[What made me decide to start up this place? Maybe it was to try and fix the depressing atmosphere, maybe to try and give these fools something to do, maybe to give myself an excuse as to why I’m not feeling all that depressed out being here, maybe I was just bored as hell. Whatever the reason we’re stuck here now so we’ll see how it goes. Now are you here to make a request, take one, or just here for a beer?]
Three weeks ago, me and about five thousand other people got into a closed beta test for a new MMO that was going to be released later next year: Avalon. The beta was about halfway done and what we were given to explore was, according to the developers, a medium-sized hub-city called Humanity’s Edge and its surroundings. But man, when they said that the city was only medium size we thought they were joking, someone timed it and it took about an hour just to get from the north gate to the western one!
The city had a mountain range that could be seen spreading out on the east side. A giant forest to the north, and a seemingly endless grass plain to the west that could be seen spreading all the way to the southern tip of the city. Separating the plains from the mountains was a large river flowing down from the side of a mountain that also seemed to flow into the city somewhere. Finally, surrounding the entire city was a massive 6m wall made of extremely thick polished stone with a large gate at each of the four cardinal directions.
All in all, it was a lot just for a beta but the developers told us that they really wanted people to get a feel for the game and the types of areas that would be in it. Most of the players felt that the city would be needlessly big when we first started but we quickly figured out why it was so large. Only about a fifth of the city was actually in use. From the north gate to the west gate in almost a reverse crescent was all of the NPCs living there, along with the shops and inns.
On the edge facing the rest of the city was a wall that looked like it had been constructed as fast as possible while still being somewhat sturdy. The rest of the city was uninhabitable and was crawling with monsters. Strangely enough, only the portion being lived in was referred to as Humanity’s Edge, shortened to Edge by players. The rest of the city was called Humanity’s Failure by NPCs which was shortened to Failure by players
As we all started playing through the game several odd things began to be noticed, the first was that there were no indicators for taking quests like exclamation points above heads or anything, instead, you had to ask around and see if one of the NPCs had something they needed done. Most of them were easily missed because you never actually accept anything, so for the first couple of days, people were wondering if there just wasn’t any quest system in the game or if it was bugged.
Another was the fact that most quests could only be completed one time, not just once per player, one time and that was it, no one else could do the quest. Kinda makes sense if you think about it, you can’t really expect an old lady to pay five thousand people to go collect some apples for her. The exception to this was for things that someone was in constant need of, like getting a blacksmith materials to forge swords or armor, or when a merchant said they were low on a certain item and would buy all of it at an increased price.
Although there was a limit to even these, the merchant ‘quest’ for instance, when people found out about a quest that you could do seemingly without limit they flooded the merchant with the requested item and in doing so found that soon after the reward decreased until finally, even that quest was no longer doable.
After that, someone raised a question in the chat: “If we can do that, can we affect the prices in the shops if we sell them a bunch of the same thing?” An hour-plus of ‘debating’ later we decided to try it with a relatively easy to get herb found in the plains not far from the west gate of Humanity’s Edge. It wasn’t bought for much but sold for quite a bit for some reason, and with its description reading ‘As one of the basic ingredients of alchemy, this herb contains a small amount of magic power’ everyone thought it was a joke item due to the fact that no one had found either a magic system or any type of alchemy crafting in the game.
That day a large number of players could be seen in the west plains hunting for the ‘magic’ herb and running to the shops to sell it. At first it didn’t look like we had done anything but holding a faint hope we waited until the next day and when the largest shop in Humanity’s Edge opened we all broke out laughing at the sight of the herb being sold for barely half the price as the day before. There was even a large amount of it being displayed in the store.
Finally, after everything had settled down and a couple of days had passed after we began to discover that things we did in the game affected it to an extent. The tipping point was after someone failed a quest to defend the inner wall facing the rest of the city and a large hole had opened up in the wall causing part of Edge to fill with monsters as a result. Despite the player complaining repeatedly that there was no way that he could have defended it with just him and some NPCs with swords, some players were overjoyed because of the myriad of quests that followed for exterminating the monsters and gathering materials to repair the wall.
At that time myself and a few other players realized that if you failed an important quest you could potentially change the game completely. While this may not be as big of a deal in a closed beta where the developers could just reset everything, what about in the full game? What would happen when tens of thousands of people got on to play and found everything different from how it was yesterday for seemingly no reason? With this in mind, a few of us decided to post the question on their website’s forums and find out if maybe it wouldn’t be as drastically game-changing as we thought it might be. After a couple of days of not getting a reply we tried emailing the developers directly instead.
After waiting a few days we finally got an answer, albeit a very strange one, [There are no second chances]. All things considered, it was odd, before this the developers had been very open with the beta testers in general. Taking feedback and balancing things in a way that made the game’s combat feel challenging but enjoyable, fixing bugs and changing drop rates of items almost as soon as a few people posted about it on the forums to the point that it almost seemed surreal.
But after that, it changed. For the next few days, there were no more posts from the devs, and the once a day admin announcements stopped. In fact, players couldn’t even find the admins, who normally could be seen occasionally around the city, anywhere. At first, we considered the developers had just stopped development after we had pointed out a big flaw in the game’s system. But that didn’t fit due to the fact that we could still play the game.
Three days later there was a post on the forums from the devs, they apologized for not responding to our comments. The reason being that they were preparing a big patch for the game coming the next day and asked for as many people as possible to log on at the same time as a ‘stress test’ for the download. Being on a Saturday and seeing as almost all of the people who got into the beta were game addicts it wasn’t hard to guess that pretty much all five thousand players could get on when the patch hit.
That day it happened. I woke up excited to see what kind of new things this supposed ‘big patch’ had in it. After eating whatever I could find in the fridge, I looked at the clock to see it was about time for the patch to drop. I went to start up the game and just as it finished and as I hit the login button I suddenly felt myself falling asleep. I tried to fight it but failed almost instantly, as my head slowly fell on the desk all I could hear was the intro music coming from the game. The last thing I remember thinking was ‘I really hope this isn’t what I think it is.’ as everything went black.
