659 Chapter 659 - Revenue Calculation (1/2)
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.