That Wasn't the Plan Read online

  Chapter One.Two

  (Wednesday, May 7th / Day 17 of The World.)

  Running Pod Diagnostic – Complete

  Synchronizing controller units - Complete

  Neuro Synchronization - Complete

  Initializing virtual environment …

  Opening my eyes, I saw that the sun was just starting to rise and burn off the morning fog as Neysa and Helgath shifted beside me at my return. Before I could even sit up to greet my ladies, my HUD lit up with a system message filled with scrolling text.

  Emergency Hot Fixes have been applied:

  Hot Fix for death, de-leveling, and imprisonment:

  Player Spawned NPCs: Upon death, a player can now only lose ten percent of their current level with each proceeding death until their current gained experience bar is reduced to zero. There will be no de-leveling. Once the loss of current experience points occurs further de-leveling will not be possible, but any following deaths will come with a temporary de-buff status effect equal to losing one level. This temporary level loss will stack with each additional death. These debuffs will stay in effect for up to five hours after last death. After which, the player will return to their original level with zero experience points towards their next level.

  City Spawned NPCs: Can de-level a player by one level depending upon the crime committed. Some crimes will require a monetary compensation while others will be “exile” level. “Exile” level crimes will require a player to be killed five times to clear their “exile” status. This can be completed by a player (player cannot be part of the same guild or alliance) or NPC. Each death will have a monetary “bounty reward” paid by any military or city guard officer from within the kingdom or city that the “exile” status was given. Each death will drop the “exiled” player’s experience points by twenty percent of their current level until the player has lost a total of one level.

  Deaths from Monsters and Other Natural Enemies: Upon death by a monster or other natural enemy of The World, a player will now only lose ten percent of their current level and with each proceeding death until their current gained experience bar is reduced to zero. There will be no loss of level beyond this point even with repeated deaths.

  Imprisonment: Players can now only be imprisoned for up to five-hours by NPCs and Monsters. Once the five-hour time limit has been reached, the player will be given the choice of respawning at the nearest graveyard, the nearest graveyard outside of the current area, or to the last friendly city they left. In addition, this time period can only be served while the player is actually logged into The World. If a player is captured in PVP within a training area, the time limit is only a maximum of five minutes after which the player will be given the choice of respawning at the nearest graveyard, the nearest graveyard outside of their current area, or the nearest friendly city. If a player is captured in PVP outside of a training area, the time limit is only a maximum of five hours after which the player will be given the choice of respawning at the nearest graveyard, the nearest graveyard outside of their current area, or the nearest friendly city. For PVP, the player does not have to be logged into the game to complete the required time out.

  Hot Fix for Land Management:

  Regular and Advance players can now take ownership of a primary castle that has been either abandoned or conquered. To take ownership of a primary castle, they must keep ownership of the control room for seven continuous days. On top of that, new primary castle owners will be able to access an advance magic trees and unique NPCs options. A player can only take ownership of one primary castle at a time. Primary castle owners can expand their lands and create additional fortifications, but these additional fortifications won't come with additional magic trees or unique NPCs options.

  Nightmare players can only own one primary castle at a time. Primary castle owners can expand their lands and create additional fortifications, but those additional fortifications won't come with additional magic trees or unique NPCs options. Nightmare players can only own one primary castle at a time but can take ownership to pass the land to another player within twenty-four hours.

  There is a new interface available to remotely manage your land. Check your land management tab for specific information.

  Hot Fix for log-out options:

  Hot-Logout: This is a fifteen-minute option. Allows the player's avatar to remain in-game and accessible to your group. Other players will be able to see and interact with the logged-out player's avatar. AI will control the avatar at a reduced capability to allow the player to take a break or deal with issues within the real world.

  Warm-Logout: This removes the player's avatar from the game. Other players cannot interact with the player's avatar, but NPCs will still be able to interact with the player's avatar in a limited sense. This allows players to travel long distances and other interactions while not being logged in the game.

  Cold-Logout (Selected by default when in a non-protected area) Completely removes a player's avatar from the game.

  Hot Fix for NPC and Monster levels:

  Elite Nightmare: Increase of a plus 160 to all attributes. These bonuses will be applied to higher level Boss Chieftains, Rulers, elite Generals, and Monster Hero classes.

  Nightmare: Increase of a plus 80 to all attributes. These bonuses will be applied to NPC officers and elite monster types.

  Advanced: Increase of plus 40 to all attributes. These bonuses will be applied to regular NPC guards and monster types.

  Hot Fix for NPC:

  Resurrections: NPCs can only be resurrected every twelve hours. If an NPC dies again within the 12-hour window after being resurrected, they are permanently dead. This does not affect soulbound companions.

  Hot Fix for Spells:

  Level 50+ spells will no longer be allowed to be cast against or within designated cities within training zones.

  Hot Fix for Soulbound/Summoned Combat Pets, Mounts, and Companions:

  The twenty-four hour lockout upon death has been reduced to one hour, while the experience point loss remains unchanged.

  I felt Helgath and Neysa’s curious mental touch as I read through the information before my eyes. It almost felt like we were sitting together discussing the pros and cons of each change. From the list, it was obvious that V-MMORG had been busy since the destruction of Telrain. Having Hot Fixes pop-up in an MMORPG on log in wasn’t anything new. It was the method that most online games used for applying irregular fixes. Usually, they were simple tweaks to a class’s special abilities or an attack that balanced out small issues for PVP.

  Emergency Hot Fixes, on the other hand, were another story altogether. They only showed up in a game when there was a major problem that had to immediately be fixed, usually because it threatened to break or unbalance the entire game world. This list of Hot Fixes was a prime example. The “Level 50+ spells will no longer be allowed to be cast against or within designated cities within training zones.” was to stop the same series of events that occurred to take-out Telrain, which had disrupted untold new players spawning into the Human zone.

  The “Hot Fix for de-leveling” directly affected my ability to wage war against my PKer enemies. Obviously, someone had complained about losing so many levels. That, or I should have thought twice about allowing the Royal Investigator, Rani Lamkin, be a part of my raid. Whatever, I thought sourly. At these lower levels, the experience loss wouldn’t be much of a deterrent. Still, I was glad they’d decided to keep some form of experience loss in the game. The five hour debuff would force those players to stop fighting to recover their levels at some point, which was something, I guess. Unfortunately, bigger guilds could still wear down smaller guilds to take over their land.

  This seemed like a complete FU by the game administrators on one level. I understood why V-MMORG had done this on one level. Being able to de-level players was a major bug in The World and one I’d mercilessly taken advantage of in my battles against the Chaos Storm Alliance. Now that the larger guilds knew how to do this, they c
ould troll their enemies and de-level them to zero once they purchased their own people of The World. That had to be stopped at all cost or the game would be ruined.

  Unfortunately, without the fear of permanently losing levels, it also meant there was nothing stopping the larger guilds from constantly waging wars against their enemies to wear them down and take away their land. With how the rules were being set up now, the small and medium sized guilds would run the risk of having their players worn down defending against constant PVP attacks. Those constant attacks would make the defenders unable to level up further, while still allowing the larger guilds to rotate out their player base to continue the attacks. Once the level gap gets great enough, the larger guild would be able to take out the defenders without any problems to take their land. This lack of consequences for constantly attacking other players was going to dramatically affect the game’s PVP, I thought sourly.

  At the same time, what could V-MMORG do? Either they stopped players from being able to gank and de-level other players whenever they wanted or they allowed larger guilds to rule over the game. It was a simple decision to keep the game balanced. It sounded cold, but no one was making players participate in the RTS portion of the game. While I hoped they’d come up with something to stop that from happening, I doubted it would happen until a lot of people lost their castles.

  For now, it looked like V-MMORG was going to take the route that most companies took. The RTS portion of the game was going to be regulated to the domain of the larger guilds just like the endgame dungeons were in most MMOs. This could be fought in a number of different ways, but it wasn’t easy. I’d managed to beat the larger guilds at their own game by forming a number of alliances between smaller guilds. While that worked, it was always difficult to maintain due to the various personalities of the different leaders in the alliance.

  Another way the smaller guilds could increase their power to fight off the larger guilds’ attacks would be to strengthen up their people in The World. This was what I was banking on and one of the things I needed to have my people keep their eyes on. I was already doing this by getting my people better gear. Not to mention, the additional skill ups like Dark, Fire, and Frost magic and making sure they could handle themselves in melee combat. These were all ways to give my people the additional power they needed to fight off our enemies.

  Hopefully, the weapons, traps, and castle construction ideas I was bringing in from the real world would help on this front too. While these innovations would make a difference against the Hobgoblin invasion headed our way, I wondered how much of a deterrent it would be against other players. With all the changes coming from V-MMORG, I had a feeling that this wasn’t going to be enough. I’d have to make sure I focused on additional ways to empower my people. Otherwise, this was going to turn ugly fast, I thought, letting out a heavy sigh.

  The planned Hot Fix for the City Spawned NPCs wasn’t particularly bad. At least, V-MMORG still allowed people to lose a level if they messed around within the cities. I’m sure most players had no idea that their actions had consequences and they could be de-leveled by the people of The World if they were caught breaking the rules. The exiled and bounty status was pretty innovative and could possibly start a whole Bounty Hunter player-constructed class. It was also an announcement to players that they could lose levels if they acted up in city and towns.

  The Hot Fix for Deaths from Monsters and Other Natural Enemies was just more of the same removal of consequences to players for dying in-game. Though I could understand why the change had been introduced, it still annoyed me. Old school MMORPGs had started out with severe death penalties. As those games became more widely popular, those penalties had slowly been reduced to the point where there was nothing lost by players upon death. While that seemed like a good idea at the time, it had actually changed one of the most important facets of the genre. Having no consequences for death or dying severely altered how players viewed the virtual worlds themselves.

  Instead of making the worlds feel more real, the lack of consequences made people treat the virtual worlds more like … well a game. Immediately, bad manners became rampant and a player’s reputation became unimportant nearly overnight as people began griefing each other by pulling mobs onto groups of players they didn’t like, while ninja looting became rampant along with a number of other anti-social behaviors. Instead of players being able to police their own communities, game companies tried to make rules to stop players from fucking with one another. While they managed to pull that off to an extent, the new rules completely destroyed the social aspect of the game that had made MMORPGs so popular to play up until then.

  Another issue that I felt caused the demise of the MMORPG genre was the introduction of fast leveling. There was no longer any special feat for leveling up within a game. High level players lost their status. Between that and the loss of the social aspect of the game, most players started bypassing the amazing content of the virtual worlds, as MMOs became only as good as their end game dungeons. These changes, along with a handful of others, nearly made the MMORPG genre die out completely.

  When V-MMORG said they were bringing death penalties back, the announcement was received with mixed feelings from the younger gamer community, albeit the older generation of gamers couldn’t have been happier. From my days of playing old school MMOs, I knew this was an important addition to The World, but for most of my peers, it was the first time they had to worry about losing levels, gear, and experience points upon death. The thought that they could lose their hard earned loot and experience points caused a small uproar. Not that anyone was going to pass up on playing the new FIVR game, but the issue did stand out in my mind once I saw the Emergency Hot Fix.

  I also recently remembered seeing several flame-threads on the forums with players complaining about being de-leveled upon death, when I was uploading my video of what had really happened in Telrain. The complaints must have been so bad that V-MMORG had been forced to tone down the consequences on death to keep players happy. Hopefully, V-MMORG would honor their promise and not take the consequences away completely. With that depressing thought weighing down my mind, I went to the next item on the list.

  Imprisonment was another interesting, if not welcoming, addition. A five-hour lockout wasn’t long, but requiring the player to be logged into the game to complete the required time out was brilliant. Being forced to sit around instead of playing and having fun inside a game world was pure torture and possibly one of the few things that might stop players from outright griefing the people of The World. I just hoped that it would be enough to stop the abuses from players like the Dread Pack. The PVP side was even more frustrating. There went any future use of tactical torture sessions to get needed information. Hell, I couldn’t even assure that the enemy wasn’t warned about our arrival ahead of time. At least, not above five minutes. It was so frustrating. It made taking over an area from another guild almost impossible to accomplish if you couldn’t equally face the enemy’s numbers on the battlefield. Fucking Royal Investigators limiting my options, I sourly thought, as I continued down the list.

  The Hot Fixes for Land Management were on another level of altogether. The fact that players and the people of The World could now take over fortresses and castles was a huge change. It really opened up new possibilities for the real time strategy part of the game, especially with most of the Isolde Line being down. It was a prize waiting to be plucked, but only if I could get the forces together in time to take advantage of the change.

  My inner greed monster rattled its cage trying to get out as it filled my head with visions of taking over huge swaths of land with my allies. While it was tempting as hell, in my heart I knew I was already biting off more than I could chew. If I tried for anything more, there was a good chance I’d lose it all. Sometimes, I had to remind myself that slow and steady really did win the race. At least, it did if you already bit off as much as I had, especially when talking about the distances involved in my current te
rritory.

  I did take a moment to go over the interface for the remote management option. Pulling up the Land Management Console, I found there was a way to specify the build order that I wanted my people to start working on things first. Also, there was a map that visually showed all the land that I owned and the finished structures. I could even specify the placement where I wanted new construction started and showed shaded areas for where the next items were currently planned to be built, which could be moved around as needed.

  Drilling down into the different areas showed I could also specify build orders for current potions, enchantments, and even blacksmithing items. One of the areas listed the troops available to me and even gave me options for directing their movements. Going through everything I could do with the interface would take some time, but it was a great option for developing my people and lands without needing to be on hand to direct everything myself.

  Going to the next item on the list, I read the title with a curious hmmm, Hot Fix for log-out options. The first option for a Hot-Logout seemed pretty helpful. Basically, it sounded like putting your character on follow with auto-attack enabled. The dumbed down AI was somewhat interesting. I’d have to try that out sometime time with my friends to see exactly what that meant. Not that I particularly needed it now since I had my suit, but definitely something useful for the non-hardcore players in the game. The last option for Cold-Logout was just as straight forward. If you didn’t have a camp and were logging out in the wilds, the last thing you wanted to do was have your body left in the game and open to attacks from wandering monsters.

  What brought me up short was the middle option they’d named Warm-Logout, especially when I read the words, “NPCs will still be able to interact with the player's avatar in a limited sense.” I immediately froze as I slowly re-read the words once again. What the hell did “in a limited sense” even mean?