[TheBlackSheep]

Live, a month after release. Before I elaborate on a particular incident, let me just say that first month was one debacle after another. A quick summary:

Night of release, first character was an Erudite Paladin (first mistake). Couldn't see at night in Toxx and lost my corpse after getting jacked by poachers. Rage quit for a few days. Re-rolled a half elf paladin. Got him to 8th level. Joined a bard and ranger who were IRL friends for my first foray into the Karanas. It was their first trip as well. We're rolling around behind the bard, who has speed, killing everything we can. Good times for about an hour. Then we roll up a hill to find ourselves staring at the asses of Choon and Froon. We could never recover our corpses. We rage quit for a few days. I rerolled another half elf paladin. Spent another week in BB and cautiously killing bandits and random shit in the Karanas. I'm level 12 and quite full of myself at this point.

Okay, here we go.

So I'm down in BB, I see a half elf in full bronze plate armor. I mean I thought I was a pimp in my banded. I shit myself. I mean, there was nothing else on the planet that I wanted more than to be in that bronze armor. After some tells to the guy, I find out you can buy it and the best place for cash was the gnolls roaming outside of Splitpaw (this was obviously before they were buffed up), because hardly anyone knew it existed at that point. No camping, no competition. Just constant killing and looting. Take an a bunch of bags and sell all the stuff they drop. He also told me about the shortcut out in the river, which if you hit just right, warps you straight across into SK, shaving off a lot of travel time. I'll have full bronze plate in no time!

I tell my IRL friends, and they're all over it. To fast forward, it took us a couple of days and some deaths to figure out the zone warp and find the place, but we get there. Much joy to be had. We start the farming marathon and business is goood. Of course, we're having to WALK back to Qeynos because we're so encumbered. BUT, we're making loads of cash. We did this over a weekend, 16 hours a day for almost three days straight. At some point, the walk back was really getting to us.

So I had a brilliant idea.

Fill up all our bags with phat loot, leave half of them behind, run back and sell the other half, come back, get them, fill them up again, lather, rinse, repeat. Genius! Then I'm like, "Dudes, we shouldn't leave this shit sitting on the ground, a gnoll will pick it up and give it all to the others, or some other player will happen by and steal it all. Let's hide it in a tree!"

We spent two hours finding a tree limb we could jump up to. Dropped half our bags and off we went. I was a hero to my friends. We run back, and ...well, the bags are gone. We searched trees for hours. All of it gone. We were all convinced that someone stole it. We petitioned, but there was no answer for hours. We started to kill gnolls again, but we were all so pissed. We couldn't get over it. We all ended up raging quitting again for a couple of days. Never went back out there.

Post mortem, ultimately I got my bronze armor about a week later. I immediately ran to BB and stood on the bridge, basically a "Hey, look at me" douche move. But then I'm looking around ....what the hell? Unfortunately, by then there were a dozen guys running around with bronze plate. I was actually physically depressed and rage quit for a few days ...again.

Of course I had some other good ones, like not standing on spawn points because I thought they would not spawn and camping Najena for 24 hours for JBoots, only to be so excited to get some, sending all my friends tells while standing over the corpse, someone else came in and looted them out from under me and took off. That was the day I learned about locking down corpses. I rage quit for a week after that one.