Chapter Thirty four - Problems of an expert

Second day of the launch of the game . There were still lots of marketing. But it was not exaggerated. Apart from influencers, livestreamers and the ilk, the social network media by casual players showed quality and joy in playing rather than shockingly beautiful scenery and meticulously planned buildings and costumes.

Few places even interviewed players who died and red players. Talking about red players, the game makers were mum on the whole subject. Common players grew cold after series of posts were made, all on probability of whattheir silence meant. The red players may not be penalized much. One post by Mr Backseat Theory gained a lot more traction.

"....the makers keep telling us that this game might share few similarities with other games but slowly and surely, it will shed those similarities to walk and entirely new path. And the plot runs on how players decide.

From this we can infer many things. First the red players. They may seem same as in other games. Killing players = punishable offence. Jail and fine. This works at village level because they are down to earth and right is right, wrong is wrong for them. Moreover, the chances of red player being an outsider is more, so obviously punishment is more. I think the situation will change in cities. Unless red players kill in presence of guards or police or someone similar, the rest of the NPCs will not care about the death of the player. The punishment would be severe if caught by guards but otherwise red players could just play normally.

The other way is to have red player centric establishments. After all it takes skill to kill a player. Not now, all are low level thrash. Now PK is mostly ambush or overcoming with numbers. But by the time players flourish in the cities, PK might become a badge of honour. Arena! I am looking at you.

The red players have not divulged how they got rid of the 'redness'. Probably, it will wash off very slowly. So, all players out there, beware of PK in early hours of the day. If players turns red and can't enter the village before night, he might just kill himself. No red player or PK fanatic will do that...."

More often than not, PK would be a heat of moment matter or to show off their power. As game progressed, players would resort to PK to get resources. If killing gets you nice weapon, why waste time grinding in the map? But as of now, players didn't have to worry about PK. Even the guilds didn't focus on PK.

Though it is said and shown that guilds are upright and in the face, the faults and good points shown openly, guilds needed few to do the dirty work- be it becomes a spy, sabotage important raid or kill guild members of opposing guilds when faced in maps. With experience, they had found that village level fights were useless and not worth much. So they would just focus on these unpalatable things later on.

By the time half of the second day was over in the game, nearly everyone got used to buffs, debuffs, penalties and started to stretch their wings. Level 0-3 were considered beginner maps. Monsters would not be able too hard to fight or escape. Beyond that, the difficulty would increase as th aggro range of these monsters would be higher and monsters fought back better. Some even used the terrain to fight and kill the players.

Most of the elites had transitioned to level 4-6 maps, with experts exploring and hunting level 5 and 6 monsters. Experts never had to travel back and forth from village to maps thus saving lots of time. The potions, apples, whatnots all were brought to the maps they were fighting. Yes, fighting. They were not profient enough to hunt these monsters. Moreover, they never took tasks too unless it was important or gave huge rewards. The bad part of fighting against higher level monsters was it depleted resources faster. They would hack, bash or stab till the durability of the weapon reached nearly zero before switching to next weapon. The assistant would get someone to get it repaired. Each expert would carry 3-4 weapons as a batch and the assistants would take batches of weapons to be repaired each time. So technically, 10-12 weapons had to be reserved for each expert. So from where did they get these weapons? The first weapon taken during first spawn would be the finest available for the number of coins they had. This weapon was baby. As soon as the expert felt that the durability had reduced by half, he would shift to other weapons and get it repaired. Only when there was a good weapon in hands of an expert, that he could show off his strength.

Consider, a mage. His initial weapon was of high grade as he spent coins lavishly at the time of creating his avatar, so the attack was in the range of 100-120. But normal staff would provide attack in the range of 5-10. Initially, they could damage small critters but now ...the situation was turning bad.

How can players get weapons or equipments? One method was to but from NPCs. They bought low and sold high, so unless in desperate need, not many would choose this method. In village level, better weapons were sold in astronomical prices. Next would be by killing elites or bosses. Monster drops could contain anything from body part of monster to potions to recipes to equipments to weapons to skillbooks. Only chances of potions and body parts ( meat, skin, gall bladder, liver, bones...) were a tad bit higher but others ... Well, it depends on luck. If you are lucky, your luck stat was higher, the monster drops would be better, sometimes even unique. But if someone got such weapon, it was sold real quick because there was no mention of it in the gossip list. And men gossiped like there was no tomorrow when playing, as if they want to vent out all their repressed feelings.

Apart from first one who got immortalized in steele outside the park for getting a weapon as the drop, no one was brave enough to share their success stories. And it would be a success story if someone got a good weapon as monster drops.

The extra sets of weapons were from logistic players or those who were doing miscellaneous work other than grinding in the map. So they were trash or near there. Even a clever wife can't cook without rice. How can an expert show his strength with a trash like weapon? So towards as soon as these elites and experts started exploring level 5 or 6 maps, their progress stopped. Now unless the guild got better equipments or weapons, or skill books, they could forget about killing these monsters. Forget killing, escaping would be near impossible.