Virtual World: Close Combat Mage

Gu Fei had spent all his game time these past three days on Sword Demon, supervising Sword Demon’s training every day he got online, and mercilessly pointing out any of his problems in a stern manner. Of course, the time that Gu Fei spent online did not increase or decrease as a result of this added responsibility, but even when Gu Fei was not around, Sword Demon would continue his grueling training by himself.

Coward’s Savior was also present for all three days, and his main function was to be a human media player. To think back when Gu Fei was learning kung fu, he had used plenty of modern methods. When Gu Fei was younger, he would attend lessons that were similar to what they were currently doing, where Gu Fei would listen as his father proceeded to lecture in front of a projector screen several meters wide. After that, they would spar and have someone standing by the side to record the fight, so they could review the footage when they played it back later. There was no way to do this in the game, so Gu Fei could only ask Coward’s Savior to take the “starring role” as the human recorder that he was, but Gu Fei was still griping about the fact that there was no way for him to playback, slowdown, rewind, pause and other such functions.

Sword Demon did not have any shocking comprehension on his part either, but his unyielding persistence was second to none. Just the tenacity he demonstrated from his grinding made it apparent that no matter where he applied this trait, it would be enough to make a difference and see some results.

While these three days were not enough for there to be any obvious improvements, Gu Fei was very optimistic about him. It was as the saying went: A teacher may lead a student to knowledge, but continued practice depended on the individual. A disciple like Sword Demon would definitely give his master the greatest peace of mind. Everyday, Gu Fei would come over so that he could supervise, but did Sword Demon even require supervision? Essentially, all Gu Fei did was teach, and as long as Sword Demon could memorize it, the man would keep cramming as best as he could. In any case, Sword Demon would rely on his tenacity to keep digesting everything. At the same time, Gu Fei told him, “If there’s anything you do not understand, do not hesitate to ask.” Gu Fei was afraid that he would be tenacious in this aspect as well, becoming too embarrassed to ask anything. It would be too much of a waste of time for him to wallow in self-study.

Sword Demon had more or less digested everything that Gu Fei could stuff into him the past three days, and plenty of bad habits that he had to overcome were abandoned. As for getting used to this new style of combat, that would be entirely up to his hard work alone. Gu Fei had left Coward’s Savior behind so that he could help remind and point out things for Sword Demon from time to time. Even though Coward’s Savior’s kung fu was far from the caliber of a professional martial practitioner like Gu Fei, he was nevertheless stronger than Sword Demon. And with how passionate he was toward kung fu, there were quite a few things that he had knowledge of, but could not execute, which made him a little bit like Brother Assist. For Sword Demon and him to exchange reasoning and pointers in such circumstances, the two could then also be able to improve alongside one another.

After Gu Fei had finished arranging the special training, he then proceeded to join the market research team. There was a total of eleven men from the workshop, with Five Nights taking the lead, and Gu Fei had no idea who the other ten players were. Their levels were a mixture of high and low, and their equipment was extremely average, looking like they were all employees of the workshop that actually did work. Meanwhile, aside from Gu Fei, it was only Southern Lone Blade and Glue with them. They originally had no use for many people for this assignment, as it was mainly the workshop that would do the work and they simply had to stand on the side and watch.

“Brother Miles, you guys come take a look. This is the situational report that every workshop branch from every city submitted to us,” Five Nights said the moment they met, waving a stack of paper that he had in his hand as Gu Fei and the others arrived.

“There’s a total of 100 cities in Parallel World at the moment, and every city has roughly a population of 500,000 players. Presently, the majority of players are above level 40, and they take up about 60% of the game’s player base. Level 30 to 40 players take up around 30%, while the remaining 10% of the players are under level 30, given how quick it was for players to level up below this threshold in the game. What we mean to say is that there’s no need to develop any efficient monster grinding routines for players level 30 and below, so we should mainly focus on those above level 30, especially the level 40 grinding maps, which will be one of the focuses of our development. Meanwhile, even though the number of maps for every city differs, it seemed like the amount of players that these locations could hold was more or less the same. Maps from level 30 to 35 could hold about 10,000 players at any one time, while level 35 to 40 grinding maps would be able to take around 20,000 players or so, and level 40 to 45 grinding maps could reach up to 50,000 players at any given time. From this escalating figure, we can infer that the officials have pretty much made certain predictions as to the distribution of the number of players and their subsequent levels. Adding to the fact that there’s a good portion of players who would level via questing, there should be enough grinding maps for everyone if the players were able to reasonably space out their times. Unfortunately, there’s no way for the players to evenly spread themselves out across the time frames. The time from 7pm to 11pm would always be the peak period for players online, and the grinding maps would always be filled with players the whole time.”

“Yeah!” Gu Fei nodded, before following up, “Tell us about the part that is relevant to us then!”

“Oh, sorry about that…” Five Nights hurriedly continued. “Even though the amount of players that could keep leveling in these grinding maps from all the various cities were more or less even, the number of grinding maps itself actually differs from city to city. Using Yueye City as an example, they have a total of nine level 40 – 45 maps, but in Linshui City, they have seven islands that fit this criteria. Meanwhile, Mengtu City actually have 12 different grinding maps encompassing that stretch of levels!” Five Nights exclaimed.

Gu Fei nodded his head, “It will be more troublesome for us if there are more grinding maps.”

Five Nights concurred, “This is the information we have gotten with regards to the distribution of the various grinding maps across all the cities, take a look.” Five Nights handed a pile of papers over to the three, but he continued to speak, “At the moment, out of the 100 cities, there are 511 maps from level 40 to 50, 204 for 35 – 40, and 117 for level 30 to 35. That is a grand total of 832 different grinding maps, all locations that we can develop.”

“832 maps…” Gu Fei’s forehead was already collecting sweat.

Meanwhile, Five Nights looked at him as he continued, “Now, we need to know how much time you two will need to develop an efficient monster grinding routine.”

“Well… The monsters are all of different levels, meaning that the difficulty would vary as well. If we’re talking about a level 45 monster, that means we need approximately an hour to develop a routine!” Gu Fei answered.

“An hour for a single routine…” Even Five Nights was furrowing his brows. “If we do the calculations accordingly, it might just be too slow. If it was just Eternal Dominion alone, and we were to go with an 8 hour daily work schedule, it would take 104 days before we could completely develop them all… That’s over three months, and that is just way too long a timeline for this project.” Five Nights said. He was looking for speed when he came up with this plan in mind; as long as everything was done quickly, they would be able to make a wave of money before the officials react. He could not accept that it would take over three months to accomplish this, because if the officials were to call for a stop to the efficient grinding method after a month into enacting the plan, that would mean that all the work they had done would be for naught. This was an eventuality that Five Nights simply could not tolerate.

In the end, it was Gu Fei who laughed bitterly and shook his head when he heard this, “There is a huge misunderstanding here… A single routine doesn’t refer to all the different sets of routine that a single grinding map would contain. With how we had previously run our business, a single grinding map would provide a total of nine routines.”

“This…” Five Nights was all the more bewildered. “Doesn’t that mean that it would essentially take a whole day to develop a single map?”

“It’s something like this…” Right now, Gu Fei and the others had only done one such comprehensive development over by the White Mill, where Gu Fei and Eternal Dominion had simultaneously developed and taught together with Southern Lone Blade’s gang of seven, spending the entire morning in such a fashion. While the level of monsters that he faced in Youye City were high that day, he only had to develop the Thief and Archer’s Agility-based routines by himself. The players involved had a harder time learning the subsequent duo grinding routines, but it was obviously much easier for both Gu Fei and Eternal Dominion to finish off a monster together than doing it on their own. The speed of their development was not slow either, which was why they were able to finish the development of the routines rather quickly, only spending a little more effort when teaching it to the other players after.

This was quite the heavy blow for Five Nights, as it was only at this moment that he realized the great plan he had formulated in his mind could only theoretically exist. By the time they could realistically enact it, time would instead become his greatest enemy… And it was this lack of time that was Five Nights’s plan’s biggest weakness.

“Why… Why didn’t you say so sooner!?” Five Nights had nearly collapsed to the ground right there and then when he learnt this information. He had originally been very confident in his plan, boasting endlessly in front of the boss, but how would he have known that he would only be aware of the crucial problem of this issue at this critical moment. If a single day was needed to fully develop a grinding map, with over 800 maps… It would take more than two years. Five Nights nearly grinded his teeth down to their roots.

But this was when Southern Lone Blade suddenly interjected, “We can avoid the problem of needing a whole day for each map.”

“HOW!?” Five Nights was already unhappy with spending an hour to develop the grinding routines for each map! After having been struck with the knowledge that it would actually take a whole day for each map, it was as if his baseline of expectations had been lowered even more.

Southern Lone Blade answered, “Actually, with a single grinding map, it doesn’t matter if we provide only a single job class’s efficient monster grinding routine, as the players registering would not be worried about this issue in the least. Furthermore, we had to consider catering to all the job classes mainly because we had originally claimed to do tailor made routines for the players, and we were afraid that the other job classes might intentionally disrupt things if we picked a single job class. But this situation isn’t the same. If we were to launch across all 800 maps at once, we could definitely allocate a hundred per job class: a hundred just for Mages, a hundred for Warriors and another hundred specifically for Thieves. Continuing along this line of thought, we can reserve the final hundred for specialized needs. Wouldn’t this make things simple and convenient for us, while making it that much easier for us to operate as well?”

“You’ve got a point there!” Five Nights had perked up again when he heard this suggestion.* Why had I not considered this myself just now? Looks like my concern toward the matter had really thrown me off objectivity.* Five Nights slapped his own forehead, throwing a grateful gaze at Southern Lone Blade. Now, even though they would still go back to spending an hour to develop routines for each grinding map, he felt that still sounded much better than having the despair of spending an entire day for each map, like what Gu Fei had previously mentioned.

But Gu Fei suddenly added another piece of information, “You previously felt that spending an hour for each map, totalling up to 104 days to set up this project, would be too long. But it just so happened that there’s something that could further cut down on the number of grinding maps. With the number of maps decreased, would we not reduce the amount of time we need on our end?”

Five Nights was stunned when he heard that the number of maps would decrease. While the time it took for their overall project would be reduced, it also meant that the amount of money they could make would proportionately decrease as well! Just as he was thinking about this, Gu Fei had already continued, “It’s not like the efficient monster grinding routines do not have requirements in terms of the enemy they face. Level and job classes are not actually crucial to its viability, but the most important aspect is actually to ensure that the monsters are all humanoids.”

“Humanoids?” Five Nights was startled.

“That’s correct. By humanoid, I don’t mean that they must be humans. It is fine as long as the monster is bipedal, and it moves like a human, like a werewolf for example. So monsters that are quadrupedal, birds, insects, lacking in a face or an arm, elemental creatures that would be floating about, or other such fantastical creatures would definitely not work. After taking these away, if you still think it’s too much, we can also drop those monsters that would cast spells as their main mode of attack. And on top of that—”

“Alright, that’s enough. I’ll go do a recount,” Five Nights was flustered. So it turned out that the 800 grinding maps he originally thought they could use would still be reduced. Furthermore, the condition of the monsters being humanoids was rather strict. In this fantasy VRMMO world, it was of course the non-human creatures that Gu Fei had just mentioned that took center stage. They would compete in earnest with the humanoid monsters when vying for the role of monsters that the players could grind for their leveling needs. Five Nights reckoned that with Gu Fei’s addition of this criteria, more than half of the grinding maps would be ineligible, and that meant that half of their potential revenue would be gone. Just thinking about it made Five Nights’ heartache.

The stack of paper was returned to him, and was distributed among the ten men he had brought along with him, so they could sort it out in a hurry. Naturally, the research included information of the monsters present in the various grinding maps, and determining whether they were humanoid or not was easily discerned in a glance. As such, after taking a good amount of time going through everything, they did a final tally of the monsters that could qualify. Five Nights was very depressed when the results came back, as it confirmed that that Parallel World was nothing like Earth. With the recount, only 331 grinding maps contained humanoid monsters, less than what he had first presumed, and it was a good hundred less than half of what they originally had!

“331…” Five Nights reported this tally to Gu Fei and the others even as he did further calculations on his own. But Southern Lone Blade had vocalized the calculations, “331 grinding maps, if we were to go according to the recent 400,000 players that turned up for our session near the White Mill, each paying up to 99 gold coins, that would reach approximately 1.31 billion. If we were to go with the current gold coin to RMB exchange rate of 100:30, that would come up to be around 300 million dollars. What’s the percentage of your take from this?”

“20%,” Gu Fei answered.

“Then that would be around 60 million dollars at the very least,” Southern Lone Blade nodded.

“No no no no…” Five Nights had begun to shake his head. When he was handed the papers, he had already did an estimation of the profits, so of course he came prepared. Even though the sum changed from 800 to 300 million dollars, the principle remained unchanged.,Five Nights continued. “Now that we are consecutively developing 331 grinding maps, it’s entirely different from how you guys had initially developed a single map at once.You cannot just substitute the calculations in such a manner.”

“Then how should it be calculated?” Gu Fei asked.

“There’s a factor that I have always been stressing, and that is risk! And it mainly comes from the game company. Honestly, I’m not really optimistic that our deal here will have a good ending, and there’s a very good chance that the game company would call for our cessation the moment we begin, which is why we will be executing the plan differently from how you guys had first approached this business idea. Our headline of developing 331 grinding maps at once would be too impactful, so we don’t have the time to wait for players to register and sign up over a day or two. We’ll have two hours at most, and we need to start teaching right away! This is because this will be a race against the game company; perhaps at the moment we advertised our services, they had already begun holding a meeting, discussing just how they should deal with this situation. We need to hurry up and make as much money as we can before they can react. Thus, we have no idea just how much revenue can we make in this one push, because market elasticity is huge, and because we have no idea just how the game company would react to what we are doing. There’s no way we can proceed in the same manner that you guys did, waiting for 40,000 players to sign up,” Five Nights said.

“Oh? Then what will we do if the game company tells us to stop?” Gu Fei asked.

“We have no choice when that happens. Remarkable Flair has a coexisting relationship with the game company, so if they were to ask us to cease our operations on this project, we will have to comply,” Five Nights said.

“So if they ask us to stop, what would happen to those players who had already paid, but were unable to learn the efficient monster grinding routines in time?” Gu Fei asked.