Deep Lore: I was born and raised on Shana Bei 6 to a middle class family on the outskirts of a large city. When I was 14, I sneaked through the cracks of the Pilots Federation admissions process to obtain a license at a very young age, but I was hardly able to take advantage of this due to schooling. My father wanted me to revive our family's scholarly background and become an astronomer like my ancestors, and the only way to do this was to sail the stars personally. Rather than wait until I was in my twenties to get my license, my father used his influence and some money to get me through. I am unable to pay him back, however, because he perished during the democratic revolution of Shana Bei, which occurred from June to August of 3303. This war was instigated by Evangeline's Elite Expeditionary Force, a democratic faction that started on Chu City, my home starport, and was funded by the Federation. My father was a high ranking individual in the old dictatorship, the Official Shana Bei Constitution Party, and he was executed by the party for leaking battle plans to the other side. I was in deep space at the time, and by the time I had returned, the dust had already settled.




Actual Lore: I began in November of 3301 in the Shana Bei system, and for my first 6-8 months I was completely solo. The way I made credits back then was buying slaves from Chu City (my home port), and selling them on black markets in neighboring systems. Dirty work, but I was desperate. In January of 3302, I made my first deep-space voyage, all the way to the Pleiades! A very routine route these days, but quite nerve-racking for a relatively new pilot. In August of 3302, I jumped in my unengineered Type-6 Transport to haul materials to Jacques Station. After 20 hours of flying, I finally arrived. Only being 10,000ly from the core, I decided to visit it, and from there I went to the top of the galactic bulge (roughly 2000ly above the core). After that, I flew directly back home.

I eventually joined Canonn in 3302, although my contributions were quite insignificant. Not too long after, I joined CoR. My first memorable thing from CoR is assisting with the attack on Admiral Denton Patreus' flag ship. It was during this attack that I actually lost a very dear NPC crew member. My last memory was assisting with the escort of Salome on April 29th of 3303, although I don't believe she ever reached my position. To this day I still feel upset over the whole incident.

After her death I went on a personal trip to the Formidine Rift for a few months in some sort of desperation as I couldn't come to terms with her death. When I came back, I found I had been mysteriously removed from the CoR discord, and I found that a new faction had taken over my home system of Shana Bei, Evangeline's Elite Expeditionary Force. I thought CoR had been disbanded with the death of Salome, so I did not inquire as to why I was removed from the discord, and I did not really care much about the faction that had taken over my home system.

Afterwords, I did not participate much in Canonn except for some investigation into a possible hidden message in Guardian Obelisk sounds, which came up as inconclusive. I began to retire partially, with the exception of checking out Thargoid encounters, and eventually even fighting them. During this time I killed approximately 5 cyclops interceptors, but not without the help of acquaintances from Canonn.

In late 3304 I was introduced to Julian McCoy, someone that has many connections. After being amazed by his skills, accomplishments, and history, I pledged my allegiance to him and his small group, McCoy Spaceways (MSW). From then until March of 3305, he taught me many skills about how to properly engineer my ship, how to fight, gave me a great deal of insight into many of the galaxy's mysteries, and so on.

One thing Julian taught me was that the Thargoids are our friends, but I didn't agree with him at first. As a result, I had no problem grinding for my Pilot's Federation Combat rank by killing thargoid scouts, but I was obligated to leave the MSW squadron as to not cause the squadron to appear on the anti-xeno leaderboard. Later in 3305, thargoid incursions into the bubble became less and less common, and eventually stopped entirely. With that, I rejoined the squadron and began doing some BGS work.

After that, I learned that I could make a huge amount of money mining for Void Opals using the new mining system. I bought a Type-9 and went from 100 million to 2.5 billion credits, then I settled down. In the second half of 3305, I heard a hint that fleet carriers won't cost more than 20 billion, so I went back to mining, this time out in Colonia in December of 3305. In Colonia I believed that it would be easier to find pristine hotspots than in the bubble, thus making my credits per hour increase despite Void Opals selling for 400k less in Colonia on average. Suddenly, the Void Opal market crashed in January of 3306, leaving me with 5.5 billion credits. I went back to the bubble after unlocking all the engineers out there, and I waited for fleet carriers to release while I did some BGS work for MSW. In the meantime, I finally managed to contact the faction that had taken over my home system years ago. They turned out to be a virtuous group, so I pledged my allegiance to them (although I still primarily support the MSW).

When the carriers dropped, I bought one immediately, dubbing it the MSV Otto Struve. I loaded the carrier with about 3000-4000 tons of Tritium, and then I went to explore the Galactic Halo. Firstly, I went to Messier 67, a star cluster 3000ly away from the bubble in the direction of Barnard's Loop. This cluster was the ultimate destination of the Distant Suns expedition of January 3303. Back then, getting to the cluster was a one-way trip. After reaching the cluster, I scanned every star system within it, and found 5-6 other fleet carriers had beat me to it. After surveying the whole cluster, I decided to penetrate further into the halo. I managed to get quite high above the galactic plane, much higher than I ever thought was possible. Unfortunately, I could not reach any Globular Cluster with my 500ly jump range, or if I could, the Galmap was not displaying such clusters, thus preventing me from targeting them. After reaching roughly 5000ly directly above the bubble, I came back down, briefly stopping to gather a few hundred more tons of Tritium. After returning, I started mining for Low Temperature Diamonds, and more recently, Void Opals as they have made a rebound in the markets.

After I managed to unlock all services onboard my carrier, I started mining Void Opals for my squadron commander to buy a fleet carrier. On September 5th 3306, the MSV McCoy's Pleasure was commissioned. I began to focus my efforts towards things such as BGS, engineering, and even PvP. I started to become slowly absorbed in personal study, and I let my assets operate more autonomously.

On September 10th 3306, two community goals started to deliver supplies for the upgrade of refinery outposts in the bubble. These upgrades would turn outposts into starports, which would allow tritium off-loading to be done more easily. Operation Ida, having nothing else to do, decided to fly into action. I wanted more readily available tritium, so I volunteered my carrier Operation Ida. My carrier performed a total of 4 trips full of power generations and build fabricators, and helped finish the second CG.

On October 9th 3306, I departed with many friends and strangers to Sagittarius A* and Colonia aboard my carrier. The trips were executed very quickly due to a new program called the "Carrier Navigation Computer", or CNC, which would automatically plot jumps for my carrier. Myself and other MSW members investigated a strange phenomena known as the "Landscape Signal" in the core regions of the galaxy. We were unable to localize the source, but it must have been very close to where we were. Our squadron leader, Julian McCoy, stayed behind to further investigate (although he too was unable to completely localize it). We departed for Colonia on the 11th of October and arrived 8 hours later.

Only a few days into our layover in Colonia, we got word that something big was about to happen back home. We hastily loaded everyone onto the carrier. Since Julian was left behind in the core region, he was forced to make his way very slowly towards the bubble in his Type-9, McCoy's Quest. After several jumps of the carrier, I decided to take my Anaconda, IXS Wiggles, back home so I would beat the alleged deadline we were given. This meant the carrier was not able to jump as often because the CNC did not work over remote management. When I arrived in the bubble about 2 hours later, I waited several hours for the deadline. When it finally came, it turned out to be a very minor attack by Thargoid forces in the Witch Head Enclave. During these investigations, I started coordinating the movements of the carrier with Julian so it could pick him up. Once my investigation was complete, I got back in my Anaconda and flew back to the carrier. By the time I got onboard, Julian was docked, and I fired up the CNC to bring us home. We finally arrived back in HIP 13644 on October 16th 3306, just one week after we departed.

During the last few months of 3306, I began to associate myself with a new group called "The Cult of Braben", which was exclusively a ganking group founded by CMDR acowforallseasons. We mostly ganked in either Diaguandri or Deciat, or wherever a community goal was going on. Coming towards Christmas, I started to become less interested in the group, and I left the group altogether in mid-January. While we ganked in Diaguandri, we actually pushed the controlling faction, Exo, into lockdown. This seriously hurt their influence in the system and it nearly made them lose control of it. This seriously upset Exodus Coalition, and they started harassing Julian claiming it was his fault since this was only benefiting our faction, the Brotherhood of the Dark Circle. Exo won the war and regained control of the star system, but Julian banned me from ganking in Diaguandri for the time being.

Due to real life stuff, I began playing the game far, far less. I actually took a two month break from the game. Coming up to the alpha of Odyssey, I began to play a little bit more, but not much still. I did however start playing again in late March in anticipation of the Odyssey Alpha. I participated a little bit in it, but found it to be very buggy. This made me feel like the release would be pretty bad, but I kept my hopes up. As we started getting closer and closer to the May 19th release date of Odyssey, player numbers just kept going up and up. Things were looking bright. Even people I hadn't seen play in years were starting to log on.

The release of Odyssey, as I'm sure you know, was absolutely horrible. However, something occurred that completely changed everything: The Carrier Duplication glitch. This glitch was discovered, on accident, by CMDR acowforallseasons live on Twitch only an hour after the servers went back online. The glitch involved glitching items in your cargo hold so that when you tried transferring them over to your carrier, they would both stay and transfer. This exploit stayed unpatched for a whole week, allowing MSW to get as high as 36th place in trade for a period of time. The Borann Boys also used this exploit, getting as high as 11th place in trade. The reason fdev never reverted the exploits is because of how hard it would have been to do so. You see, I would duplicate a carrier-load of something like Void Opals and position myself near a starport buying them for a high price with zero demand. This would then get advertised on Inara, and people would come to trade. I only earned about 10 billion making the runs to and from my carrier, but other people doing the runs for me earned me 36 billion. The funny thing is that since I was selling for about 100k per ton and the starport would typically buy for 500k per ton, I actually injected nearly 200 billion into other people's bank accounts through this exploit. This means virtually the entire playerbase was affected. It would have meant having to revert everyone's progress over the previous week, so fdev decided to just let the effects of the exploit stand.

Odyssey continued to be a terrible dumpster fire, which as a result started killing the game. People started to leave in droves, player numbers plummeted, and people began to wonder if this was the end of Elite: Dangerous. The last true PvP event was the Third Borann Colonia Trip in August. Due to college related reasons, I was unable to attend this trip, but I did attend the departure from the Borann system. After this, I took my carrier to HIP 13644 to mothball it for a while. After about a 2 month break, I returned to the game to find it even more dead. The Borann trip lasted 2 months instead of 1, and finding even random people in open play was becoming harder and harder. The game was truly dying.