ITT: Runescape Nostalgia:
Remember when KBD was meaningful?
//
Kidding aside, two of my most satisfying moments came at the expense of someone else. Once was when I happened across a guy droptrading to one of his alts in an insufficiently vague location and nabbed maybe 85k worth of stuff, though I ended up giving most of it back and making friends with him.
The other one, though... storytime!
It happened while I was grinding bowstrings for my first whip. Yeah, that's how I did it. Thankfully they were only a couple million at the time, so I only got a fairly mild case of CTS from that. Anyhow, I was getting close to the mark, had already banked around 1.8 million from running flax->string constantly for a week over the summer. A guy was in the spinning room (it was the prime run at that one member's town right by the Arthurian castle knockoff) was selling bowstrings.
He went AFK. I don't know why, I don't care. After a minute or two, a swarm appeared. You remember those, right? The random event, a little cloud of flies that chipped away at you 1HP at a time until you ran off? The guy was AFK, he wasn't running anywhere. I kept doing my flax run, a careful eye on him whenever I went to spin. He was in the mid-80s levelwise, plenty of health, so it took a while. Eventually he dipped below 25%. I stopped doing runs, banked everything, and settled down in the spinning room to wait.
His health ticked lower and lower. I honestly couldn't believe it was happening; you hear about that sort of thing, but who ever sees it happen? Well, lads, it was happening this time. As he got down to a sliver I started frantically left-clicking. If you've ever done it, you know that trying to right-click a deathstack while people swarm it is an exercise in futility, best to just nab what you can. He died, keeled over, and his stuff dropped. I was the only one waiting on him, though people instantly rushed over. Maybe they thought he was trolling them.
Nevertheless, I was the first there, and I filled my inventory. What did I get? Oh, I got a lot of pointless crap. I got three pieces of his whatsit-bark armor. But that's the small change.
I also got his stack of 2.1k noted bowstrings. That's part of it. I got his gold stack too, 831k in total. Don't ask me why he was carrying that around, I couldn't tell you.
And that's the story of how I got my first whip and Barrows set ahead of schedule. Literally best moment in the game for me, and still one of my strongest gaming memories. Folks, that's why losing items on death is both good and funny.