(A Virtual Room in NERV HQ)
Isaac was busy. Paperwork, if such a thing truly existed in his virtual office, was a constant headache no matter where you went, it seemed. At the moment, he was going through the bug reports (of which there were surprisingly few) and the player complaints (which seemed never ending). Thankfully, the AI in charge of going through the game’s code was a sharp one, and any bugs usually got hot-patched before they had even escalated to his desk.
The player complaints, however, were often beyond the understanding of an AI that was primarily logical in its makeup. Few of the complaints, after all, had anything to do with logic. Of course, some were legitimate, like the absolute shitstorm of complaints they’d fielded during the Jagloth incident, but the rest were, frankly, crap. Most of it was people whining about how things weren’t ‘fair’ because they fucked up and the game kicked them where it hurt. The Lord_Kickass file was already two gigabytes large, with just text files!
Of course, it seemed like a growing number of those ‘no fair’ complaints all had to do with one company in game. Well, really just one player, and the group he’d gathered around himself. Who could have imagined, when the game started, that one player would have so quickly found himself at the center of most of the game’s major events?
Certainly a little of that was due to the compensation package he’d gotten for being so amazing during the beta, but the only event that had been set up for him on the company’s side hadn’t happened. They’d set it up so he could replace Princess Sheila if he wanted, but that had been scrapped by him planning his own escape, and the assassination of the Emperor. Since then, he’d had a few lucky breaks, but most of it had been his ability to react to the situation. The company hadn’t stepped in to do anything for him until the Event Quest.
Ironically, the Event Quest wasn’t what most people were complaining about. The whole ‘we don’t want another Jagloth’ thing was pretty blatant, and the only group of Nomads who were in a position to do anything about it were the Black Stars. No, that wasn’t the problem, it was the new Gateway Addresses.
Specifically, the fact that he’d hidden the Nuevo Edo address in his streams, and the address that everyone now knew was the Amazon system. Unfortunately for the eight players who had managed to get through the gate, they didn’t realize until it was far too late that they couldn’t land on the planet. Some of them had lost everything because the ships they’d been working to get had melted around them. They were now stranded on the planet with a bunch of (slightly stupid) Amazons who thought of men as nothing but breeding tools. Looking over the logs, there had been no less than twelve ‘Death by Snu-snu’ incidents involving Nomads since they first crashed on the planet. Six of them involved a character named Gemroth, who got an achievement for being the first Nomad to set foot on the planet now being labeled as Amazonia.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Fortunately, these tickets were easy to close out. A simple email saying that yes, the player had the right to edit their stream to conceal location data, no, it was not the game’s fault that they wandered into an area that was unsafe while trying to do nefarious deeds, no, the player was not at fault for them losing their ships, no, they could not simply move the characters to a new planet. Finish it up with an offer to have a paid character change, allowing them to start a new character with additional points to spend in chargen, and send. Basically, he had it down to a form letter by now.
Of course, that was a minority of the Gateway-related complaints. The others mainly had to do with how him hiding the gate address meant they couldn’t cash in by telling various factions the correct new address. Those tickets were closed summarily with only a simple, “Your claim is denied.”
Morgan poked her head into the office, and said, “Oh, there you are. I thought for sure you’d be in the ‘pit’ watching the procession into Dimiya. Some pretty impressive theatrics going on there.”
Isaac sighed, and shook his head. “No, I had to get the latest bug reports and complaint tickets signed off. Fortunately, we’ve managed to keep things down to a dull roar, since the bugs get fixed quick. The idiots complaining because they don’t get free shit are starting to piss me off, though.”
“Yeah, I can see that. They’re a pain in my ass, too. Thought you’d like to know that our boy just shocked the hell out of some NPCs, by basically declaring himself a nuclear state, and then daring the Prime Minister’s aid to do something about it.”
Isaac quickly pulled up the logs, reviewing them. “Hmm. Well, he’s got enough clout with enough groups that he can pull that off. And he is technically within the law, so there is that. Wait, he threatened to run for government?”
Morgan chuckled. “Yeah, but I don’t think he was actually serious. I mean, he isn’t really the kind of player who would have the patience for all that wheeling and dealing instead of just cutting straight to the heart of the problem, even if that meant cutting someone’s head off, literally. Not to mention that he wouldn’t be able to go have fun exploring and would have to endure endless meetings and the like.”
“Yeah, I don’t see him doing that, but damn would it be fun to watch. At any rate, it looks like once the Confederates get a trade deal in place, they’ll open the gate for real, and then the fun begins. After all, there’s about six or seven game days until that enters the Nuevo Edo system…”
End of Book 11.