by Arthur Stone
“Not quite. I must have made a mistake, but I dumped all my points into Agility. Most of them. Oh, and sorry, I told you the wrong Perception value—it’s two, not one. Forgot about that.”
“So what’s your Agility, then?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Digits stopped and shook his head.
“That wasn’t a mistake, lad. You’re screwed. Royally screwed. You’re in it—right at the bottom of the legendary pool that collects all of this world’s shit. I’m shocked, lad! I could almost admire you! You are something! You’re the emperor of noobs!”
Chapter 5
“TWS guild is hiring workers for its mines:
Miners:
Copper: dwarves. Strength: 26+. Carrying Capacity: 10+. Vigor: 6+. Mining & Quarrying: 2+.
Malachite: one miner (no zero-level players). Conditions and salary TBD (private messages).
Mules: orcs. Strength: 30+. Carrying Capacity: 15+. Vigor: 8+. Experience with single-track lines with underground junctions a plus. Ogres: TBD (private messages).
Terms: no guards in the mines at night, dorm accommodation (four workers per room), three meals a day, buffs in the morning and at lunchtime, work clothes and equipment deduced from salary, constant daytime guard of high-level players.
Pay: 44 dollars per day. When production exceeds the norm by more than 1.5, a daily bonus is paid. General bonuses paid on a monthly basis. Bonuses depend on the volume of extra production, contract terms, and behavior.
Norm: 285.”
The first post in one of the numerous threads of the Anglophone sector of the game forum.
* * *
“But, Digits, stat points can be redistributed, can’t they?”
“Of course they can. You can also take a trip to Mars accompanied by all the starlets from The Return of the Nymphos and have fun with each of them while you’re at it. I don’t see how this is impossible in theory. Practically, though, you might run into a few complications.”
“You mean redistributing the points will be hard?”
“Even if you only needed to reset your primary base stats, you’d need twenty thousand gold pieces or their equivalent in silver. The current exchange rate for one gold piece is one dollar and seventeen cents. But even if you had the money, you wouldn’t be able to do anything useful, since the only characters capable of resetting characteristics are NPCs ranking no lower than a Viceroy or an Archmage. You’ll have to arrange an appointment with them and then wait a while. By ‘a while’ I mean two or three months, and that’s if you’re lucky. They can also refuse to see you without having to explain their reasons. You have a work account, so you pay around two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a month in the worst-case scenario. I hate to give advice—even though I do it all the time—but it would be easier for you to create a new character than keep on playing with this cripple. As far as I know, even the cheapest work accounts give you three free tries.”
“Out of the question.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t want to go into details, but trust me—I won’t be able to get a new character. You can safely assume I have problems back there that are even more serious than yours.”
You don’t tell the first person you meet your body is in a state of artificial coma, after all. Even if he managed to arrange being brought out of this condition, the attempt may not succeed. The risk was enormous, and his body may not endure it. The first time he came to his senses was a miracle—the doctors had no other explanation.
And miracles had the penchant for not recurring.
“All right, then allow me to inform you of the following: you’re up shit creek without a paddle. You’ve just fallen into a colossal shithole—it’s so wide that an elephant could fall in without touching the rims once.”
“It’s that bad, is it?”
“It doesn’t have to be. You can keep me company. We can wander the city together, read newspapers, and hunt frogs. And I’ll boast to all my contacts that I know the Emperor of Noobs personally.”
“Why would we have to hunt frogs?”
“We’ll need to eat something. Without food your character weakens and becomes a total wimp. You can also get paid for helping the locals—chop some wood, collect bugs from their veggie patches, or play the postman. But it’s pretty tedious, and the pay is a pittance. Hunting and roasting frogs is much more satisfying. Their legs are a true delicacy. Take a look over there.”
Ros looked in the direction pointed by Digits. He hadn’t even noticed that they had left the city past the silent guard, and were now following a narrow path between the city wall and the moat. Digits was pointing downward—there were lots of large frogs sitting on the steep banks and on lily pads.
“There’s plenty of food,” his new acquaintance kept talking. “Also, the guards might give you a copper every now and then—they’re not that fond of all the croaking. So we’ll get by—in some twenty or thirty million years we might even make a million in real money. Although you probably won’t manage it—my account may be free, but you’ll have to cough up a few hundred each month, even if you have a long-term contract with a discount or some special offer.”
“What about a miner’s contract?”
“Not for the likes of you. They need Strength, Carrying Capacity, Vigor, and Speed. In that order.”
“What are the minimum requirements for each stat?”
“Well… You’ll need around twenty points of Strength, ten or eleven points of Carrying Capacity, around five points of Vigor, and some Speed wouldn’t hurt, although it’s less critical. My estimates may be off, but not by much. Stats like those can land you a job in a more or less decent mine with average pay. Although you’ll have to put some effort into it—your potential employers won’t queue up to hire you.”
Ros compared the stats with his own: nine points of Strength, four points of Carrying Capacity, and eight points of Vigor.
“Look, I have eight points of Vigor—is there a chance to get hired if everything else is a bit lower?”
“Since you have dumped everything you had into Agility, they won’t be ‘a bit’ lower—they’ll be much lower. They won’t even hire you to dredge shit out of a village privy—you won’t be able to lift a big enough bucket.”
“Crap…”
“Are you sure you’re a zero?”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t level up, right?”
“Nope. It’s a work account.”
“Even work accounts vary. Some can level up to ten or even more—that’s enough to get enough experience for a complex craft or a low-level creative occupation. Gardeners, stonecutters, construction workers, figure casters…”
“I have experience working with electronics, and lots of other things as well.”
“Forget your real world skills. You start from scratch here. Someone like you is unlikely to find employment even as a servant—after all, servants need basic combat skills. No one needs a worker who can fall under the weight of a heavy tray and smash an expensive set of dinnerware. Are you sure you can’t get a different character?”
“Quite sure.”
“Well, sucks to be you, then.”
Digits sat down at the edge of the moat, took a pebble out of his bag, tossed it up on his palm, then took a swing and threw it at the nearest frog. He missed, and the amphibian escaped with a loud splash. Digits seemed unfazed, and tried again—this time successfully hitting and killing his quarry. He stared into the distance gloomily for a while, and drawled mirthlessly:
“There goes our kill. You know, if I could upgrade at least stats, if not levels, the way zeroes do, I’d have received some measly bonus to Accuracy by now—maybe a hundredth of a percent or even less. So after five or six hundred frogs I’d add a point to Accuracy. Get it?”
“Not quite…” replied Ros distractedly, deep in somber contemplation.
He didn’t just contemplate—he was writing a message to his at
torney in the chat window, listing his stats and asking whether anything could be done about it.
“Let’s say you chop down a tree—that’s what lumberjack workers normally do. The tree has its own durability points—or hit points, of sorts. Once you get through them, the tree falls, and you receive your experience points. A worker can receive experience, but it does little good—the leveling-up is blocked. But the stats aren’t, get it? If you spend Vigor points as you work, your Vigor stat will grow by a tiny amount. If Strength is used, it goes up as well. Even Accuracy may grow if the worker hits his first notch, or whatever it is called, repeatedly, without letting the axe chop all over the place. Do you get it now?”
“Not quite.”
“You’re too dull-witted, even for the emperor of noobs. It’s really easy—you work, your stats rise, albeit very slowly. I don’t know how much time it’s going to take you, but you can totally level up your Strength until it’s sufficient. Drag heavy stuff around, and it will grow, as well as Vigor, which grows faster the more often you use it up completely. I remember as much from my own experience. It’s tedious and nauseating, but you can still raise these stats.”
Ros was reading the reply from his attorney just then: “Do not attempt anything. Resetting the stats is too complex and costly. Getting back to character selection would require a functioning body, and you are currently comatose. Please wait—we might be able to find you a position as a janitor or something similar. Those positions are usually filled by NPCs, but we see no other choice in your situation.”
He felt dizzy for a moment.
A janitor? Well, even if he didn’t mind, what would the pay be like? Since no players seemed to want that kind of work, it was easy enough to guess.
Not the job where you could make a million…
What was the matter with him, anyway?! A noob, indeed. He may have made a mistake, and his understanding of this world may be poor, but he still had his brain!
Well, perhaps the brain wasn’t working as well as it should. His body was in a coma, and that might affect things.
Think, you idiot! Try to strain whatever you have left!
“Uh, Digits, you were saying that stats can grow from long and hard work?”
“They can. Your levels may be blocked, but your stats are open. Keep in mind, though, that the only ones that grow easily are the ones that are currently at zero. Progress between one point and two points will take a great deal more time. And it will take longer to get from twenty to twenty-one than it will from zero to fifteen. Also, only the primary stats grow easily—the secondary and auxiliary ones are much harder. Some are next to impossible to level up. But you shouldn’t worry about Carrying Capacity—it isn’t one of the latter.”
“I don’t even have an axe I could chop wood with.”
“It wouldn’t do you any good, anyway. The guards won’t let you chop any trees in the city, and out in the woods you may run into problems once some mob with rudimentary intelligence realizes there’s a zero-level noob on the loose, and easy to track by the sound of the axe hitting the trees.”
“You don’t like to give advice, but?”
Digits was about to throw a pebble at another frog, but stopped his arm, turned around, and drew a heavy sigh.
“I could give you an advice, but you’re bound to curse me for it. Nor right now, perhaps, but you’ll definitely curse me at some point.”
“Shoot.”
“There is a job you could do. And they’ll even pay you for it. But you’re not gonna like it. There’s nothing else I can tell you, but remember: you’ll end up cursing my name—and, perhaps, more than once.”
“The pay is nothing to write home about, I take it?”
“You’re absolutely right.”
“I won’t refuse it. I need to start somewhere, anyway.”
* * *
The ensuing developments seemed to happen in some sort of a daze. Digits brought Ros to some nondescript house. Inside was a Dwarf NPC sitting in the middle of a tiny room cluttered with lopsided bookcases stuffed with papers. He reacted to the offer to let the new laborer work at the clan mine with a barrage of caustic epithets, each of which characterized Ros negatively in one way or another. “A piece of useless shit” was the mildest term, and sounded almost like praise as compared to the rest.
Next came a player of an unfamiliar race—pointy-eared, like an elf, but with dark skin. He told Ros to join his party—he had to accept the invitation that popped up before him. Then Ros opened his stats for perusal, and the dark elf laughed long and hard together with the NPC, having used the word “noob” some two dozen times in a variety of combinations and intonations. He ended his diatribe by saying, “I really wonder where you manage to find cretins of this caliber, Digits.”
Ros was beginning to realize that Digits may not be helping him out of pure altruism, suspecting that he may not be as harmless as he seemed. However, he already took the bit between his teeth, having received a “cheerful” message from the attorney who had found him a vacancy, after all. The job involved waving a large fan over a rich player pretending to be the Shah of Persia.
He decided not to wait for the next vacancy of a harem eunuch to open. No matter what happened next, he had gotten into this thing all by himself, and was now going to paddle out on his very own. He was hardly a fool, so he should think of something. He might as well start with hard physical labor—he’d get used to it and see what he could do next. He was no child to be led by the hand, and he was determined to prove it.
Ros was taken outside the city walls and given a place in a two-wheeled cart. The NPC driver said gruffly:
“Just like you miners to wander around in the dark. We’ll join a caravan of villagers in a bit, and keep following them until the morning. Then we’ll take the turn toward the mine. If you get lost, you’ll have to find your own way. And if you fall asleep the way your ilk do, when no one can rouse you, I won’t even bother to dump you there, and you’ll be taken right back to the city.
Fall asleep and become completely unresponsive? Did the NPC think Ros might log out of the game? If only he knew—Ros had no way out.
* * *
“Why is Second World so popular? This is indeed the ultimate question, and no one has managed to provide a simple answer so far. You want me to try to answer it? All right, I’ll give it a try.
We have repeatedly been accused of plagiarism, and I have to concede—we did, in fact, plagiarize. We have relied on the achievements of our predecessors very heavily. Seasoned players familiar with many projects will find the best elements of what they already know inside Second World. Or, perhaps, elements that are far from the best—we had to make great sacrifices in order to make the world balanced.
So, what do we have? We have a great many things copied from a variety of gaming projects, blended together in new and creative ways. You might say that we didn’t invent it, and that there were numerous instances of copying before we came along. And you’ll be absolutely right—many games were nothing but clones of the same game, the only difference being the graphics. So, why are we better than them? Why have we been so tremendously successful?
Let me answer as follows. Second World rests on three pillars.
The first pillar is the financing that has made if feasible for us to gather enormous resources to launch just a single project. We have the best of everything: developers, software, and hardware. Hundreds of creative talents have contributed to the development of the gameplay. The best artists have worked on the graphical content. Every byte of code was tested a few thousand times. We haven’t had a single critical error in our entire history, and those were common enough in the games that preceded ours. The world is controlled by fifth-generation AIs—even one of those is beyond the means of many sovereign nations, whereas we have several of those servicing every sector. It is extremely costly, but amazingly reliable.
The second pillar is that we have brought the deep immersion technology to a conceptua
lly new level. We were the ones who have achieved true verisimilitude. The players do not notice any differences from the real world—their characters are perfectly real, up to the patterns on their fingers and the prints they leave. The world is just like ours—its primary difference is that every item, event, and even personal ability is expressed as a sequence of digital data, similarly to the multitude of games developed earlier. Second World may seem simpler in some aspects and more complex in others; it is also perfectly real to one’s perception. It is complex and keeps evolving—there isn’t a single guide that would manage to cover so much as a quarter of its secrets. One can’t help but want to learn everything there is about it—it is a perfect vehicle for satisfying one’s desire for new sensations. And, for all intents and purposes, it is the only one available to the overwhelming majority of the Earth’s population.
Finally, the third pillar is that no one can affect the processes that transpire within Second World with non-gaming methods. Not a single employee of the corporation can materialize so much as a copper coin. They would have to create a character, produce some copper ore, use an industrial or a magical method to extract copper, and then send it to the mint, where the Imperial financial advisor will oversee its transformation into coins of the lowest denomination. There are no other methods. Second World is just like our good old Earth in this respect—no item can come from out of nowhere. It can only be the final link in a production chain. Games that came earlier gave administrators plenty of special privileges. They could appear inside the game using a “godlike character” with maxed-out stats and make any items in any number, block a player from a chat, or even kick them from the game. All of this led to abuses, or at least suspicions that the administration meddles in the gaming process. In Second World this is impossible even theoretically.”