Scattered across a dim office space, a group of employees sipped cold beverages as their faces were illuminated by flickering artificial light, originating from three rge, wall-mounted screens. Aside from the usual low hum of electronics, the room was quiet, with only some occasional sounds of clicking, typing, and scribblings of pen on paper.
Beside a desk near the centre of the room, a ginger-haired employee slouched deep into his chair, his legs kicked up on another chair as he banced a notepad on his p and rested a pen against his lip. Contrary to his rexed posture, his eyes locked onto the centre screen with ser focus, never straying away for a moment. Moving his arm, he shifted slightly, dipping a hand into a crinkling bag of nuts resting beside him. After a quick toss and crunch, the room reverted to silence.
Bam!
Suddenly, the entrance door smmed open and in scrambled an overweight man wearing an undersized suit, moving with hurried steps. “Everyone! I just got a call from Jessica and–”
...The man stopped at a handrail and paused to look around the room. “What the hell are you guys doing? I told you to call me if there’s an emergency, and now that there is one, you’re all scking off watching videos and drinking Pepsi?! Clyde, what’s going on here?”
“...” Giving a smile which wasn’t really a smile, the ginger-haired staffer put his items to the side and reached into his pocket before turning to respond.
Click.
“Team Leader Derrick... is it not okay to have drinks? We thought it would be fine since you’ve been out drinking coffee all day.”
“?!” Derrick’s eyes went wide, taken off-guard by Clyde’s acerbic response.
“Anyways, what emergency are you referring to? If you’re talking about the results of the archer css patch, nothing’s happened so far that I didn’t already outline in my pre-patch report. Since you gave the order to proceed with implementation after I sent you that report, I presume you read through it all first?”
“Wh-?” Derrick’s face flushed. “N-no, it’s not about the archer patch, it’s about a pyer who–”
“An archer pyer, right?”
“Yes; Jessica says we’ve received over a thousand compints regarding a livestreamer suspected of using cheats... Did you already know about this?”
“Of course. I explicitly detailed him in my report, after all.” Clyde rustled the bag next to him and brought out a handful of almonds. “I presume you remember the segment about the pyer named ‘Gun’?”
“Gun? ...No, I’m afraid I don’t. Refresh my memory.”
...Crunch.
In pce of responding, Clyde flicked almonds into his mouth and stared bnkly at Derrick, offering nothing but the sound of loud, deliberate munching as a loaded silence ensued.
“...” Derrick’s face twitched, but he waited for Clyde’s response nonetheless.
Swallowing the almonds, Clyde still did not answer and instead reached for a pstic cup on the desk to his side, bringing it up to his face.
Sluuuuuurp.
Veins appeared on Derrick’s forehead as Clyde sipped nonchantly from his drink, effectively ignoring him. Looking to the other employees, Derrick found them avoiding eye contact, not willing to inform him either.
Bang.
Clyde smmed his cup down on the table. “Gun... is an archer pyer who managed to fully clear the archery css test. That is, he managed to meet the requirements for the final mastery bracket by clearing all of the assessment hurdles on his first attempt, eclipsing the results of other test-takers. Normally, this would have resulted in him obtaining the final-bracket css title, ‘Master Archer’, with a 100% final archery damage bonus.”
Derrick’s eyebrows creased. “Normally?”
“In actuality, he received a unique css allocation named ‘Deadshot’, one of only three unique csses given out so far in the game service, granting an additional 50% archery damage on weak-point and lethal damage variations.” Anticipating Derrick’s follow-up, he continued, “I scoured back through Maestro’s decision logs to find out how he got the css. According to the AI, he not only hit every target in the practice range, but also hit the bullseye each time – even for the final target, which stood a hundred metres out from his location.”
“Hm, sketchy...” Derrick scratched his chin in thought. “Wait, is this css what everybody was compining about? As long as the bonus damage doesn’t climb higher than that, it should be fine, right?”
*Cough* An employee near the back of the room made an involuntary noise and held his chest.
Clyde’s face darkened. “Derrick, I’m not sure if it slipped your memory, but we recently released a bance patch boosting archer damage.”
“...Oh.” Derrick paled.
“After the patch, Gun’s 100% and 50% damage boosts were increased to 200% and 100%. Furthermore, the test Gun completed was the original, high-difficulty one, so, as an existing archer, his bonuses were increased a further forty percent to 280% and 140% – an absurdly high amount.”
“...Wh-why didn’t you tell me about him?”
“It was in my report.” Clyde returned a steely gaze. “You might remember, I texted you about my recommendations earlier today and your exact words were: ‘Stick to what we discussed earlier, make no other changes, release it with the compensation patch when you’re done.’”
Derrick’s face turned from pale to tomato-red. “I... must have overlooked it at the time. Regardless, what is he doing to receive so many compints so fast? Have you looked into it?”
“What do you think we’re doing?” Clyde pointed to the triple screens at the end of the room. “Before you came in and accosted us for it, we were watching his livestream to gather information.”
“Oh.”
Ignoring Clyde’s overt irritation, Derrick directed his attention toward the video footage being shown at the other end of the room, where three rge dispys shone brightly, each dispying different things. While one held static data, another showed gamepy while the st presented a fast-scrolling chat dispy.
Focusing on the gamepy, Derrick watched the archer on the screen. He took down orcs with incredible speed and accuracy, killing each with a single arrow shot.
“Bloody hell, that’s a lot more going on than just high damage. How the f*ck is he doing that?”
“That’s the golden question. As you can see, he’s performing at a level far above the realm of an average pyer, to the point where even his own viewers suspect him of using cheats. He doesn’t seem to have any stream moderators either, so the chat is a bit... spicy.”
Derrick looked over at the chat section.
—Is he hacking client-side or server-side? Either way he’s a twat
—How does it feel to have zero self-respect?
—Reported
—My guy, at least try to hide the cheats lolol
—Bruh, his hacks have hacks
—Someone check his pod for military-grade hardware lol
—Government is putting bro on a watchlist
—Chat, do we report, or do we build him a temple?
—He better have a firearms license at least
“...” Derrick facepalmed. Despite the meme comments, it seemed there was almost unanimous consensus that the archer was hacking.
—F*ck, I think I’d rather fight god himself
—Bro is the main character
—SOMEONE UNPLUG HIM FROM THE MATRIX!!
—How is he even doing this? I thought the capsules couldn’t be hacked?
—Maybe he’s responsible for that cyber-attack from yesterday?
—Hehe, massacre go brrrrr
—I will adopt a small child if he is not hacking
—Somewhere, a dev is nervously taking notes on how to nerf this lol
—Pls upload the hack tutorial after! xoxo
Clyde drank some more of his Pepsi while watching sweat beads gather on Derrick’s forehead. “Anyways, it’s not like we’re completely clueless. We have some idea of how he’s pying like that.”
“You do? Then it’s not just hacks?”
“Not sure, but a lot of it isn’t at least. Here, catch.”
Clyde threw a notepad up to Derrick, which Derrick caught with a slight fumble.
“These are the five main things we’ve identified. Take a look through.”
Derrick happily obliged.
Gun – Why is he OP? – A Multivariate Analysis
Reason 1: Pyer obtained the unique ‘Deadshot’ css, providing superior damage output and additional damage when attacking vitals. Additionally, the archer css patch boosted these bonuses by 140%.
Reason 2: Pyer secured multiple powerful titles boosting attributes and damage output. Notably, one title grants a 60% attribute bonus, double its standard value due to a first-pyer completion bonus. The strength attribute bonus also enabled the pyer to use a more powerful bow.
Reason 3: Current bow physics allow multiple arrows to be shot simultaneously with no apparent power dampening, causing the bow to be deadly at close range – need to consult with the development team or handball to the QA team to see if this is intentional. Likely reted to the ‘Multishot’ subcss.
Reason 4: Arrows can seemingly be withdrawn using a storage ring, allowing for fast arrow acquisition which bypasses inventory transfer cooldown of 2s and quiver capacity limits of approximately 20-30 arrows.
Reason 5: There is a passive skill called [Successive Speed] under the ‘Rapid Fire’ subcss which gives an indeterminate number of stackable increases to arrow velocity for accurate shots. While damage, momentum and penetration are not affected by the skill, arrows travelling at supersonic speeds cannot be reasonably dodged by an ordinary pyer or mob, and the skill is also easily exploitable.“What?!” Derrick bellowed, “How the hell did he get a 60% attribute bonus? That’s ludicrous!”
“He was the first pyer in the game to solo kill a BOSS monster 30 levels higher than him. We’re also not sure how he did it, but we saw him kill a level 52 field BOSS a few minutes ago without any external help, so we think it’s most likely legitimate.”
“Level 52?!” Derrick’s voice cracked. “How can you talk so calmly about that?! It should take an entire party of level 50 pyers to beat a BOSS like that – not just some random greenhorn on the second day after release!”
“...” Clyde shrugged.
“Hah... Alright, then do you at least have proof that he’s cheating?”
“Marcus?” Clyde prompted a thin bespectacled man seated across the desk aisle.
Nudging his gsses up, the man spoke, “Actually, we were able to do an investigation by cross-referencing his data with our instaltion providers. Records show a single registered capsule linked to his account, which was installed less than three days ago. Since he’s been using the capsule for much of that time, it’s very unlikely he found time to modify it. Additionally, he’s only using a silver capsule, which has a very limited digital integration and has not been broken into since its release several years ago. Unless he is more capable of reverse-engineering technologies than the best R&D specialists and engineers from foreign nations, the odds are extremely unlikely that he would be able to do anything to give himself an advantage on the client side.”
“Client side? Then what about the... the other side, whatever it’s called?”
“The server side? We don’t know. The security status of the game server is above our security clearance, so we would need to consult the higher-ups to obtain that information.”
“Ugh, well then that was useless.” Derrick scoffed. “Whatever. Striking bullseyes a hundred metres away isn’t just a thing that people can do, so it’s obvious to anyone with a brain that he’s hacking. Keep looking and let me know when you find the proof.”
“Derrick.” Clyde smiled fakely. “I’ll be frank, nobody has ever hacked a Virtek game before. There’s no precedent for it; we don’t even know what to look for. You might as well ask us to prove bigfoot exists, or that time travel is now possible.
“Well then what are your solutions?” Derrick yelled with vexation. “Something needs to be done about this! We can’t just leave things as they are.”
“Solutions...?” Clyde looked down to check his watch. “Hmm... well, my 12-hour shift just ended; I believe my solution is a good, long bout of sleep.”
“?!!” Derrick’s expression changed as Clyde stood up and collected his belongings.
“Naturally, the final decision for our course of action rests with you – our senior. At the very least, all that caffeine from drinking coffee the whole day should keep you awake long enough to figure it out.” Clyde smiled. “Well then, I’ll be leaving now. Good night, team leader!”
Clyde strolled past Derrick, loudly sipping his drink as he departed for the company parking lot.
