Tag Archives: Gankers

Gankers

A gamer in the Sons of Sword Universe is playing through a great game of Champions of Battle.  Not willing to pay the outrageous price for an upgrade, she has gathered the ore to make the next piece of armor herself.  Now it’s time to return to the forge.  She’s about to get back into her ship when suddenly a lightning bolt comes out of nowhere killing her instantly.

By the time her body is retrieved, she has lost the ore and her shirt, literally.  All the stat increasing Hanja it contained now makes her mysterious assailant stronger or richer.  So, she has another difficult task to complete before she can continue her adventure.

Another gamer has just finished the final leg of an extensive quest chain with a secretive and hard to impress faction.  The prize for months of frustrating quests and searches is a rare treasure that only this faction can give.  He has burned many bridges with former allies in order to get this prize, steeling or ruining things they hold dear.

All of the trouble is well worth it.  This prize is as useful as it is rare.  It is not however all powerful.  This fact is easily proven.  Not five minutes after getting it, he is swarmed by an overwhelming horde of attackers.  They rip the prize from his Champion’s cold dead hands and roll dice to see who keeps it.  By the time his body is retrieved the attackers are nowhere to be found.  To get a similar prize, he has to start the whole process again with no access to his former allies.

These attacks are just a small portion of what is capable of those who have been named “gankers” in the game Champions of Battle.  A common occurrence in free roam games, they are a problem and a peril that is difficult to sort out.  They have been called bandits, cheaters, cowards, thieves, raiders, and many other colorful phrases.  To the enemies of the attacked, they could be called fortunate.  They have been hunted, hired, and are usually not trusted.  They are the reason that most low level players stay in cities with high level guards.

Who knows why they do what they do?  Perhaps in a gaming world a player can act out their craziest dreams without being punished.  The player can become an outlaw then sleep soundly at home.  Perhaps the player’s idea of fun is making sure that others don’t have fun.  Maybe the player is powerless in the real world and lash out in the world of fiction.  For any of these reasons, the result is the same.  Whenever a Champion steps out of the protected cities, they must be wary.

It is not an easy existence.  Gankers too live in fear in the Champions of Battle world.  They too must be careful.  With increasing reports of dishonorable activities, they have to be careful where they go.  They have few safe places to rest.  There is usually a bounty for their capture.  This bounty increases with every dishonorable thing they do.  This, “fun,” is encouraged to become less fun for the players.

With an increasing bounty, gankers have to take greater strides to stay hidden while carrying out their daily lives.  They have to look for more and more secure hideouts.  They have to search for special cities equally full of lawlessness to be relatively safe from bounty hunters.

When gankers are caught, painful strength reducing torture in a prison cell may await.  All of their acquired equipment and a great amount of their funds could be taken.  To be completely free from their captors, they must hope for rescue from their allies or the enemies of their captors.  Such help may or may not come depending on how securely the prison is hidden away.  Anyone that attempts to free a ganker and fails is placed in a similar condition.

Gankers are difficult to deal with because they have uses in Champions of Battle.  The Crisho race is a very small.  The average height is around five centimeters.  Even in a video game world, ill-equipped explorers should be wary.  Low level players are not supposed to wander far.  They are encouraged to play carefully and strategically or fail a task they may not be trusted with again.  Gankers create the necessary fear for other players to stay relatively safe until they are ready to venture out with all the proper equipment and tactics.

Gankers are used politically in game as well.  There are always warring and conniving factions.  Catching or hiring a known outlaw creates a winning situation.  They are used as free agents to attack or spy on foe or ally without revealing the true source of aggression.

The temptation to break, steal, or vandalize stuff is sometimes too powerful to resist, especially in video games.  However, Champions of Battle is a game where things are continually moving.  A Champion is still active even when their player is not playing.  It is possible for a Champion to commit a crime, only to be caught while its player is off-line.  Even if a player does a few dishonorable actions they must be careful.

Champions of Battle: AD7 – Awakening #13

Did I just dodge a missile?  Adrianne thought to herself.  She had little time to reason it all out.  Whatever shot at her would shoot again.  As much as she wanted to see what it was, stopping to look would be fatal.  She had best run now and figure things out later.

Tree bark and branches fell where she had just been.  She picked up the debris on her scanner.  Just then she realized she was moving in a straight line away from something that was going to shoot at her soon.  It had only been for a split second but that’s all it takes to aim.  She activated Silent Blur’s wings and their rockets to sharply change direction.

As Adrianne was committing to the maneuver, her instincts kicked in again as she activated her Kin-Po and Aura talents.  She was wearing a gravity suit similar to what the racers wore, but her maneuvers were just a little more intense and desperate than the suit was designed to handle.  With her life on the line, even getting a little disoriented could be the end of her.

Blaster bolts followed her as she swerved behind a tree.  Thankfully, the attacker could not keep up with her acceleration.  The blaster fire trailed her hitting the tree a few times before it stopped.

Using Silent Blur’s wings again, she quickly whipped the ship around to a position fit for climbing.  Metal claws dug deep into the tree as she scrambled up.  It was a long shot, but just maybe she could shake it off her trail.

It almost worked.  The attacker moved very quickly around the tree to get a good angle for a shot and found her.  Adrianne saw something move and began to corkscrew up the tree to avoid the blaster bolts.  It fired mindlessly as it tried to keep up with her climbing around the tree.  Adrianne stayed ahead of it, but it was not easy.  She was going fast enough to launch the ship off the tree.  She had to use Silent Blur’s wing rockets to press Silent Blur against the tree as she climbed.

At this point, the attacker was having a hard time keeping up while shooting.  It also showed little intelligence.  It kept following the shortest path behind her instead of cutting her off.  It had to be a machine.

The machine continuously fired and it continuously missed.  At this point, she was surprised that the woods were not catching on fire.  She was thinking of a way to end this impasse without getting shot down but couldn’t think of a solution.  Her confusion increased when the continuous rain of bolt fire suddenly stopped.

She thought it was a trick at first.  Then her short range motion tracker caught a parachute opening.  Her motion sensors found the device in her data bank.  Even without the data bank the device looked familiar to her.

It was a hover hunter, a small droid designed to search and hunt for a designated target.  She knew them very well.  She modified her defensive droids from them.  They had exactly one missile and a short battery life.  They had a cloak but the device was small enough that it avoided most scans.  They were invisible unless you looked for their particular frequency.

They could be reused.  Once the droid was retrieved, the missile could be reloaded and the battery recharged.  Each droid had a camera and a tracking device so the gankers probably knew exactly where she was.  They could surround her before she saw them.

Hunter hovers were very expensive to say the least.  These gankers were very well funded.  She had to be very careful to get back to Rubin’s Trail alive.  Now that she knew the weapon of choice for her enemy.  She searched for the frequency to allow her to pick up the little deadly drones.

She wasted no time stuck in the tree waiting for the blips to appear.  She knew they had found her.  She knew they would overtake her in the air.  The best she could do is to run along the ground hoping to escape the danger.

And so, she jumped out of the tree towards the ground and let Silent Blur’s wings soften the fall.  Heading west, she hoped to avoid any hover hunters they may have released from their ships to track her since the first one had failed.

The frequency scan was short.  When the scan was over, she was in no way pleased with what she saw.  Five cloaked hunter hovers in her vicinity and two cloaked ships circling directly above her.

#1 – Awakening #12 – Awakening #14

Champions of Battle: AD7 – Awakening #12

Rubin’s Trail Research Lab:

It had been about an hour since Chaeri Wu had someone call for Adrianne to return to the lab.  It was simple enough to get others to do what she wanted.  She knew why the young males around the lab looked her over so often.  Her position also gave her at least a small amount of power.  All she had to do was ask and whatever she wanted would be done.  She saw the intern dart for the office phone when she asked him to call Doctor Yu.

AD7’s brain activity was off the charts.  This was an incredibly important event for the research lab, even more so for Adrianne.  Doctor Yu should be here.  Is AD7 a threat?  Should they try to help her?  They needed to know what to do.

Chaeri knew Adrianne would have flown strait here as fast as she could as soon as she got the news.  However after all this time, there was no word.  Something was wrong.

Chaeri was Adrianne’s assistant though she simply refused to dress for the part.  Her baggy black blouse and matching pants did not do enough to hide her curvaceous figure.  Her pale yellow skin was covered in large golden yellow patches and a few pink spots.  There was a large golden yellow patch on her face but it only made her look cheery.  She was rarely cheery.

The door flew open and she rushed out to the lab floor.  She walked briskly to the intern that made the call before, startling him.  “Any word from Doctor Yu?” Chaeri spoke in her standard, to the point, tone.

“N… no ma’am,” the intern replied, “Do you want me to call her again?”

“No,” she said pausing for a brief moment, “Call the Sky Guard.”

——

Somewhere in Rubin’s Woods:

Adrianne was moving Silent Blur at average speeds, hopping from tree to tree steadily away from Rubin’s Trail.  Judging from where they were and the average range of jamming signals, she should be at least almost out of range.  She only had to get out of range and call Rubin’s Trail to get the Sky Guard out to help her.  That is, if she needed them.

If the gankers really wanted to find her, she had no hints.  No ship flyby.  No energy signatures on the short range scanners.  No pings for her location.  Now that she thought about it, they didn’t even turn when she dove into the woods.  They kept going towards Rubin’s Trail as though she were invisible.

Maybe she was imagining the whole thing.  She had no real evidence they meant to harm her.  They may not have even cared for her in the first place.  It was out of reflex that she dived into the woods.  She put some pieces together that made sense at the time.  Her reflexes had saved her often enough.  Every now and then, they made her look silly.

She looked on her short-range scanners again.  Nothing was there, only the wild beasts.  The beast usually got spooked when something noisy came near; they were calm.  She had nothing to tell her that there was anything going on, only her nerves.

She looked at Captain Bubbles as if to ask it where she should go.  The little sailboat inside pointed behind her to the city.  However, she decided to play it safe and go the extra twenty meters before calling.  That would put her well outside a radio disruption signal if they were not following her.

She continued a steady pace.  She was about to climb the tree to get a better view and a good signal for the city.  A sudden large energy spike appeared on her scanners; really close, really powerful.  Instead of wondering what it was, she instinctively moved with all her power to change directions.

“BOOOMM” A missile hit exactly where she would have been.  The blast shook the limb she was on, loosening her grip for a moment.

Time to go!

#1 – Awakening #11 – Awakening #13