Yet Another Disciple Surpasses My Best Ever--In 1.5 Months

Evening; Feb. 20, 2008

Although I'm once again feeling less and less motivated to login and hunt, I decide to put in a little hunting. My last login was a few nights ago after putting in 4 hours of hunting fouls, bristlehogs, kerberos (kerberoses?) and tantardions. I did horribly that day except for the kerberos. They were--let's say--looting above average, though certainly nothing so good as a global. I probably had a rare break-even hunt on the kerbies, looting 3 Isis CB5's (2 of them actually at *gasp* max TT condition!) and a few other 6 to 11 PED loots. However, after 2 hours of hunting them, loots went sour--really sour--way too many no-loots, so I packed up and went back to the tard-fields for a while before logging off.

Tonight I login and spawn right where I left off the other night; surrounded by a bad case of crabs. It produces nothing good in the way of results; more often than not, the tards produce no-loots, and the rare loots themselves are below-average loots, certainly not balancing out the no-loots (as MA have told us in the past, no-loots are supposedly balanced out by better average loots; what a lie--at least for me, and especially when you go 12 consecutive no-loot tards followed by tards that loot a PED or less). However, I'm soon to receive my first global after several days of hunting, but it's not the kind of global I was hoping for.

My recently-graduated disciple Rin just logged in. Within seconds, I'm hearing the PM notification beeping twice, 3 times..hmm, someone's excited! I take a moment from sweeping off the crabs that are crawling all over me and answer the PMs. It turns out I'm about to receive 50 PEDs that I hoped I wouldn't receive. During the first week of Rin's discipleship, we were talking about my ridiculous and impossible bad luck with trying to loot an uber over 1K PEDs TT value, and I bet Rin that he'd probably uber before I did. The first to loot an uber pays the other 50 PEDs. In about a month and a half, Rin has more than doubled my best-ever loot in over 5 years of playing EU, striking a 1790-ish PED mining claim, and reaching #5 on the mining HOF list. Yay. Is he just lucky? Or is there something more happening behind the scenes? Rin says maybe his good karma was coming back to him, as he was helping some n00bs...before remembering the day he met me, I was handing out free rifles in Nooblantis. Hmm. Yeah right, MA, "my avatar appears normal". I remember when I was team-hunting with Rin early in his discipleship, hunting some big Exarasaurs, and he looted 2 foot-guards while I looted Exo teeth. Once again, my happiness for Rin is vastly overshadowed by my complete disgust with how fucked up my avatar is. I've seen this all before, dozens of times.

I wonder if I should just logoff and say "Fuck it" for another year, fed up with this incessant bullshit, but decide to hunt anyway. Rin appears and insists on giving me the 50 PEDs, even though I tell him to keep it. 50 PEDs is a grain of sand on the beach of my losses the last 3 weeks. He meets me in the tard-fields and boo-yah, I'm 50 PEDs richer. Sweet, that'll cover the cost of decay of 2 hunting trips. While I'm at the tard-fields, I see another avatar appear, one whose name I see frequently popping up in the chat area getting globals and HOFs, Jussi. I'm convinced he's going to get a tard HOF now that I've hunted up this joint for a week and a half now and gotten mostly no-loots, mentioning it to my disciple Rin, but Jussi gets bored and heads off elsewhere. Within 15 minutes, Jussi gets a 120+ PED global on a daikiba with full pockets. Yay again.

After about 2 hours hunting the tards and crabs, I move elsewhere. I wonder why I'm even playing. I must love masochism or inflicting pain upon myself or something. I decide to return to the kerberos that took up residence at the old male umbranoid town, they were looting better-than-average last night, so I figure I'll make it my duty to oust them from their umbra-town digs. Nothing good happens, but I invite another ex-disciple, who used to be a member of my society before having his account locked out due to inactivity, to team up with me. MK2's make easy work of the kerbs. Rather than each hunting our own mobs, we're instead shooting the same mobs. Maybe my wondrous skills are weighing in, but it seems I'm doing 3/5 to 2/3 of the damage, and the team I created was "Stack Share". We hunt there about an hour and a half. The only item that drops is a mid-TT Isis CB5, and guess who gets it? That's right, even though I probably did 2/3 of the damage on the mob, the item goes to my teammate. Surprise, surprise.

In general though, the loots are otherwise bad, so we break up and go our separate ways. I decide to head SE to Twin and wipe out whatever argos get in my way. I soon find myself coated with red argo-dots and since my 300K of medium laser cells is almost gone, I switch to my M2875, only using my MK2 or Opalo and dwindling medium cells for finishing shots. Although I only hunt argos about 45 minutes, I've got more red spots on me than a pubescent teenager with a bad case of acne, and I probably kill a hundred. Nothing good happens (for me), but a nearby hunter gets a global. I continue my way southeastward, stopping to slaughter several dozen caudaterguses (caudatergii?) and FINALLY loot items! A minimal-TT male goblin harness, and a mid-TT female one. Hell yeah, what amazing luck!!!

Now thoroughly disgusted after hunting from 9:30 PM to 2:00 AM, wasting about 350 to 400 PEDs in ammo during that spree, with not a single global, and my only prizes being those 2 shitty Goblin harnesses worth maybe 5 PED total, I finally get to Twin and logout. Thanks for yet another wonderful gaming experience, MindArk!