SgtSteele

Everything began with the commandos. Rarebit had just introduced The General to the community and offered LESIG the chance to play the roles of commandos in The General’s ragtag army. This was only several months after the conception of the group and until that time, it had really not served much of a purpose whatsoever. Everyone was posting their ideas of what sorts of events would be cool to do and what sorts of things Rare should develop. As anyone who has looked at the Development Roundtable subforum will know, it was a messy mixture of ridiculous ideas mixed with unfeasible ideas, with a smattering of things that were already being worked on anyways (such as HCFrog’s org abilities and control towers). By letting us play the roles of commandos, Rare finally gave us something to do and drastically cut down on all the pointless development suggestions. A small group of 5 members formed a small unit of commandos on Syntax.

The Original 3 Commandos

Meeting with Niobe before the big introduction

Commando Meet ‘N Greet

Steele’s team helps him take down a level 40 Lupine

On that Syntax rooftop, Niobe introduced the commandos and told the players that as part of Zion’s agreement with The General, Zion operatives would train the commandos, who were not adept at functioning in the Matrix simulation. Specifically, they were being trained to combat exile targets and help Zion in their conflict with the Merovingian, I believe.  Players took this assignment very seriously, and I recall the sergeant leveling very quickly. I also recall Mindsweep, a Merv player at the time, constantly harassing Steele with a barrage of French. Or maybe it was Starschwar. Or both. I wish I had written down these memories a long time ago. At the time this happened, Rarebit was only just beginning to reboot the storyline. If you recall, in the shift from Monolith to SOE, there was a period of maybe 4 months where there was no new storyline content whatsoever. Naturally, everone was upset. So when the commandos arrived, people really pounced on it.

At the time, we were fairly out of the loop in terms of what was actually going on in the story. For the first couple weeks, I thought I was playing a redpill character who was part of some sort of strike force. That explains why SgtSteele had a bluepill name in his details. As well as the “Just don’t stand in the way of his promotion.” or whatever it said. I’ll have to ask Othinn some day. It was awhile before I found out we were all programs and adjusted my character accordingly. There was no standard for our RP at the time, so we each adopted a different view of how the commandos should act. I was always more than a little disappointed by how much personality and lol-isms the others put into their characters. I always felt the commandos should have been cold and emotionless soldier programs, programmed only for functionality. Gaining personality over time through interaction with the players would have played a great role in the experience. But like I said, we were new and the group hadn’t really weeded itself out yet.

Steele's team helps him take down a level 40 Lupine

After awhile, other members tried to organize commando squads on Vector and Recursion, however they didn’t seem to be as well received as the original Syntax commandos and many of those members lost interest and/or turned to better things when the LO positions were introduced.

As a commando, I had a blast. I remember saying “You are not authorized to access that information.” a lot whenever someone would ask anything about the story that I had no idea about. For me, Steele was always a cold and calculating program who only knew his mission objectives, targets, and parameters and everything else was irrelevant. SgtSteele was my first time ever RPing in an MMO and it definitely had it’s impact on me, inspiring all the characters that came after him. Before Steele, my only MxO experience was pwning noobs with my faction on Vector. Or was it Enumerator? Not too long after the SOE transition, my whole faction made the move to Lineage. I stayed behind for awhile, but eventually canceled my sub. Actually, this is a pretty amusing origin story.

I had played MxO through beta and into Live, but once the live events were gone, I lost interest and left the game. Sometime in December of ’05, I guess, someone sent me a message over xfire to tell me about the datamining exploit, which was a big deal at the time. In fact, I think it was someone by the name of “cognoscentee” if anyone remembers him.  Eager to make some easy $info myself, I logged in and took a stab at it. But I wasn’t having much success, so I turned to the forums to find answers to my questions. That’s when I found that magical PM in my inbox that revolutionized my MxO experience. If it weren’t for the datamining exploit, I probably never would have come back to MxO and would probably be a very successful physicist now. Unfortunately, I instead became immersed in a world of storytelling from which I could never escape.
…And I never pwned a noob again.

…Until Entropi showed up.

MxO Forum Search: “SgtSteele” => http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/search/search.m?clean=1&query=sgtsteele&keywordType=&searchTerms=all&author=&userType=&exactMatch=true&forumId=&sortBy=relevance&sortDir=DESC&categoryId=&postTime=

Niobe’s introduction of the commandos => http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/posts/list.m?start=0&topic_id=35000000063&#35000000080

Some cool dialogue I found with SgtSteele => http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/posts/list.m?start=0&topic_id=23500001086&#23500001086