Admin: City, War and Paladins (7)

After the announcement about the formation of the ‘Infernals’ guild, yeah, the name made me cringe a bit, but then again, where else but in

After the announcement about the formation of the ‘Infernals’ guild, yeah, the name made me cringe a bit, but then again, where else but in an MMORPG are Players allowed to unleash their most cursed impulses? In any case, after the news broke that a major guild of demon worshipers had formed, the factional skirmishes intensified, but not by much. 

Ja-Raja had clearly pulled his forces back to regroup and tally his roster, while the other guilds redirected some of their Players to aid Jabberwocky, who was knee-deep in launching a full-scale exploration of the portal to new lands. Thank god, because another thing I’d been dreading finally happened. 

Newbies. The Rookie Wave.

To be fair, new Players were nothing new, I’d survived not one, not three, but six waves of them – but these rookies were different. 

They were spawning into fully cleared zones.

For all the previous waves, I’d designed fresh zones with tweaked mobs, overhauled terrain, and placeholder quests of cleansing the islands of ‘corruption’ so the Players could unlock new areas. They’d joyfully grind through the same rinse-and-repeat tasks – pure, uncut MMORPG progression.

But at some point, I’d decided that seven starter zones were enough, and I shifted focus to post-tutorial content and introduced the storm respawn mechanics, where roaming sky-island tempests revived the enemies’ spawn. Now, I watched as newbies flooded into zones that were already mapped, farmed, and cleared. 

Sort of. 

Most of the islands had their mobs respawned, except for a few claimed by veterans as safe hubs, and I’d allowed that, because Players would rage if mobs suddenly spawned in their AFK zones. The bridges between islands were already built, so newbies couldn’t trigger the main story quest there, their only leveling path was grinding overworld mobs… Which, of course, led to rising competition over spawn points, and I’m not making more of them.

All I could do was pray that Jabberwocky’s portal to the new zone would draw the high-level Players away from the noobs still figuring out their hotbars.

Not an urgent crisis yet, but dealing with Players has taught me two contradictory truths. 

1) Always expect problems. 2) You’ll never expect how such problems would come from.

So, while the newbies spreading thinly across the starter zones felt predictable, they were also walking bundles of raid-tier chaos. Thankfully, or not, most are not acting like the first-wave noobs, who’d poked walls, yeeted themselves off cliffs, and stress-tested my half-baked game physics to its limits. 

It seems that already having the pioneer, the previous generations of Players, pathing the path already, has an unexpected boon.

These new rookies adapted fast, some rushed out to bully Imps, carrying the same old improvised weapons of the previous generations of Players. Others followed cryptic waypoints only they could see or recognize, probably to meet IRL friends, and some beelined to the faction NPCs. 

The ‘pioneer’ effect was gone. The first waves of Players, after nibbling at the game’s edges, had declared themselves experts and spammed guides online. On one hand, fewer clueless players meant fewer headaches, on the other, it turbocharged progression. Not that I minded, virtual EXP is the one resource I’ve got in infinite supply.

What intrigued me most was how a significant number of Players began joining those who had already settled into the starting zone, which I and the old Players, without any coordination, had dubbed the Dust Fields. My old idea to add ‘mines’ amidst the floating sky islands as one of the zones had resulted in many islands now being cluttered with rocks, boulders, and even simple dust, all suspended in anti-gravity-like formations. 

Originally, this was meant to serve as part of the zone’s architecture, immersing the Players in a truly alien world while also acting as an obstacle for those trying to speedrun through the islands. A punishment for rushing, which I’d wanted to discourage, in the form of cracked skulls and mouths full of grit.

But, after I abandoned the zone post-launch, the players clearly hadn’t forgotten it. Now that their patience had snapped, fed up being forced to resemble cave-dwelling Cro-Magnons, they decided to leap into the next technological age. 

Of course, there was no ‘invent metallurgy’ button visible to them, so there I was, watching a dozen players huddled around a crude stone furnace. Players clumsily pumping makeshift bellows, made from the early leather-making and carpentry, used to raise a makeshift furnace fire’s temperature. Occasionally, another Player would toss in dry branches harvested from another starting zone, desperately trying to figure out when the shiny, heavy ‘ore’ rocks would finally melt. 

I observed this with equal fascination — and far deeper bewilderment.

What’s the ore’s melting point? None. Seriously, I’d slapped together all these systems and materials out of thin air. Why would I bother coding physical properties like melting points? Was I supposed to simulate steel alloying chemistry too? Of course, none of this would, or could, work right now.

The crafting system, crafted by my sleepless hands, and some choice, inventive, curses, was impressive but fundamentally only built on the ‘hunter-gatherer’ principles. I haven’t thought of anything more complex yet. 

Players could butcher monster corpses into parts and use them for crafting, tie a claw to a stick, and the ever-vigilant AI, one that is usually monitoring Jabberwocky, as he was the one that would usually declare such a thing, would declare it a ‘crude spear’. 

Issues with the system cropped up constantly, forcing me to manually review player creations and explain to the clueless AI what something was meant to be. But, sometimes even I didn’t even know what the Players were trying to make – worse, sometimes the players themselves had no idea. Haphazardly gluing sticks, claws, and leaves together and praying it would magically become an artifact.

The system was simple enough, it included mechanics like tempering stones or bones in campfires, but the Players hadn’t explored that yet – Metallurgy, meanwhile, lay far beyond my, and the AI’s, expertise. Well, Jabberwocky might improvise something in the future… But then I’d have to clean up its chaos afterward.

That's why in every MMORPG, mine included, there are crafting recipes and ambiguous mechanics — bring five iron bars, smack an anvil with a hammer, get your sword. Such a thing worked and was accepted by the Player base because blacksmithing, like any crafting profession overall, is an art form. It’s unlikely that any Player would spend the 15 years conducting in-game research on how to properly care for a specific type of fantasy turnip. Tilling the ground for each crop for four months straight, only to harvest it and conclude the soil needs more potassium and crushed magic crystals. 

So it went with Blacksmithing.

Games can lean into realism and even be hardcore, but not that hardcore. Especially if the game isn’t explicitly a farming simulator.

So, in the next zone, a shattered sky-city, I’d planned to add ‘crafting recipes’. These would be hidden triggers that, when met by Players with the right skills, levels, and stats, would unlock certain actions that would lead to item creation. A recipe requiring three kilos of iron, precise strikes here and there, and boom, they’d forge their dream weapon.

But then the Players had cracked the secret of ‘Metallurgy’ on their own within a week of the game’s launch. To be fair, they had cheats, they could google historical dissertations on ancient smelting furnaces anytime they want, letting them leapfrog chunks of human civilization’s progress. Meanwhile, I wasn’t given four billion years to leisurely figure out all the physical, chemical, and whatever-else properties of matter that would need to make such a realistic thing work in my game. 

However, complaining about unfair Player progression didn’t help. Focusing on how to handle their current ore-smelting shenanigans did.

Truthfully, it wasn’t even a proper ‘ore’, just an object tagged with the ‘convertible to ore via specific actions’ tag. The fire under the furnace wasn’t real fire either, it was an object in the shape of ‘fire’ with a ‘boosted 150% by bellows’ modifier. 

It was the most patch-worked workaround, and that’s fine! It’s not like the Players would care to calculate the proper bellows’ oscillation ratios or invent in-game thermometers and pressure gauges… Actually, I wouldn’t put it past them, like Jim once tried brewing imp poison in a cauldron and accidentally kickstarted alchemy. 

I’d lazily defended missing systems with its just ‘hardcore’ realism, and everything went downhill from there. My Players are definitely the kind of people to invent thermometers and pressure gauges into the game.

Which is why my brain, entirely unclear on whether my limiters are being discreetly removed, better not fail me now.

Let’s pretend, again, that I planned for such a thing all along.

***

Roller, or as his name tag says, Roller-Poller, but saying the full name was a hassle, wasn’t obsessed with ancient history or recreating civilizations from scratch. He just loved hardcore simulators. There’s no deep reason for it, he just enjoyed in-game labor, unlike doing so in real life, there’s no pesky human needs and limitations to get in the way of his fun. 

The more detailed and realistic the simulation of the game, the better. He’d loved mechanical simulators where he could tinker with transmissions getting his car juuuust right, Or microbiology simulators, where he could track the most minute of gene expressions. And, weirdly, even farmer simulators where he could optimize industrial purifiers for cow sheds. 

The fact that his hobby forced him to cram his brain with extra knowledge, or that it involved grinding through monotonous tasks, never bothered him.

However, Roller had no desire to pursue such professions in real life, even if they paid well, he was drawn to do it only in games, not reality. 

This was also why Roller typically regarded MMO-RPGs and other games with ‘crafting systems’ with disdain. There was no joy in simply gathering resources and watching them mystically transform into magic armor, nanobots, or assault rifles and their ammo, somehow, on their own. 

Though, he’d have loved to craft all three, if it required more than three mouse clicks and a vague ‘crafting process’.

So, when news broke that the heavily advertised MMO from Titanomachia, or was it a V-MMO?, featured crafting ‘as in real life’, Roller, who’d initially vowed to avoid such a game genre, abruptly changed his stance. He signed up for the open beta among the first wave of Players. 

Well, not the first wave, his early hesitation cost him, but as the second wave, he logged in a week later and immediately dove into action. He rallied to like-minded Players on the forums, scoured historical theses for intel and knowledge, and studied the existing in-game crafting examples. He looked to the exploits of Jim, who’d pioneered alchemy, and others butchering demons to forge weapons and armor from body parts. 

Seeing all that is already accomplished, Roller decided to stake a claim to the enchanter niche.

The problem was, as he quickly learned, magic in the game was scarce, very scarce. The most advanced of mages, even the pioneers, could barely conjure a ‘Magic Arrow’, and NPCs offered only vague hints about enchantments. 

Statements like ‘Yeah, it exists… but nobody’s got it’, abound. So Roller decided to start simple, and rebranded himself as a blacksmith. And there he was now, watching his Guild mates pump the forge bellows, hoping it’d suffice to smelt the ingot for his masterpiece.

It both irked and delighted him that, unlike the other crafting simulators, there were zero tutorials here. Historical references might not apply to this fantasy world, but such was the hardcore nature of the game. He had to adapt. 

After all, there was a charm to being a pioneer.

Now, Roller strained to listen to the furnace’s roar, trying to gauge if the process was on track. He didn’t know what exactly to listen for, historical texts seldom covered smithing workflows, let alone offered tips for aspiring blacksmiths, such things were secret after all.

But like all pioneers, Roller simply had to try, and try again until he succeeded.

A sudden crack echoed across the clearing, and the exhausted bellows-pumper, mentally speaking, not physically, as the Players felt no true fatigue, perked up, staring at Roller for orders. After a pause, Roller nodded. 

He stepped back, and others hauled out the furnace’s contents, a heap of assorted stones, for Roller and his crew to inspect.

None of those present were, of course, trained blacksmiths, let alone ones skilled in the ancient techniques. But it wasn’t hard to spot the gleam of semi-liquid metal, not yet fully hardened, among the cracked, blackened stones scattered across the forge tray.

Roller scanned the tray, mentally comparing it to the image he’d searched for on the Internet,  then he glanced at his gathered colleagues and grinned. 

“Gentlemen? Seems like we’ve hit the motherlode.”

***

I had neither the time nor the inclination to sift through a million books on material science, on how to extract ore from rock in real life. Besides, as I’d said before, the Players only think that they want hyperrealism, but no one’s going to spend years studying metallurgy just to… work in a video game. So replicating the exact processes of reality was off the table anyway. 

And I had the ultimate shield to justify shortcuts, ‘It’s fantasy! Who’s to say physics or chemistry here work like your boring Earth rules?’

With help from my loyal AI, recently dubbed the ‘Master of Details’, I’d cobbled together a semi-logical, if shallow, stats for the two materials the Players had tossed into the furnace. Melting points, thermal conductivity, specific heat capacity… Enough metrics to let future crafters sweat over extraction without totally ruining the materials. A little frustration felt fair, given they’d ‘inspired’, read; forced, me to create this system.

I also tossed in traits for future-proofing. Stuff like hardness, brittleness, malleability, and multiple outcome paths for processing, stuff the Crafters would need once the resource-hoarding euphoria faded and actual crafting began. No clue on how the anvils are prepped IRL, but I doubt my Players do either. 

Good luck power-gaming this, nerds, when I myself don’t know what I’m doing. 

Thank god, sulfur and saltpeter don’t exist in my world. The last thing I need is some genius ‘inventing’ gunpowder. Sky pirates? Fun. Napoleonic line infantry? Keep that Redcoat nonsense far, far from my fantasy.

Maybe I could just… ban explosives? ‘Gunpowder doesn’t ignite here’, like in that old book about dragons and incest. But then, if I ever add steampunk-adjacent races like gnomes, dwarves, goblins, their aesthetic would tank without firearms. 

Or maybe I could set up a future magic versus tech rivalry dichotomy? Like saying that one cancels the other? Like in that one ancient video game. But then, how do mystic airships and its pirates even function? Unless their power’s divine, not arcane? Ugh, I’ll figure it out later.

For now, let the Players celebrate scooping up a slurry of… Whatever molten not-quite-metal that is? Is it Iron? Copper? Heck if I know, I’ll decide later. Though, should I retroactively put into lore that the sky pirates use such an ore for their gear? Wait, but this stuff was mined on the floating islands, why would pirates have it? Handing newbies some important or rare metal like Mithril? Very dumb. 

Ugh. Players, can’t live without ’em, can’t design anything around their chaos.

And so it was decided the metal in these gardens was once extraordinary, but now it’s just some kind of iron, perhaps purer than that found on Earth. Because I don’t want to search just how the metal is formed IRL. 

And then, in about three years’ time, when everyone has forgotten about their starter weapons, when the Angels descend back to the Garden, I’ll announce that the metal has regained its ancient power. Let the Players scramble to rediscover long-forgotten weapons that unexpectedly become top-tier in the game later in the game History. 

As for the starter zones then becoming much more important for High-level Players… I hope by then I’ll have designed a dozen more like them, or I’ll just make that they’ll suddenly become high-level areas due to a sudden demon invasion. A plot twist nobody saw coming! 

That’s narrative mastery for you.

Assuming I don’t forget I ever planned this in the future.

Fine, I’ll jot down a note for the distant future, for now, let players gather this de-powered miracle ore that is identical, stats-wise, to common iron. Meanwhile, I’ll start brainstorming the tree mechanics, as the Players will inevitably start thinking about charcoal next, for smelting ore or forging steel…

Though, as usual, I didn’t have time to flesh out this idea, when even the intel from the AI wasn’t its usual panicked or confused gibberish, the chillingly simple clarification that made me break into a cold sweat. The question I’d dodged for so long finally cornered me:

Where did the sky pirates come from?

***

Double and Sturm ultimately never joined any faction. Even after hearing Jabberwocky’s plan to build a portal to their new zone, they neither interfered nor assisted. Instead, the duo, now fully integrated into a pirate crew and slightly acclimating to working with each other, decided to act by themselves.

I could see why they would see direct interaction with the factions as too risky. Though Jabberwocky declared his city neutral territory, the factions swarming around him, each eager to seize Sturm’s functional airship or dismantle it for parts to repair others, made his neutrality hard to believe in.

Plus, Sturm would be a massive idiot if he’d basically declare that he is now working with Double. The Player who is already famous as the ‘first’ Demon Worshiper, and the Player that had stabbed Jabberwocky’s back, multiple times in fact.

Still, once the portal was complete and the factions rushed to conquer the Shattered City, the Pirates under Captain Signia, including the two Players, would get a one-in-a-million chance to strike it rich. They’d amass not just wealth, difficult in a game with scarce currency, but social and political capital. 

The loot and booty that they’d amassed would suddenly find a lot of buyers, buyers with fat wallets, eager for any edge over their competition.

There was one catch to that image of a bright future for the two Pirates, however. By the time the pirates could offload their ‘honestly plundered’, or rather, ‘rescued from the demons’, loot, the other factions would already be in the Shattered City, stripping the goods of their novelty and exclusivity. 

So the duo, though by the way the two interacted with Signia, it sometimes felt like a trio with just how immersed the two in the game are. Treating Signia like a real-life person rather than the NPC that she actually is. 

No, Double, Storm, and Signia, had decided to settle instead on preemptive looting. 

Specifically, that they would be exploiting the Players’ likely delay in exploring the City after they reached it. They would need an adjustment period before they could freely and safely raid the locations on their own airship. And they would be targeting the grandiose ruins, the collapsed spires and towers, betting that size meant valuable loot, like Sturm and Double did.

For my part, I even mildly encouraged such pragmatism, especially since their ability to identify the most lucrative loot spots left much to be desired. Among the truly valuable items, they only found a couple of magic textbooks and a recipe for a first-tier enchantment, which I’d introduced into the game to test the system. Not that I blamed them for their oversight. I’d distributed rare treasures based on game logic rather than real-world logic. 

The best loot wasn’t in the largest buildings but locked behind the strongest enemies.

By cruising around in their airship, the Duo never encountered these foes and thus missed my trick. Still, they did manage to secure some decent loot by pillaging the city ahead of the others, they also hoarded plenty of lower-tier but still useful items. From gold coins to weapons Players wouldn’t be able to properly recreate for a long time.

So, what was the real problem?

After a successful raid, a generic NPC in Signia’s crew, controlled by sub-processes of a more advanced AI, casually remarked that if they sold their haul on the market, they would be able to ‘party for a week’. A harmless comment, I thought, but it struck a chord with Sturm, who’d been brooding over the pirates’ origins. Following my directives, Signia’s crew member shut down the inquiry, but Sturm wasn’t so easily deterred. 

He pressed Signia directly, and here, my greatest ally in bamboozling the Players, betrayed me. 

The Charisma Stat.

Originally, Charisma was a dump stat, later, I’d tied a rudimentary reputation system to it, where each NPC belonged to a faction and had personal and factional reputation meters that influenced each other. Sturm, having leveled up significantly during his exploration of the Shattered City, had invested heavily into his Charisma Stat. 

And with every raid where he dutifully handed most of the loot to Signia, it boosted his personal reputation with her to the highest tier; Friendship. Thank god, I didn’t add tiers beyond that, I had no interest in enabling a reputation grind to ‘Exalted’ status.

By funneling loot into ‘Signia’s fund’, Sturm also earned rep with her entire faction, the crew of sky pirates who loved his generosity. Now, the AI notified me that, according to its calculations, Signia had to disclose her backstory and origin… Unless the AI was mistaken, and she was meant to stay a secretive, manipulative villain. 

Given that the AI’s roleplay was based on the few times I’d manually controlled Signia to interact with players, silence seemed like the weaker option.

The catch?

I had nothing to tell the players. The pirates didn’t exist outside this zone, they were conjured whole cloth for NPC interactions, to give quests to push Players beyond endless demon-slaying and level-grinding, and later as a proto-guild framework. 

Their backstories? I’d skipped that part.

On the other hand, even if I somehow manage to weasel out of this current debacle and declare that Signia was refusing to discuss it, it’d still just be stalling the inevitable. Sooner or later, I’d end up having to spill the beans on this whole mess anyway… And I sure as hell don’t think that moment will magically arrive after I’ve spawned ten kingdoms outside the playable zone, scripted their lore, and plotted their timeline for the next millennium.

Which meant I had to cook up another batch of fabricated lore for the Players, complete with tweaking the AI to ensure they not only knew about the lore but could also contribute to it… Within strict parameters, of course.

“Though…” I mused, as I logged into Signia’s avatar and synced with the digital Avatar. 

“The Demon and Angel factions turned out decent. Maybe I can brew up something wild for the pirate expansion? Sparks and plunder, eh?”