Everyone's Lost But Us

At the end of my first week in beta, the devs held a load stress test. The MacGuffin was to be a terminal dropped somewhere in the game that would contain x number of credits. So we all loaded up, ready to strike it rich.

As I recall, we were in Bestine, but it doesn't much matter for the story. We were many and we were eager, standing around in the worst possible attire, without any real clue as to what was going to happen.

Suddenly, we were all off and running. There was a certain direction we were to head, though how or why anyone knew that is beyond my memory. Again, we were mostly new and very confused. I recall it being dark, and something that I would come to learn as "lag" was the order of the day.

Within minutes, the crowd disappeared. And I mean that literally. Where there was once scores of players, there was just me and one other guy.

So I elect for levity and type in "Everyone's lost but us."

To my delight, the other guy not only laughs, but even gets the reference. (Did you?). He came running down the hill towards me, his toon yucking it up from just him putting in "lol".

I don't think the stress test lasted much longer. I'm not even sure I know who won. I suppose someone did and that they spent all their winnings at the cloner insurance terminal. In the coming days, I came across this guy a few times. We'd adventure when we had the chance, share experiences; both our triumphs and our humiliating defeats. In the image below, you'll see why we had more of the latter then the former.

We'd lose track of each other as beta grew and then the game went live. But fate did bring us back together after the game launched. (That's a tale for another time.) He'd later send me this screencap he took during beta.

I remember this day in beta, meeting a "friend" of his who wasn't very good at games at the time, and wasn't comfortable typing. He used emotes from some shortcuts that were set up for him. Turns out that this was my buddy's father playing on a guest account that all us beta invitees received.

What I laugh about in this picture is how wounded we all are. Check out the black on our health bars (actually Health, Action and Mind). We had no idea we were hurt, nor was there any doctor around at that point. We probably didn't even know where the hospitals were.

It didn't much matter. We were probably just minutes away from running out into the desert sands to be trounced by a bunch of angry womprats. But we did it with style and more then a few laughs and quotes from movies we loved.

The father and son would go on to be a part of my guild and city in the coming months. But as I said, that is a story for another day.