Piracy Quest 2007 part 2
What Mauler forgot to add to the write-up above, of course, is that we also encourage other forms of piracy for this quest.
Music piracy
The great thing is that the word 'Piracy' invokes a long series of crimes these days. For one thing, you could try pirating music. There are a series of ways you could try this, but programmes like Limewire make the task a lot easier. For newer albums, you could try Usenet, as the binary groups on there hold vast amounts of illegal music downloads. Please post a list of all the tracks you've illegally downloaded in a daylog on May 1st. For every music track downloaded, you will get 1XP.
Movie piracy
The next popular pirating topic is movies. As discussed in Netflix and the hacked DVD player, having a Netflix (or an UK equivalent, like LoveFilm) gives you a steady stream of movies to your doorstep. The trick lies in not actually watching the movies, but copying them. If you are bothered about quality, do a DVD-to-DVD copy (there are plenty of guides for that out on the internet), or if you are particularly hardcore, just rip them, re-encode them (DivX / XviD or H.284 are all great for this). Same as with the music piracy, post a list of the movies you've pirated in a daylog, and you'll get 3 XP per movie copied.
Actual piracy
The final branch of the quest is actual piracy. I know what you're saying, 'but the above two versions harms nobody! How can we be expected to go further than that?'. I guess a whole industry of intellectual property lawyers would argue differently, and that music and movie piracy does harm someone, somewhere. Having established that means everyone who is prepared to break IP law should probably be flexible enough to have a go at real piracy.
Real piracy is very different from how you've probably read about it in books. There's no more swashbuckling, eye patches, peg legs and parrots. In fact, piracy is a brutal and rather lucrative niche of crime. You'd be surprised how easy it is to hijack a freight lorry or a ship in transit. The former can be done by hanging out at a service station, shoving a gun in the face of the lorry driver, tell him to get in the back, and just drive off. Drive to a secluded spot where your friends are waiting, unload all the valuable items transported on the lorry into a waiting van, tie up the lorry driver (or just shoot him), and off you go. Sea shanties would be optional, at this point.
Pirating a ship is a little bit more involved, but a reasonable quick vessel (perhaps of the type that is often referred to as a 'speed boat', or a quick sea-doo does the trick) gets you quite far. Transport ships are lucrative catches, as they often transport a mixed load of high-value items. Cars, motorbikes, consumer electronics, all items that can easily be sold at a high price. However, the shipping industry has grown wise of this, and you might wish to start a little easier. In most harbors around the world, you find luxury yachts. Apart from being worth quite a bit of money on themselves, they are usually kitted out with all the newest technology: sonars, radars, lidars, televisions, along with expensive art and bars filled with expensive booze. Wait for the owners to start the vessel and start moving, then board them. Be aware that they may have means to protect themselves, so looking extremely menacing is the key here. Submachineguns - especially AK-47s - may come in handy.
For every lorry highjacked, you get 20 XP, and for every ship plundered, 50. Post the results and links to the news stories confirming the boardings in a daylog on May 1st, and we'll give you the XP you deserve!
Violent XP rewards
If you, in your course of your pirating, dismember anybody, or perhaps even kill them, /msg me privately. Extra XP will be awarded on a flowing scale of brutality (30 xp for taking out someone's eye, up to 1,000 XP for a particularly gruesome keelhauling), but I fully understand if you don't wish to post incriminating evidence on a public website. Then again, if you really were a pirate, that wouldn't bother you.
Message SharQ about any questions about this part of the quest. Deadline is on the last day of April, 2007.
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