The conversations in the group became more generic as the multiple battles dragged on. Of course most of the players here consisted of couples, since these were the best players, and in order to play the game most effectively you needed to do it as a pair, so most of the conversations were also between couples.
“Hey, how do you select who you vote for anyway?”
“You didn’t know that? Just tap on the character on the screen you want to vote for, darling. Did you pay attention to what that strange NPC maid said?”
“Sorry, I rarely pay attention to cut scenes in RPGs.”
“But it’s VR, so you are in it? Isn’t it interactive?”
“VR or not, it’s all the same exposition. I do not play games in order to talk to people. The fact that I am forced to talk to NPCs while interacting with them, rather than just pressing a button like in flat screen games, is actually a step backwards in efficiency.”
“Darling, I am rather lazy when it comes to reading text too… Honestly, isn’t it strange that even with all the government funding they get, they still make us read some many messages rather than using more cut scenes? I mean… What happens when we choose a champion anyway?”
“Well, you are one to talk, when you can’t be bothered to read the text in an rpg, which is the most important thing, but I guess that’s why that stupidly named Cupid System thing thought we complemented each other… As to what it said, well the champion chosen by us will fight against the champion chosen by those rich snobs over there… whichever faction’s champion wins will decide which faction will have exclusive, uncontested access to the new, unreleased Apis Dungeon.”
Of course, most of the players here were hardcore gamers who could have long bailed out with a hefty profit or on the other hand got into too much debt buying equipment and items for the game, and so were desperate to make that money back somehow.
Similar conversations were also going on in the benches opposite to ours belonging to the Elite faction, even if they were rich, or precisely because of it, that meant that they were even more eccentric than us, since they played the game even if they didn’t necessarily need to play it. One thing that I found out after coming here, is that many rich people were only “rich” because they were in a lot of debt, so it is not that the financial gains to be made in the game were worthless to them either.
Obviously, I wouldn’t have been able to get the player factions invested in some AI non-player-character sideshow without dangling some kind of rewards in front of them. Of course, the more rewards I doled out, the less value further rewards would have, that is the iron clad rule of marginal utility; power creep means that previous rewards can become meaningless too but it’s not like the players were blind to that – if I let all the rewards become meaningless or too unreachable then they would stop playing. It’s like a dance where we are mutually manipulating each other.
“I might be First Consul and leader of our faction but you have a right to exercise your own thinking, and vote as you see fit. Don’t let the reward for uncontested exclusive access to the Apis Dungeon affect you. Just watch the battle.”
Most other dungeons kept on changing hands depending on which faction was able to get control of them, and by controlling access to the drops to a dungeon, it was theoretically possible to exert an extent of control over the price at which the drops sold. However since the dungeons often changed hands forcefully, this meant that the incentive was to try to get as many drops in the shortest time possible from the dungeon before the dungeon was taken back by another faction. This increased the supply of the drops from that dungeon and therefore rapidly reduced the prices that the drops could fetch on the market. While also reducing the incentive for another faction to come and take it, since it would be less profitable and therefore harder to justify the costs of taking over that dungeon. In other words, the faction which snagged the Apis dungeon could net as much as a million pounds over a few years by simply limiting the supply for its unique drops which were necessary to do other quests and dungeons, and so squeezing out as much gold coins as possible from players who needed to those quests or get access to those dungeons.
Of course, the fact that there were more members in our faction (outside of the Senate) meant that the Elite faction stood to gain more from it, but on the other hand since the Elite faction could just buy the best equipment etc… and even whole dungeons from other factions. It meant that we needed it more than they did. Basically, I would have to come up with something to rebalance the power between the two factions without breaking the game or stopping people from using real world money to affect the virtual world, since the whole point was to make the integration between the virtual world and the real one as seamless as possible until I could somehow escape from here. Honestly, both factions spent more money on the game than they made from it. The house always wins. However neither I nor Chamberlain were interested in their money but rather their attention which meant that neither faction could conclusively win. I don’t care if I have to trap all of them here for me to get back out and get back my ordinary risk-free life which was stolen from me. I would rather betray the world than be betrayed by it.
At the current rate, especially after the unplanned introduction of Nanashi’s mech, the only thing stopping the Elite faction taking over, was my cheatskills. Eilis caught me staring at her and smiled at me like she knew she was going to win.
“Don’t let it get to you,” said Peter. “It’s all psychological. Man, I wish I could be fighting off those enemies along with that crazy looking berserker white haired chick rather than sitting here in a room. Actually, I know who I am going to cast my vote towards.”
I ignored Peter’s comment and looked back at the battlefield.
