241 - Steve Cop?!

Pietro stood with his car parked in front of the bank as he heard the sound of the bank alarm going off, screams and gunshots inside, while looking at his shaking hands.

"What are you doing, Pietro? Isn't it wrong to rob a bank?" He asked himself anxiously.

The game was so realistic that sometimes it was hard to separate reality from the virtual world.

At moments like this, when the emotions were very strong in the players' chests and minds, it was difficult for them to tell whether they were in the real world or the virtual world.

But Pietro didn't even have time to think about it when the three doors of his car were opened and the robbers entered with guns and bags of money.

"Go, go, go!" A woman shouted as she got into the passenger seat next to him.

In automatic mode, Pietro began to accelerate as he fled the bank.

Within seconds, dozens of police cars appeared around him and began chasing him, making Pietro's heart race even faster.

If he had his real-world powers in this game, he could easily find blind spots between the cars and use the extra reaction time he had to think of the best options in an instant.

But in Oasis, he was like a normal person who had to play by the rules of ordinary people, which made it more fun for him.

The adrenaline pumped non-stop in Pietro's blood.

With hundreds of thousands of other people in the city running from the police, every few minutes Pietro would pass other players who were also running from the police while doing something illegal.

Pietro noticed that some players were running from the police because they had thugs like him in the car, others were betting on illegal races with each other, while others were even using their own cars to try to destroy the police cars.

The city was in total chaos.

A chaos that even Alex, watching from above, didn't like very much.

He realized that having so many players in one city doing illegal things at the same time was breaking the immersion of the players and diminishing their sense of reality.

So he made a drastic change.

Instead of putting a million players in a hub, Alex reduced the number to just 500 players per hub.

This was still a large number, considering 500 people running from the police in a city at the same time, but it was still two thousand times less than the original number.

Alex set it up so that players would switch hubs when they were in an isolated place with no other players around, so they wouldn't notice the change.

When he went back to watch Pietro play, Alex realized that this change was a good one, because not seeing other players gave Pietro a sense that this world was real and got his adrenaline pumping again.

Looking at other players, Alex confirmed that this was indeed the best alternative and that players would be much more immersed this way.

At this point, there were already a few players who had been caught by the police.

Since his game was in full VR, Alex had the police actually arrest the players and make them feel a little bad about getting caught, as well as leave them in jail for 30 minutes with no ability to earn any more points and lose half the points they already had.

Since these players didn't have any points, they didn't lose anything.

But the feeling of being black in a jail cell wasn't great.

With the player data, Alex saw that the number of players logging into Need for Speed was constantly increasing.

There were tens of thousands of players logging into Need for Speed every minute through the various portals in the various Oasis Hubs.

Streamers like Ned were very excited to run from the police or get arrested.

But the biggest discovery of a Streamer was that of Steve Rogers, Captain America, who decided to try a Stream in the Oasis on Peggy's recommendation, and who had gained a very large audience in the last few days, competing with Tony Stark in opening Streams.

When he realized that he would have to be a bandit and do illegal things in this game, Steve didn't like it at all and even wanted to leave the game.

But when a policeman stopped him, Steve didn't know what to do and asked if he could become a policeman too.

Hearing his question, both the NPC and the stream viewers were shocked.

But the biggest surprise came when the NPC confirmed that Steve could become a temporary police officer to help them deal with the crime wave in the city.

As soon as Steve confirmed it, his outfit was changed to that of a rookie cop and his car was customized to match the paint job of an NYPD car, with a Gyroflex on top.

Instead of the dashboard of his car having a screen showing the crimes he could commit, it now showed the criminals he could chase!

Seeing such a big change in Steve's stream caused millions of people to connect to his stream and be shocked as they watched Steve try to steer the car to follow the other player.

Chasing two players was much more difficult and interesting than when the player was just running away from NPCs.

And when viewers realized that Steve could even arrest the player, send him to jail, and earn points for doing so, a new wave of players who wanted to be cops flooded the game.

Players who were cops in real life, players who didn't like crime, players who felt bad about committing crime, or even players who just wanted to make other players lose points started becoming cops, and the game became even more interesting!

And when the criminal players saw that there were players controlling cops to hunt them down, the adrenaline rush of escaping became even greater.

Because unlike the NPCs, who weren't as agile and clever as them (by Alex's choice), the police players were just as good or even better at chasing them, which made the game much more challenging!