It's funny. You wait 3 years for the game to end so you can go public and make a big fancy goodbye post and then the time comes and you don't know what to say.

I suppose I should start with the names for which I'm best known: SgtSteele, Entropi, TheWatchmaker, TheJokerOfSpades, TheJokerOfClubs, TheJokerOfDiamonds, Strayshot, CoffinsNail, BrickDissuader, The "Keep Your Eyes Open" crew [6414, Caigne, Kabarr, Diced, Phasmata, Kitasu, Kisoku, ToroFurioso, and Piqo], as well as many of the United Tomorrow characters.

Next, I'd just like to say thank you. Thank you Rarebit for giving me the opportunity to be in LESIG and the tools to put on events in MxO. Thank you LESIG for supporting my stories, at least when I wasn't being a lone wolf.  Thank you Paul Chadwick for mentioning me in an issue of The Sentinel.  And thank you, members of my audience, for supporting my stories and playing along. Thank you for making me believe that I could make it as a writer some day.  I've had such a great 3 years here and, while I'm glad that I don't have to leave wondering how MxO is doing without me, I'm sorry it has to end.  I hope that many of you stay in touch in the future via my blog.

I've had a lot of names in the Matrix Online. 10011 from the start. Bodhisattva in LESIG. Message_Buffer for posting story stuffs. Inkblot the volunteer forum mod.  Outside the Matrix, I'm a 21-year old physics major at UCSB. Next year I'll be graduating and hopefully getting a job continuing my work on robotics.
Back when I started MxO, I was still in high school. I was 10011 the Vector machinist. I was the faction leader of ASSIMILATION, which was a fairly unremarkable PvP faction aside from the fact that Bayamos was in it. I enjoyed the game for the first few months, LEs and private meetings with Agent Gray, but after the events dried up, so did my interest and I quit. I probably never would have come back to MxO if it weren't for one fateful story that cognoscente from Vector told me about the afk data-mining exploit. Eager to come back and try it out for myself, I logged into the forums and discovered an invitation to LESIG. It's very funny to think that if I hadn't been trying to exploit the game, I never would have come back and written all those stories.

After joining LESIG, I had the pleasure of becoming one of the first commandos on Syntax: SgtSteele. That was a fun acting experience and we LESIG really had a blast reviving the players' interest in the game.
Soon thereafter, Rarebit announced the Liaison positions and once again, I jumped at the offer. I immediately knew that I was going to be the liaison for the Vector Mervs and that I was going to be the saucy and impetuous Entropi. Fortunately the "cant LO your home server" rule wasn't in place at the time, although I had no ties to the Vector machinists anyways by that time, with my faction gone and Bayamos having been banned. I'm not entirely certain, but I think I can lay claim to having been the first LO ever, as I was the first to be publicly introduced by the Merovingian in a private meeting with Merv faction leaders.
My time as Entropi was wonderful and the Mervs were great and extremely enthusiastic about the RP-PvP we did. To my surprise, the Zion and Mech players also took quite a liking to me and we had our share of hostility and name-calling as Entropi leveled all the way to 49. As Merv LO, I also had the pleasure of laying claim to some of the best events each month. Most notably, I remember claiming the very first Twin reintroduction. I think I might have done one of the first events involving org areas too, but I don't recall. Anyways, it was wonderful fun and I managed to pick up ~500 CQs along the way. That was my senior year in high school and I had only 2-3 classes per day and a robotics job in the late afternoon, so I had a tendency to spend long lunches jacked in.

Of course, I began to develop an interest in trying to recreate events on the scale of what the old LE team produced and the Watchmaker was born. Once again, I think I can brag and say that I produced the first LESIG event back then in January of 2006. The Watchmaker began as just a random character that I intended to provide chit chat on the bench at Mara C. But as players discovered him and talked with him, they grew convinced that there was more to him than meets the eye. So naturally, I was forced to craft a 2-month story for them to unravel. First came the quest to decipher the Watchmaker's macroed looping error message and determine the proper steps to fix him.  I don't know if anyone remembers the binary code hidden in his pants, but that was amazing.  With macros, his pants flashed black and white to spell out a binary message.
After players fixed him, they discovered that a portion of his timing code had been stolen and could pose a potential threat to the Matrix. The players then had to run checks of specific hardlines throughout the city, with the help of the Watchmaker's pal Mercury (the Uriah mission contact) in order to uncover messages that had passed through those hardlines. Now, these messages were from the various mission contacts around the city and I spent a lot of time researching their mannerisms and backstories before writing those messages. Through reading the messages and solving a simple puzzle, players discovered that Grisaille was to blame and was trying to engineer a virus that would incapacitate his father, Mr. Black, so that he and his siblings could usurp his power and take control of his substantial holdings. I often consider this to be my best story and closest to the heart of the Matrix Online.
Unfortunately, with the end of the story, it also meant the end of the Watchmaker. That event had a really spectacular finale, with the Oracle arriving to thank the players and the Watchmaker, before hugging him goodbye and apologizing. There was a crowd of quite a few people there. I could maybe exaggerate it to a hundred people. The instant they saw Agent Harris show up at Debir Court, they knew something was up. And they really surprised both me and Rarebit. Everyone screaming "Nooooooo" and yelling at Agent Harris and trying to break his Admin bubble. We put on a rather dramatic show for them. I'll put up some screenshots when I have a chance.

As for the Joker and the rest... I'm going to need a little more time to write about that but I have to be dressed for my girlfriend's sorority formal in 20 minutes so I must leave now. Thank you all for being such a wonderful audience for my stories.

Please check out my blog (http://binaryvisions.wordpress.com/) which I will hopefully continue to update with supplementary material and anecdotes about MxO. Also, if you have any unanswered questions about my stories and the things I did in MxO, please ask them here and I'll do my best to leave no question unanswered. I'll continue my nostalgia trip later with the Jokers, Keep Your Eyes Open, and United Tomorrow.

Oh, and as you may have noticed, I found an old sig I used years ago after the Watchmaker. Enjoy!

If someone were to hypothetically have three game accounts, is there a way to triple-client MxO?

I'm familiar with dual-clienting by using the launcher -clone, but the -clone can only open a second launcher. Also, if you close the original launcher, there is no way to relaunch it without closing the -cloned launcher as well.

Is there some other way to do this so that one could open infinitely many game clients?

"Hello, my name is Addict..." - A short by 10011 

Before I was awakened, I was a confused teen.  I was in a world that I didn't understand and didn't plan to any time soon.  I guess I could blame it on the Matrix.  I could say that I was beginning to get that special awareness that comes before you get the magical pill from the man in the black trench.  I could say that was why I did the things I did.  But the truth was, I didn't have the slightest idea what the Matrix was and I didn't care.  I was oblivious to the world (with a little help from my friends, of course).  There's plenty of virtual narcotics for an unhappy bluepill with the drive to find it and the cash to back it.

Bliss... it's an imperfect thing. You think you're happy but you're just pretending. The whole time, you're sinking deeper into that hole. It's a hole in yourself. It's a portal into the void. If you go in too far, you never come back. So I guess it was lucky that I was "discovered." Frankly, I think he made a big mistake on that one. He... to be honest, I can't even remember his name. You'd think that the man who frees you from the Matrix would be someone worth remembering, but I can't recall. He's probably dead. It's the same future that's waiting for any of us; a forgotten casualty in a war that will never end. They tell me that there's been half a dozen Zions before this one. I can believe it. This conflict is something that we'll never get past.

I was awakened into a world that had no place for me. I wasn't cut out to be a soldier. I was a drug chaser, not a militant killing machine. I wasn't disciplined. I wasn't cut out to follow orders. If I had thought there was any chance, I probably would have gone back. But instead, I tried. I did what I was told and I fought with the rest. Some died, some lived. I lived. But it was a hollow life. Don't get me wrong, there were people that meant something to me. But they're dead, and they're gone and that's that.

But then there was hope! He died so that we didn't have to. It was a truce. Something that nobody thought possible, least of all me. I know it won't last; it can't at the rate things are going. This war is eternal, one man is not enough to stop it. But I still played by the rules. Because now there were newly awakeneds everywhere. And crowded hoverbarges where one man is as inconspicuous as the next. The only thing that pulled me away from the sweet, comforting embrace of unreality was the vital and immediate need for food. But when you got back from the mess, there was always a space just opening up. And that was how I slipped through the cracks.

I didn't even do anything in particular. I would wander the streets aimlessly. Sometimes hit a club, sometimes go to a movie. I took a cab everywhere. I didn't need to exploit the system to make myself feel big. In here, I had my old life back. Zion had nothing to offer me. A swift memorial when I finally bite the bullet, but little else. Zion is a human machine. It has gears made of people and circuits made of blood and the whole thing runs on sweat and shell casings. The Zion machine will grind itself against the Machine system until there is nothing left. They're two machines, locked together and fully throttled. The way I see it, they'll both rip each other to pieces. That's no kind of life. So I say live and let live.

Spotty record-keeping lets me log some fifty odd hours a week jacked in. There's plenty of other newbies around to keep me camouflaged and under the radar. Plus, there's captains pilling new ones every day. I roam the streets, I do my thing. It's not the places that are important; it's the quality of it all. The air is smoggy and sweet. There's a sun in the sky and a chocolate bar in my pocket. It's a little melted, but to me... it's real. Sometimes I walk past AA meetings. Some day I will walk in and say "Hello, my name is Cole and I'm an addict. Your reality is my drug. And I'm never going sober again."

Message Edited by Walrus on 11-11-2005 04:33 PM