September 10th, Monday.
Yan Qi sat down at his workstation, still yawning.
Over the weekend, he had spent some time finally completing all the updated content of “Eternal Samsara.”
Based on the information currently available, the entire game progression of “Eternal Samsara” highly overlapped with “Turn Back to Shore.” The major scenes were basically the same, except that the appearance and skills of monsters, as well as the art style and routes of the scenes, had undergone some changes.
The entire scene progression of “Turn Back to Shore” could basically be divided into the initial village, ghost town, Ghost Gate, Yellow Springs Road, Three-Crossing River, Forgetting River (Bridge of Helplessness), Homesick Platform (Three Lives Stone), Yama’s Main Hall, Six Paths of Reincarnation, Avici Hell, and a few other scenes updated in previous DLCs for “Eternal Samsara.”
“Eternal Samsara” started directly from the Yellow Springs Road, with the first part of content updated to the Bridge of Helplessness.
The end of the Bridge of Helplessness was still used as a scene for a boss battle, but after defeating Boss Lady Meng Po, players couldn’t continue. Although the teleportation point was activated, the white misty door behind Lady Meng Po hadn’t opened, clearly waiting for the next update.
This new version of Lady Meng Po had given Yan Qi quite a bit of suffering.
The changes to the boss were similar to other minor enemies: compared to the original version, the new Lady Meng Po was no longer set in a frenzied state, her desire to attack had decreased, and she maintained rationality according to the setup. However, her AI seemed to have been improved, making her combo attacks and instant-kill throw techniques more threatening.
Yan Qi felt that the current combat experience in “Eternal Samsara” was very difficult, but the enjoyment hadn’t increased—it had actually decreased.
He couldn’t quite tell whether it was because the numerical values hadn’t been properly set, resulting in the Martial God’s damage being somewhat ineffective, or because he had actually grown tired of “Turn Back to Shore’s” combat style, and this fatigue had completely erupted in “Eternal Samsara.”
After all, “Eternal Samsara” was entirely reusing game scenes from “Turn Back to Shore.”
If there had been completely new game scenes and monsters, even reusing the previous combat system would still provide a fresh combat experience.
But now, with the same things over and over again, even though the appearance of monsters had changed somewhat, it still felt like playing New Game Plus, which was relatively monotonous for many veteran players.
Yan Qi’s thoughts were clearly not isolated. Over the weekend, players online had also engaged in fierce debates about “Eternal Samsara,” arguing heatedly.
The conflict between core players and ordinary players erupted instantly.
In fact, when “Turn Back to Shore” was first released, this conflict had already shown signs.
Core players sought higher difficulty challenges. They hoped their superior skills would set them apart from ordinary players, so the harder the game, the better—the fewer people who completed it, the better. The higher the challenge, the more it highlighted their skills.
Ordinary players, on the other hand, didn’t have that patience. They only wanted to experience a limited degree of challenge while maintaining gameplay. Once the difficulty of the challenge became too high, they would lose patience and become frustrated.
So, this situation often occurred: ordinary players felt the difficulty was too high and complained online, while core players mocked them, saying the game wasn’t meant for those with poor skills in the first place, leading to disputes.
When “Turn Back to Shore” was released, there had already been one such argument, but that dispute was resolved by Qiao Laoshi’s video.
“Players with poor skills can better understand the true essence of the game, because struggling in the sea of suffering allows them to become one with the protagonist’s experience.”
This statement gave ordinary players a reason to continue playing, which was why “Turn Back to Shore” could bridge the demands of both types of players and become a classic.
But “Eternal Samsara” seemed unable to use this excuse anymore.
Because the numerical difficulty of “Eternal Samsara” had actually exceeded the threshold of what ordinary players could bear, and they no longer had the patience to experience the so-called true essence of the game.
Thus, ordinary players who complained about the numerical design of the game and core players who wanted the game to be as difficult as possible engaged in debate.
Ordinary players believed that games were meant to serve the masses, and if most people couldn’t derive enjoyment from them, then it was undoubtedly a failed game. The success of “Turn Back to Shore” was once due to its balance between difficulty and enjoyment, but “Eternal Samsara” hadn’t achieved this.
Core players believed that the “Turn Back to Shore” series had always been a high-difficulty action game. Given that the main game had already catered to ordinary players, increasing the difficulty in the DLC and giving players a higher challenge was entirely justified behavior. Those with poor skills and fragile hearts didn’t have to play.
These two types of players argued until they were red in the face.
Additionally, another group of players was researching that special parrying mechanism.
Many players had discovered that the game indeed triggered a special parrying mechanism, with an extremely small probability of activation only after wielding just the demon sword and dying frequently many times.
After triggering, there would be a certain damage reduction effect, but it wouldn’t provide complete immunity. Because the damage from monsters in the game was extremely high, the significance of this damage reduction was really minimal.
However, this automatic parrying mechanism would change as the game progressed: the probability of parrying became more frequent, and the damage reduction effect gradually increased.
But since all of the game’s content hadn’t been released yet, what it would become at the highest stage remained unknown.
So players speculated whether this parrying mechanism might be related to the new combat system.
In an instant, the updated content of “Eternal Samsara” caused enormous controversy, gaining extremely high discussion and attention online.
Yan Qi sat at his workstation, both consuming the online drama and checking work reports and plans submitted by various departments.
“Tenda is truly a company with constant heat. Even something as sure as releasing DLC can be made so breathtaking.”
“I’ve seen it all now.”
“Always able to dance repeatedly on the edge of failure, and the key is that until the very last second, you can never tell whether they’re actually failing or performing some kind of performance art for everyone.”
“Anyway, I’ll just watch this drama rationally.”
“It’s just a DLC, not enough to make Tenda fall from grace.”
Logically, when a game’s main body has already succeeded, as long as the DLC isn’t priced too unreasonably and isn’t made too poorly, it basically won’t be criticized.
But the current situation of “Eternal Samsara” was obviously not like a typical DLC.
Recently, there had been many comments online about “Tenda falling from grace,” indicating that the update of “Eternal Samsara” hadn’t pleased enough “Turn Back to Shore” players.
Some of these people were stirring up trouble, while others were genuinely disappointed with this highly anticipated DLC.
But in any case, it was just an inexpensive DLC after all. Yan Qi felt that talking about “falling from grace” seemed a bit premature.
Having seen quite a few of Tenda’s bold moves, Yan Qi thought it was better to wait until the entire DLC was completely updated, then analyze it carefully before making a final judgment.
At this point, Yan Qi noticed a new announcement on the Morning Dew gaming platform.
“Hmm? Game Connoisseur?”
When he first saw this announcement, Yan Qi didn’t think much of it.
After all, the concept of “connoisseur” exists on many gaming platforms and even movie review websites; it’s not uncommon.
The so-called “connoisseur” simply means giving quality users certain rights, allowing them to become opinion leaders, influencing other users’ first impressions of a certain game or movie to some extent.
The job of these connoisseurs is to write reviews, enriching the content on the platform.
As a platform where players have high autonomy and can even remove games from the shelf, it was entirely normal for the Morning Dew gaming platform to introduce this connoisseur system.
Yan Qi initially thought this was normal, but after carefully reading the content of the announcement, he was shocked.
Because the Morning Dew gaming platform’s connoisseur was completely different from connoisseurs on other platforms!
…
The announcement clearly outlined the detailed rules of the entire connoisseur system.
First was the number of connoisseurs: one ten-thousandth of the platform’s monthly active players.
With 500,000 monthly active users, there would be 50 connoisseurs; with 2 million monthly active users, there would be 200 connoisseurs.
As the scale of the Morning Dew gaming platform continued to expand and the number of active users continued to grow, the number of connoisseurs would naturally increase as well.
Different game categories would be allocated different numbers of connoisseurs based on the number of players.
More popular games would have more connoisseurs, while niche games would have fewer, but there wouldn’t be a situation where a cold category had no connoisseurs at all.
Second was the selection method for connoisseurs: mainly based on three standards—duration and quantity of games played, number of trophies earned, and number of likes received on game reviews.
In other words, the more games played and the longer the play time, the more achievements and trophies obtained, and the more influential the written game reviews, the easier it would be to win in the connoisseur election.
It’s particularly worth noting that when selecting connoisseurs, the principle of “expertise in one’s field” or “professional matching” was emphasized.
For instance, a connoisseur skilled in action games could only function within the realm of action games and couldn’t extend their influence to other unfamiliar areas.
Of course, it didn’t exclude the possibility that some players might specialize in multiple fields. As long as their data in the respective fields met the standards, there would be no problem.
Third were the specific responsibilities of connoisseurs: writing game reviews and determining game recommendation positions.
There’s not much to say about writing game reviews. In fact, there were no restrictions on this; every player on the platform could write them, but reviews from connoisseurs would be displayed with priority.
Moreover, the Morning Dew gaming platform would also actively commission these connoisseurs to write, allowing them to play unreleased games in advance. If the written game reviews received enthusiastic responses, there would be certain cash rewards.
Even more crucial were the recommendation positions.
Connoisseurs could decide the recommendation positions for games in their areas of expertise. The specific mechanism was: connoisseurs would vote weekly on games in their area of expertise, and the final arrangement of premium, secondary, regular, and other different levels of recommendation positions would be based on the number of votes from high to low.
In case of a tie in votes, the order would be determined by the player recommendation rate of the game itself.
The vast majority of recommendation positions on the entire platform would be allocated according to the votes of connoisseurs, with only a very small portion of minor recommendation positions allocated by the platform, mainly to ensure that new games would have a minimum level of exposure.