Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 262 - 271 Continuous Negative Emotion Entries

Chapter 262: Chapter 271 Continuous Negative Emotion Entries

Three o’clock in the morning.

Instructor Ding yawned, rubbed his bleary eyes, and said, "Alright guys, we finally finished... I can’t take it anymore, off to sleep!

"I’m out, I’m out, everyone should get some rest early."

No sooner had his words fallen than the live broadcast screen went black.

Many viewers in the live broadcast room also couldn’t take the late night anymore.

Prior to this, no matter when Instructor Ding ended his stream, there would be barrage comments like: "Going to sleep so early, you live in luxury, huh?"

Or ones like "big streamer" or "live-streaming civil servant."

But this time, there were noticeably fewer viewers leaving similar comments, with "88" or "886" filling the screen, clearly indicating that the continuous seven hours of battle had made many viewers sleepy as well.

Before going offline, Instructor Ding deeply regretted his decision to enter this novice dungeon at 11:20 PM and set the flag "I’ll go offline after finishing this dungeon."

That took over three hours!

When Instructor Ding first entered the dungeon named "Fel Rift," he thought that it would take at most one hour to clear it because the map didn’t seem very large, and there were only four bosses.

If everything went smoothly, it was even possible to clear it in 30 minutes.

However, the subsequent battle experience struck Instructor Ding like a blow to the head!

First, the mechanics of the first boss were on par with those of a guild dungeon entrance boss. With no plugins for alerts, the five of them had to figure out the mechanics while fighting, and it took them about half an hour to overcome it.

After defeating that boss, everyone was happy, thinking that the team had conquered the hardest boss.

As they progressed, they found that the subsequent bosses were just as damn difficult!

Even the regular enemies got tougher and tougher!

Midway through the dungeon, there was a wave of mobs that wiped them more than a dozen times.

These mobs looked ordinary, just situated in a deep pit before the third boss, roughly divided into four groups. Each group contained three different types of creatures, consisting of the Fel Orcs, which summoned demons, the High-rank Demon wielding a big chopper, and two Demon Imps.

Instructor Ding and his group had planned to clear them methodically but once the fight started, they realized that this group of mobs was as tough as a boss!

The High-rank Demon wielding a big chopper had a lot of health, and its sweeping strikes attack was particularly unfriendly to melee DPS classes, easily leading them to be downed in one wrong move.

The Demon Imps’ Fireball Technique did high damage; hitting the tank, who didn’t have much resistance at that point, caused his health to plummet.

But the worst part was, the Evil Beastman Sorcerers had the thickest health, they would randomly cast Rain of Fire onto the crowd, and every so often they would open a portal to summon new High-rank Demons!

Since the portals and Rain of Fire couldn’t be interrupted, the only option was to kill the Fel Orcs.

With insufficient DPS, Instructor Ding’s team on average needed to wipe once or twice just to clear a wave of mobs.

After clearing half of them, they tried to take a shortcut and bypass the remaining mobs to start the boss fight. But as soon as they engaged the boss, all the remaining mobs in the room converged on them!

Needless to say, it resulted in another wipe.

And what was even more frustrating was that, after they had finally killed the fourth boss after more than two hours, thinking they were about to complete the dungeon, a yellow exclamation point popped up above the head of the NPC they had rescued.

Instructor Ding thought it was a task like "take a message to an NPC outside the dungeon," but then he got a look at it and his face went dark.

The quest required players to defeat another hidden boss within the dungeon!

Instructor Ding looked closely at the story and realized that in this rift, there were four evil sorcerers of different races, each conducting dreadful summoning experiments.

Although they defeated these four evil sorcerers, the sorcerers activated the summoning circle in the center of the dungeon with their blood before dying, and a powerful demon was about to be summoned.

Although Instructor Ding and his companions were demons too, they were the "good" kind of demons in the story, so naturally, they felt obligated to intervene.

It wasn’t because completing the quest would reward them with a blue gear piece with very attractive stats.

So, the five of them headed to the center of the map to face the final boss of the dungeon, and this wipe lasted nearly forty minutes.

When they finally managed to defeat this hidden boss, the group was so overcome with emotion, they almost wanted to cry.

They were tears of extreme joy!

Happy? Sure, but not by much.

Because the whole process was just too tormenting!

All five players were veterans, and it’s hard to say whether that was good or bad.

If there had been one or two new players among them, they probably wouldn’t have been able to stand it and would’ve bailed early on, let alone stick it out until three in the morning to clear the entire instance. But on the flip side, everyone could have been freed from the ordeal earlier...

As for the experience points awarded by the instance, that was an even greater heartache—going in at level 12 and coming out at level 15.

If those three-plus hours had been spent leveling up outside, they definitely would have advanced much faster.

Of course, that’s because Instructor Ding and his team wiped too many times, dragging out the duration. If they had cleared the instance in one go, perhaps they could have completed it in 30 minutes, and then the experience gain would have been considerable.

But the problem is, with the instance’s difficulty laid out there, what kind of godly players would be able to clear it in one go?

I’m afraid the only hope is to come back later with a high-level character to carry a low-level one.

...

Many of the first batch of players to enter the game have gone to sleep, of course, there are a few die-hard grinders who are still up all night battling on.

However, the number of complaints about "Shadow World" online was growing!

Clearly, just the difficulty of the game’s opening was enough to deter a significant number of players!

The level 6 monsters deterred a group of lone-wolf players who didn’t want to team up with strangers, and the first instance deterred many new players with average skills.

And this is all before reaching level 20! A lot of players had already quit.

This was obviously a very bad sign.

MMORPGs rely on the number of players online, because the more players online, the better the experience. Moreover, the longer the game time, the more inertia is formed, and the stronger the player retention.

Maybe one or two quitting points seem trivial, but when players haven’t formed enough attachment and they drop the game in frustration, they might never pick it up again.

And the quitting of one group of players further affects the gaming experience of others.

In extreme cases, if low-level players can’t go on and leave in droves, those low-level players who are still in the game may find it impossible to form teams for outdoor monster-killing or complete high-difficulty tasks, which could trigger another round of deterrence.

Over time, low-level areas turn into ghost servers first. The experience for new players becomes extremely poor, barely able to progress without a high-level character’s assistance. And without fresh blood, the experience of max-level players will also worsen, leading to a full-scale collapse of the game.

On the first official day of "Shadow World," many players expressed such concerns.

But as usual, Nitiandang did not respond in any way to this.

...

...

January 3rd, Saturday night.

Lilith was lying comfortably in a massage chair, looking through backend data of "Shadow World" on a laptop handed to her by Gu Fan.

These days were the New Year’s holiday, but the concurrent online numbers of "Shadow World" hadn’t shown any significant growth and in fact, there had been a slight decline.

This was enough to show that her many measures had been effective.

Judging from the collection of negative emotions, this was indeed the case! At this point, "Shadow World" had accumulated over three million negative emotions in just one week and the number was still rising at a steady pace!

The speed at which these negative emotions were collected truly pleased Lilith.

You should know, the single-player games they made before generally hovered around five or six hundred thousand negative emotions at first wave collection.

"Shadow World," although it didn’t generate a particularly large amount of negative emotions in a single instance, prevailed in its lasting effect. The deterrence it exerted on players was all-encompassing and without blind spots.

What’s even more valuable is that even if players have spent a long time on the game and have built up a tolerance and resistance to the deterrence mechanisms, there will always be more deterrence waiting for them later on.

Every time old players feel they have adapted to the game’s intensity and think the fun is about to begin...

Sorry, but Lady Lilith is always waiting ahead.