Posted - 2009.08.10 17:51:00 - [1]

 

Edited by: Astro Punk on 10/08/2009 19:23:54
This story starts in the early months of 2006 when my brother needed a place to stay. I wasn't much of a gamer back then and for the most part if I needed a fix I played Command and Conquer.

Bro sets up shop on the other side of my desk and boasts about his new uberer computer and all the things it can do compared to my old clunker that I bought on sale at the local office supply shop for about 200 bucks.

Soon he can talk about nothing but this new online game called Eve and just how cool it is with all the graphics and stuff you can do, all for only 15 bucks per month. I look over at his monitor and see him sporting around in his newb ship mining veldspar, it kinda looked VERY boring, but it also looked like a bit more of a challenge than C&C so I downloaded the client (2 hours back then even on what was at the time, a fast connection). Next thing you know I am mining Veldspar in Duripant, running rookie plex's ad getting blasted to bits for looting things I should have left alone, but I was having fun, but constantly broke.

After about 3 weeks of this I had finally earned enough isk to get my first Thorax, and keep in mind that back then, you got less than 30k skill points when you where born and there was no 100% bonus to training, so this game was a grind.

Then one day, bro tells me that he found this new mineral that he was able to sell and make over 300 million isk in just under an hour. He was unable to recall the name of the stuff and was never able to find it again. He was kind though and gave me 50 million isk and I was in freaking heaven...oh the thing that I could buy, like a pile of skills and even a new thorax.

Soon after this he managed to find another belt of this elusive empire ore and boasted that he had just made a billion isk, except this time his Visa card was still on the table and he had this sly look on his face. I know the look and said WTF Bro, what am I missing, I can't find anything better than Scordite and we are in the same freaking system. He smiles, and says that on a web site that he found you could actually buy the isk and they would ship it to your character. He is so proud of himself and I am so not happy because my little bro is in a Battleship and I am still in my thorax. I consoled myself with the fact that I still have hair and he is bald as an egg....but he still has a battleship and I don't.

So I go to this web site and sure enough, there is the isk for sale in increments of 100 million, 200, 300, 500 and 1 billion isk. Then I look at the price and the stuff is selling for 260 US dollars per billion. There was now way I was going to pay that price for game credits and slumped back into my chair and activated my Mining Laser 1 on the next roid.....

He saw me looking sad and sent me 100 mil. Thanks Bro.

Fast forward 12 months and Bro has this worried look on his face. It seems that he has logged on to find that his wallet is...um...in the negative. At first I think that he is bs'ing me but then when he opens a trade window it says that "his characters name" would require 26 billion isk to complete the trade. I look at him and say "are you really in the hole 26 f***ing billion?" How much ISK have you bought you f***ing idiot. His reply was "I didn't think it was that much", but all of a sudden it became crystal clear that he had dumped thousands of dollars into buying game money.

For the next 3 days I followed him around empire as he packed all his gear into haulers, warped to planet 1 and ejected so I could get into the hauler and move the stuff to a trade hub where I could sell it and slowly put the money back into his characters wallet. At that point in my eve life I had never seen so much faction stuff and was shocked at how much it sold for. He had so much of it he didn't even know how much he had, no inventory control, no way of how much stuff he was giving me....muhahahaha, this was how I got my first fortune.

End of part 1