Chapter 8 - Keeping up Appearances (1/2)
Upon exiting the changing room, Gray walked over to the huge door that led to the game world. Reaching out he pushed with his hand.
"It's as heavy as it looks…" Gray said to himself.
Gathering his strength, he gave it a much harder push, but still nothing happened.
"What gives?"
Gray looked up and saw the clock above the door, it still had a little over an hour left on the timer.
"Oh yeah, it's not time yet, whoops…" said Gray sheepishly while hoping nobody else was around to notice.
Gray didn't feel quite like logging out yet so he decided instead to actually read the electronic copy of the user's manual that he received. As a veteran gamer he felt like he was committing a taboo by reading it, but he told himself it was just out of boredom.
The manual itself was very concise with the instructions and merely explained that one should treat this game as if they were living in the real world. NPCs remember you and your actions, you may be a player but your stats are the same as NPCs. Raising stats is done through gene therapy and training. Players also must return to their incubation chambers in game to log out.
"This game has another weird rule… I understand not being able to log out immediately, but I can only log out from my incubation chamber?" Gray imagined this was done to prevent people from abusing the game by suddenly logging out in the middle of combat to prevent a loss as other games used forms of this as well. Being anchored to the incubation chamber seemed annoying but Gray was hoping maybe enough players would complain about it and this would be patched out.
As for stats, Gene therapy lets you adjust your stats after you return to your incubation chamber. Depending upon the amount of adjustments, the waiting period would vary, but even the highest level only had a waiting period of half a day. This was fairly normal as the wait was there for balance Gray imagined. While waiting, you were unable to move your character from the incubation chamber. You would not be able to log in to your character during this time, but you could still return to the game lobby and wait if you didn't feel like completely logging out.
Training your stats was slow and arduous, but it was free. The other advantage of training over Gene therapy was that taking difficult missions would often add training naturally. Much like in real life, the results of training couldn't be calculated prior to training, only show you the result of such training. The weakness of training was that if you didn't maintain it, the manual said your stats would slowly degrade.
One of the more interesting features Gray read was that your characters physical appearance would change with training. For example, if you slacked off on physical training your character would get fat and if you trained to much your character would become so toned that they'd look almost sickly thin.
"That really is a lot like real life… so basically I can't be a couch potato like I am in real life if I want to keep this six pack." Gray said as he admired his own six pack which he hadn't seen in real life since his early college days.
As Gray continued to read, more players started to log in to the game as the timer got closer to the end. Most players had already created their characters already, but he still enjoyed watching how some people REALLY adjusted their appearance. It seemed tedious that only a few people could use the changing rooms at once, but this was one of many lobbies and only the Diamond-Tier players used this one.