The following morning, before Karine leaves for her day job as a licensed insolvency trustee, or LIT, she awakens to an announcement from MAA's manufacturer. The servers will be taken offline to deploy emergency patch 2.1a at 1 PM GMT. Patch notes will become available at that time.
It has always been like this when new content patches are released for MAA: the manufacturer is always in a rush to get the most important bugs fixed in the first week of a content patch's lifecycle, Karine sighs, while 1 PM GMT would mean, for her, 8 AM in her time zone. She then prays that the unrest will be quelled among the trash mobs in Upper Perseria upon returning to the game tonight.
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When 1 PM GMT arrives on Earth, in MAA's world, on the other hand, Karine's characters are having a conversation with other players' characters about the alarm Karine's bishop, Monseigneur, sounded last night. She is at a function at the Death Fiscalists' guild hall, which is a lavish palace on a tropical island, lined with decorations of varying rarity.
"Last night, I told... Karine, I think, about how what people from her world were making us do barbaric things we wouldn't have otherwise" Monseigneur gossips about what she told Karine at night, in the presence of other characters played by Death Fiscalists.
"Yeah, they made us endure what they call... wipes? Over and over" Béteulle, Ram's bard, sighs, while no player is currently online.
"And some people in their world somehow see it fit to laugh at either us tanks or at healers when wipes happen. If only people in their world actually understood the plight of ours... I saw it myself in Upper Perseria" Monseigneur harangues the bard around the guild's dinner table. "We risk everything for them, and that's how they treat us?"
Monseigneur then keeps talking about how some people patrolling Upper Perseria who, to the players' eyes, are trash mobs, demanded the people responsible for what they deem to be the massacre of innocents in Lower Perseria to be brought to justice.
Speaking of Perseria, its city council holds an emergency meeting, seeking to prevent the unrest among its residents from spreading any further.
"Mr. Mayor, this is unacceptable: riots keep erupting in Upper Perseria as they demand retribution for the repeated massacres of innocents that took place in Lower Perseria!" a city councillor representing a district in Upper Perseria makes their case. "I fear irreparable damage might be done if nothing is done to prevent further riots, or the perpetrators of the massacres in Lower Perseria aren't punished!"
"I propose that the city be put under lockdown to prevent rioting from taking place, and to protect the residents from themselves!" the mayor of Perseria opens the city council meeting, knowing that the clock is ticking on them.
The city council keeps debating various measures they feel could stem the wave of unrest among its residents, while the would-be rebels are ready to roll out measures of their own as they quietly slip out of the city for whereabouts unknown, hiding as a caravan of traveling merchants... for now.
"I say we banish people affiliated with the rioters from this city!" a city councillor vehemently suggests a course of action.
"By exiling people affiliated with the rioters, what's not to say that they can't spread the unrest elsewhere in the world? They will seek refuge in other city-states..." the mayor is concerned about the consequences of exiling the rioters and their sympathizers.
"And turn the rest of the world against us?" another concerned city councillor yells. "Just don't banish the rioter sympathizers!"
"One last thing about lockdown: the only people authorized to enter or leave their homes are food merchants and guards! Those in favor of banishing the rioters..." the mayor signals.
The mayor of Perseria counts three councillors in favor of banishing the rioters, and then four in favor of locking down the city to those not selling necessities or the city garrison.
"By order of the mayor, all residents are ordered to remain in their homes until further notice, with the following exceptions..." the mayor announces to the city's residents.
And the city's residents remain locked in their homes, but they are in for an unpleasant surprise when the servers come back up. Now that the players can play once again, the residents watch in horror parties traipse through the city, lower or upper, unopposed, with the guards too busy herding the residents.
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Once the game's servers come back up, Ram decides to run Lower Perseria in fatal mode in an attempt to farm cosmetic recipes, in hopes of raising money for the Death Fiscalists' race to world first through crafting cosmetics for sale, and then buy consumables such as runes, food and potions.
MAA dungeons have 4 difficulties: story, the lowest is intended for solo play, normal, the next-highest is intended for leveling in groups of 5, and, while it doesn't require a tank, it does require a healer for a queue to pop. The highest two, brutal and fatal, on the other hand, are not available until max level, and only fatal difficulty queues actually require a tank to pop, whereas the other two queueable difficulties can pop with a healer but no tank.
Monseigneur claimed that she heard trash in Upper Perseria clamor for justice for what happened in Lower Perseria. However, is it me or Lower Perseria is now trash-free? Did the bosses realize that trash was ineffective? Or use the trash for other purposes? Ram starts thinking as soon as the run begins and arrives at the first boss a lot faster than he did in earlier runs this week.
Even with the bonus boss, it takes him and his guildies about fifteen minutes to run Lower Perseria now, compared to twenty without the bonus boss and with trash before the emergency patch was deployed.
"Please double-check the patch notes. Do they say anything about the removal of trash mobs from Lower Perseria?" Ram questions his guildies with whom he ran Lower Perseria.
So while the emergency patch includes fixes for malfunctioning mechanics and abilities, player or enemy, or some visual glitches when certain actions are taken, it doesn't say anything about trash being removed from an instance, much less Lower Perseria. Is it a new bug, or is there something going on in that world that the manufacturer has no control over? Yes, in other games, sometimes debugging can feel like a giant whack-a-mole game in the source code. I wonder sometimes if Karine has any actual experience as a game developer... Ram sighs, as his character starts crafting a unit of cosmetics.
"No trace of trash removal in Lower Perseria" one of the DPS players answers him.
"Time to try Upper Perseria; Monseigneur alleged that trash in this dungeon could demand justice for Lower Perseria for some reason" Ram asks his squad to run Upper Perseria, in hopes of completing the set of cosmetic recipes from the dungeon.
When Karine returns from work, that day, she starts preparing food for another night on air, taking other viewers through content while Ram takes care of purchasing the supplies for a week of almost nonstop progression raiding. And buying hundreds of runes (which lasts for a certain amount of time, but persists through character deaths), as well as thousands of ingredients for food (whose effects cease when a character dies) and potions (whose effects last a few seconds) can seriously dent guild finances.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
After learning about these troubling new developments in the Perseria dungeons from Ram, Karine has lingering memories of last night's encounter with Monseigneur's astral projection.
"Looks like people will run these two dungeons ad nauseam, or at least those who have any actual skill at dungeon crawling" Karine comments on this development. "So I suggest that we go run brutal-mode Operation Heathrow on our alts since we are locked out of it on our mains"
Operation Heathrow being the newest raid of the game, and the objective of the players is to kill Belzebuth, one of the Seven Princes of Hell, who is terrorizing the airspace around the airport Belzebuth was last spotted at, and hence preventing its use. That, even though the game claims the airport was built using demonic technology.
"Tonight, this run through brutal mode Operation Heathrow is brought to you by Monseigneur Tanking and the Death Fiscalists!" Karine announces at the start of the Death Fiscalists' alt night.
As the Death Fiscalists make their approach towards the airport terminal and prepare to face the first boss at its entrance, they don't suspect that something sinister is afoot. The ten players walk onto an access ramp, and then attack the squad cars and the demonic police officers protecting the entrance to the terminal. Which, to one of Karine's faithful Friday night subscribers, strangely reminds the viewer in question of London Heathrow's Terminal 5.
Upon destruction of the final squad car, an explosion occurs underneath the party as they approach the departures floor's plaza, with all 10 players being caught in the blast radius. Also, the access ramp is severed in the blast, right where the access ramp's curve is sharpest.
“What’s happening?” Ram, a player with a healer alt, asks, surprised that the access ramp would be destroyed.
“Last time we ran Operation Heathrow in brutal mode, the squad cars didn’t contain triggers for booby traps that can destroy the access ramp!” Karine rants about how the patch changed the game for them.
“Something doesn’t add up: how could the devs somehow allow an access ramp to be destroyed like this when there is no health bar to it?” Ram asks his guildies, puzzled that the access ramp could get destroyed in-game.
The viewers watch, horrified, the party falling to their “deaths” because the access ramp to the departures floor’s plaza exploded. And some of the reactions on Karine’s chat are just priceless.
“Did the devs just introduce more bugs with this emergency patch?” a Friday night regular asks Karine on chat.
“Call me crazy but the airport operators wouldn’t use a booby trap resulting in the destruction of an access ramp, especially since there’s only one access ramp leading up to the first boss? Flying mounts are not allowed in raids!” Karine tries to answer to her viewers, and she combs the patch notes for information related to the fixes made to Operation Heathrow, if any.
She also proceeds to file yet another support ticket about the destruction of Operation Heathrow’s access ramp, as she did last night for Upper Perseria’s trash chanting about justice for Lower Perseria.
However, because Karine is filing a ticket, the rest of the guild seems to have its own set of issues to sort out, even when the trash leading up to the departures floor of the terminal has been cleared.
Meanwhile, in MAA’s world, the other 9 guildies, rather than to try to get back on the access ramp leading to the first boss, investigate the areas where chunks of the access ramp fell on the ground. But then Francis, playing a skirmisher alt (a damage-over-time DPS spec wielding guns) notices that some strange figures are retreating from the scene. He gives chase to these strange figures, riding a mount the character won in a previous raid, the mantis queen. However, as the other 8 players wait for Karine to be done reporting the issue to the manufacturer, the skirmisher keeps riding in the direction of these “strange figures” but doesn’t seem to get any closer, nor is he within firing range.
In the mind of one of these “strange figures”, the attack seems to have been made to demoralize the victims. What matters might not necessarily be the outright elimination of these people controlled by otherworldly entities they call players, but to sever what makes these otherworldly entities control them, one of the fleeing “strange figures” thinks, while the skirmisher is returning to the rest of the team as the skirmisher enters an “exhaustion zone” even though it’s visually no different from the rest of the area.
Once Karine is done filing the ticket, and the skirmisher is back with the rest of the team, the faithful subscriber points out the following:
“Try to enter the terminal via the arrivals floor!” the faithful subscriber tells Karine on the chat, realizing that what worked on their first run a few days ago doesn’t work today.
I guess we can always try that, but I must be mindful of the first boss holding the key to the baggage sorting areas, and therefore we can’t skip this boss, Karine then realizes that this route is not optimal, and this means more trash to fight, more squad cars, and then more demon security guards and police officers to wade through than if they went through the now-destroyed departures access ramp. And also leaving a trail of blood. Once the team makes it to the departures’ plaza, they face the Head of Airport Security, the first boss of Operation Heathrow:
“Phew: there was no booby trap in the arrivals area staircase” Karine sighs before she starts explaining the core mechanics of this boss in brutal mode, so the viewers can understand what’s happening.
First, the taxi stampede mechanic, which causes lanes to have taxis randomly cross any number of lanes, and players can’t get hit; then there’s the turnstile mechanic, which forces tanks to swap after eating 3 stacks of the turnstile curse. And that’s only what they will need to face in phase 1, before reinforcements can arrive from both the exit ramp and the terminal, in phase two.
“I’ll take care of one of the adds in phase two, understood?” Karine asks her guildies before the tanks make the first pull on this boss for this raid night.
“Pulling in three, two, one” Caroline, the tank alt assigned to pull the boss, counts down.
But then, as the boss fight starts, the taxis instead seem to come in from the exit ramp as opposed to the access ramp as normally. And, because a hotfix for the access ramp bug isn’t forthcoming, at least not yet, the taxis jump off the destroyed access ramp. As the taxis jump off the destroyed access ramp, they make collision and explosion noises that Caroline’s co-tank mistakes for a taunt and hence misses a tank swap. Causing her co-tank to die by being thrown off the platform, propelled by a turnstile.
Ram attempts a battle rez when the tank’s body turns up at the edge of the departures’ plaza, which takes three times as long to cast as a regular cooldown.
Yet, it took them three long hours to defeat, in order, the Head of Airport Security, the Cyber-Tech Alligator, Leopard 2 and T-14 Armata, General Confusion, Tiamat and then Belzebuth, the last one being a giant fly, and caused them to incur the most wipes.
Once again, at night, after a long stream that resulted in her getting new followers, and even some donation for this comedy clip that resulted from the destruction of the access ramp, a rested Monseigneur uses her astral projection power to talk to Karine from across worlds, and somehow kept abreast with people from other guilds she invited to come over to the guild hall while the alts were off running Operation Heathrow.
“The municipal authorities of Perseria put that city on lockdown, as a direct result of your actions last night in Upper Perseria, causing the population to be really angry!” Monseigneur’s astral projection tells her.
“What did I do in Upper Perseria that could cause unrest in your world to flare up? For that matter, what happened in Lower Perseria? I assume that what took place in Lower Perseria took place just a few days ago” Karine feigns ignorance of both events in front of her character’s astral projection.
“Don’t pretend that you don’t know! The residents of our world feel like they are controlled by… otherworldly entities! We risk everything for them, and how do they reward us?” a furious Monseigneur asks her.
“Better gear, fashionable outfits, more prestigious titles, better housing and perhaps better food?” Karine answers what other players typically did with their characters.
“You have a point, but it’s as if our tastes in clothing and housing are ignored!” Karine’s character keeps ranting.
“Enough! I refuse to keep talking to a hallucination!” Karine screams at Monseigneur.
She called me a hallucination, but I need Karine to be in full possession of her abilities. She appears to be smarter and, more importantly, less selfish than other players, Monseigneur keeps thinking, in the Death Fiscalists’ guild hall, while her astral form vanishes from Karine’s room.
As her character’s astral form vanishes, Karine feels like something is off. Why do I keep talking to what amounts to a hallucination? That hallucination claims that her world is on the verge of revolt! I ought to see a doctor after this race to world first ends! Karine starts thinking of what she could possibly have done in Lower Perseria that might have drawn her character’s ire. And she’s also wondering whether she’s having an impact on MAA’s world beyond her gameplay alone. Yet something’s not right: normally, in-game buildings, open-world or in instances, would not crumble like this without a health bar, and Operation Heathrow’s access ramp didn’t have any. Most players would be led to believe that what’s happening to me, or to them, would simply be byproducts of bugs. Which they expect to be mostly confined to newer content or features.
She tries to find a neuropsychologist that could potentially help sort out this hallucinatory mess, and get an appointment with one, but she doesn’t expect a response on Friday night.