Madison decided it was time for a new game. His current settings, sci-fi world heavily-oriented towards grinding and scarce quests, may be somewhat satisfying and close to what his friends played for extra closeness, but given their current rankings, it would take him forever to come close to most of them, and he didn’t particularly enjoy the thought. After all, he could only pretend not to care about rankings for so long, as his universe wasn’t original enough on its own to justify his lack of performance with interest in others areas. And he couldn’t say to his friends “No, I’m not interested in trying to catch-up with someone playing twice as much as me in an environment where all interactions are completed by thoughts.” Actually, he could say it, he just didn’t have that many friends already and wasn’t willing to take the chance.
“Blast it, I’ll forget about the rankings and just try something else.” Having said that, low-spirited Madison figured he’d just have to find an appalling way to play that would interest him enough to forget about all competing. Like his friend Ashley, who’d play with graphical settings a lot just to enjoy the views, either psychedelic or artsy. Or Marlowe, always playing in sport universes, all about gliding, surfing, riding and things. “...” Unfortunately, he felt both of them had deep-rooted passions for their respective choices and a - should he think it ? - a somewhat circular personnality that allowed them to self-sustain in their own bubbly universe. And it’s not like Marlowe had bad rankings. “Let’s face it, I can’t forget about the rankings.”
Turning the analysis on his own personality, Madison felt a need to reach out to others, even if only through scores, and he wasn’t one of these high-spirited individuals who can be fired up about the strangest things. Instead, his passions all died within weeks of their awakening : hell, if he didn’t constantly switched games, he wouldn’t be behind his friends all the time ! Or so he thought. Yet his way to solve the problem was another game change, the irony wasn’t lost on him. “I can’t compete in numbers of hours with my studies anyway, so my only option is to set up a high difficulty universe. But without any real life skill, I first need to assess my options.” Sighing, he turned to the Internet to search information on the high-difficulty settings.
The difficulty setting, as he read, was deeply rooted in its programing origin, meaning the highest difficulty wasn’t some carefully tested mode with only a slight chance to progress for experienced and talented individuals, it was the setting above which normal people would die without having time to disconnect - It wasn’t used besides for suicides, and from what he could guess, that was a painful way to go. The few individuals playing in extreme but livable settings would have nausea just walking, be openly discriminated in every town, while only allowed to one life - which didn’t matter much, since typically the evil masterminds of the worlds would ally themselves and take over the game within 2 weeks of the start of the server.
So what you had to do when starting a difficult game, was to carefully adjust the settings. For beginners, it was strongly advised to put the “pain” setting to “wound-only”, meaning you wouldn’t feel anything except in fights situations. Otherwise, pain could be linked to success of actions, forcing you to withstand inconfort proportional to the difficulty of what you tried, for example, or even feeling needle piercing you when talking with someone. As mentioned above, the settings were raw, they had a barbaric feeling to them : the game engine would do something clever about what you gave him in low or normal difficulties settings, but you couldn’t ask for high-difficulty and pain without encountering absurd tortures situations.
Another recurring advice was to adjust the familiarity of the world to players to manageable levels. At the most extreme setting, every being generated by the game engine would -know- about being an auto-generated IA designed to please users and be very, very angry about it. One second in, you’d be swarmed by billions of Skynet-like creatures all aiming at your throat. Even a less extreme setting would mean being treated as an alien - imagine being a powerless Superman and everyone is Lex Luthor. On the other hand, being identified as a regular citizen was bad too, since a compression time of 5:1 was standard across all competitive HUBs, and you wouldn’t realize anything when playing only one day out of 30 - and that was with 4 hours of gaming a day ! So something like “distant but pleasant foreigner” was probably good if you wanted to interact successfully with the game.
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The list went on and on, no clever antagonists unless you were a genius, no overly sophisticated communication means as it would result in constant betrayals and cabals, not too high physical prowess as battles would be impossible without special training… In fact, high settings were used as training for athletes so it could be interesting if you wanted to train like them. The more he read, the more Madison felt low-spirited. He resumed his take on this with “If you want to play in high-difficulty, just don’t”. Fortunately, he finally found someone explaining that the key to high-difficulty was to max out areas you didn’t intend to play in. If you wanted to play in a trading role, make sure NPCs are as strong as bandits and max out difficulties of fights you’ll never partake in, hiring some escorts when moving, or if you are to be Conan, make sure to max out NPCs level of language, so that feeling like an uncivilized brute wouldn’t matter if you are, indeed, an uncivilized brute.
The Game Engine would of course detect your behaviour in some way and adjust the difficulty settings if you tried to cheat him, but as long as you made sure the part you spent most of the time on were still difficult and that you were good enough for them, if was the perfect way to earn solid rankings. Finally recovering his spirits, Madison read story after story of successful people who not only had good rankings and were enjoying themselves, but were also becoming quite good in the areas they specialized in. “I should have started that years ago !” - an exclamation that would have had more strength if not frequently uttered by the kind of gamer Madison was, always jumping from an idea to another. Nevertheless, he was currently oblivious to that and quite happy about himself.
It was time to launch the game creation kit, and Madison happily set a fixed difficulty among the higher but manageable ones, allowing the Game engine to adjust factors he didn’t change so the global difficulty remained constant. He chose a fantasy universe, as he preferred those, and not feeling like a fighter outright set fighting techniques at maximum difficulty. He didn’t see the point in letting pain dictate what he can do, so he followed the advice and put it at 0, and did it too for the NPCs knowledge of players, put normal settings for illnesses, extremes of luck and others possibly dangerous events that allowed no counterparts. As a personal preference, he ensured quests were plentiful, scarce quests would hinder his growth. In others areas, he allowed some part of randomness in the setting which, combined with the auto-adjustments, made sure he still could be surprised about what the game entailed.
From that point on, he pondered what he was good at, so he could have something to rely on. “I think I’m all-around good at video games. Not in actual rankings, but I tested so many things that I know my way around them, where to ask, who to please and mechanics I ought to rely on. In some way, a theorycrafter.” - it was a blatant lie. Accordingly, he put NPCs exigences to a high level, and a somewhat high mechanical value on every area, trading, magic, logistics, craft, etc… Even if he didn’t feel that confident, he figured he could still learn bit after bit. And as he told himself, trying new things always is a good thing in itself. Last thing to do was to put a name to his game, in case someone else wanted to try it. He didn’t care much as he figured only his friends would bother to look at it, so he put “Madis0n’s mad Skillz”, which was as good a name as any.
Seconds later.
[td4]
Connect to Madis0n’s mad Skillz ?
[/td2]
YesNo
Any remark or criticism is of course welcome.
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