One Wonders How One Becomes A Cross-Time Banker
November 2nd, 2018
At this point in my nerdy series about the City of Heroes / City of Villain / Going Rogue game, I've gone on at length about all of my major characters, whether they were heroes, villains, or just a showboating loudmouth of a hooligan. All except for one, that is. The trick, though, is that this last major character wasn't really just one guy - he was, in fact, eleven different characters!
The way the City of Heroes series of games were set up, which is like how most of these massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMO RPG) are, was that there were multiple servers to handle the vast amount of people who might be playing at any given time. Each one had further 'instances' within each, which made the whole thing seem kind of redundant to me, but whatever.
The probm was that you couldn't transfer materials from one server to another, even if you had characters on both. Sure, you could do trades with other players, which were ludicrously limited at first, so moving things from one of your own characters to another required an intermediary. But even then, this was just within a given server. Other servers were, for all intents and purposes, variant earths.
With me indulging in hundreds of character experiments, most of which didn't get far since they, to me, sucked, I played on almost all of the servers in the game - European ones notwithstanding. Annoyed with starting over every time I moved to yet another server, I got the idea of providing a service of sorts, taking resources from one player on one server and giving them back to them on another.
Thus, my Cross-Time Banking Service was born! Banker Bob was built on all eleven game servers, and I would use him to generate influence, the currency of the game, on each. Then, whenever someone wanted to start a character on a server where I had the funds available, they could pass them over to me on their starting server, and then I could return them to their new characters on the next one.
In time, others stole my idea and tried to run with it, to varying degrees of success, but I helped countless folks spread out across the game. In time, the powers that be made it so you could just transfer your characters from one server to another directly, as I did with Firebomb, so Banker Bob was no longer necessary, and alas, his business model crumbled. As did my use of all eleven variations on him. Heh.
But still! Good times, good times.
Note to self: fix that 'probm' link sometime!
Installments in this series: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14