The village centre was very busy. New players gushing about the game visuals. Early players rushing to hand over the tasks and rushing out again. If they were in party, each would handle different things, thus saving time. One would handover task. One would search for new task or a quest. One more would purchase potions and as such. Maybe even sell some while waiting for the party members to join back. So there were lots of makeshift stalls selling limited amount of items.
Would the guilds give up a way of advertising? They too had stalls, bigger and better ones. They had more items and equipments too. Problem was they were costly but come on, who purchased from these if not desperate. Few middlemen had cropped up, bargaining in the small stalls and later selling to the guilds.
If it was any other player, he would have purchased some equipments like good gloves, armour, boots or even a better staff. Money is meant to be spent, right?
Not Artha! No sir! He would be a Scrooge, a penny pincher. He had no wish to even window shop.
He went into his room. Put in lots of potions. Also few more staff. The itsy bitsy items dropped were still in trader bag. Should he multiply them? After keeping some for personal use, he decided to take remaining ones. Back to village centre. Create a makeshift stall. The banner said in red captions 'Selling potions- Limited amount only!'
Before he finished putting exclamation mark, he had five customers waiting for him to turn around. A feeble minded would get a heart attack.
Unfortunately, all of them were middlemen of guilds and knew bottom line of each other. So each tried to reduce the amount to be paid rather than increase the price. Would Artha agree? Hahaha.
Soon another sentence was visible in the banner -' Only 5 potions per person'. The basic potions sold were of least efficacy, thus having long cooldown/CD. As proficiency of potioneer increased, it would change too, thus reducing CD. At that time, these potions would be equivalent to trash. Not worth purchasing. He had nearly 2500 of them. He had to clear them off. But there would not be 'massive sales', at least not now. He collected the names/IGN of middlemen though. He would do business with them later. These people left after purchasing the potions. Buying 5 together in this stall meant they could pay 1 bronze coin less than when they purchased in the NPC shop.
Before they could call others in their guilds though, few neighbouring stall owners purchased and Artha closed the stall decisively. Currently he had monopoly over these potions, he could make the rules.
He walked to the next set of map. Yes, it was a set of map labelled giant coop. It had a smallish map, twice bigger than level 0 map with level 0 monsters little chicks, a small map with level 1 hens and a bit large map containing level 1 and 2 roosters. Chicks could only cluck and use beaks to injure players. The hens were 2-4 times bigger and could also use claws to tear. The damage and frequency was amped with roosters. Majority of the regular players would die atleast once in coop, according to the hearsay in the village. As the difficulty increased, monsters dropped more XP and loot including potions, equipments and skill books, thus enabling players to play better. There were more tasks in the coop. Whether it was to collect chick feathers, hen meat, eggs, rooster crowns or to collect danolli flower, jade and agate mushroom, cut starpine woods or phynnis branches...there were lots of kill tasks and collect tasks too. If these maps were not large enough, the stampade would have begun within an hour of game launch. Though called a set of maps, these were fairly far from each other. Even the game wanted to stagger player movements. Normally players would be like get task, go to map 1, finish it, go back to village, handover the task, replenish supplies with the task rewards, get new task, walk to map 2 ( wasting even more time as you have to pass map 1 to reach map 2), take time to finish( hunting would be more difficult),go back to village to handover and replenish. Only the leveling maniacs or experts would search for better pastures and not care about the tasks.
Let's 'observe' and see what all tasks can be done in this map. As a noob who had use the 'observe' skill just once in level 0 map, this map looked like a museum with loads of stuff kept here and there. So many collectable things! And these chicks. They are not cute. No need to feel bad. Poor moles. Their peck skill would take away 1-2 HP. But these little monsters would take upto 5HP in each attack and could attack twice or thrice at a time. He even saw few players dying. There were lots of players who were sitting near map border, munching food and drinking water.
If the first map was a freebie thrown by the game developers, this map would show what the game was made up of. The exertion was real. Concentration was a necessity. Stamina would fall as if pulled down by gravity. Fatigue would gather and pull you down. You could not win by playing mechanically. The breaks in between might bother few but many would use the time outside to learn about monster attack patterns, agro range and think of ways to kill them. Artha even saw few players live streaming. Their mouth wouldn't stop even when they rested.