YOU KNOW WHO WINS EVERY WAR? THE ARMS DEALERS!
Well, Siege Perilous is seeing its first war, and, no doubt to the surprise of many, it doesn’t involve anyone going OoooOoooOOOoo… yet, anyway.
Full disclosure: just for the three of you who don’t already know, I am, in UO, a member of the Temple of Mondain guild. Our first activity as a guild on SP was in making a GM Smith, Mondain’s Hand, based in Minoc. This was a cooperative effort, and with 20 miners and 4 people playing the smith character full time, we managed to have the first GM smith on Siege. Scroll down a ways and you can see me bragging about it.
Shortly thereafter others also achieved GM Smith, including Adrick out of Britain and Batlin (who smiths as Mr. Craftsman), also out of Minoc. Batlin immediately won the Adrick Award (given for pissing everyone off on CoB) by posting that well, he was the first GM Smith who actually worked at it. This failed to amuse those other GM smiths who managed to work through tens of thousands of ingots simply by smiling a lot and waving or something.
Not content with that, he then posted his price list, which severely undercut most other smiths to the point of idiocy. Adrick’s immediate reaction (after having the same reaction as everyone else, namely “WTF Man…?”) was to accept the very reasonably priced gauntlet thrown down in front of him. After a few pleasant words, Batlin threatened to have Adrick’s miners killed. He also bitched about Mondain’s Hand not having a life (apparently not realizing that MH was a guild’s cooperative effort).
Meanwhile, Batlin’s price war was having a cascading effect, as others marked their prices down to stay competitive. Adrick was unhappy about this, and pleaded with the other smiths to see reason. Batlin, being the mature competitor that he is, responded by calling Adrick a big baby. They exchanged views further and then went off to their respective corners. Meanwhile, Basil, who has apparently made it his life’s unceasing mission to whine about our guild, continued in his quest.
The price war continued, as Batlin dropped his unreal prices even further. (Any lower and he would be paying players to accept his goods.) He was cheered by some, but Adrick’s response was basically “if you want to provide smithed items at below market value, I’ll buy them off of you and make a profit reselling them.“
Batlin thought this was fairly dirty pool (Imagine! People actually buying things he offered! The horror!) and posted a complaint about it. Adrick laughed, and other enterprising merchants decided to start profiting from the war. Adrick reiterated his position, and Batlin entrenched himself and announced that he was taking countermeasures against Adrick’s profiteering.
Meanwhile, the secret masters of Siege Perilous watch, and laugh.
(This evening’s entertainment brought to you by those fine folks at COB Discussions.)