Rock, Paper, Shotgun

For people keeping score. Griefing: very funny. Benny Hill theme: makes me want to die.

Pre-empting my Rainz was a Patsy JFK/Lord British feature idea, The Escapist has an interview with Fansy the Famous Level 5 Bard, the infamous old-skool Everquest Griefer.

For those not aware of Fansy’s infamy… well, get to the page, already. In short, on the original hardcore PvP Everquest server – i.e. anything goes – he found a loophole which he abused in such a dramatic way to make the developers pretty much change the whole world just because of him. Anyone beneath level 5 was invulnerable in PvP. So he headed out into the wilderness, and dragged back enormous chains of monsters to pound on everyone else, while maintaining a faux-naif personality in all OOC chat. Which he then shared with us in the aforementioned website. In any other server, he’d be a monster. In a place devoted to beating on people… well, he’s a little like the guy who would walk into Arkham Asylum in Gotham City with a portable Nuke strapped to his chest (While laughing). Yes, crazy. But – at a distance – a kind of admirable crazy. JohnH in the Escapist Comments thread sums Fansy’s achievements succinctly: “In a world made for griefers, Fansy succeeded in becoming the Grief King, and doing it in a way that brought to them a bit of that all-too-scarce commodity, karma. The real stuff, not governed by any game-tracked variable.” Anyway – read the interview.