townie
Who dares wins
Posts: 612
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Post by The Omen on Jul 11, 2004 12:56:19 GMT -5
Yes, Shiggy is right! You should post the rest!
EDIT - And on the new forums, you'll be able to post the entire story. I think.
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Link
RPG Townie
Ya well, you know what? Go suck a lime.
Posts: 702
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Post by Link on Jul 11, 2004 14:51:50 GMT -5
As to public request here's part 2 and 3 (though I'll have to post it in a double post) I think there's like 20 parts, so I'm waiting for the new forum. THen I'll post it all. -------------------------------------------- Part 2
"The Early Bird Gets The Worm"
I can't think of a better quote to describe Eve Online's trading system; the key to succeeding as a trader in Eve laid in being one of the first to login to the newly reset server, before all the trade routes became exhausted. With this in mind, I set my alarm clock to 6:30 AM and woke up with a new purpose in my day, to make as much virtual cash as possible. I had already planned out some routes during the previous weeks, so I hit the ground running. My first route involved bringing computer hardware from the Amarr region into the Gallente region; this would be about 16 jumps, or the real-time equivalent of 25 minutes. I bought the hardware for approximately 1100 credits per unit, and spent all 3 million credits on it. This amounted to 2700 units of computer hardware that I would need to sell. My heart pounded with excitement at the prospect of actually making a real profit in this God forsaken game.
Each space sector in Eve is assigned a security rating; this rating, ranging from 0.0 all the way to 1.0, determines the strength and speed with which the intergalactic police respond. In 0.0 regions, there are no police, and pirates, both PCs and NPCs, fly around freely, and in 1.0 regions, security is tighter than Jessica Simpson's snatch. During this first eventful trade flight of mine, I had to pass through a 0.3 region. At the time, I naively believed that anything above 0.0 would be safe, because nobody would be ballsy enough to dare provoke the wrath of the 5-0 in space. I turned out to be wrong; not dead wrong, but pretty f**king close.
I knew that something was wrong when my ship started to beep and a red target lock cursor appeared in the horizon with the name "Dethbringer". The beeping accelerated and a red square appeared around my ship. Since I hadn't even bothered trying to fight a training pirate yet, I had no idea what the hell was going on. He sent a message to me, "250k or die." I responded to him, "okay", the sweat dripping down my armpits, past my side, and accumulating in a little puddle at the edge of my shirt. Five or more seconds must have passed as I fumbled for the MWD hotkey, and just as they started to warm up, the first missile slammed into my ship. The warpgate was 15,000 meters away, I had to be within 800 meters to pass through it, and I was currently flying at about 300 meters per second. A second missile exploded against the hull, bringing down my shields and tearing apart my armor. I knew that if one more missile hit me, my ship would be nothing more than space debris, and this f**ker who couldn't even spell "Death" correctly would have access to all I had worked for. "COME ON YOU f**kING PIECES OF nuts", I shouted at the monitor. My dog started to bark in the background, but I could barely hear it. The only thing that mattered was the gate, because I knew that if I had lost that cargo, all my weeks of hard work and all my finely tuned bullnuts would be down the drain.
WHOOOOOOSH. I hadn't used the MWDs since the night before, and forgot about just how powerful they were. I was now shooting towards the warp gate at 3.5 kilometers/second, and all Dethbringer had to account for his two expensive missiles was a trail of dust. If you're reading this right now, Deth, I'd like to give out a hearty f**k You.
I arrived at the specified starbase in the Gallente region, my ship battered and bruised, and my ego several sizes smaller. I sold the computer hardware for a total of 3.7 million credits. The hull repairs amounted to 100k. I felt my heart with my left hand; it was still pulsing rapidly, and the realization that I netted 600,000 credits in 25 minutes, along with a healthy dose of action, sent it shooting up even further. I did several more trade routes that morning, and by 9 AM, my credit count read "5,780,000 credits". I knew that both Trazir and HardHead were gonna cream their pants when they saw this, but for now, I had to go to class.
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Link
RPG Townie
Ya well, you know what? Go suck a lime.
Posts: 702
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Post by Link on Jul 11, 2004 14:52:28 GMT -5
Part 3
All I could think about during the day was returning to Eve. Calculus equations, physics problems, the musings of long-dead authors, all these things meant nothing to me now, for I was well on my way to becoming a virtual pimp. I drove home like a maniac that day, darting in and out of traffic and speeding through crowded city intersections. I sprinted to my computer and started Eve, my heart warming at the gentle glow of the galaxy sun. I netted about 1.5 million more credits by 7 PM, when HardHead logged on. He wasted no time in messaging me.
HH: "Hey dood, how's it going? How's the financial situation?" Me: "Pretty f**king awesome, I've made 5 million credits so far." HH: "Are you kidding me? Jesus Christ that's a lot, can I have my money back?" Me: "Sure. I'll give you a million extra too, just as promised."
HardHead logged in, and I wired him 4 million credits. His trust in me was now firmly established, and I got back to work, doing what I did best, running trade routes. During this time, Trazir pregnant doged and moaned, asking me to wire him money so that he too could start doing trade routes. He even called me up a few times, asking for virtual money. I eventually gave in and sent him a million just to shut him up. By the time I went to sleep that night, having made an additional 500k by whoring large amounts of cheap items through safe areas, I knew that my virtual life had changed forever.
Over the next two weeks, I traded harder than a Chinaman in a flea market. Trazir even joined in, but since he was too lazy to wake up early in the morning, he would be lucky on his best days to make half what I made on my worst days. During this time, HardHead told me about how he had moved on to actually writing scripts for the game so that he could find and mine the very rarest of asteroids with ease. I also became a master of blasting off with my MWDs the second any hostiles showed up near a warp gate, and while there were a few close calls, nothing ever rivalled my experience with Dethbringer. By the end of this period, I was worth close to 85 million credits, and Trazir was near 30 million. I felt like a f**king space tycoon, a financial juggernaut, ready to expand my realm of influence from the monetary to the military. I was going to buy a cruiser, the next step up from the frigate you are given when you first enter the world of Eve.
I did my research, and decided that the best ship for combat would be the Caldari Moa; it was fast, deadly, and had an armament approximately equal to the United States’ missile arsenal during the Cold War. Nuclear winter, here I come. I was going to pick it up from a guy named “OneEye Willie”, a hard boiled manufacturing magnate I met one day in IRC. Willie sold the ship equivalent of an Alienware computer; terribly overpriced, but outfitted with all the best decals, all the best hardware, and most importantly, the best weaponry that money could buy. When you bought from Willie, you weren’t just buying a combat ship; you were buying death incarnate, a million credits at a time.
After an intense bout of haggling, some shouting on my part, and some screaming back on his, I worked him down to 35 million credits. Willie, in addition to being just a little eccentric, manufactured his ships far away from civilization where costs were lower and competition was nil. I suspected that he supplied pirates with their combat ships, but I never could confirm it, because Willie never, ever talked about himself or his other clients. I would pick up the Moa in some near-abandoned outpost in a 0.0 sector in the Caldari region. It would take me 2 hours to fly out there, but I wanted that f**king ship, so it was worth it. Since it would be 0.0 space, and since I didn’t want to have to leave my indie out in the middle of the space equivalent of Bumf**k, Alaska, I would be flying out in my lifepod.
In Eve Online, your lifepod is the final string in the cold vacuum of space which keeps you in the world of the living. Unfortunately, it’s about as strong as an anorexic midget in a world of steroid-laced giants. NPC enemies ignore lifepods completely, but the NPCs were easy to get away from anyway. It was the other humans you had to watch out for, the not a very nice person player killers who destroyed lifepods and set you back hours, not for profit, not for personal gain, just for the sake of ruining somebody’s day.
I had been gliding through space for about 90 minutes when I saw the red targeting cursor. My pod beeped, and I shouted at the monitor, “f**kING d**n IT!” Seconds passed, and I was perplexed; no missiles had hit my pod, and no lasers blasts were ripping through my hull. My speed bar was decreasing. 400 m/s. 300 m/s. 200 m/s. I slowly grinded to a halt. “Your engines have been disabled,” the notification read. His name was DanielSan, and he had me immobilized in space. My life was in the hands of the f**king karate kid.
His message arrived shortly after, “give me 500k or I’m gonna blow you to nuts.”
“All right, calm down, I’ll wire the money right now.” I groped for the send button, nervously trying to type in 500,000 in the wire transfer box. The way I figured it, giving up the profits from a single 30 minute trade run more than justified the loss of skills and time I would have incurred if I was blown away.
A second before the wire went through, I received another message: “send it NOW you pregnant dog. Heres a little present.” A single laser blast tore through the mass of my ship, bringing my hull integrity down to 15%. “Ok, you can leave now pregnant dog, and dont come back.” Thirty seconds later, my engines let out a low whine as they came back to life. Once again, I had narrowly evaded death at the hands of a malevolent prick with a dumb name. My engines were damaged and on fire, only operating at 1/3 capacity. My ship hobbled through space towards the jump gate, beads of sweat broke out on my forehead with each additional meter; I feared that the karate kid would pull the equivalent of a Mr. Miyagi finishing move by blowing me the f**k up. As I passed through the warp gate, I vowed my revenge, and 60 minutes later, I arrived at Willie’s, a broken, burning shell of a man.
“Bout time you got here. Man, what the hell were you doing anyways? You said it would be 2 hours.”
“I got into a little accident. Can I see the ship?”
He placed the Moa in a trading window, and it was just as beautiful as I envisioned it. It had 3 long-distance laser racks, 2 high density missile bays, and an ECM ray to drain enemies of their ships’ energy. I gave Willie the money, and within minutes, I was flying away from Willie’s base in a shiny new Moa. I had a good idea of who my first target would be, and I was shooting through space with a rage I hadn’t felt in weeks. The familiar explosion of the MWDs sent me roaring, closer and closer, towards each warp gate. He was minutes away, I could feel it in my bones, and I burned with a rage equal to that of the galactic sun.
And finally, I knew it. He was one jump away, and I was only a kilometer from the warp gate. He would be on the other side, camping, bullying, killing, waiting for another innocent soul to pass through his dark grasp. I loaded up my missile bays, readied my left hand over my weaponry hotkeys, my right hand over my targeting hotkey; this was gonna be one hell of a fight, and it didn’t help much that it was going to be the first time I ever fired a weapon in Eve. I nervously gulped and passed through. ----------------------- Cliffhanger. Enjoy
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The Omen
RPG Townie
Who dares wins
Posts: 612
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Post by The Omen on Jul 11, 2004 15:42:13 GMT -5
Noooo! Post the rest!!!!
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Post by zumbum - The Screen Monster on Jul 11, 2004 16:09:12 GMT -5
Post the rest d**n you!
*kicks at Link*
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Post by Shiguru Wazzat on Jul 11, 2004 16:18:20 GMT -5
Post teh link d00d!!!11 If you post the link to where you got it from we can read it right now Unless you want it to be like a story and post it separatly...
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Link
RPG Townie
Ya well, you know what? Go suck a lime.
Posts: 702
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Post by Link on Jul 11, 2004 17:18:46 GMT -5
To post...or not to post...that is the question.
I'm just posting it chapter by chapter intil we move to the new town.
Anyways here's chapter 4 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Part 4
The heat was on. My targeting system had Danielsan acquired, and I activated my MWDs; I would unload on that motherf**ker with the wrath of the Cobra Kai after the halloween party. I quickly reached firing range, and let loose with both missiles. They glided through the air gracefully, passing through each others white trails like two avian lovers mating in flight. The ensuing explosions annihilated his shields and did significant damage to his hull. Oh yes, he would be mine. He fired back pitifully, his laser volley barely denting me thanks to my shield booster. I let out a cackle of delight as I pressed the "fire laser" hotkey, and watched his ship disappear in an inferno. Payback wasn't mine yet, though. I fired my ECM ray on his pod, draining it of all its energy and effectively keeping him from engaging his hyperdrive. I knew it would take about 20 seconds for his pods' capacitor level to reach the point again where he could enter hyperspace, so I wasted no time in messaging.
"Give me 750k or I will pod you, pregnant dog."
Seconds later, the money appeared in my credit box. I was contented now, but not quite happy. For a moment, my left index finger wavered over the fire missile hotkey as my conscience actually questioned whether or not I should blow this f**ker up. The two burning hot streaks ejected themselves from my ship, furiously shooting towards their target, and 5 seconds later, Danielsan was no more. He didn't bother messaging me after that; he knew that he had done wrong, and that the Great Magnet had effected its will upon him. I flew back towards civilized space, happy and gleeful and free.
I regaled Trazir with my story that night, saying that he needed to get a cruiser as fast as f**king possible, for the thrill of a fight and the joyous feeling of seeing your enemies slain before you was rivalled by nothing in this God forsaken game. He agreed, but pregnant doged about fiscal problems; apparently he'd done a few bad trade routes where he actually ended up selling his acquired goods for less than he bought them. How this happened, I do not know. Out of the goodness of my heart, I wired him 2 million. Classes had ended for both of us by this point, and Trazir overcame his natural laziness, not by waking up extremely early like me, but by going to bed extremely late. He would sleep during the day, jerk off during the night, and wait until the servers came up at 7 AM to start doing his trade routes. Within a week, he was worth 60 million credits, and I was nearing the same. But then, one morning after I logged in, it happened.
I was running my trade routes as usual, when I came upon a pirate named Lando Griffin. No big deal, I thought to myself, just hit the MWD key and blast off towards the gate.
"Your ship does not have a sufficient amount of energy to use that."
"WHAT THE f**k?" I slammed my finger into the MWD hotkey again; this must be some sort of joke, some temporary bug in the game.
"Your ship does not have a sufficient amount of energy to use that."
The bullets from his machinegun pinged off my shields, doing considerably damage, and I knew it was only a matter of time. I watched in terror and heartache as my ship slowly cruised towards the warp gate; each bullet into its side was like a cut into my heart. I was carrying 30 million credits worth of goods, and I was NOT going to let those goods be destroyed. My only hope was to try and enter hyperspace, try and get away, try ANYTHING to recover my money. But alas, a moment before my finger stroked the hyper-drive hotkey, his ECM ray drained my ship of its energy. I messaged Lando, desperate for survival.
"I'll give you 5 million credits if you let me go. PLEASE MAN."
He responded with a dual-volley of Phalanx Rockets. My formidably armored industrial ship was now on fire, each lick graphical lick of flame consuming the last vestiges of my morning optimism. I was dead now, and I knew it. I force-ejected from my ship, hoping that he wouldn't destroy it if it was unoccupied. My pod hovered in space, like a small child seperated from its parent. I jammed my finger into the hyperspace key, and moments later, I blasted off into the stars. By the time I was tens of kilometers away, I saw a small speck of light in the galactic horizon. The f**ker had destroyed my ship.
I wasted no time in calling Trazir on the phone. A few days earlier, he had purchased a cruiser of his own, one that I knew was just as powerful or even more powerful than my own. It was an Amarr Maller, a ship with more combat slots on it than a f**king space station. He told me that the purchasing price was 40 million, so I knew that unless he got ripped the f**k off, which was quite possible for him, each of those slots possessed a piece of ordnance capable of ending a star system. I flew back to my Moa, which was about 15 jumps away in Caldari space, and had him meet me there. We were going to exact revenge, and unless Lando had Han Solo and the entire rebel armada with him, he was going to have the space equivalent of dry, painful prison rape.
About an hour later, we arrived at the space sector where I had been attacked. We were on the phone with each other, which made instant communication possible, and I hoped that this would tilt the advantage in our favor if Lando had any other pirates with him.
"Listen," I said, "If there's more than one, I'll call out a target, and we both unload on him. Focus fire. Open up with missiles, keep the pressure on with lasers, and once you think his hull is at about 50%, fire your ECM."
"Okay, but what if one of us gets badly damaged?"
"Fight to the death. We need to rid the game of these kinds of scum."
We engaged our hyperdrives and darted towards the jump gate where I had been destroyed. Vengeance would be mine, and my foes would rue the day that they crossed me. Or so I thought.
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The Omen
RPG Townie
Who dares wins
Posts: 612
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Post by The Omen on Jul 11, 2004 18:04:37 GMT -5
I want that game.
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Post by The~Inquisitor on Jul 12, 2004 7:27:52 GMT -5
That was a great read. Of course, it would have been even better if you had actually written it yourself. It is very difficult to believe that you wrote all of that, came up with some brilliant game scam etc. when you are only 13.
It would have been better if you posted the author's name or at the very least changed the words from a first person narrative to a third person narrative.
After reading posts from you that are not in this topic, I'm still finding it difficult to see how your grammar could improve this quickly. It seems very fishy to me.
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Link
RPG Townie
Ya well, you know what? Go suck a lime.
Posts: 702
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Post by Link on Jul 12, 2004 7:49:56 GMT -5
Well Inq, you're right. I didn't write this. I got it off the Ctrl-Alt-Del forums, which they got off another forum. I would have posted the Author but they didn't say who it was, so it's kind of impossible.
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Lurking Niklas Fanger
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Post by Lurking Niklas Fanger on Jul 12, 2004 7:58:20 GMT -5
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Maxy
RPG Townie
Posts: 187
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Post by Maxy on Jul 12, 2004 8:48:31 GMT -5
To put it slightly more diplomatically than Inq, this should have been referenced. I have made a case for giving authors due credit for their work in previous topics like this. I understand that you may not have known who had originally written it, Link, but you should still have given the URL to where you found it - as it is it appears to the more naive reader that you wrote it yourself. This is, of course, plagerism, one of the worst offences you can commit on the internet, in my opinion - 2nd only to child pornography but just above credit card scams. It is only common decency to provide the author's name. There's no harm done this time since our resident super-sleuth the Inquisitor unraveled the fabric of this mystery, but in future I think we should all endeavour to give the author their dues. Perhaps we could have this in the rules to the new RPG Town?
Anyway, this topic doesn't serve any purpose. It could be replaced by a simple URL to the topic on the other forum, and why do we need this? Is RPG Town so weak in its content that we need to direct people to other forums for something to read? Really, if that's the case, what are we still doing here?
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Post by zumbum - The Screen Monster on Jul 12, 2004 11:21:06 GMT -5
I THOUGHT there was somehting funny about him being 13 and talking about driving a car EDIT: Just read the whole thing on that link someone posted. Good story, kept me attention for longer than most things.
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