It was a game they say was born from the mind of a single genius.

His name was Aureo Uber, and it was in a certain major nation that he made his sudden debut on the world stage as a prodigious scientist.

Strange was that nobody knew who he was or where he came from, and he’d been a complete anonym with no particularly notable results to his name until then.

What brought about his abrupt emergence and catapulted him to fame was this: Total success in the until-then stagnant field of intracerebral signal analysis, upon which his new technology almost magically took the concept of a full-dive VR set—hitherto deemed a pipe dream—and made it an overnight reality.

One would expect such technology to find application in countless fields, but he demonstrated no interest in any, save for one.
After unleashing a round of groundbreaking medical technology into the world, he quickly sold off his rights to the rest of it, preserving only the minimum needed for his own goals.

With his vast fortune in tow, he traveled to Japan, and knocked on the door of a certain corporation with a proud history of video game console sales and a tendency to dabble in the cutting-edge.
With that corporation’s assistance, he funneled his entire fortune into founding a game development company, and immersed himself in the creation of a whole new type of game… the full-dive VRMMO.

—After that, years went by.

On the wings of the technology he bequeathed, the fields of AR and VR tech made massive strides. The world continued to transform at a dizzying pace… and his name was all but forgotten in the passage of time.

It was upon the launch of a new game console that his name surfaced once more.

In the time he’d been absent, other firms had embarked on their own full-dive VR gaming R&D, but questions of funding and technology meant release timelines dragged on and on. Half in resignation, gamers all across the world continued to wait for that dream of dream games to arrive.

They would wait no longer. Out of nowhere, the introduction of a new console, upon which rode the name of the man who created the very foundations of full-dive technology, inflamed the expectations of every gamer… and once said console was released and in their hands, they found their expectations not just fully met, but indeed, far, far surpassed.

With its specs, it practically never lagged for want of processing power. As long as you had a stable connection, it ran like a treat.
Otherworlds sprawled with vast and endlessly explorable playfields. Elaborate, breathtaking landscapes unfolded before your eyes in every direction.
Endless droves sought to purchase one as a set with the launch title and world’s first full-dive VRMMOPRG, Worldgate Online, but for some reason, its developer Aureo had heavily restricted how many units could be shipped out, to the point retailers had been out of stock for years.

Meanwhile, when it came to the game itself, one could take the official base model and customize it as much as they liked, provided size, physique and volume were all within limit. The sheer freedom of the character creator became a talking point in its own right, boosting its popularity ever higher.

And yet, almost every layperson came away unsatisfied with the results they achieved, and save for a vast minority, were forced to either purchase officially provided materials (which, to be clear, boasted a shocking degree of freedom all on their own), or else customization data created and sold by firms seeking a profit.

—Fast-forward seven years.

All that kerfuffle was now but an episode in history. The console continued to proliferate. Following the release of development tools and core libraries, companies across the board had unleashed a variety of full-dive VRMMORPGs into the world, fresh new curiosities saturating their audiences.

Within the hubbub, a slow calm had begun to creep over the grandfather VRMMORPG, Worldgate Online… yet in the last few months, it made a startling revival.

Through several major version updates, the initial level cap of 80 had been steadily raised higher and higher. With this year’s inaugural patch, it had risen to 110.

In tandem came the bombshell addition of the ‘Reincarnation System’. One could now preserve all their obtained skills while dropping back down to level 1 as an advanced version of their race with high growth modifiers, and a new tertiary reincarnation job available to job-change to. It all sounded like standard fare for an aging MMORPG… but the true storm would only kick up three months down the line, after the in-game unprecedented and vastly inflated EXP requirements had finally been surmounted, and the first ever reincarnation job came to light.

The Unique Job.

The three races—Human, Celestial, Demon—each had a list of occupations from which you picked one to start the game with, and within each of those occupations was now a job that could belong to a maximum of one person in the entire game. True to its name, the Unique Job was one you could truly call your own.
After the first player to achieve a reincarnation job sounded the bell on its existence, gamers alike plunged into a frenzied leveling race, all drawn to the sweet, sweet idea of being ‘special’.

Popular farming spots became profanity-filled fields of carnage, while party recruitment became a game of efficiency first, everything else last.
With a massive boom in players seeking to topple others, in-game conduct dipped into profoundly lawless territory for a time.

…How ironic, then, that most of those who achieved glory were ones who looked on at such shameful conduct from the sidelines while continuing to calmly, patiently devote themselves to the grind.

This commotion, too, settled down in the half-year since. Most occupations’ Unique Jobs were now filled up, and peace was returning to the game once more.

…Even now, there remained certain jobs which nobody had achieved. Those of the corresponding occupations continued to grind, half-defeated, no light in their eyes. No matter when you logged in, their job bulletin boards read like a funeral service.

They were the support jobs—and above all, the Priest line, the healer.

While a comparatively popular class in other games, one could almost feel the dev team’s malice in how badly they handled Worldgate Online’s supports.

One first had to note a critical flaw with support classes in VRMMOs: ‘You don’t feel a rush when playing them.’
The Priest line stood out here. Being a healer, maintaining allies’ HP and applying damage reduction were the bread and butter of its defensive support duties, and in truth, it was a lot of plates to spin at once.
And yet there was scarcely any tangible feedback for all that work. For as busy as the role was, it was an utterly thankless chore. Did you want to wield a sword with your own two hands? Did you want to blast magic everywhere? Did you want to move your body as you tangoed with tough monsters? Then your first step was to pay no attention to the Priest.

It didn’t help that you could only make one character per account. Thanks to that, each edition of the player census showed it competing for worst job in the game.

Further adding to the game’s player count woes, it was hard to even play as a different gender to your real-life one.

It wasn’t impossible, but the game—or more accurately, the console—was only purchasable by ordering from the official online shop, which required you to provide a copy of your resident record, after which your console would be sent to you with that information prefilled.

That console would then only let you pick the registered gender. For health reasons, supposedly.

Publicly, the dev team’s stance was that they applied controls at time of sale and bore no responsibility afterward, and it wasn’t as if any access restrictions were in place, so others could use it. The question then became if a woman would hand over a device filled with her own personal information to someone else. Obviously, it turned out nobody would.

Which meant, if you wanted to pretend to be a girl anyway, you had to ready up the cash for a decidedly costly platform, find a female acquaintance with no interest in games, tell her ‘I want to be a girl in a video game so please buy this console for me’, bow your head and hope. Awful. What a stupidly high hurdle. 95% of people gave up right here.

And for that reason, the male-female ratio of in-game player characters leaned heavy on the male side.
Plenty of people wanted to play their mages—and especially supports—as girl characters in online games, while the trend with boy characters was to want to put up a handsome fight, and because of these desires, support jobs were silently left to rot.

What of the female playerbase? Most were frustrated by the backbreaking leveling process, that was what.
For some reason, WGO didn’t have the party EXP bonus that existed in so many other MMORPGs. It split EXP into exact and even portions, adjusted those portions to account for level differences, and gave each member their share.
More people in your party meant exponentially less EXP per person.

On top of that, support jobs had universally low damage output, so if you wanted to grind levels solo, you had to pick out fairly underleveled enemies, lap up a pittance of EXP from them, then rinse and repeat in a test of patience.

As the game went on and players’ combat ability and tactics improved, the focus of leveling shifted to how to defeat large numbers of enemies efficiently. There was little incentive to bring a healer when you could be adding more DPSes to churn through enemies that much faster.

If you could defeat them all before even taking damage, then your healer had nothing to do but stand there, and was effectively baggage.

Conversely, when parties gave their healers plenty of work to do, that essentially signaled the party’s DPSes were out of their depth, and they would invariably try to shift the blame for that onto anyone else—particularly those in vulnerable positions.

Add it all up… and healers who broke their backs pulling parties out of dire straits found themselves the target of abuse.

Just to add fuel to the fire, there’d been a lull of several years after the level cap became 100, during which the devs added cheap, powerful healing potions to combat burnout, meaning by the time the cap of 110 rolled around, ‘no one needs priests (゜Д゜=)ノ⌒゜’ was an all too common refrain.

Were support jobs truly unneeded, then? No. In fact, once you’d gone through the raid bosses and your levels were raised, they were practically mandatory in postgame content. The balance of supply and demand completely flipped.

What awaited a support at the end of all the trial and torment, at the perfection of their ability set, was a bloody tooth-and-nail scramble to snag them.
One might have grit one’s teeth through the leveling process out of a sheer desire to be of help to others, but after that, with battlefields fraying as parties vied over them, malignant users persistently adhering to them, the sheer whiplash of a collective and shameless about-face right in front of them… Plenty, despite coming all that way, folded there and ceased to log in ever again.

As an aside, the female Priest starting outfit had been updated several times throughout the course of the game, perhaps out of the dev team’s desire to increase player counts. As a result, it had a reputation for its top-ranking cuteness, reflected by the cosmetics section of the game’s popularity polls.

One could always find fashion-minded players at the beginner level who’d been lured in by that… but the leveling process would dash their dreams, they’d remake their character, and whether they’d painstakingly put the design together or splashed cash to buy it from a commercial maker, their cute custom character would be consigned to the data graveyard. It was a phenomenon the game’s users had termed the ‘official honeytrap’, and they watched it happen again and again, shivering all the while.

***

#[End notes]#
About the selectable races:
Human … Baseline people. Unremarkable. Excels in vitality, high HP modifiers.
Celestial … A race with wings on their backs. Low attack, high defense. Can fly up to a fixed altitude.
Demon … A race with horns on their heads. High attack. Only race with access to blue skin, of which there are diehard fans.