Fred ducked behind the thick wooden boards of the barricade that his camp had set up and bolts, both physical and magical, took a jaunt down the passageway and slammed into it just as he managed to get there. The dark brown skin of his arm was blistered over with what felt like acid, where a bolt of magic managed to land a lucky shot earlier. The NPC had been a bloodmancer, an advanced form of geomancer who filled their crystals with blood instead of elemental energy, and the blood arrow that hit the shield he was using had unexpectedly returned to a liquid when he blocked it, and that ate through the wood and singed his flesh. There were a surprising number of magic users out there, especially considering the resource cost they tended to have. Either the NPC army had a lot of backers, or they were able to ignore the spell cost for the sake of a more entertaining event. So far, the NPC Uprising questline was the first large scale event that the game had shown, given it was mostly focused on exploration and discovery, so there was some sense in the designers giving it more of a dramatic stake by increasing the magic in play.
At least, that's what the player in him thought, the shopkeeper in him was pissed off that his shop was being burned and looted, his crops stolen and workers killed, while he could only organise a defence and wait for the front line to return and save him. So far the siege had lasted three in game days, with little sign of easing or breaking. It had been a normal day when it started, and a particularly profitable one at that. He managed to sell off a large part of his stockpiled food to an NPC village, something he hadn't worried about since his farmers were due to harvest more that very afternoon, a decision that was apparently not in his best interest. When the NPC army entered the camp, they approached from four sides and used trade carts to hide their numbers. Anyone looking at a single direction wouldn't find their approach strange at all, just a trader with the sense to hire guards. It was only once they formed up into two groups that they started to seem suspicious, and by that point they were already at the camp's edge. With their soldiers well rested in the caravans, they burst out and charged the camp in two arrow shaped columns, with fighters at the arrowhead and mages in the shaft. Their blitz immediately killed camp's healers and mages, with the NPC's looting the materials needed to cast magic before they could spawn back into camp, rendering them unable to aid in further combat. While the camp still had components in the cave vault, that was all Fred's own property, and he had been reluctant to hand out those supplies when the combat started, thinking that the raid was just some disorganised bandit group.
While the farmers and other field workers evacuated, non-combat NPCs entered the camp to harvest the crops and burn whatever couldn't be taken. It should have been obvious then that the NPC were in for a siege, but Fred had still not thought of the possibility, given most games wouldn't pull that kind of stunt due to it being the kind of frustrating event that caused players to lose interest. He hadn't thought the event would last long, and hadn't issued any kind of rationing. Aside from a handful of Fred's staff, no one else knew about him selling off the reserves, and they hadn't held back either. Fighting was an energy intensive activity, especially with heavy gear, and hunger wasn't eliminated by death. By the third day of slow combat, there wasn't a single fighter who wasn't fighting through starvation. They had started managing their food when they were nearly out, and the food went to fighters first and casters only after them, since it was far less intensive to stand still and throw out spells, and they couldn't even do that by dawn of the third day, with the last of the resources used up. Worse still was how many NPCs still remained, and how well off they still seemed. The NPCs outnumbered the number of players, and they used their numbers to their advantage. The two wings started pressing and pulling back in perfect co-ordination, as if they were in constant communication, like a single gelatinous monster instead of a mass of people. They'd press hard on one flank to force the defenders to focus there, only for the other wing to break through the weakened side and make strikes at the exposed ranged players before pulling back again and repeating. Like that, the players were pushed back into the cave, where the crafting players had set up defences that maximised their defensive power. Unfortunately, that had also limited the number of people in active combat at any time, which meant the NPCs could cycle through their fighters and give themselves plenty of food an rest.
Worse still the players numbers were steadily reducing, even as their supplies were. The siege had caused a lot of players to stop playing, angry at having their resources stolen or wasted and having wasted their time, having only spent their play time paying off their costs to Fred, just to have their gains broken. It wasn't just new players that were quitting, veterans, even second wave players, were getting frustrated with the hunger and uselessness of it, and were dropping out. That was especially the case when they found out the worst part, and had to find it out through the forum. The NPCs had some witchdoctors amongst their magic users, and they were capturing souls on the battlefield. If a soul was captured, then the player was unable to spawn again until either the jar was broken or the soul was used as fuel in a spell or witchdoctor skill. It also seemed that they weren't being used as fuel, and were instead being packed into crates and shipped away from the combat. Unless someone went after those carts, it was the equivalent to permanent in game death; all progress lost. There were some players who didn't mind that kind of thing, and others who saw that as an opportunity to make a new character without making the same early game mistakes, but it was a major turn off for most.
As such, Fred's cave was starting to look bare-bones, with very few defenders left. He couldn't be sure that there would even be reinforcements. He had posted the help request on the forum, but that had since been drowned out by the permanent death complaints. Looking around, the defenders that remained were mostly tired looking, hungry people whose moral wouldn't last much longer. Fred fished through his pockets and pulled out a handful of coins, a portion of what he had made through selling the food. While he had started the game as a tinker, as his camp expanded he had spent less time making things himself, and had instead started to level up as a merchant. He held the shiny golden coins over his burnt arm and spoke the words that would activate a healing spell, restoring his wound but giving the coins a dull grey sheen. It wasn't the best use of the coins, it was even a bad use of them. But, he had had enough. His progress had been stripped away and his lands burnt and salted; there was no rebuilding. He had held out through the first wave, but at that time he had nothing and lost nothing by losing. Now the game had let him build, grow his base and feel progress before taking that away from him. That hurt more than any of the deaths.
He resigned himself. It couldn't go on. He walked slowly out from behind the cover and walked out to where the front line of each side was clashing, hoping to call a truce and surrender. When a stray blot, not even aimed for him, took him in the throat, he fell to the ground without fighting it, letting himself bleed out. From there, he logged out of the game, left his console pod and his apartment, instead going for a slow and wandering walk of his city, no longer caring about the game, or any game really.
In the game, the marker that had shown the camp known as Fred's Discount Swords disappeared, and players found that there weren't able to spawn there anymore. What was left of the camp was quickly overrun, the weakened players unable to resist having their gear stripped from them before they were killed. Before the remaining resources were packaged onto carts and shipped out, Fred's head was pierced by pike so that his body would remain standing at the cave's entrance.
