Since it was an agreed-upon alliance, the meeting place must have been decided before entering the game.
For example, the place Ivan and his two former allies agreed upon was the Great Sept of Baelor in King's Landing.
However, due to his allies dropping out, he changed his starting point to the Riverlands.
Now that his allies were gone, other players were not like this; they would definitely go to iconic buildings like the Crossroads Inn or Sataya's Tavern to rendezvous as originally planned!
Driven by this 'First Blood' quest, wouldn't those pre-arranged allies become ready hunting targets?
Admittedly, some players would become wary and back out of the agreement after seeing this quest, but humanity has never lacked adventurers.
If an endeavor offers a twenty percent profit, people will become restless; with a fifty percent profit, they will dare to take risks; for a one hundred percent profit, they will trample all human laws; and with a three hundred percent profit, they will commit any crime, even risking hanging.
So what kind of profit did this quest offer?
Putting aside the attribute points and skill points, the sheer amount of money was a full three thousand gold dragons. With this money and two S-rank NPCs, a player could even easily assemble a small army of over a hundred men.
In this game, where most players couldn't obtain resources from the system, what did it mean to be the first to acquire such a large sum of resources?
He might be difficult to surpass for the next few years, and could even escape the threat of the leaderboard assassination mechanism, developing freely in the way he desired.
Players had no reason not to take this risk.
"But… the second problem still hasn't been solved!" Ivan quickly calmed himself down. "Discernment, how do players discern the disguises of other players?
Firstly, let's assume two pre-arranged allies meet at the agreed location, but with the 'First Blood' quest in play, they wouldn't carelessly use their pre-arranged secret codes to hint at their identities, would they?
They would definitely be cautiously hiding themselves while trying to probe others.
But how easy is it to probe a wary player? Everyone is an elite player who has fought through so many qualifiers; how could they easily reveal their flaws?
From the planner's perspective, since he has designed it to this point, it means that in his view, players can definitely discern each other. In other words, there is something that all of us don't know, or have overlooked, a flaw that exists."
Ivan suddenly thought of that background story. According to Annie, the existence of the background story was to help players disguise themselves.
But clearly, the planner did not want players to disguise themselves well; on the contrary, he wanted players to discern each other and fight.
This made the planner's actions very contradictory.
Unless there was a problem with this background story?
Ivan quickly closed his eyes, opened the auxiliary system, and entered the data section to read his background story in detail once more.
Soon, he really did find a small problem.
That was… he had no surname.
Originally, as a commoner from the Vale, he indeed had no surname at first, but in the subsequent story, he had already been knighted, which meant he had the qualification to be granted a surname.
But he still had no surname, which was very unusual.
However, this was just a minor issue, not enough to be considered a discernible flaw, and this problem should only be unique to players starting as Sellsword Knights, not a problem common to all players.
"Right, all players… To achieve stable discernment, this flaw should be common to all players, or at least the vast majority of players. So, what could be the commonality among us that serves as a flaw?"
What do players have that is obvious enough to be a commonality allowing most people to discern them?
It couldn't be that they like to walk by jumping, could it? This is a real world! There's no way to play by jumping, right? Wouldn't that be exhausting?
Ivan paced back and forth in the room, pondering this question.
Suddenly, his gaze fell on the equipment piled in the corner of his room.
A hand-and-a-half sword, a nasal helmet, a gorget, an old chainmail, a pair of chainmail gloves, and a pair of greaves.
In a trance, the preview image of the final character creation screen once again appeared before his eyes.
"Damn it! Starting equipment! It's the starting equipment!"
The starting equipment for each profession was the same, and over ninety percent of players should have chosen one of the five professions Ivan listed as their starting point.
This meant that the players' current appearances, apart from their faces, were exactly the same as the preview image on the final character creation screen!
Among them, the Traveling Merchant was the most obvious, with their 4 servants, 4 old pack horses, two carts, and 7 mules—that whole set was almost an open secret (but correspondingly, they would surely realize they were easily exposed and would make changes).
Next were the Sellsword Knights, because they abnormally possessed a complete set of equipment usually only owned by landed knights, yet had no squire.
Of course, the Shipwrecked Sailor and Brotherhood Hunter weren't much better off; after all, these two professions were relatively less common, and one used throwing axes while the other used a yew longbow, which were also easily discernible features.
In terms of concealment, perhaps only the Wandering Sellsword was slightly better. After all, the taverns large and small throughout Westeros were filled with Sellswords, and the Wandering Sellsword's starting equipment of old leather armor, a short sword, and a dagger was almost indistinguishable from that of the natives.
But apart from the Wandering Sellsword, once other professions appeared at the rendezvous points agreed upon by players, they would probably react upon seeing each other—'Haven't I seen this guy somewhere before?'
This was the true purpose of the planner designing a background story for players!
He deliberately made the character creation options so complex to make each player have numerous differences, thus overlooking the commonalities brought by the final profession.
He had the AI intentionally explain the existence of the background story as 'allowing players to have background memories, so as to disguise themselves better,' precisely to mislead players, giving them a preconceived impression that their appearance would not be easily discerned!
When the human brain receives information about a certain matter, the first viewpoint it accepts usually has greater influence, even preventing people from actively considering possibilities contrary to it.
Even Ivan himself initially overlooked such an obvious flaw as the starting equipment!
Since the organizers could not interfere with the game's progress by any means after the competition began, the planner chose to pre-arrange in this way to quickly instigate player infighting, thereby making the competition more exciting!
Damn it! I didn't expect that in this hundred-person game, the first enemy players would face wasn't each other, but the trap meticulously designed by the planner!