Back in Montreal, Adèle is busy inserting a new feature for alien abductions, and planning how to kick off the next patch about hyperspace travel. Like a storyline about an UFO crashing and the surviving aliens blame the residents of the world recklessly using fireworks for the crash. And then the game's world would reverse engineer the hyperdrive and avionics, so they can build their own spaceships, using alien tech.

However, a most disturbing report about the baby shower party causes her to snap out of this alien reverie.

"Now it seems like baby showers are being farmed for the Mark Seven VLS getting gold on these would net players, and it seems like some players have managed to get, and sell, dozens of VLS by just hosting baby showers over and over!" Adèle explains to the other engineers working weekends to fix bugs as found by the players.

"What fixes do you suggest for the bug?" the gay engineer asks her.

"I'm OK with the VLS to be tied to baby showers, such as hosting a perfect baby shower on the first try, but if you have other ideas..."

"Other players claim that the VLS exploit led to demand for infant adoption to skyrocket, but in a wave of toddlers being abandoned!" the trans engineer suggests her.

"What?" Adèle gasps upon hearing about how some players who throw baby showers over and over saw infants as golden gooses, or at least golden gooses with short lifespans. "I actually pity those players who will adopt toddlers, or even children if they spend the entirety of their in-game lives as toddlers without being adopted!"

"Maybe just change which fireworks silo would drop from getting gold as a baby shower host!" another engineer suggests.

"Why does it have to be a fireworks silo? Fireworks are too dangerous to have around infants, and baby showers are there to show babies to other players!" an artist retorts.

"We already have cribs as drops for the attendees. Maybe have the toddler tablets..."

Oh boy: they are making it look like this bug came from some typo in the code where the item ID of the reward was improperly entered for whatever reason. I just need to look up the toddler tablet ID and then change it into the baby shower's loot table, Adèle starts wondering how did an endgame partying fireworks silo become somehow available to newborns.

"Let's back up a little bit. It seems like the order in which players can adopt the kids is flawed. There must be some sort of system allowing NPCs to adopt abandoned children if a certain delay has elapsed since their abandonment!" the trans engineer yells.

"Like I get that ghosts in their young age should have a second chance in life if their parents messed up their early childhood, but they can't stay forever in the adoption pool!" the gay engineer adds.

"And there should be an escalation in the penalties meted out to players who repeatedly abandon adopted children! We can't just punish players for a fixed period! The whole VLS exploit, however, made it clear that this wave of children abandonment isn't happening in isolation, that underlying factors must be addressed!"

While the gay engineer tracks down the toddler tablet item ID, Adèle, on the other hand, codes in another achievement that makes players earn the Mk7 VLS for hosting a perfect baby shower on the first try, without any retroactive awards. Which is very much like the Natural Host achievement, earned by people who get gold at their first party as a host, from a coding standpoint.

When the engineers are done finding and applying fixes to the bugs found so far, and Adèle has finished coding the VLS-granting achievement. Along with the availability of adoptees, which, in her mind, is random, but the probability goes down the longer it has been since CPS took the adoptee away. And, of course, adding in the licensed alien abductors. The devs' workday ends when the servers are taken offline, and the fix is then deployed.

That was rough. Who knows what other bugs the players could find at this point of beta testing. But I really need a good night's sleep right now... Adèle returns home, tired of having to look after RCG's bugs as the players find them, with little to no time to implement new ideas she might have, at least for the time being. Yet she still has a lot on her mind as she sleeps. And not a very good sleep, either, as she soon finds out:

Aboard the HMCS Saint-Laurent, underneath the Victoria Bridge. Adèle found herself right next to the ship's VLS, brought to combat readiness as part of a test required of the ship's post-launch tests. As the ship was sailing clear of the Victoria Bridge towards Champlain Bridge, the window for its crew to fire the blank SAM was short.

"All hands, clear the deck!" the captain yelled.

Adèle was brought to the ship's combat information center, or CIC, by some sailors treating her like an intruder. She entered a room full of communications, radar and sonar consoles.

"What's going on here? Why would they conduct test-firing of SAMs in such crowded airspace?" Adèle questioned the actions of the ranking officer at the CIC.

"Yeah, captain, we're within firing range of a major international airport! We're not about to endanger the local airspace's safety, and Transport Canada will never forgive us for that!" one of the fire control crewmembers warned the ranking officer.

"Abort! Abort!" the captain yelled at the fire control sailors.

"What should we do with this intruder?" another sailor asked the captain.

"Bring her to the brig for questioning!"

At the brig, Adèle started hallucinating, while she waited on the MP officers to question her. She could already feel like she was in deep trouble even without hallucinating.

Several ghosts circled around her, the first two of which belonged to RCG players who used the baby shower exploit.

"The whole baby shower exploit is a fiasco! Remember this: with new content, exploits will be found!" Sigrun's main hissed.

"I'm playing this game to honor my ancestors in ways almost no other game allowed me to!" Artabeles' main yelled at both. "Too many toddlers were being abandoned left and right!"

Artabeles' gyan-avspar ancestor jeered at Sigrun's main. "You were the one who was barred from adopting children because you abandoned children left and right, and one of them ran away from home!" He then turned to his RCG look-a-like. "By using the VLS exploit, you brought shame upon the gyan-avspars!"

"Unlike Sigrun, my player plans on keeping his adoptees for the long haul! And I even told Marjo on air what gyan-avspars were! No gyan-avspar worth his station would adopt infants only to abandon them still in childhood! Exactly how did I bring shame to the gyan-avspars?"

"Gyan-avspars might have been sworn to do everything in their power to protect the Shahanshah, but would that include raising money by engaging in illicit commerce, or abandoning their own children?" Artabeles' ancestor scolded his descendant's main.

"I only sold VLS that some administrative error made available too readily; never did I abandon children!" Artabeles' main pleads with his player's ancestor, who had a Persian accent.

"Even though you didn't abandon children yourself, by discovering a get-rich-quick scheme based on baby showers, you encouraged large-scale child abandonment!"

Oh sure, a gyan-avspar might still have had illegitimate or adopted children, because they were chosen for their soldiering skills, but even then, gyan-avspars were usually rich enough to take care of illegitimate children, because they were drawn from at least azadan-levels of nobility. Knights, if you will. Just not necessarily as one would a legitimate child, Artabeles' main mused, interrupted before Karine's ghost entered the fray.

"How could RCG players be even worse towards their characters than MAA ones? Is that behavior abetted by the players knowing they are dealing with ghosts? I expected players of that sort of games to coddle their characters to the extent feasible!" Karine's ghost yelled at Adèle's oneiric self.

"That's totally unlike you, Karine! You're an expert in debt and insolvency matters, without whom there would be none of that in RCG, and no Treaty of Perseria either! Clavet became Perseria's eran-spahbed and even signed it for Perseria proper..." Adèle's face turned red, knowing Karine used her MAA toons as tools.

"Eran-spahbed? That's a term I didn't hear in ages!" Artabeles' ancestor turned to Karine's ghost. "You might not know it, but you have Sassanid aristocrats for ancestors, too!"

"What do you mean, I have... Sassanid aristocrats for ancestors?" Karine's ghost asked the ancient ghost, not knowing what Sassanid aristocracy even is.

"More specifically the Karen-Pahlav! Your ancestors included eran-spahbeds, but, while they are female names today, Karen or Karin were male names in Persian antiquity!"

"Tabarnak!" Karine's ghost screamed. "You say that I had an eran-spahbed for an ancestor, but what's an eran-spahbed?"

"The army's commander-in-chief, in either Perseria or Sassanid Persia" He turned to Artabeles' main. "You claimed that your player played RCG to honor his ancestors, but he goes by a name that sounds Achaemenid, almost Hellenistic even..."

"Before there even was a RCG, he played Total War: Attila for years! He got burned out of the game, and sought a different genre!"

Artabeles' ancestor's ghost then went on a rampage, drawing his shamshir and tearing through the other ghosts. And later, going for Adèle, who screamed in horror before her real self awakened in the dead of night.

Upon awakening, Adèle is left wondering what other exploits the players will find, either in the base game or in any future content. What matters most is that new content doesn't invalidate older content: Sigrun requested as much out of a MAA private server. However, I expect, going forward, that future bugs and exploits come mostly from newer content. So I guess there must be a way to make people not seek to play aliens only. In essence, balance out the benefits of alien play with disadvantages. I'm afraid that playing with abduction rates will only affect the server's early stages of alien play.

"Damn... Beta testing is there for a reason: engineers might have a certain intended playstyle, and I certainly do, but players have a wider variety of play styles!" Adèle starts sobbing about what happened in the past few days in the game.

I really need sleep. However, how am I to get the sleep I need when I keep getting nightmares containing elements of the game, or its players, in it? I get it, RCG is a labor of love to me... Adèle struggles to fall back asleep, but yawns still. And the worst in all that is that I had no clue at all how I could have landed myself on a brand-new River-class destroyer, and I hallucinated like crazy while detained!.

But when early morning comes to Grenaa, Sigrun, once again, tries to host a baby shower, after reading the patch notes, she's a little wary of them.

"Heja, Danmark!" (Come on, Denmark!) Sigrun yells at her screen, while preparing to run another baby shower, as she did on repeat before the beta server closed.

I think I have no choice but to bake the cake myself. I don't think new players even know how to have their characters bake cakes! Sigrun starts making her transfem bake her very own signature cake.

And then she takes new players through a baby shower, telling them in the in-game chat how to fulfill the objectives of the party. From a ready-made list of instructions she keeps on a second screen and that she can copy-paste as needed. Like how to tell stories or jokes. Or even congratulate the new parents.

And even secretly berating some of these players for making the baby shower even a few seconds longer.

"What's taking them so long? The cake is ready, people should be able to get their attendee gauge completely filled before the cake is finished!" she yells without anyone else noticing since the others aren't in a VC.

It's only then that she realizes having her characters endlessly running baby showers and eating cake over and over is not without their sets of troubles: not only she wasted mountains of cakes, but her characters have become fat. So fat that they're the fattest characters the game will allow, which is morbidly obese.

And a number of debuffs hit her characters: diabetes, and also another one with the need to eat what the game deems to be "real food". She earns a brand new achievement, which, much to her delight, rewards yet another Mk7 VLS, albeit the game now makes it clear that it was earned from an achievement tied to hosting a perfect baby shower on the first try, and not the party itself. I can't shake the feeling that the bug isn't actually fixed, but I'll make all my adult characters go through liposuction, provided it's in the game. Otherwise, I'll have them exercise.

However, much to Sigrun's chagrin, she finds out that any subsequent baby shower drops toddler tablets for gold, but at the same time, she realizes the achievement isn't retroactively awarded.

"The devs made baby showers no longer worth farming, but what will the next farm be? In that sort of games, there's always a farm of some sort for at least one item or currency..." Sigrun sighs.