"Phew... That put me through the wringer..." Soren commented casually, as he was currently stretching his body, a bit after disconnecting right outside the Hunter's Guild and splitting away from the others for the day. After spending so much time narrating and hunting, he was feeling mentally spent and decided to turn in early for the day in his new dwelling and take a quick power nap, until it was around 8 PM.

  "Ah! I forgot to... Right... It's closed..." Soren rose suddenly from his bed, as he remembered that he had closed down his coffee house, before collapsing with a deflated expression. As he stared at the ceiling thoughtlessly, his phone suddenly vibrated a couple of times, prompting him to check the cause of the vibrations. Once he opened his phone, he saw a message from Logan. 'You alive man? Have you been silenced? o_O'

  Seeing the message, he decided to answer him back. 'I'm still alive, you filthy sailor. Don't write me off as dead yet. At least find my hanging corpse before making sure I'm dead.'

  'That's rich coming from the depresso enjoyer. Seriously, did you take another one man? >:-|' Logan typed back after a minute, while Soren was slowly preparing a cup of coffee for himself.

  'Not yet, I'm preparing an depresso injection for myself. Anyways, how are the others doing? Haven't heard much from them for the past few days.' Soren typed back with a slight exhale and waited for his response, while putting his coffee to boil.

  'Hmm... Haven't heard much from them either... They seem to be pretty absorbed in the game... You think they're ok? (0_0)'

  'Roland's probably working overtime or something... As for Pan though... Maybe she's busy with something?' After typing that, Soren couldn't help but worry about the radio silence from his friends, but could only hope for the best.

  'Sure hope so man... Speaking of which, how're doing in the game? Come on, tell me the deets. What's you doing in the game?' Seeing this message, Soren engaged in a casual conversation with Logan for the game, as the two of them spoke about their game, barring any sensitive information about his job, as well as listening to his tirades about the Black Rank's seemingly endless grind. Slowly time passed and by the time he finished his espresso, the two of them had finished their conversation for the night.

  "So the grind towards level 10 proficiencies is as bad for me as for everyone else... Seriously... How did they manage to power grind their magic proficiencies in a week to level 10? Am I missing something or are they just grinding 24/7?" Soren commented, as he remember how Logan was currently struggling hard to increase both of his combat proficiencies past level 7. Hearing about it, he decided to do some digging through in the matter and chose to go through any sort of forum about the game's grind.

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  The results of his search were kind of a mixed bag, as some claimed that it was fun to learn how to swing their weapons properly, while others were cursing the developers for making the grind atrociously slow, to the point some claim that they are doing backward progress. Ignoring everyone's personal opinions on the matter, he didn't find anything new though, as all of the information is stuff he's mostly found out by himself. He considering doing a deeper dive in the dark web for any hidden forums that might talk about hidden mechanics or leaked information, but decided against it, as he didn't want to end up to get any unnecessary attention from any of the parties down there, or AionTech.

  With that in mind, he decided to turn his attention towards people's actions towards the game's denizens, as he had seen some forum posts about people performing all kinds of questionable acts towards players and NPCs alike. After spending around an hour going through forum posts and news reports about that said topic, he couldn't help but feel both worried and disgusted. There have been hundreds of confirmed posts and reports about assaults, murders and rape incidents between players and NPCs alike, especially towards the latter. Although they have been punished with timeouts ranging from a couple hours, up to a couple weeks, the fact that those incidents keep happening, despite the punishments, are already making Soren break a cold sweat and worry even more about his friends.

  "I need to take my mind off this crap, otherwise paranoia will start acting up..." Soren commented, as he decided to close all of those posts and reports and instead, focusing on obtaining some information about the dungeons, as he was sure by now that the top players have more than enough stats to enter the dungeons. Unfortunately, his expectations were thoroughly crushed, as all the top players still haven't reach the necessary forty overall stat points, as the player with the highest stat total is LMN (Loving Moving Novice), with 37 stat point, followed by Boras (Boras III) and DO4 (DaylightOrc4) with 36 stat points.

  Seeing those numbers, he wondered about the difficulty of reaching 40 total stat points and decided to do a bit of research on stat collection, before doing some quick napkin math for minimum amount of proficiency levels he'd need for those 40 points. Obtaining the mastery skills gave no points, every level up gave 1 stat point, although it's hard to tell if those are random or not. At level 5, he'd gain 3 points and once he'd reach level 10 on a mastery, he'd obtain a skill, as well as 5 stat points. With the starting 6 points, he'd need 34 more and assuming the stats point amount is the same through each increment of 10 levels, he'd need 23 levels on a single mastery, to reach the required 40 points.

  Realistically, no one's going to reach that, unless they've been grinding for a few months, so it's a lot easier if he split the levels between all of his starting three proficiencies. Still, he would need, two proficiencies at level 10 and one at level 5, but could also substitute the second level 10 and level 5 proficiency with a level 8 and 9 proficiency respectively. Granted, since he had an additional proficiency, he had some additional leeway about it and could spread his levels a bit further.

  Unfortunately, a new problem had appeared a few days ago, which complicated things even further. Although there reports are somewhat mixed, there have been many reports of players, losing their production skills at random points and the top players have also fallen victim to this "bug".

  A lot of players have made reports AionTech about this supposed bug, but AionTech's response was rather peculiar, at they claimed there was no such bug in the game. Unfortunately the players weren't satisfied with their response and demanded an answer, but AionTech didn't give any additional statements about it. Now there's a mix of reports and blogs saying it's either a bug or a feature.

  Either way though, the players are clearly not happy about it and despite their protests, AionTech still hasn't made anything about this problem. Now with players being constantly paranoid about losing their skills, Soren was sure that this issue would eventually reach a boiling point. Knowing this, he made sure to make a mental note about it and ask tomorrow about this particular topic, lest he wanted to lose another proficiency skill all of a sudden.