Val was greeted by the title screen and theme music of Avalon. Reaching up with his hand, he swiped to proceed to the sign-in screen. In the midst of inputting the credentials of his main account, Val’s mouth twisted into a grimace as he remembered the ban he had received the previous night. His frown turned upside down when he recalled that he had more than enough alternate accounts to outlast any number of bans.

Username: FluffyKitten

Password: ************

Val tapped the confirm button with his fingers. After loading for several moments, he was brought to Avalon’s main menu. Not interested in the value deals that Camelot Games was offering, Val tapped on his profile in the top right corner of the screen.

Name: FluffyKitten

Tier (Solo): E

Tier (Team): N/A

Shaking his head to himself, Val reckoned that it would be fun to take an account into the lower tiers to have a little fun. The players of Avalon were separated into six tiers: A, B, C, D, E, and F. Of course, the players in the world were not uniformly distributed across the tiers. Tiers A and B held the world’s top 1% of players, with the A tier holding a mere 2100 out of the approximately 105 million players in the world. On the contrary, 70% of the world’s players were either in the F or E tier.

For a player of my ability, climbing should be a piece of cake, Val thought.

Making peace with the dismal ranking of his account, Val hit the “Play Now” button at the top of the screen. On the game mode selection screen, Val selected Solo Ranked and moved to the role selection option.

Avalon was a game that pitted two teams of five against each other. Usually, there was a meta surrounding the types of players that should consist a team. The standard meta for the game was having one scout, two fighters, one support, and one mandatory king. The game started with the legendary sword Excalibur being randomly placed somewhere on Avalon’s map. Afterwards, both teams would be spawned an equal distance away from the sword. There were two conditions to win the game – either kill the opposing team’s king or have your team’s king pull Excalibur from its stone. Of course, being the alpha dog he was, Val’s main role was the king.

Val marked down king as his preferred role and proceeded to the character selection screen. Lifting the headset off his eyes, Val opened his backpack and pulled out a binder. He opened the binder to reveal pages upon pages of Avalon trading cards. However, these weren’t simply trading cards – each card contained a chip such that when the card was plugged into the headset, the card’s character would become one’s in-game character.

Flipping to his page with the ultra-rare cards, Val pulled his main, Lancaster the Knight, from his sleeve and inserted him into the headset. Upon processing the decision, the headset displayed Lancaster’s base statistics on the screen:

Health: 80

Physical Damage: 76

Magic Damage: 15

Armor: 75

Magic Resistance: 35

Speed: 50

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Ability: Timelapse (slows time for 0.5s)

Upon confirming character selection, Val was taken to the equipment screen. Before every game, each player was given 100 gold to spend on weapons, armor, spells, and hundreds of miscellaneous items. Val scanned through the items and settled on purchasing a Dragonbone Longsword (+35 to Physical Damage), Steel Armor (+20 Health, +20 Armor, +10 Magic Resistance), and several Health Potions (+20 regenerated Health)

Satisfied with his configuration, Val confirmed his decisions and entered the matchmaking queue. After waiting about half a minute, Val’s screen flashed dark. The next moment, he was in game.