I can finally tell this story 18 years later. haha. So they had the auction house but the winner was determined by whoever bids LAST. It was stupid. So I came up with a plan to gather up guildmates and go into the auction house. I only had about 8 people max. We coordinated over in-game chat, voice chat was only used for raids later on. Right before the auction ended, I had the guildmates hand everyone in the auction house random things. That popped up a trade window and cancelled their auction. I made sure everyone was covered.

I won the auction which was PANTS. I believe this was in the beta (pretty sure).

So everyone reported me, the guild, and so on. These fuckers lie like crazy because they hated me for being a forum moderator OR they hated my openly Republician/Christian politics. They spun the story into the guildmates are “ping bombing” everyone out of the game. They said we purposely caused lagged to lag people out. This was all complete lies and nonsense. We didn’t even do anything technically against the rules are illegal. We just handed people items at the perfect time. It was infuriating letting those lies stand and not being able to dispel them.

So then the company had to figure out how to address this. Each time something like this came up which was only because I was a public gaming figure or had my personal website, they NEVER backed me up. They always sold me out. Which makes business sense because you have to err on the side of the customer and act like you’re a noble company (unlike today where you’re complete trash jacking people’s mobile money for $100k).

So they suspended me. They said we’re not firing you. They had no system in place as to what happens when an employee does something wrong in their eyes. But the whole game as a service was new and something that was developing on the spot. The guy who was making up the lame gamemaster documents on rules, got fired for playing too much of the game. haha. All he did was play the game and nothing else and everyone thought he was working and he was in charge of 100s of people. He just made people think he was a boss as is common, even today.

My boss (only person in charge of the .net service) forced my character to have a sex change. Which is fucking hilarious because I essentially was the first trans character in the game. haha. This was before they even offered “paid sex changes.” or whatever PC name they gave it. They wouldn’t let me reveal they did that for me either. They made me hand my guild over to someone else. I gave it to guild member obviously but the guild was lame as fuck ever after that without me in charge. It still continues today though. They made us change our name. Because some wankers said it was an Indian God because they wanted to attack us and me. So we changed it to something safe as fuck such as “Beautiful Balloons” I believe or similar. Then we kept changing it on a regular basis to other things. Eventually after they relaxed the guild names we just changed it back.

I was essentially still the shadow leader, but all that matters really is the technical “guildmaster” in game so I never felt I was really in charge. And as things continued, I didn’t want to be in charge because we had done everything that could be done in the 2002-2005 range anyway. Whocares.

But back to the main story. I KEPT THE FUCKING PANTS. I just waited for my suspension to be over and wore those pants throughout the entire beta. It was fucking worth it. I had the best pants. Pants worthy of being suspended over. They also changed the auction house to add more time if someone bid which is how it shoulda been to begin with.

So goes the untold unknown legend of the first to be suspended.