Chapter 108: Earn Money by Playing
Because the "internal beta account" of this game is too stuck and it will never be open to the public, there are only three and a half rich people "mingling" in the player community so far.
Half of them is Qin Guan, who became an internet celebrity and later got a lot of money from sponsors, so he can finally spend money to play in the game; the third one is Brother Lahong, who is a small self-employed boss, and the two bosses who run to the team area to call for group booking - they are the two who bought the Fraud Orb in the first place.
The so-called group package means that the boss only pays money but does not put in any effort in the process of teaming up to clear the copy, and relies on his financial ability to monopolize the props or resources produced in a copy, or even monopolize all of them.
The inner demon doesn't drop anything. The only things you can get after clearing the level are enhanced equipment and increased attribute enchantment times for the equipment. If two RMB players want to form a group, this is what they will get.
The number of enchantments obtained by the thugs cannot be transferred, but they can take other people's equipment to help enchant; it is equivalent to the boss paying the workers to help them pass the copy in order to obtain eleven times to enchant the equipment.
From the perspective of ordinary players, this is really a waste of money, but from the perspective of RMB players, this is a good deal... After all, rich people may be lazy or stupid, but they rarely don't know how to calculate. They both know that if they don't find a strong worker, it will be difficult for them to pass the level by themselves...
Yang Ying, who had become a semi-professional gamer and made a little money from the game, and Tang Jia, a poor college student, ran up to the two bosses. The boss' eyes lit up when he recognized them and he immediately took the initiative to greet them: "Sister Ying, Soft Candy, are you willing to take us? If nine with two is inconvenient, we can take ten with one. Orange Cat and I will charter a separate group."
This is where the relationship between bosses and employees in games is different from that in reality... bosses who spend money are usually easier to talk to than employees.
Yang Ying and Tang Jia were originally here to work and earn some pocket money. After they whispered a few words to each other, Tang Jia said, "Then you two wait a moment. I'll ask Qingyue for her opinion."
When the two bosses heard that they could hire Enbuteng to work, they nodded repeatedly: "Okay, okay!"
Tang Jia ran to find En Bu Zeng and muttered to herself for a while, and En Bu Zeng followed Tang Jia over...
"It's really hard to lead two with nine now, but we can give it a try with one with ten." Entropy said, "But I can't promise to give you all the enchantment times. If any of our teammates want to enchant their equipment by themselves, then we won't sell them their times. Do you agree?"
It is difficult to say whether it is cost-effective to buy a total of eleven enchantments for 2,100 RMB without a market price to refer to. For players who are willing to earn RMB, it must be a good thing to make 200 RMB by playing a copy, but for players who are unwilling to make this money, it is a loss-making business.
The two bosses were obviously ready to bargain. They discussed it head to head. The boss with the ID "You Zhi Gan Mao" nodded and said, "Okay, then how about this? If you are willing to sell the enchantment times after the game, I will give you a red envelope on the spot. If you are not willing, forget it. What do you think?"
"That's it." En Buzeng nodded, turned to Yang Ying and said, "Sister Ying, gather a team, and let's take the orange cat boss through it first."
Most of the friends know Yang Ying's real-life situation. His father ran away, his mother has no job, and he has a younger brother who ran away from home because he didn't want to study. He used to work for less than 4,000 yuan a month and could barely make ends meet. He quit his job and became a semi-professional gamer, only then was he able to save some money.
If this weekend's activity could become a stable source of income, not only would Yang Ying's financial situation be improved, but En Bu Zeng and Tang Jia would also be able to earn some extra living expenses... Their families are not very wealthy, especially Tang Jia. If she hadn't sold the game coins she earned from buying two helmets last month, she would have had to eat dirt for the next half month.
Of course, Yang Ying was made the team leader not entirely out of sympathy, but because Yang Ying, who had a stable online time and a cheerful and open-minded temper, knew more people than anyone else and had a very good relationship with others.
Yang Ying happily searched for her online acquaintances and soon gathered workers who were willing to come and make money. She did not disappoint Enbuteng's expectations. Not only did she attract acquaintances like Jialuo who usually followed them, but also Qin Guan's warrior player Sang Yeluole and Lahongge's walker player Shenmi Xuexi were brought to her...
When the event dungeon was first opened last week, many players died at the step of entering the dungeon. After all their immediate family members were scolded on the forum for a whole week, the crappy planner seemed to be fed up with the scolding and made some slight improvements. Although the dungeon is still as terrible as before, at least the process of entering the dungeon is not so difficult. Four out of five times of trying to hit the "dungeon entrance" can successfully enter the dungeon.
The number of enchantments obtained after clearing the level does not necessarily allow you to give a desired enchantment to a certain piece of equipment - after clearing the level, Lord Yang (his projection) will appear in the dungeon. Talk to Lord Yang to use the number of enchantments and select equipment, and three enchantment options will pop up. Players can choose one of these three enchantment effects.
This should naturally be a point of criticism, but players did not criticize it, and the reason is very simple... the randomly generated enchantment effects are all useful terms, unlike those forced-to-play games that contain a bunch of garbage terms that force players to wash them endlessly.
On the first night of the cooperation, the two bosses each organized two clearance groups, enchanted all their own equipment, and agreed to continue next week - if the attributes they enchanted this time were not to their liking, or if they got new equipment, they must come again.
After clearing Hal's Inner Demon copy four times, there was still more than an hour (game time) before dawn in the game, so Yang Ying prepared to pull his teammates to open up Tattle's Inner Demon copy - the team pulled together when there is money to be made is often an excellent one, and it would be a pity to disband such a team of all kings.
Before Yang Ying could talk to her teammates about moving to open up new land, a bone claw was placed on her shoulder.
Yang Ying turned around and saw a skull face very close to him.
Ou Yan came over at some point, looked at Yang Ying firmly, and said in a sonorous and powerful voice: "I'll book a tour too."
Including Yang Ying, all ten strong workers were confused...
"Boss Ouyou also needs to charter a group?!" Sister Jialuo, one of the workers, was shocked.
Ou Yan didn't say anything, just stared at Yang Ying, the team leader.
No matter how awesome he is, he can't possibly clear the game alone... Instead of looking for a team and spending time getting used to it now, it would be better to find an existing team and be the boss.
"There is money to be made, why are you talking nonsense? Keep going!" Tang Jia waved his bone claws heroically.
Yang Ying couldn't help laughing. As he added Big Boss Ou to the team, he said, "That's right. Come on, everyone concentrate. We must not embarrass ourselves in front of Big Boss Ou. Let's play this dungeon well and try to pass it without making any mistakes!"
After that, she didn't forget to remind Tang Jia: "Don't get carried away when you make money. Buy less Hanfu, otherwise I'll have to hear you complain about eating dirt every day in the second half of the month."
Tang Jia felt guilty when she mentioned this, and her voice became soft: "I know, Sister Ying..."
The nanny-level guide to Howl's Inner Demon, a collaboration between Miaobishenghua and Enbuteng, has been posted on the forum. Not only does it clearly describe the details of how to deal with the monster, but Miaobishenghua, who has a solid foundation in painting, also drew a schematic diagram of the positions, a route map of movement, and the weak points where the monsters are slow to counterattack when attacked.
But even with such a detailed and thorough nanny-level strategy... still not all player teams can successfully pass the level.
The reason is very simple. When ordinary players form a team, it is impossible to exclude all the slackers among their friends and relatives. In a team of eleven people, there will inevitably be two clumsy players who drag the team down.
Entropy does not increase. It is not safe for a strong player to bring two with nine players, and it is okay for a strong player to bring one with ten players. Ordinary players who are already far behind the first echelon (limited player group) have to bring one or two players who drag them down. Whether they can pass the level or not cannot be said to depend on luck, but on fate...
If it is a working team that is purely for making money, then there is no need for others to say anything, the players who know that their level is not enough will refuse to join the team - most online game players have normal brains. It would be very unpleasant to be criticized for joining the team as a slacker.
Yang Ying's team was striving to achieve the zero-error clearance achievement, and the team of players who were also squatting in the Hal Heart Demon team area was annihilated miserably ...
When Yang Ying's team of workers came out of the dungeon, several players rushed over and said, "Sister Ying, are you still bringing people into your team? I want to form a group too!"
"Me too, me too!"
"This...it's almost dawn in the game, and there's no time left." Yang Ying didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
"It's okay, let's arrange the time for next week's event first. We came here first, so can you give us priority?" The players who wanted to spend money to be the boss said enthusiastically.
Yang Ying had no reason to turn down the offer, so she immediately exchanged WeChat accounts with those who wanted to make an appointment...
“That’s great.”
A fixed team of players was wiped out several times and finally successfully passed the level before the end of the event. When they came out, they saw Yang Ying's team, which had been reserved for players who wanted to be bosses, and stood there for a long time with complicated expressions.
"We're going to start coaching the boss next week too?" one team member said to his companions with envy.
Hal's inner demon fears the most is mistakes and casualties, so everyone has to be careful to save their lives and not be killed instantly; if they can maintain a low error rate for about ten minutes and concentrate their fire on knocking off the two limbs that emerge from the monster's chest without losing anyone, the next monster will be a cakewalk.
However, the low error requirement within ten minutes has blocked most player teams - this game is a holographic panoramic game. The oppressive feeling of monsters and the tense feeling of battle are completely different from traditional PC games and console games, and it really tests the psychological quality of the players.
Another team member was very dissatisfied with the team member who always gave away heads at the beginning of the game, and said impatiently: "With the current team strength, why should we lead? Is the team boss coming in to see the joke? At least make sure that we don't lose players at the beginning of the game!"
"That's right. We were struggling to fight to begin with, and with one person dead, our output was even less than what we had." Another team member, full of resentment, said, "We have too many walkers on our team. We should have more warriors. Why did we kick Sangsang away at that time?"
The captain was originally very uncomfortable when he saw that the warrior player in Yang Ying's team, who was dug up by me to play with Vanilla Pudding and Miaobishenghua, had lost his leaves. Hearing this, he said unhappily, "Is it interesting to talk about this now? Didn't you all dislike that warriors only had burst damage but no sustained output, and asked me to replace Sangsang?"
The players in this fixed team all fell silent.
The warrior class's Blade Storm and Blade Flurry can both cause a lot of damage in a short period of time, but the CD of these two skills is relatively long, and the continuous output damage is indeed not as good as that of the Walker, whose stab and backstab skills have very short CDs and higher flat attack damage.
Well... the real reason is that Blade Storm and Blade Flurry are powerful skill runes that control the overall movement of the player's skeleton character, which consume a lot of available mental power, so the CD is long; while inefficient skill runes such as Stab and Backstab only control the arm force and hitting angle of the player's skeleton character, which consume less available mental power, so the CD is short.
Players have no concept of mental strength at all. From the perspective of playing the game, players must only consider the practicality of skills.
The models of wild monsters in this game are all very large. Once you find the correct strategy and the knight player's four skills can effectively restrict the monsters' movements and they can stand still and output safely, the walker player's continuous damage output advantage will far exceed that of the warrior.
Because of their past friendship, they didn't say they were going to kick Sangsang out when he switched to a warrior at first. But after two more days of team-hunting, the people in the team became increasingly intolerant - whether it was clearing the spider's nest or the poisonous fog swamp, Sangsang's (the mulberry leaves had fallen) total output was only two-thirds of that of a walker player.
The efficiency of killing monsters affects everyone's income, which is the real income that can be converted into RMB. Who can tolerate such a slacker in the team who not only drags the team down but also has to share the same money with everyone else?
At that time, Sangsang was kicked out and replaced by a traveler player whom he met during the first expedition mission. No one said a word for Sangsang.
In dungeons, where there is no safe way to stand and output, and everyone must keep moving and take advantage of the opportunities to output, the importance of warrior players increases sharply, but the warriors in their team have already belonged to others - not only do they not play with them when spawning monsters, they also don't play with them when doing dungeons.
"Forget it." An old team member sighed and said, "We can't go down the path of clearing dungeons and leading the boss, so let's go back and honestly clear wild monsters. We'll talk about it after the game is publicly tested and we can recruit new players."
The captain didn't say anything else, waved his hand, and led the team to kill monsters.
At dawn in the game, the weekend Heart Demon event officially ended, and the players gathered in the Hal Heart Demon team area logged off, or killed monsters to complete tasks.
Westham and Wagner got up before daybreak.
The guest room that the black magician Yang had arranged for him to stay in was quite nice, even better than his home in Innadri, but Wagner did not have a peaceful night...
On the one hand, he was worried about the future of himself and his family, and worried about his wife and children who were waiting for him at home. On the other hand, the magic of this big house was too active, stimulating him to have nightmares as soon as he closed his eyes.
Magic is poisonous, and a serious knight like Wagner would never touch meditation that could possibly infect people with the poison of magic; but there was a black magician squatting across the wall, and this black magician seemed not afraid of losing control and meditated frequently, which was very torturous.
Not in the mood to worry about whether others were out of control, Wagner got out of bed, stepped on the wooden slippers that were already in the room, washed up at the well in the yard, and then started to do the work that Yang had asked him to do last night...
As he was washing and scrubbing numbly in the yard, the street outside gradually became lively and human voices could be heard even through the courtyard wall; there were couples quarreling early in the morning, children crying for candy, and knife sharpeners hawking their wares on the street, sharpening scissors and kitchen knives for people.
Wagner couldn't help but sigh.
He was about to retire in a few years, and if nothing unexpected happened and he could retire successfully with his pension, he had planned to sell the house in Inadele and move to a small town with his wife - the prices in Inadele were too expensive, and if they moved to a small town, the gas bills and other living expenses they saved would be enough to continue to support his children's studies in a private classroom in Inadele.
Royal and aristocratic colleges, which require parents with respectable enough status to send their children to, are out of reach and beyond expectation. Wagner cannot afford high-level colleges that require large tuition fees. The level of workers' schools is too poor. For middle-class income earners like Wagner who have a certain social status, sending their children to private classrooms is the best option.
This so-called private classroom... is a bit like the cram school in the Chinese dimension. It is usually opened by intellectuals with a higher level of education. It only enrolls dozens of students and charges tuition fees that are higher than those of workers' schools but lower than those of private colleges. It provides wholesale tutoring to these students. The competition to be a tutor for nobles is too fierce. If the losers in the competition don't have the connections to squeeze into senior colleges, the only option is to open a private classroom.
As for the royal academy and the aristocratic academy, ordinary intellectuals cannot enter... Without a sufficiently impressive identity, you can't even hold your head up in front of the students.
Westham also has private classrooms, but the quality is not very good. It can only teach the children who enter school to read and write newspapers, and learn some arithmetic and mathematical formulas, so that these children can be more competitive in finding jobs when they are fifteen or sixteen years old than those who don’t even know their own names.
Wagner knew very well that as a foreigner of his generation, it would be difficult for him to achieve better success in the Rhine Kingdom, so he could only place his hopes on the next generation; he didn't even care whether his family's knight title would be taken away by others, as long as he could get a full pension and guarantee his children's tuition.
And now...his spiritual sustenance is crumbling.
Wagner was lost in thought as he mechanically washed the sofa covers and curtains that Yang had asked him to wash. When it was time to hang them out to dry, he suddenly came to his senses and noticed the quality of the fabrics of these sofa covers and curtains.
"This is... a cloth for the dead? A cloth for the dead that is better than the ones that appear on the market in Innadri?"
Wagner touched the thick, solid fabric with superb printing and dyeing techniques. After being shocked, he couldn't help but secretly criticize the Nightmare Butcher's extravagance - Adela III's daily clothes might not be made of such good material, and Yang actually used such good cloth to make sofa covers and curtains!
Wagner had seen good things and his vision was truly authentic... The curtains, sofa covers and other things used in the place where Yang Qiu was going to live naturally could not be clearance items sold at low prices, but new autumn models purchased on Taobao - hot-selling models that had withstood the test of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, with impeccable materials and printing and dyeing, high-end and classy, low-key and gorgeous.
Wagner couldn't help but calculate how much tuition these curtains and sofa covers could pay for his children, and he felt quite bored...
He was having a hard time when Yang, who for some reason didn't sleep well but stayed in the living room all night, opened the window and called out to him, "Wagner, go to 101 Town Avenue and bring us three breakfasts."
Wagner subconsciously pointed at his nose and asked, "Let me go?"
"Yes, go ahead." Yang took out a stack of copper coins and stacked them on the windowsill. "You ask the waiter there to bring you three standard meals. Don't make Lowell's meal too spicy."
Wagner was annoyed again... He didn't know whether he was glad that Yang gave him freedom and even let him go out alone, or that this guy was so conceited and powerful that he didn't worry at all that Wagner would take the opportunity to escape.
He certainly wouldn't be stupid enough to try to escape. A spellcaster who built a wizard tower could control an entire territory. Even if Yang, a high-level black magician who had been rampant on the continent for hundreds of years, didn't build a wizard tower, it wouldn't be a big problem for him to control Westram.
The only possibility for him to escape from Westram was that the black magician Yang had done something to him and let him go on purpose.
Wagner took the copper coin silently and went out alone. Not long after walking along the alley, he saw the street sign of the town's main avenue.
He passed this street yesterday when he was tied up and thrown on horseback and dragged into the town. At that time, he saw that many buildings in this street were being renovated. Now when he walked out onto the street to take a look, he saw that many buildings had isolation zones made of wooden boards and stones, and many men and women townspeople were busy in the isolation zones, moving out some broken brick and stone waste and pushing them away with carts.
Wagner had never been to Westham before, and was not impressed by the unrecognizable state of this well-known red-light district. He just glanced at it casually, then walked forward according to the house numbers hung on the walls of the buildings facing the street, looking for No. 101 as Yang had mentioned.
After taking a few steps... Wagner stopped, turned his head suddenly, and looked to his left in astonishment.
Across the street, there was a building that was being renovated, and the people coming in and out of the door were not townspeople, but ghosts? !
Wagner's mouth opened uncontrollably.
Wagner was very familiar with some parts of the outfits of these undead... This undead had a wristband that originally belonged to their city defense army wrapped with a strap on his arm, and that undead had a leg guard that originally belonged to their city defense army fixed with a leather buckle on his trousers.
An undead was pushing a cart full of construction waste and blending into the group of townspeople to deliver the waste. The helmet on his head had the family crest of the Bartles family clearly engraved on it - which was also the flag emblem of the Innadri city defense force.
There was no doubt that these were the same undead that had attacked them yesterday, robbed them, and captured them, horses and people alike.
Wagner held his head in his hands, and seemed to hear the sound of his worldview shattering in his ears.
Not only will these undead spirits obey Yang's orders and fight for Rex, they will also work for Rex like the townspeople? !
Gods, was his previous knowledge of the dark creatures wrong? Was the news in the newspaper a lie?!
