Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 547 - 530: The More You Draw, The More Absurd It Gets

Chapter 547: Chapter 530: The More You Draw, The More Absurd It Gets

"Pfft."

Lilith couldn’t help herself and almost laughed out loud.

It must be said that the players were quite creative—the shift from "Nine Swords" to "One Sword" was quite a straightforward transition.

"At least high-end computers can handle it, making the Myriad Editor playable to some extent. The programmers at Shengjing Group do have some skill," Lilith remarked.

Gu Fan nodded, "Yes, high-end computers can play it.

"But there lies a small paradox.

"The main target of the game is still mobile casual players, who can’t play on mobile devices; while those with high-end computers can indeed play, they don’t really like this type of game."

It was clear Gu Fan was putting it mildly—those with high-end computers barely tolerating this type of game was already quite something.

Lilith asked, "Why don’t they like it?

"Isn’t the game developed according to AAA standards?"

Gu Fan nodded, "Yes, it’s developed up to the hardware standards of AAA titles, but the gameplay isn’t.

"This game claims to combine the best of both worlds, so where exactly does each excel?

"The strength of AAA titles is their visual performance and rich game content; while the strength of mobile games is cross-platform interoperability, attracting a large volume of casual players, and the ability to earn excessive profits through a free-to-play, pay-to-win model.

"If you adopt the visual presentation of mobile games and the pricing model and hardcore gameplay of AAA titles, isn’t that just a collection of drawbacks from both?

"That would just die even faster.

"So at first glance, ’Nine Swords’ does what it set out to do: its graphics match AAA titles, it has an open-world large map, and the map is filled with puzzle elements and various content.

"At the same time, it includes some content related to traditional culture, such as general knowledge quizzes and more.

"In terms of monetization models, ’Nine Swords’ also turned various characters from the original novel into gacha characters for players to draw.

"But the problem is that the people at Shengjing Group started with pay-to-win mobile games and they lack experience in creating open-world and puzzle content, and the results aren’t great.

"The game might just be comparable to a canned game full of question marks, if not worse.

"For those with high-end computers, this type of game content is quite discouraging.

"Furthermore, there were issues in character planning in ’Nine Swords.’

"Although there are quite a few characters in the game, the number isn’t as large as in Three Kingdoms or popular anime IP.

"There are only about five or six top-tier masters, a dozen first-rate masters, and the rest are minor characters.

"With these numbers, it’s insufficient to support a large pool of characters.

"Therefore, initially, Shengjing Group could only use some minor characters from the original story as featured characters in the UP pool, but the players were not buying it.

"Shengjing Group has its reasons—if they sold the top-tier characters right off the bat, what would they sell later? So, this creates a structural contradiction."

Lilith suddenly got a blind spot, "Wait, didn’t another company also create a card game? That requires different cards, right? How did they solve it?"

Gu Fan explained, "Their solution is simple, providing multiple cards for the same character.

"For example, characters from different stages can have different cards, or you can add a prefix like ’Ghost’ or ’God.’

"President Li, I know what you’re wondering, why can’t Shengjing Group’s ’Nine Swords’ do the same?

"Because their ’Nine Swords’ isn’t a card game, it’s an open-world game.

"In card games, a common card and a God Card, even if for the same person, can have a significant distinctiveness.

"Different original art and skills are completely acceptable to players.

"But it’s different for open-world games; the same person being split into four-star characters and five-star characters with vastly different strengths feels too bizarre.

"So after much consideration, Shengjing Group had to abandon this approach.

"In fact, Shengjing Group had previously used the ’Nine Swords’ IP for other games, which were quite successful. But back then, they were MMORPGs where players were passersby and the powerful martial arts masters were NPCs or dungeon bosses in the game.

"So, in MMORPGs, this wasn’t a problem at all."

"Unfortunately, in this open-world mobile game, this issue became unsolvable."

Lilith nodded in realization, "Hmm... what happened next?"

"There is no ’what happened next’!" Gu Fan continued.

"This game actually pleased no one—not the original story fans, not the character fans, not the MMPRPG players, not the single-player game fans, not the mobile game players, not the younger crowd, and definitely not the middle-aged men."

"It almost crashed upon launch as players came up with all sorts of memes and jokes about it."

"Obviously, Shengjing Group couldn’t tolerate their billions going down the drain, so they scrambled around for a long time, claiming to redo and majorly overhaul the game multiple times, but..."

"The outcome is not hard to guess."

Lilith nodded, "Okay, okay, it sounds like there are indeed lessons to be learned from Shengjing Group.

"What we need to do is learn from the advanced experience of ’Nine Swords,’ and of course, we must also make some improvements.

"At the very least... we need to lure in more players initially."

In Lilith’s view, although ’Nine Swords’ was a good game, it suffered from having too few players.

If not enough players are lured in at the beginning to produce abundant negative emotions, wouldn’t all the effort be in vain?

Pigs still need to be fattened before slaughtering.

Players also need to be lured in before being discouraged.

But, then again, this shouldn’t be too hard.

Times have changed, and the Myriad Editor isn’t as problematic as it used to be.

Nitiandang’s latest games have all been developed using the Myriad Editor. Although it’s still challenging to optimize it perfectly for mobile devices, at least it’s not directly turning players away anymore.

In this regard, it’s enough to perform normally.

The key is to continue implementing Shengjing Group’s inconsistent design philosophy, where both single-player and mobile game players need to find their own unique misery after initially feeling joyful.

That still requires a high level of skill.

"So, Gu Fan, do you have any good ideas about the gacha mechanics?

"I’ve thought about it over and over," Lilith said earnestly, "and always felt this issue was rather tricky."

The so-called ’gacha mechanic’ issue was the main reason Lilith had previously avoided making any pay-to-win mobile games.

If we go by how it feels for the players, the pay-to-win gacha system is actually quite frustrating and should generate lots of negative emotional value.

But in reality, Hell’s current calculation of negative emotions is quite complicated.

Almost all games with pay-to-win gacha aren’t a secret anymore because the law requires clear disclosure of the odds, so there’s a small guaranteed payout at a certain point, a larger guaranteed payout at another, and specific probabilities of pulling different characters are well defined.

Players are quite aware of it.

Certainly, some games do pure random draws, or have no protection mechanisms at all, which at first glance, might seem more likely to cause player frustration.

However, when players dive into these kinds of pools, they also prepare themselves mentally, which results in a counterbalancing effect.

Statistically, as long as the sample size is large enough, the final probability will approach the theoretical value very closely, thus the system doesn’t generate much negative emotional value.

It’s what many players summarize with the self-coined ’Conservation of Luck Law.’

Of course, this law is baseless, without any theoretical or data backing, but it does reflect the mentality of some players where the negative and positive emotions of unlucky people and Whales tend to cancel each other out.

To make this new game successful, the first thing to tackle is this issue with the gacha mechanism.

Gu Fan pondered for a moment, then said, "President Li, I do have an idea.

"If we follow the usual mobile game strategy, no matter whether we use false or true probabilities, the outcomes won’t differ much.

"We need a system that increasingly dissatisfies everyone in order to continuously harvest negative emotions.

"So... President Li, what do you think about letting players become increasingly unlucky the more they draw?"

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