Chapter 12: Meeting

Disconnecting from the game, I opened my eyes back in our testing chamber. I saw my other team members of the pioneer team are going out as well, we were told to only test a few areas today and check which features are not working so that we can immediately patch them.

"Hey Ankush! Hope you got your checklist covered? We need to report to Mrs. Spileen now, she's waiting for our feedback on anything we might have to adjust or change."

That's Natasha, another one of my team members who was in charge of checking out the death realm. Mrs. Spileen is our coordinator who is also responsible to take our feedback to the adjustment team people we have on standby for any situation. The main dev team right now will be focusing on more of the balancing all kinds of stuff and adding more stuff based on feedback, they also got some more annoying tasks to check out which we, the pioneer team won't have to or now. We are given the task to play the game as a part of the company, because when you are part of any organisation, your achievements are part of their as well, so despite us making the game, if no one from the company actually contribute to the government by playing them and discovering things, it will get ugly quite fast.

"Yea, I thought of some stuff, but I'm sure all of us did, let's move on then, I see only two of us still connected."

"Ah! They will be out in a while, heard they faced a death due to those missing bars and all so they are now testing the respawn system as well."

"Well, at the very least we got all the basic systems covered, hahaha."

"Hehe, it probably isn't funny for them, let's go, those two will be out in a minute or two."

I and Natasha went out to the small conference hall two floors above the testing chamber. Inside I already found three of our members sitting while probably thinking about all the things they want to say, Mrs. Spileen and Gibson, a member from the feedback and adjustment team, are also there waiting for us. We went to our seats while greeting them and went to think about our own parts.

To be honest, after only spending the time in that marshland, there are only a few points I can talk about, but the good thing is that I'm not holding the burden alone, so we will gain quite a few suggestions tonight, not to mention our forums are probably full of people asking about this and that, I hope the feedback team can sort out all the stuff being talked about in the forums before the adjustment patch that is planned to roll out tomorrow. We expected to fix small bugs or glitches as soon as possible, but anything that requires a bit of work on the coding part or any kind of balancing and changes to roll out together as one whole patch by tomorrow. The AI can handle minor issues, but we will go through an adjustment test first before releasing the balance or changes, which is why the resource bars weren't implemented as soon as the issue was notified, since the dev team tested the calculation in different scenario in our dev build setup, especially the resource regen part.

While thinking of this, the last two members also joined us, our team composed of total seven members, Natasha, Stacy and Luna being the female members and Qian, Tarif, Lock and myself being the male members. Natasha is from USA, 7 inch tall with blond hair and blue eyes, she's very fit and outgoing. Stacy being more of someone who loves to be in the internet most of the time, she's also a streamer which is also why she was chosen to show the character creation process during our live stream. Luna is half asian and half germen, you can give her some animals and she can spend her whole day with them.

Qian is from China, he's a geek through and through, among us boys, he's probably the only one who spends most of his time sitting in a chair with data and gets overly excited about new technology. Tarif is from Arab, a very fit and build body and a very reasonable mind is a weird combination you can say, although me and Lock also exercise, he's just a big hunk for us. Lock is from Britain, among us, he's the most expert in hacking, he's a certified hacker who worked many times with the government. Myself, am an Indian, though, my specialization is not actually coding, it's electronics, I am part of the hardware team in here, but we all know something about coding at this age after all.

"I see all of you are here already, so let's hear your opinions, considering I don't need to ask how you felt the world and all since we all experienced it once before at least. Go on young fellows, tell me if you have found any major problems and any idea you might want to see inside Chaos?"

Mrs. Spileen interrupted us from our thought, we looked at each other and as we had decided, Natasha went to tell her piece first.

"Myself being a part of the death realm, there are a few ideas I found, first, the death essence absorption can be modified, during the intro quest we have to farm those essence, but any additional essence harvested during the quest are discarded immediately as the quest is submitted, I propose that we can make those additional essences into poor quality essence stone, the currency death realm uses. And we can also make sure players can't exploit that by adding a timer, I've found an average player can get all 30 essences within 5 minutes and can still harvest some more, so we can make the timer 5 minutes and any additional essence will become their currency as they submit the quest."

"We can try that out, I'll forward the idea to the dev team so that can check if there will be any future imbalance due to that, if not we will roll that out."

"Thank you, next thing is that I found the soul type death beings are a bit hard to tell whether they are male or female, they also look kind of monotonous."

"Yes, The team will fix that and make the soul take shape of the actual living person as he was supposed to appear, with some additional features to tell that they are dead beings."

"May I also ask something due to this topic, can we allow the soul type to gain access to a body? For example, design a quest where they will gather materials to forge their body to house their soul. Because a soul type player can never stay in the living world for more than eight hours of in game time, due to them being yin type existence and only those eight hours is when the yang in atmosphere decreases. Also, they won't ever visit any area or instance that is dominated by fire, lightning or any yang type attribute. So, by giving them a body, their yin skills will become weaker but they gain some resistance to yang and will be able to visit the world, although we can add some restrictions to make sure they don't harm the living."

Tarif butted in, he is also in the death realm so I guess he also got some good ideas, this one sounded fun at least.

"Maybe we can do that Tarif, but not yet, let players get accustomed with their soul form, then later we can introduce something perhaps.

"Thank you."

"Thanks Tarif for your insight, may I also ask to do something about the death penalty of the dead beings? It is probably lighter than the living and I see people exploiting that to gank higher level death creatures."

"All right, that will be forwarded as well, allowing ganking was never our intention for leveling up, I'll make sure we fix that."

This time it was Gibson, this request was under his part as the penalty goes under adjustment.

"Also, the players get easily resistant to yin type attack due to both them and the enemies being yin type."

"This one can be tricky, I'll see what we can use to salvage this situation, that can become a good way to grind yin resistance for the dead, and it will later become a problem for the dead themselves."

"The last problem I'd like to address is the skill usage that are based on the resource pool, players are becoming too fatigued after using three or four of them, the pool might be getting emptied too easily, may I ask the team to check upon the resource management?"

"All right, soon the resource bars will be shown so we'll check if there's any problem and will fix that out, but the problem, if there is any on the consumption side, will get fixed on the major patch."

"That's it for me, Tarif, anything to add?"

"Nothing for now, thanks, I'd like to check tomorrow the changes and then will report if anything goes out of place."

"O.k, from the living realm then?"

Luna went up immediately. "The resource problem is probably shared, I felt the same and have seen players saying as such."

"Priority one then, go on."

"May I add an idea?" I asked.

"Yes, do so."

"The wild zone hunting and exploring is a bit monotonous, I saw some people farming, but also some who are getting bored, I think we can add a bit of hype there? The wild zones are home of many different creatures, so let's add a counter depending on the zone size and when that amount of creatures are killed, rather than normal creatures, much powerful ones from same race will spawn. So, here we can divide the creatures using the star division system we devised before, you will find 1 star and 2 star creatures normally, when a certain number of them dies, the rest retreats, whereas the 3 star ones come out to drive off the killers. When players kill enough 3 stars, certain number of moon grade will start roaming, they will be few, and when players will be able to kill them, a sun grade boss will come out, the moon and sun grade creatures will drop rare materials and useful essence, which players can use to their skills if they need it or sell to guilds. Once the boss dies, the zone goes under cooldown period of certain amount of minutes, when that race will no longer spawn. Players can then safely harvest minerals or plants in their habitat or go hunt another species."

"But will players be able to kill bosses as they are now?"

"Add a timer then, if the higher grade won't die within a said amount of time, they will retreat and the basic mobs will come out, and the cycle restarts. We can also make the boss appearance as guild emergency quest, so those that joins the team and kills it gets special reward from the guild, we can also release the team alliance system so a lot of players can participate in that, whereas the death penalty can make sure no one can try this after dying 3 times maximum."

"Doable, it might even get fun, I'll forward this to the dev team."

Like this, some more suggestions were given, some will be put under consideration immediately, while the others are for future updates. We spend half an hour covering all the parts before finishing the meeting so that we all can go home. Saying goodbye to the rest, I went in my car and relaxed while the AI drove me back home. Which is given to me by the company, my original home is quite far from here, so I go there during any vacation or weekends, my parents along with my elder sister lives there. Most of the employees of our company got a house nearby the company so they can communicate easily and can arrive as soon as possible. The houses are not exactly luxurious, but they are not that bad either, you can easily spend your time comfortably there. Due to the infrastructure, the area is always clean and comfy. I just got freshened up and ordered the robot to cook some stuff. These kind of domestic robots are now available easily, and they do make your life so much easier when you are living alone. As usual I called my parents and spent some time talking with them, sis is now apparently busy in the game still, so I reminded mom to make sure she doesn't stay there too much, although it has life support, that's why in case of emergency, never for convenience. For tonight, I just decided to finish dinner and take a nap, from tomorrow, a lot of time will be spent in the game after all, so a good night's rest is really needed.