After ripping off from rich and guilds, the game gave sweet candy. But with addendum. Only the strongest can have it. Guilds could be still established early in the game. As soon as a single member of the guild reached level 10, need not be the the guild leader. Why this is good news? Because they didn't have to go to novice city to establish guild. Just 10 members are enough to build a guild. Good. In that case, all the money spent by the guilds to have batches of their loyal players to spawn in same place will be worthwhile. None of the guilds can have same name. Eh, this just needs co- ordination between team leads. Can even turn into competition between them to establish guilds first.

Analysts pondered long and hard over this move from the game developers. The guilds and clubs or corporations managing them had a whole team of highly intellectual people just for analysis. They could expostulate many things from such news.

A round of assignments landed of students, which made them moan and groan. Come on! They were all busy with the game. Where would they have time to finish assignments? But when they opened the assignment list, they were gobsmacked. Are these assignments? No, no, these are free passes to play games without worry. Most of not all of them were related to the game.

Give detailed cost benefit analysis of reusables? Do them same for the weapons or any items you purchased within a week of game? Or,

Give detailed report on anthropomorphism of the NPCs in the tutorial island. Or,

Code all the characters of any single NPC you have interacted with. Or,

This one was easily best and the worst- leave your name in the Glory list, any of it. The name of the game said it all- for the glory. So, it had loads of glory lists. It can be as silly as first person to enter the village to first person purchasing something from NPC or first person to sell something to NPC. The game had others too- first to kill a moster, first to get consumables as monster drop, first one to finish quest, first one to finish dungeon, first one to find new map etc in addition to top 10 or top 100 players. And the good part, it was tailormade to each village, town and city. So, the chances of entering in list should be easy, right? Wrong! Entirely wrong! Unless you are strong in games or have deep bank balance, the chances of you entered such lists was very less. Reason - guilds! They were congregation of powerful players and they had back up of money and human resources. Moreover, these lists were excellent way to show off and pull new blood into guilds. How can they not fight tooth and nail for a glory?

While the students at Norton's were crying in despair and thinking of ways to hug the golden thighs of guilds, the game developers released next surprise.

The game could be played in three modes. The experience and the drops would depend on mode of playing. Three modes were complete assist or CA, semi assist or SA and lastly Nil assist, NA. The names would explain the details. In complete assist, the aiming and execution was completely via game AI, thus gave least experience and loots. To put it simply, the AI and the player were considered party and one with maximum contribution got most of XP/experience and loots. This would explain why players received less. Using same explanation, we can think what happens in SA. Here, work is nearly half and half between player and AI, so the experience or loots are going to be more than CA.

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NA is for those confident and powerful players. They never use AI to hunt or play, thus all the experience and loots would solely belong to them. So, if you are well played, the experience would be more each time and the difference in levels between players playing in three modes would slowly increase.

The people gave different names for these modes though - noob, amateur and professional. A average salaried person developed a small goal. In the game, though he would start as noob, using CA mode, he would finally transition into amateur, using SA mode, hopefully within a year of playing the game. The students in Norton were a bit different, they rejoiced on receiving the news. Finally, there was hope. Guilds and the ilk would concentrate on professional mode, leaving two lists to others. A bit of luck and they had a chance to be immortalized and be on the glory lists.

The top student dormitory room was gloomy. Asher Beaumont was becoming more and more moody as the launch date neared. He was in the frenzy to finish assignments and revise. Sure as he k, he would not be in the mood to study when game gets launched. With the release of different modes, he could envision completely hostile future. Him, in CA mode and the players his brother had recruited to power level him up in SA or even NA mode and the difference in the levels just increasing each day. Soon, they would have eligibility to leave novice village or town and go to City proper to play the real game. And all others would know that he was a paper tiger. Just thinking about that scenario made him scowl.

Leroy Fletcher was not having it easy either. He didn't care about the game at all. Even when the supposing hush hush rumour got circulated that the players can convert their game coins to credits. 100 credits to a single copper coin. Yeah, that's initial scarcity and hunger marketing. Even assuming that the game company would use the money they had scalped from rich to pay the poor ( Robinhood was long dead and he was a fictional character anyway), would they be able to pay the same price? Leroy was pretty sure that other than lucky few who would make a windfall, others would run behind the mirage to earn more than their salary via playing games. By the time game stabilized, the price of game coins would be as little as 100 credits for a single silver coin or perhaps even lower.

The marketing of the game created a suction effect, pulling all people into the current which made other interests pale and stale. This inturn meant that Leroy had less working options. The money he had scammed, hmm, tution fee he received, from Asher was nearly gone and he needed new methods to earn money. If this game had not been there, his initial projection of cash inflow- outflow would be materialized and he could have spent last few months of his college life, focusing solely on studies and job interviews. D*mn you, you stupid game! You messed my life plan! Leroy scowled. His scowl only deepened when he saw the new list of assignments. Even the teachers had joined the bandwagon, even they wanted the students to play.