Project Overworld

- "Congratulations! You all were received into the NASA!" Horace Johnson exclaimed.

- "Well, that certainly is a relief..." Keith commented. "Thank you again for trusting in us, Horace."

- "No big deal. In any case, it should be time for you to prove what you're truly capable of... You'll receive the official paperwork in a week's time. See you around, Keith."

- "Yeah, see you soon Horace." The young man replied as he hung up the call.

'Well, those are some good news!' He started celebrating in his mind. For the four of them to be recruited into the NASA was a pretty impressive result and he could not wait to start his new job related to space engineering. 'I should be telling the others about it. It should be way better than leaving them waiting for the official mails to turn in.' Keith decided before putting on his simulated reality device.

_______________

After checking on the situation of other Spacol members, Keith disconnected from the game and resumed his human resource management workload. It has been a week since he last announced that his company would be recruiting new members, and he has received even more applications than last time.

Keith was initially surprised by that fact since he thought Spacol had decreased in popularity due to him not talking a lot on the forums anymore. However, it seemed like people were still really hyped up about the whole space stuff and the recent images of the Spacol Moon Base did get a lot of attention.

'Well, looks like the program I did code last time around will be useful once again.' Keith meditated. For the first few days Keith had been gathering all the application inside one doc.u.ment and started filtering those who typed random things or in a language he did not know about.

It was kind of cold-hearted from him since not all Project Overworld players talked english but he could not afford wasting time translating everything one by one. In any case, the same warnings as last time have been posted on Keith's forum post and in an even larger scale. Thus, if they could still not follow basic instructions, Keith would not want to be working with them anyways.

It was even possible for them to use a translating tool to fill up all the required fields of the application form, so he assumed it was straight up laziness at the point. Fortunately, the proportion of lazy and troll players was drastically lower than the first time he tried recruiting players into Spacol, and his initial job at filtering those bad forms out of the stack was rendered easier.

Since he had yet another week to finish this job up, Keith decided not to rush it. In any case, he would not be able to set up a recruitement event anytime soon since he wanted to familiarize with his new 'in real life' job beforehand. Thus, he planned to prolong the chosing of interesting profiles across several weeks and have the best engineers participate in a competition.

'Alright, we have a lot more to do, let's focus up!' Keith motivated himself.

_______________

For a few months after long-range communication has been developed by some creative engineers partenered with the municipal team of Yggrasil, the development of Project Overworld's playerbase went through a lot.

First off, the computers were becoming more powerful and helped the world keeping interest in this simulation. The premisses of games were starting to be developed on these large electronical devices and soon Asgard got upgraded to a whole another level. It was now common to come across large screens displaying the latest news and the best deals this city had to offer.

Casinos also surged in popularity after lots of new and interesting games have been developed there, without mentionning the huge breakthrough in cinematography allowing producers to film thrity to forty minute scenes to show to the public. It still was nowhere near the large budget films which were being developed in the 'real world' but it was getting somewhere.

In any case, all those changes started reaching the ears of people not initially related to this game. Medias loved sharing the most recent dicoveries inside the popular simulation and even more players started gaining interest in it.

In fact, it was to the point Advanced Simulations had to install new infrastructures to hold off queues of hundreds of thousand players. The fact that computers were being serialized at a huge pace within their game also played a large part into this structural problem, and Project Overworld developers were doing their best to maintain everything in check.

After retrograding the visuals of computers and basically every complex electronical devices, they hoped players would stop gaining interest towards this particular domain. However, they suffered intense backlash and basically had to revert some of those changes.

- "This is really getting out of hand." Amber realized. Ever since she became mayor of Midgard, she has been surfing on cloud nine trying to think of the next technological improvement she could be pushing players towards. However, she recently started gaining interest in the large amount of updates that has been done to this game and even affected some of her subordinates on investigating the issue.

Apparently, the developer team started panicking and some of them even voiced their concerns on social medias. Since they were not very well known, these issues had been disregarded up until now but Amber gathered every bit of information to discover that the actions of the players also had consequences on the real life.

The servers were being forced to run round the clock with some maintenance every few hours a week. A lot more processing was being left to the players' own devices to tally, meaning that some players were having difficulting actually running the game when they had not problems a few years ago.

- "How should we prevent that?" She meditated. Amber was really concerned about this issue because their future in this game could run short if the playerbase continued developing more and more devices. 'Advanced Simulations', being the company that it is, would certainly be trying to hoard as much money as they could before leaving the ship to sink.

That was why, Amber could not count on them buying more servers and lose money from it. The best alternative she could think of would be to restart the servers from scratch and let the players experience the beginning of this game yet again. 'Project : Vanilla' proved it, there would be a large portion of the playerbase interested in such a turn of events, but the others would certainly leave this game for good.

To her, it would feel like losing her home and she would certainly not return to Project Overworld in a long while. Not only that, all the technological breakthroughs they could accomplish within this game would essentially be restricted by the servers' capacity and she would be losing most of her interest along with this fact.

In any case, now that the machine was up and running, Amber would not be sabotaging her own work and instead decided to let the future decide of the fat of Project Overworld. The only thing she could be doing for the time being was to lower the amount of projects she would be following up close. As the mayor of the most populated continent in this game, if she was to become laxer people would eventually slow down their own work, voluntarily or not.

- "Let's give some breathing room to the developers of this simulation for the time being." Amber concluded. "Maybe they'd really be able to find a solution to the problem, in the end..."

_______________

- "How is the construction going?" Keith inquired.

- "Well, the SMB should be fully assembled in two weeks of time." Leyla replied. "Additionally, we've stocked enough materials to build another few hundred yards of the pipeline."

- "Good. We'll soon be having new members to help us with the routing of materials from the Earth so we should have an easier time with this situation." Keith explained.

- "Don't overwork yourself, though. We have a much more important job awaiting for us next week."

- "No beggies. My program is doing most of the work anyways, and I'm only spending around two hours a day to the reviewing of the new candidates' profile."

'Now that I think about this, since this is a simulation, shouldn't I convince other NASA employees to join us and test some ideas there directly?' Keith meditated. 'Well, I should start by familiarizing myself with the working atmosphere before proposing such a silly idea.' He realized before going back to working on their two hundred square yard moon base.