7. Aftermath (in which I learn to hate lawyers)

  It was a week before I was allowed to log into the game again, and two weeks after that before Paula was expected to join me. Fortunately Uncle Tommy was able to get my guild a message regarding my raiding obligations, so there was no difficulty or hard feelings there. My guild was widely considered one of the best guilds in the game for an amateur to turn pro in, so having one extra raid spot in one of their main kill teams actually made most of them pretty happy.

  The fact that Uncle Tommy founded the guild is generally assumed to be the reason for its reputation. He’s one of the most visible faces for the game in the real world, after all, so it makes sense that his guild would be important. But the truth is that his guild was only important because I was in it. He made it for me when I first started playing, he managed it for me until we found someone who was willing to take over that responsibility, and then after that, I found the best people I could to make it take off in the direction that it would.

  It took me years, but when you’re able to run at [15X] to [30X] when nobody is around to write you a speeding ticket, there’s a lot of ways you can support people without them realizing it was all coming from one person.

  Then everything backfired, I got accused of hacking – total bullshit – and a lot of people got their gear confiscated by the administration. I had to change my screen name and avatar because, officially, Lukbenton45 was under a lifetime ban with about eighteen different names who were supposedly responsible for the exploits.

  That was the official story that my guild gave out, that Jamie told Susie. That I had found some exploits to help people, and that one of the conditions on allowing me to return to the game was that I didn’t use them or tell people how I did it. Which was technically true. But the true story was a little more complicated, and it pissed me off a lot more.

  I hadn’t realized it, but some of the professional guilds out there had noticed that I was equipping people with [Masterwork] gear for free. Or, not really for free, you had to give me the materials for them. Then I would pop off somewhere and go at [30X] for what felt like three days and come back with dozens of [Masterwork] items for everyone who had given me the materials. They were sending me people who they wanted me to equip, they were befriending me, and then they would play with me for a while until I started crafting them stuff. Once they felt like they’d gotten everything they wanted, they came up with some excuse and moved into the professional guild that they wanted to join.

  It even impacted the economy as the pro-guilds manipulated the prices and availability of the highest quality materials. That meant that regular crafters couldn’t afford to work with the really good stuff, and their own growth was stunted.

  It hadn’t crashed the entire economy, that was an exaggeration. But it made a lot of people very unhappy when the details leaked. Honestly, finding out myself still kind of hurt. Not that people were taking my stuff and leaving. I gave it to them without the expectation that it was part of our friendship and that they’d play with me forever. But a lot of them had just been exploiting me from the beginning, purposefully abusing my generosity for profit.

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  The response from the administration was generated with the intention of protecting me, the in game economy, and the game balance in mind. As far as they were concerned, I wasn’t actually breaking any rules. It was well established that you could run yourself at whatever maximum time dilation you could handle and use the results of your labors however you want in game. The problem wasn’t that I was giving stuff away . The problem was that I was being exploited, putting in hundreds of hours for my ‘friends.’ And I was immature enough at the time to not even believe my Uncle when he tried to explain what they were doing to me.

  Anyway, they had done an investigation into the guilds and people who had been exploiting me and a lot of people got into trouble. In game trouble, not real trouble, but some professional players lost their jobs, and some game organizations lost a lot of face when it came out that they were knowingly exploiting the generosity of a child. Well, children, because the official story was that I was like twenty kids working together.

  The outcome for me was that I had to start keeping track of my in-game finances and how much I was just giving to people. And … uh … well, it turned out that they sort of figured out that my generosity was a very significant factor in several economies, and then the rules became more complicated again … especially once someone finally tallied up all my Karma.

  I really don’t see what the problem with giving away my stuff is. It’s my stuff, why can’t I give it away?”

  I spent the week trapped in my [Pocket Dimension] trolling news sites, putting in the comments about how it was a hard-light superhero who was actually responsible for saving the chemical factory, and how the hard-light superhero had saved the city from a hard-light terrorist. The Lawyers weren’t happy when they found out, but I simply pointed out to them that legally they couldn’t threaten me with any consequences because my parents hadn’t been there to advise me before I’d signed any of the NDA’s.

  They got really quiet after that, and then we went through the process again with my parents.

  Then I started trolling again.

  They got mad, and I pointed out that technically, all of those documents were forged because they had been signed after the date of death of one Lucas Benton. Why would a dead kid sign a bunch of NDA’s? For that matter, how could a dead kid break an NDA, when he was dead?

  They got really mad after that. Fortunately that’s when my uncle stepped in and got me what I wanted in the first place, which was to log back into ER and start prepping.

  Because I was finally going to get to play my favorite game with my little sister.

  And I was really looking forward to it.

  ?