After a creak, the door of the virtual cabin opened, and Roland, who was in comfortable pajamas, lurched out. He patted his face and realized that he was wide awake. He didn't feel like he had gamed for a whole night.
It did make sense on second thought. His body had been resting for the last eight hours, and only his consciousness was in the game. So, his body in reality shouldn't be tired.
He observed his silver virtual cabin, which was in the shape of an egg. Honestly speaking, he found it quite shabby. It was essentially an egg-shaped bed, with a few LED indicators and two magnet-like items near the pillow. Nothing else was worth mentioning.
There were no nutrition fluids or neural connections as described in the science fiction novels. Yet, this cabin had successfully put him in a virtual world.
Also, time flowed at a different speed in the game. One hour in reality equaled three hours in the game.
The game was only available from 22:00 to 06:00 the next day. The eight hours in reality were a day in the game, which was why the game was frozen in the morning of the second day. The time was up in reality.
It was a Saturday and he didn't need to go to work. Roland worked out on a treadmill for half an hour, then he took a shower and had some bread and water as breakfast. After that, he turned on the computer and opened the game's forum.
As expected, the forum was exploding.
In only an hour, more than a hundred thousand new topics had been added, and the number was still growing. Roland read some of the topics. Some of the netizens were impressed that the game was as immersive as it was claimed to be, and some found it hard to believe that Penguin Corporation, which was infamous for plagiarism, had developed such unbelievable technology.
Roland had the same doubt. However, the fact remained undeniable: this was the first immersive game in the whole world. So, instead of questioning the source of Penguin Corporation's technology, he browsed on, only to laugh so hard that he was almost in tears.
Many people were praising the game for a lot of aspects. Some believed that the NPCs were vivid, some complimented the beautiful environment, and some thought highly of the setting. However, one particular thread was stuck on the top, and it received as many likes as dislikes.
According to this thread, players could hit on the NPCs in the game. The creator of this thread was a rarely seen Bard, a variant of Warlock with high charisma and built-in Language Proficiency, allowing him to understand what the NPCs said.
Roland found it unfair when he read this part… Why did the Warlocks only need to read the name of a spell to cast it, when Mages had to connect the magic nodes? That was definitely occupational discrimination.
However, as he read on patiently, he was soon amused.
Taking advantage of his high charisma and Language Proficiency, this player hit on several young women when he joined the game. Then, he discovered, to his surprise, that he could have sex with the female NPCs in the game, which was certainly real and exhilarating.
What happened next made Roland laugh. The two of them were caught by the woman's husband, and the husband surrounded the player with a dozen helpers.
While the Bard was a complex class with high combat abilities, he was now naked, unarmed, and his level was low. He was no match for the dozen brawny men. After he was defeated, he was pressed to the ground and h circumcised by the husband with a knife.
"The blood was all over the ground! It was not very painful, but can you imagine the mental trauma when someone cuts your penis bit by bit with a sharp blade? I think I've been traumatized."
All the replies in the thread were emojis of laughter.
There are truly all kinds of players… Roland held his belly and laughed hard. Finally, he closed the thread and entered the feedback section.
Naturally, there were not as many posts in the feedback section. Roland read some of them and realized that most of the suggestions did not make any sense. If the game was revised according to their wishes, it would be ruined. For example, someone proposed that the languages of all races in the game should be changed to Chinese so that the players could understand NPCs more easily.
He pictured the blond sorcerers chanting in Chinese and immediately found it unfitting.
Roland read on and found some topics related to his own experience. A player had suggested that the difficulty for Mages to cast a spell be lowered. All the other classes were capable of fighting, but not Mages.
Warriors had high strength, Rogues were fast and could launch remote attacks, Warlocks were natural-born sorcerers, and Priests did not need to fight under the protection of Warriors. All they had to do was cast Healing. The poor Mages, in comparison, were bad at melee battles and could not cast a spell. Their heads might even explode when they tried a spell beyond their level.
The player was the chief of a guild. He wrote in his thread, "The level-two spells, in particular, will result in head explosion whenever they fail. All the Mages in my guild have head explosion experiences, some more than once. The girls are now almost traumatized. More importantly, no Mages have successfully cast a spell yet. If you don't believe it, you can check the Spellcaster section. Please, game designers, give us some hope."
Roland felt a lot better knowing that his head was not the only one that had exploded. He left the feedback section for the Spellcaster section. As he expected, the Mage players were wailing there.
They were complaining about how miserable and wretched they were when the magic recoiled. Head explosion was actually a neat way to die. The more appalling deaths included eyeballs popping and bleeding out. Although the pain in-game had been reduced to one-tenth, it was still not a pleasant feeling.
Roland read the section for a long time. Then he discovered, to his surprise, that no Mages claimed that they had successfully cast a spell. Many Warlocks, on the other hand, were gloating and encouraging the Mages to delete their characters and become Warlocks.
I can't allow this… Roland found a portable disk and connected it to the virtual cabin. He picked some segments of his experiments and posted them with the four profiles of spells in a thread titled "Roland's Experience on Inferior Fireball."