ROBOT ATTACK!!

I hope readers enjoyed my report on Operation 1. That was definately the best of my mercenary missions so far. Later missions with Pookie, and my most recent employer, iDash, have been great fun, but nothing was quite as exciting and funny as that mission (yes, I actually yelled "POOKIE NOOO!" over voice chat).

I don't think I'll be writing big entries like that for most of my mission descriptions, but I'll try to give the same treatment to especially memorable missions.

What's in the future? Well, I'm trying to work out a new system for selling mercenary time on Ebay. Do I setup a scheduled appointment time system? I'm not sure if the people buying mercenary time actually care about playing the full 10 hours they purchase in an efficient manner. It seems like both Pookie and iDash are pretty satisfied with the current system, and were primarily interested in simply donating money to charity with a fun gift attached. But what about everyone else? Hmm.

I've also made offers to play other games as a mercenary, not just Battlefield 2. Call of Duty 2, Neverwinter Nights, Day of Defeat Source, Natural Selection, and Counter-Strike Source. But I'm not sure if anyone's interested in merc service for those other games. In BF2, the stats tracking and promotion system gives people a real reason to want to stay alive longer. If a merc can keep them alive longer, they can get more points capping flags and what not. But in other games, there's no real advancement.

Games like NWN and other online RPGs let you advance, but make it hard to be a merc for people. Level gaps between me and my client will usually make it impossible to play together easily. We'd have to constantly schedule play times together, and in most cases, we'd both have to start at level 1, which isn't something most potential employers will want to do. This is one of my biggest complaints about MMOs: the inability to play with the people you want, whenever you feel like it.

There aren't that many games that are really supportive of mercenary work. MMOs would be the most obvious choice, at first, but due to level gap problems, it's not easy to do. FPS games usually don't let you find and reunite with another player very easily, so it will be hard to find and stay next to my employer during much of the fighting.

I guess in the end I'm just going to continue to assume people who are interested in buying a "game mercenary" are primarily doing it for charity, and then also just to have a funny story to tell their friends.

Before I go, anyone have some suggestions on what games people may want to hire a merc for? I'm thinking about buying Star Wars: Battlefront 2, as a young friend of mine (Henry, age 6, you'll hear more about him later) is a big fan of Star Wars and is always bugging me to get it. I didn't really like the first one though..