Guild Wars

At first glance, you'd think that with the introduction of this feature, women would suffer more than men due to their weaker physical frames among other things.

Admittedly, in the real world this was a logical conclusion, but in Boundless? It was naturally impossible for such an assumption to be true due to the presence of classes and stats.

You could literally watch a 6 foot 7 burly strongman with muscles like the trunk of a tree getting beaten to death by a 4 foot 9 loli with twintails, both of them fighting unarmed!

In Boundless, no typical excuses could work. If you were weak, it was not because of luck, your gender or your build. It was only because you chose to be weak.

So with the Great Rape, it went both ways. Men were captured by women to become nothing but stallions and sperm dispensers while women were captured by men as cum dumpsters and semen incubators.

This had been the biggest event in the previous timeline and had shaken the world order. The World Council had been helpless to stop it, because it was easy to catch a criminal when he was one out of every ten people, but how do you go about arresting nine out of every ten people?

A lot of suffering occurred before they could tamp down on this. The aftereffects had been felt for a long time to come, even through Update 6 and 7.

Now… it was here again.

Draco had not given the AI much of the details from the previous timeline, so it naturally did not know the catastrophic effects. Or maybe it did after doing some simulations, after all, it was a superbrain beyond compare.

The AI probably brought this forward seeing that players had developed so much, along with the fact that the pods were ready to be shipped.

The atrocities wouldn't start immediately, but only when a strong majority of people started buying the pods and had their genes registered would it slowly begin.

But the process was not important. What was important was what the Evil Trio would do about it.

They had long known this day would come and they were ambivalent about it. While they could help the world and probably solve this crisis, they didn't really see why they should.

… and this was exactly what Shuangtian had been talking about.

Did it require them to put in any significant effort to resolve? No.

Would it gain them great renown and respect, paving the way for conquest of sub-human society? Yes.

Would it benefit them since it would nip chaos in the bud and promote development among players? Yes.

So why the heck were they uncertain about it?!

Sigh.

The next additions to the Update was Tier 3 Realism. This was as expected and was a normal feature of every Update, as they added more and more realistic features and removed video game conveniences that you never really thought about.

For Tier 1 Realism, the main inclusions and exclusions had been the need for sheaths, quivers as well as other miscellaneous items for daily life, hunger as well as thirst, the removal of unlimited stamina out of battle, the need for sleep in-game, the introduction of excrement activities, the need for bathing and general hygiene.

Before, all players could just sheathe swords, axes, spears and daggers as well as whatever item they used in the ether, which was unrealistic.

Now, no matter what weapon, one needed to holster it in its respective realistic form in order to use it in battle. The only exception to this rule were those with unique settings or Semi-Epic and above classes.

So yes, this rule was to suppress the lower class.

Don't like it? Git gud, plebs!

As for the rest, they were self explanatory. The only other special one was unlimited stamina out of battle, which basically was the ability players possessed pre-Update 1 to run or walk endlessly out of combat. Before, one could theoretically run all the way from one corner of the Cario Continent to another as long as they had the time and avoided all fights.

Now, one used the same amount of stamina for daily life as well as combat. This created an economy around transportation like portals, carriages or on horseback, as well as the mount system.

For Tier 2 Realism, spells and skills now had backlash first and foremost. This meant that one could be harmed by their own ability if they did not exclude themselves from it. There was also the emotional satisfaction value. Now, players would need to take care of other physiological issues like love, lust, need for accompaniment and general mood.

And then there was Tier 3 Realism, and its biggest change… friendly fire!

Now, if you cast an AOE skill or spell, your allies would not be automatically excluded. Unless you specifically had the ability to remove certain people as targets, your skills or spells would not affect everyone indiscriminately.

As you could imagine, the ones feeling this the most were the members of Umbra and the Evil Trio. Almost all their powers were world ending, with the weakest being Area Zone level damage attacks.

While they were strong enough to resist getting one shot by their compatriots, it didn't feel good to be fighting together against a large group of enemies and get smashed in the head by a meteor summoned by your pal.

After that, the next thing added to Update 3 was the World Expansion, and this one was completely new. This was something that had never appeared in the previous timeline because there had been no need for it to.

This basically increased the mapped zones by almost 100%, doubling the known world immediately by absorbing parts of the unmapped zones.

This was obviously done in direct response to the conquest of Umbra which had covered the entire mapped zones and forced many powers to become on the brink of death while others fearfully waited their turn.

With the world expanding, new forces with new abilities and heritages would come into play and could change up the situation on paper. This was unfavorable to Umbra on paper, but it was also normal.

The AI was definitely showing its favoribilty towards Draco, but its loyalties lay first and foremost to the operation of the game, just like how the Evil Trio's loyalties lay to their family and increasing their power through any means necessary.

As for how Umbra would turn this around, it was yet to be seen. They certainly had the power to, but anything could happen when fixed variables were suddenly changed without warning.

Those new territories would also have ideas of conquest seeing that new space had appeared, not to mention they would not have the necessary history or fear to submit to Umbra.

Still, that made things more interesting anyway.

The next addition to Update 3 was something that naturally should have been there, the Item Limitation. This was nothing more than the game forcibly lowering the drop rate of all items at various levels, forcing players to rely less on the system for acquiring items and start crafting their own.

There was a reason why all the experts of the previous timeline had their own handcrafted weapons, like Draco with his famous Mana Sword. It was because they had suffered through levels of item and drop limitation, and it was beginning in this timeline.

Just as well since Draco was already a Semi-True God of Blacksmithing and Alchemy.

The counterbalance to having players' drop rates for items lowered was that those items were shifted out to materials, so what would have been a sword and some coins would now become iron ore and some coins.

This change sharply raised the value of all Tradeskill crafters, but that was just natural. Their status had already been high, but that was only thanks to NPCs and the idea that they would be important in the future.

Well… that future was here.

Previously, they were still in their apprenticeship and learning phase with the majority struggling in the Amateur Rank of their main Tradeskills. Now, after almost 4 years in game, they had matured enough that most had at least reached the Elite Rank, if not the Expert rank.

This meant that they were now qualified to carry the playerbase in terms of needs, not to mention the various NPCs crafters who had not disappeared into thin air.

The next addition to Update 3 was another natural feature that should have always been there, the Resource Stat Quantification. This was very simple and straightforward, basically the ability for players to see the numerical values of their various hidden resources stats like Mana, Stamina, Focus, Concentration, Willpower and more.

Before, one had to rely on their senses to tell, but now you could just have the AI quantify it for you. The first iteration of this meant would display Mana and Stamina, leaving the others for future Updates.

They were calculated using one stats and referred to the amount you used in skills and spells. It wasn't like how most of the core members or the Evil Trio who had limitless stamina would affect the stat itself.

Mana was simply your Intelligence stat after going through the filter of stat boost multiplication while Stamina was the same using Constitution.

Stat Boost Multiplication was a key game mechanic that had always been present. It multiplied the utility value of stats in various calculations and applications depending on how much the user had.

Each tier was split by 50 points, so the first threshold was 50 points in any stat, the second was 100, the third was 150, and so on.

Tier 1 doubled the stat, Tier 2 tripled it and so on. So if you had 150 points in Strength, you only had 150 points when carrying things or doing non-combat related stuff.

But when the AI was calculating, say damage from a sword strike, your 150 would be multiplied by four, making it 600 in the end. When added to your other modifiers it would result in your final damage value.

This mechanic was necessary otherwise with how stat point allocation greatly reduced with each Rank, how could players still be dealing upwards of 1 million points of damage and the like?

This was reserved for players and NPCs, monsters did not have this benefits of stat boots. After all, they had higher stats per level than the other two, so if some sort of balance was not created, monsters would have ruled the world by now.

As for the core members who had started with around 70 points per stat with their divine classes and allocated their other stats freely, lets not talk about them.

Especially those who had passive skills that boosted their stats.

Then there was the Evil Trio with 500,000 plus worth of stats that also went through boost and you could understand why despite being under suppression, one strike from a casual skill could kill Rank 7s with long ass HP bars like they were cabbage.

After the resource stats, there was the final addition of the marriage system which was a future feature which originally belonged in Update 5. This was the obviously intended highlight of the ability of Genetic Compatibility, for players to fall in love, marry and then copulate to give birth to children.

The AI had scoured the net and understood online dating and romance through games as most had this, so this was what it thought would happen. The Great Rape was something that it did not really believe would happen, and had given it a very low score.

However, this proved that the AI had a long way to go in understanding humans as if expectations were directly blown out of the sky. Trying to calculate the actions of humankind using logic would always backfire ten times out of ten.

The marriage system was pretty straightforward and it was a player only function. It granted something similar to the Dragobond Draco had with Hikari, which allowed partners to share experience, double their experience gain when together, teleport to each other, and increase their chances of success conception after procreation.