13. Best Start, Part 5

  One of the strange things about playing EternalRealms is that it is sometimes mathematically better to be a jerk than a good guy. I liked Wen the blacksmith. Normally he and I get along very well. I like to periodically dump a bunch of [High-Quality] starter weapons into his inventory for cheap to both increase the quality of his merchandise and reduce the price for such items for new players.

  The problem was that if I didn’t reprimand him for selling such a piece of crap set of armor to a newbie on their first dive, he would try to do it again the next time he had a would-be tank come into his shop looking for gear.

  “I don’t know why you even stock such crap, Wen!” I chastised. “Look at this! We’re smelting it for the third time and it’s still barely worth forging! How did you ever get it to look like [Plate] to begin with?”

  The Dwarven NPC frowned, but simply grunted at the criticism. “It was always in stock. Nobody’s ever asked for it before, but it’s always been there.”

  “Of course not,” I said, grumbling as I realized why. A lot of the tanks come into the game expecting to wear heavy armor, but they’re disabused of the fact that ‘heavy’ means ‘bad’ in this game, except in stand and soak encounters, which are ironically more common later in the game than early on. By the time anyone could afford the monstrosity that Rick had purchased, they would have been able to identify just how useless it really was. Even if they were looking for full heavy plate, they would be looking for [High Quality Tempered Steel] or better. Rick’s armor was the beginner’s quality that was designed to be replaced as soon as possible, but it was also too expensive for any beginner to have purchased.

  Without a veteran like myself giving them the maximum amount possible as a [Greeter], at least. Slowly, deliberately, I forced myself to reevaluate my opinion of Rick. The fact was that just his willingness to tank for a group meant that he deserved special efforts to cultivate, the same as Paula did for healing and Sophie did for her support role. Good tanks were hard to find and unappreciated until later in the game, where they had often already formed bad habits.

  The little I had seen of Rick was actually somewhat impressive. After we had finished our drinks I had taken them all back to the Training Hall, they had all de-synced with each other, and I had spent some time with each of them individually before their time had run out. Once he was out of that awful armor and no longer suffering from its fatiguing effects, Rick actually had some decent instincts for how to move. Perhaps it was cliché to say that linemen made good tanks, but it was true. Not the best tanks, often the best tanks were random people who’d never played sports before at all, but players who had experience in sports like football or rugby often also had excellent instincts on how to position themselves to both draw aggro and keep their ‘back liners’ safe.

  Once he had realized that his idea of how the game was played was wrong, and once I had gotten him away from his friends where he didn’t have to put up the ‘macho’ attitude, Rick had actually been quick to ask for my advice. Apparently he had asked his coaches and they’d advised him that becoming a good tank in the game would seriously contribute to his chances of starting Varsity by his sophomore year, and he was desperate to do anything to increase his chances. After I had spent about thirty minutes of guiding him through the training hall, he had apparently classified me as a ‘cool older guy’ whom he could ask advice from without damaging his own ego.

  “So, like, how old are you anyway?” He asked at one point as I was drilling sword-and-mace techniques with him. “I know you’re Paula’s older cousin, but aside from that and that you play this game a lot she hasn’t said much about you.”

  “Yeah, that’s fine. We’ve been kind of distant since her brother died,” I admitted. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so stoked to have her playing this game with me, to reconnect with her. As for how old I am, that’s sort of a hard question to answer because of just how much I actually play this game. I am literally pushing the limits of what EternalRealms will allow me to do most of the time, and so my subjective experience is that I’ve been in the game for decades. Real time, however, I wasn’t born that long before you and your friends.”

  “So, like, you’re in college then?” he guessed.

  “Nah,” I laughed. “Higher education isn’t for me. Anyway, I don’t really need it. Not as long as I have ER. I can make like a hundred thousand dollars a month just by selling ‘best start’ experiences like I have planned for you and the rest of Paula’s friends.”

  He blanched a little at that. “You’re that famous?”

  “In certain circles, yeah,” I admitted. “The truth is that the developers have been sort of treating me as part of the game for quite a while, which means that if I ever need real world currency, they’ll announce an auction for a ‘Guided Beginner’s Experience,’ where I handhold between ten and a hundred new players who pay between five hundred to six thousand dollars. They don’t always realize that it’s one player that’s doing the Guiding, though. A lot of them think that it’s an event NPC, or several NPC’s working together.”

  “So, like, there’s no way I can afford that,” he admitted. “I can only afford this game be-”

  “It’s free for you, so long as you keep playing with Paula,” I explained. “She’s family. I’m giving her the best start I can for free, and the best start in this game means playing with friends, so you get to come along for the ride.”

  “Huh,” he said. “So, sorry I was a jerk earlier.”

  “You mean before or after you figured out I wasn’t just an NPC?” I inquired.

  “Both? I don’t know man, all this is new to me. I’m not, I mean, I never, I --”

  “It’s fine. Don’t stress it too much. It’s partly my fault, the fact that I increased the initial starting money for you made the damage you did to your reputation by being rude much worse than it would have been otherwise. Even so, it’s better to have to work to fix that damage here in the starting town than it would be to not realize that you can’t treat NPC’s like dirt just because they don’t exist in the real world except as computer programs.”

  “But they are just ones and zeros, aren’t they?” he asked.

  “More like advanced neural nets with advanced personality programming, millions of hours of subjective runtime and user interaction with a focus on passing the Turing Test,” I explained. “But that doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the way you treat them can affect your experience in game. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to be polite; sometimes being a jerk gives you a better outcome. But there are only a few NPC’s like that in the starting zones, and they’re well known.”

  “So, it’s like real life then?” he inquired.

  “I don’t know, I never really found that being a jerk in real life was ever the best answer,” I observed.

  “Man, did you drop out before you went to high school or something? ” he asked, laughing.

  “My education was mostly virtual,” I explained. “My classmates and I had a few flame wars, but that was about it. Mostly we got along.”

  “You don’t, like, have the same thing that Paula’s brother did, do you?” he asked, suddenly sounding embarrassed. “I mean, is that why you play so much?”

  “Luke only lived as long as he did because he spent most of the end of his life in the same sort of capsule you’re in right now, keeping him alive. Without that level of intervention, he would have died before he turned ten,” I explained. “He got at least three extra years of life because of EternalRealms, and subjectively – with time dilation counted – he got a lot more than that. But if I had the same thing Luke had, there’s no way I’d live until the age you think I am.”

  “Huh,” he said, considering my explanation for a moment. “So, like, it’s genetic, right? One in a billion or something?”

  “Something like that, but you need to have two copies of it for it to be dangerous. Except it’s really not even that common, because only certain ethnic groups are known to have it. Luke’s parents both had one copy, and they passed two on to him. It was nobody’s fault, just luck. Like getting blue eyes when both your parents have brown, or red hair when your mom is blond and your dad is a brunette.”

  “And Paula? She have it?”

  “She has a copy. One copy, but not two. So she’s safe. My – the entire family got checked after Luke got diagnosed. We had no idea any of us were carriers – that’s the term for people who have a gene like this but don’t get sick from it – until Luke was diagnosed. But now that we know, they’re going to make sure that what happened to Luke doesn’t happen again.”

  “How does that work? I mean, there’s no cure, right?” he asked.

  “Screening, mostly. If Luke’s parents had known before hand they were both carriers, they might not have gotten married. Or they might have used a sperm-donor, or other science-stuff to make sure that any kid they had together didn’t have two copies,” I explained. Then I swooped in past his guard and knocked him on the fingers, causing him to drop his weapon and suck on his knuckles.

  “Ow, shit,” he cursed.

  “Look, I probably shouldn’t be talking about this,” I admitted. “I mean, it’s family stuff, and I’m not certain that Paula wants everyone to know.”

  “Everyone in school knows about her brother,” Rick explained. “Just, like, not all the details, you know? The science-stuff and whatever? Enough of her classmates from elementary school came with her that she had to deal with it . I actually kind of felt bad for her at first, but there was this one girl who actually tried to use it against her. You know that backhanded bullying that girls due to each other? Well, yeah, she did that for a few days. Then your cousin comes up to her and breaks her nose, and before the teachers show up to take her away she says ‘Yeah, my brother is dead, and if you keep talking shit I’ll make you wish that you had what he had.’ Everybody went from feeling sorry for her from thinking she’s totally badass overnight.”

  I grinned, feeling intensely proud of my little sister. “You know, I heard she got in a fight, but I never heard the details. Still, it’s stuff you should probably be talking to her if--”

  “Man, I wish Kevin hadn’t gotten to her first,” Rick informed me. “I mean, I know she’s your cousin and all, but Damn! If it wasn’t for bros before … bros before girls, most of the football team would be all over her if she let them. Most of the school would be over her, especially since she filled in up top, you know?”

  “I’ve never thought of her that way,” I informed him tersely.

  “Sorry, did I hit a nerve?” He said with a stupid grin. “Look, like I said, she’s Kevin’s girl. I’m not stupid enough to butt in on that, but a guy can appreciate a beautiful girl, can’t he?

  “I suppose,” I admitted. “Just don’t treat her--”

  “Believe me, you don’t have to worry about how I treat her,” he said, laughing. “Oh man, she practically ruled junior high, man! Unless she gains like sixty pounds, she’s going to rule high school too.”

  “Huh,” I said. “I should probably check in on the others. Go practice with Master Gelbeck for a while, and do the obstacle course twice or more before you log out for the day.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever you say, boss,” he said, jovially saluting as I synced up with the next player.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  I came away from it uncertain how I felt about Rick. He wasn’t the sort of player I’d gravitate towards or invite to NinjaGuardians, but at the same time he wasn’t as bad as my first impression of him had been. Because of our conversation, I spent more time with him than I did the rest of the friends before they ran out of time, but I didn’t plan on that being the rule going forward.

  Once they were gone, I headed towards the smithy, where I had some [iron] to [smelt]. Which is how I came back to Wen, who was one of the few NPC’s in the training area who was designed for the player to be mutually abrasive with.

  On the fifth smelt – a process which in no way resembled the real world version of the process – the iron ingots came out as normal quality, which I was quickly able to turn into a [High-Quality Iron Mace] with the help of a wooden haft I got from Wen for a few coppers. The remainder I used to bind a small square shield like the one Rick had been drilling with in the training hall, and hammer out a helmet. Not for Rick to wear, but for him to trade for a set of medium-quality [Leather Armor]. Doing so would help him increase his reputation with the Merchants as much or more than being a jerk to Wen had.

  I didn’t particularly crank up my time dilation as I worked, which allowed me to auto-sync with anyone in the Merchant’s Quarter who was passing through. That was how the new player who’d asked about the [City Guard] earlier found me. He quickly made his way over to me as soon as he saw me in my [Royal Guard Uniform], but paused a moment when he saw that I was busy.

  I could have switched into a [Gearset] to maximize my smithing ability, but my hammer was enough for [High-Quality Iron], and I didn’t want to go beyond that. There were consequences to giving a noob too much good loot. Once I quenched my current project, I glanced up to acknowledge him.

  “You’re [Luke Benton]?” he asked.

  “Last I checked,” I confessed. “The guard sent you to check on the disturbance I caused earlier?”

  “No, they have me on patrol. I’m just supposed to explore the town and report anything suspicious,” he answered. “I did hear that you put on a show for the other players in town though.”

  “You should report it to your superior, especially that you came and talked with me about it,” I advised him. “It might give you a huge progression bonus.”

  “Won’t that, I mean, is it okay?”

  “Sure! We weren’t breaking any laws, but it was a disturbance. That’s exactly the sort of thing you report if you’re on patrol. It’s a shame you didn’t witness it, you could have earned even more points for that. But hearing about it and coming to me to investigate? Yeah, that’s a great progression opportunity for a young guardsman and you should totally take advantage of it.”

  “It won’t get you or any of the other players in trouble?” He asked, sounding uncertain.

  “Like I said, we didn’t break any laws. Stuff like that? This game is designed for pop-up events like that. I triggered it on purpose, although I wasn’t originally planning on doing it today. Nobody is going to get in trouble, and a lot of new or newish players are going to learn about a great way to train party mechanics. Now, if it had been an unapproved brawl, then we might have had to pay a fine or something and, more importantly, you would lose progression if you didn’t report it . The fine we’d pay would be the same whether you reported it or not, but the consequences for you, because you’ve joined the guard, would differ based on what you did after hearing about it.”

  “I don’t want to be a narc,” he said, nervously. “I thought it was NPC events that I’d be on the lookout for.”

  “Oh man, those events lead to awesome quest chains!” I exclaimed. “But most of your work as a guardsman is actually going to be with other players. Either investigating events like the one I triggered, or investigating crimes, or other stuff like that. You should work on setting up two appearances though, one for when you’re on duty, and the other for when you’re off. You’ll get treated a lot different by both players and NPC’s when you’re on duty. You can still use intel you gather while you’re off duty, but you’ll want to change uniforms if you’re going to suddenly try to enforce the law.”

  “If I keep doing this, being a guard, is that going to cause problems between me and other players?” he inquired.

  I thought about it for a minute. “Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not so much in this kingdom. The [Guard] is a strong faction here, with a lot of awesome events. Most of the players you’ll be investigating won’t realize that you’re a player unless you tell them or something gives you away. On your next login, I’d advise you to ask for a partner for your patrol, so that you can see how an NPC acts on patrol and emulate them. If you have to fine a player, pretending to be an NPC is the best way to go about it because it eliminates the hard feelings. On the other hand, if you’re questioning them as part of an event, telling them that you’re a player will get them excited and cooperative, because they’ll probably want to join in and reap part of the rewards, if possible.”

  “Does that happen a lot?” he asked.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Oh. [Johnathon]. Sorry.”

  “Well, [Johnathon Sorry], most of your gameplay as a guard is going to be city-based events. The game keeps track of the amount of crime that players commit and adjusts the presence of the guard according to the kingdom. As I said, the guard is strong in this kingdom, which means that players who commit crimes either don’t last long, move elsewhere, or get so good that the NPC’s can’t catch them. So the first type of player won’t like you at all, but they won’t be your problem for very long, or they become the second type of player, who don’t matter either. Being frenemies with the third type of player is mutually beneficial, as they’ll pick up things that you can use, and vice versa. But be careful, because there’s a chance that one of you will have to PK the other if things turn sour, and that’s not fun for anyone. It doesn’t necessarily end the quid pro quo, but it still sucks.

  “The second half of this sort of role play, and this is where the real pay off comes in, is the NPC events. Because when the player crime is below a certain threshold, which it is in this kingdom, the NPC’s start committing crimes. Petty theft, robbery, tax evasion, smuggling, even murders, although you won’t find much of that until you get into a much larger city. Some of that is just one-off events for you to do and forget about. Others are the beginnings of epic-level chain quests that span continents! If you stumble upon one of those, you’ll have massive guilds larger than mine competing to help you finish it. They’ll even pay you in real life for the privilege.”

  “Yeah, like that’ll ever happen to me,” he chuckled.

  “It’s happened to people in my guild like nine times,” I informed him. “But nowadays, if I see something that I think will lead to an epic-level quest, I just post about it on the forums and let someone else claim the glory. They get somewhat repetitive after a while. I prefer the player-oriented side of being a guard, even if the rewards aren’t as great. Once you hit [Royal Guard Captain], the quests are all pretty epic, but you have to work harder to unlock them.”

  “So, like, what sort of stuff should I be watching out for if I want to unlock quests like that?” he asked. “Bandits and stuff?”

  “Bandits and smuggling are low-effort quests. Worth unlocking and doing, but they’re always local and you can usually get a pickup group to do them inside of a subjective hour. No, for epic-level quests, you want to investigate things like orphans and widows. If you’re on duty and you hear even a hint of an injustice regarding an orphan or a widow from an NPC, you should follow it up immediately . Once you have it locked in, it will give you the quest popup which will tell you its rarity and difficulty level, and if it really is epic, you can post about it on the forums with a screenshot and just sit back and let the pro-guilds start the bidding war.”

  “And if it’s not an epic quest?” he challenged.

  “Then it might be a pre-quest to an epic quest. Or it might just be a regular quest. Either way it’s probably worth doing, because even the regular quests involving orphans or widows tend to have higher than normal rewards. Maidens too. Or murders of upstanding members of society. Or, well, use your judgment. Think of it like building up good karma. In a weird way, the lower the wealth of the victim or the expected benefit to you for investigating a crime is, the higher the reward seems to be. Especially long term. But you don’t always want to follow the letter of the law. If a noble wants you to investigate where his shipments of wine are disappearing to, you might be better off accepting the bribe from the bandits responsible than bringing them to justice. After all, they might have a good reason for targeting that noble in particular.”

  “Wait, I can accept bribes?” Johnathon seemed floored by the suggestion.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, grinning. “Players and NPC’s will both try to bribe you. And sometimes accepting a bribe is the way to get the best outcome. But not always. All of us do it to some extent. You need to be careful though, because doing it too much can get you kicked out, or at least suspended. You should never accept a bribe to cover up a murder, for example. Especially not an unremorseful noble who committed a murder and confessed to you. It’s better to get killed by his guards than do that, even if you end up reporting the bribe to your superior officer. Which, by the way, is one way of handling bribes. You can accept the bribe and turn them in to the office. You can even do that and still skim off the top!”

  “Oh. Wow. Why doesn’t the guide cover all of this? It just said that being a guard unlocks some of the best roleplay events in the game, but it didn’t say how,” Mr. Sorry complained.

  “Because the moment an epic quest is completed, it’s either removed from the game, or its triggering event is completely randomized to make it impossible to find by anyone who knows how the first one was triggered,” I explained. “The common quests are all so easy to find that it’s not really worth writing a guide for each type. The player interactions are unique to the other player, so it’s not like you can write a guide for that either. Honestly, the main reason the faction isn’t more popular is because it’s so strong in this kingdom, and it’s harder to join in the others. You can join there, and the events are just as great if not better, but learning to actually be a guard is best here because you see more of the NPC trigger events and learn what to look for.”

  “So that’s why it says to start in Wildedeer? Because it’s the best place to train?”

  “Yup. But not necessarily, either. I knew someone who wanted a ‘hard start’ as a guard, so he started in Shadowdon. Unlocked three epic quests in his first month real time. Turned out that they had maximum played hour limits on their activation requirements. Once he officially joined the [Guard] down there, it would have been harder for him to have not stumbled upon the activation criteria than to do so. In fact, he says that he missed each of them the first four times they happened. That kid made a lot of money after he posted online for help with the three he’d found, but don’t expect anything like that to happen to you. All of the other ‘maximum played hour’ quests started disappearing after people realized that they were a thing to look for.”

  “Oh,” Johnathon said. “So you think I made the right choice then? I mean, you play as a guard, right?”

  “I play as a little of everything. I’m only [Captain of the Royal Guard] because going beyond this rank would limit my play style in regards to the other factions, while falling below it would limit my options with the guards. It’s a balance, and one that’s difficult to min/max. But I have a lot more time to play this game than pretty much anyone alive. If you think playing as a guard sounds fun, you’re right, and you should totally trust your instincts. Both on your play style, and on how to be a guard,” I explained.

  “Thanks. I wish I’d known right away that you were a veteran [Greeter] and not just an event NPC, I would have picked your brain then,” he said, grinning and extending his hand to shake. “I think I’ve taken up enough of your time.”

  “Aye, that you have,” I agreed. “Oh, one last thing.”

  I tossed him a coin sack. An interesting tidbit, the sacks com out of nowhere and are free; the coins inside appear from your inventory and are impossible to pick unless you train for the skill with the Theif’s guild.

  “What’s this?” he asked, partially his answering his own question by looking inside the sack.

  “A bribe,” I told him flatly. “To not say anything about the event earlier to your superior. You can either keep the money or report that a captain of the royal guard created a disturbance of the peace and bribed you to keep it secret. They won’t let you keep the money if you report it, of course. Unless you report only part of it, which you could definitely do. I’ll leave it up to you what you actually do with the coin. Keep it, turn it in, I don’t care.”

  “If you don’t care what I do with it, why bother giving it to me? There’s twenty gold in here! That’s like ten times times what you gave me at the gate, and that was twice what I was supposed to start with.”

  “Look, do you know anything about NinjaGuardians at all?” I asked.

  “I know that they got in trouble a few years ago because some of the founding members were using exploits to manipulate the economy,” he supplied. “I wasn’t eligible to play back then. I’m sixteen, but I spent the money I was supposed to spend on a car on this game instead.”

  “Well, the real story is a little more complicated than that. The players weren’t trying to manipulate the economy, they were just trying to help people have fun. So, well, we were sharing the wealth, so to speak. We would hand out expensive gear and equipment and money to anyone who seemed kind of nice, and afterwards we’d feel pretty good about it, even if we never met them again. The problem was that the scale we were doing it on upset the balance of the game. Because of that, a lot of people got banned, but others, like me, just had to agree to certain rules. Like how much money we can give out as a [Greeter] and how much money we can give out as a [Bribe]. I gave the maximum amount to you as both because I had the opportunity to do so. I don’t really care if I ever see you again or not, but I’d like to think that my gifts made your early experience with this game just a little bit better. That’s all.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, thanks! It really was an honor to meet you, your videos are the reason I joined the guard to begin with! Being able to pick your brain, even for a few minutes, was a real honor.”

  “You’re welcome. Now go find some pickpockets or something,” I advised him. “I’ve got a few arrowheads to make with this leftover [Iron].”

  He left me alone, and I went back to crafting. I also took the opportunity to send out a {PM} to one of the contacts I’d made earlier. Still, even running at auto-sync speed with people drifting in and out of the Merchant’s Quarter, it didn’t take me very long to run out of [Iron], and once I’d done that there wasn’t much else for me to do, so I popped into my [Pocket Dimension].