7/19/2004 05:01:24 AM|||Foton|||Beep beep beep beep beep YA! Tuesday was Vehicle Day! And in a typical "Good news, bad news" strategy, it was also one of the biggest nerf days in recent memory. The day had CHAOS written all over it.

First, Grumpy was more than a little annoyed that Sony chose Tuesday instead of Wednesday to patch vehicles to the live servers. Wednesday was LOTR day, and Grumpy knows that half of his RL work staff will develop fevers and sudden abdominal pains in the afternoon so they can conveniently recover on their way home and go see the movie. Grumpy was going to trump them though, and just take the whole d*mn day off -- SWG vehicles in the morning and LOTR in the afternoon. Thereby proving, once again, that Grumpy is a far more skilled slacker than his co-workers. No such luck.

At any rate, Sony stunned the SWG population by actually getting most of the servers up and operational (and Grumpy is using the term operational very loosely here) on schedule. Sadly, Grumpy was off on a RL work errand, and missed server open BY A WHOLE HOUR.

Logging in, Grumpy bypassed the patch notes (for crissakes, he doesn't have 20 minutes to read through paragraphs of nerfs), and quickly cooked up a car deed, one of those landspeeders. Grumpy didn't want to start off with a swooper then have to step down to a car that just CRAWLED across the landscape. Grumpy is a full service dealer; he tries out ALL the options, in the interest of customer service, of course.

He took it out for a spin, towards his favorite busy starport, which was already littered with vehicles of all types ... all three of them, that is. (And everyone knows, it would get much worse, oh so much worse.) But by noon, left coast time, it was already a free-for-all at the starports.

Grumpy got a great deal of pleasure out of the car hustlers..some were selling their vehicles at close to 2 cpu. That's called trying to bleed the competition, (unless of course it's an architect...then 2 cpu for a deed is called price gouging). Grumpy let his vendor do most of the sales work, though. High decay rate, high repair cost, at risk in PVP situations..that's called repeat business which will require numerous intricate adjustments to the SWG BUSINESS MODEL, but enough time later for that.

Grumpy's favorite moments at the starports: A gang of imperials came storming through the rebel starport area. They lit up all the overt rebels trying to buy vehicles, then they lit up all the rebels driving into town, and then they lit up all the rebel vehicles until they were a smoking pile of twisted junk. Grumpy thought to himself...ka-CHING, repeat business is beautiful. Thanks for stopping, drop by again!

Another favorite...consistently, every 30 seconds, a new player would arrive to the starport area and /shout U RETARDZ STORE YOUR VEHICLES UR LAGGING ME OUT. Grumpy wondered why in the h*ll Grumpy would care that he was lagging someone out, but it didn't matter, as most people couldn't store their vehicles anyways. Which the shouting asshat would know, if he could keep his mouth shut for 2 minutes and listened to the public conversation about the store bug.

One particularly loud yo yo dawg got lucky and received a little personal attention from Grumpy. Grumpy went over to him and generated 4 vehicles in a neat row in front of him, then asked which one he would like to buy. He called Grumpy an idoit, which Grumpy thinks is french, but isn't sure. Grumpy celebrated their new friendship by driving swoop circles around the dawg until Grumpy saw the LD pop up over his head.

Grumpy couldn't stay to wait for his friend's return, he had to visit his factories and mines and restock the vehicle vendor, for the third time that afternoon. He also stopped off to repair his swoop -- Grumpy had to destory the landspeeder, it wasn't decaying fast enough so Grumpy could try a different vehicle, and although he tried his best, the landspeeder would NOT explode when he repeatedly rammed it into the side of the starport. The repair bill on his swoop for 90 minutes of use made Grumpy chuckle. Ka-CHING, thanks for stopping, drop by again!

By the time Grumpy got back to the busy starport, the tile area was blanketed with abandoned vehicles, a good portion of which were smoking wrecks. Even Grumpy's super-duper-extra-satanic computer slowed to a crawl wading through. He generated another vehicle and zipped back out to the main location to restock AGAIN, with the last of his stockpiled vehicle metals.

It was a fitting end to a busy, chaotic day, that there were two smoldering swoops out by his store. (and not surprisingly, some more recent emails about swoop sales). Grumpy's bank account is fatter and he has a shiny new swoop bike to help with running the vast Architectural Empire.

Which is good, because his mount is on strike right now.

The Grumpy Master Architect ©

|||109023868289516238|||You Can Drive Grumpy's Car (12-17-03)