More Datacron Adventures

When it rains, it pours: since my little balloon ride a week ago I've found myself on another couple of wacky datacron adventures without even trying.

This past Wednesday for example our guild leader organised an event to get people the +10 stats datacron on the fleet, an endeavour that requires at least four players, though we turned up with a full operation. I expected his estimate of how long it would take us - one and a half hours - to be overly generous, but as it turned out it was actually pretty spot on. I'm sure you can get it done much, much faster if everyone actually knows what they are doing, but most of our little group (including myself) didn't have the foggiest clue of what to do. People had to be directed towards vendors, got lost, fell to their deaths, pushed the wrong buttons and got stuck in limbo. In short, it was a brilliant bit of fun. And in the end our Sage did manage to yank everyone safely onto the right ledge.

The other night I also ended up getting unexpected access to a datacron on my low-level Jedi knight. I was questing away on Taris at silly o'clock in the morning, and the number of people on the planet was in the single digits when someone asked in general whether "any of you 5" were up for helping a Jedi with getting a datacron. (As an aside, using that kind of phrasing is a great way of making a generic and open request sound more personal and increasing the likelihood that someone will respond.) I said that I was up for it depending on what it involved, and they explained that all I had to do was push a button. That sounded easy enough.

So we grouped up and I ran over to the factory where the other Jedi was already waiting. There was a grate and a console, and if one person used the latter while the other stood on top of the former, the second person would be shot upwards at an angle and (ideally) land on a bunch of pipes leading to the datacron. The other Jedi suggested that I should go first, something I hadn't even thought about since I had only expected be the one pushing the button. Still, I was happy to try it out. Unfortunately it quickly turned out that I was absolutely awful at pipe jumping and I suggested that she should go first so I could observe how she did it.

I took some comfort in the fact that it took her a couple of tries as well, though not many. When we tried to shoot me up again afterwards it seemed like my luck had only got worse. I don't know if my positioning was just that little bit off or something, but instead of landing on the pipes I kept bumping into the ceiling or getting thrown into packs of rakghouls. It was a good laugh at least. I got close to suggesting that we should just leave it be since I wasn't that bothered anyway, but eventually I reached my target after all. I sure felt proud when I finally got those last two jumps right.

The other Jedi and I parted ways with a smile, and both of us were one green matrix shard richer. It certainly wasn't something I had planned for that evening, but in the end I have to say that being used as a living rocket by a stranger was a lot more interesting than just killing rakghouls all night.