The server was closed about one hour before Feng Bujue turned the computer on. In that time, many things had happened. When he was browsing the forums, a limitation had been set on posting so that everyone could only post once every five minutes, but even so, the front page was refreshing like once every ten seconds.
The system closed the queuing function at 8 am and would not generate any more scenarios while informing the players to go offline. Players still in the scenario were not notified yet. At 10:20 am, one by one, the previously gaming players slowly wrapped up their scenario. In those two and a half hours, the notification to log off was attached to every player’s log-in lobby. At 10:30 am, players who refused to leave were forced out of the server, and then the server shut down.
After that, the players swamped the forums. Seeing the highlighted noticeboard, the players were shocked, and everyone had something to say.
Most of the users showed various degrees of disappointment and dissatisfaction, and not all of them were from the low level range. In fact, some of them were close to or already at level twenty. They felt that it was unfair for people like them who had to go through so many hoops to purchase the gaming hub and the account to have the closed beta end so soon. After all, this meant that those who did not buy the closed beta account only needed to wait three days to play the game.
The core of their complaints was really that this closed beta barely lasted fifty hours. It was not enough for them to gain the large ’advantage’ that they had imagined.
To counter this, in the pinned official post, Dream Inc. showed the ’rules’, insinuating that this was something that all the players had agreed to when they bought the gaming hub. The rules were written clearly. When ten percent of players reached the maximum level of twenty during the closed beta, the closed beta would close. This condition had been met, and if they did not follow the rules, some would jump out to claim that they had violated their own promise.
Therefore, the players were speechless. Who would go and read this small print for no reason? Without any logic to stand on, some players became unreasonable, spouting arguments that most of the high-level players were employees from gaming studios, and Dream Inc. was purposely depriving the normal players of their gaming experience.
There were of course more instigating views like ’the scam company working together with these gaming studios to hike up the price of the gaming hub’ and so on. There were quite a large number of such posts, and in reality, they did not know anything about the relationship between the gaming company and the gaming studios, did not have basic knowledge about this field, and did not have any concept with regards to the building cost of the gaming hub.
However, they had resentment and the power of the consumer on their side. They spread accusations that exposed their ignorance and irresponsibility to vent their frustration. The funny thing was that these baseless words would attract a bigger group of irresponsible and brainless sheep’s support. Users with some rationality tried to refute some of the points and provided actual arguments, but they were instead mocked and downvoted, accused of being sell-outs and part of a fifty-cent army hired by the company. This was merely because those people were embarrassed from having their baseless accusations exposed and turned that embarrassment into anger.
Such species exists in the world, without rhyme or reason. Like a madman yelling on the street, arguing with them was pointless because they would soon be cornered by their own lack of knowledge and ability. When that happened, they would reach into their own dictionary filled with their commonly-used words—curse words to be precise, occasionally mixed with meaningless memes aimed to incite but not argue like ’LOL’, ’If I get serious with you, then I’ll lose’, and so on. Their intent was to pull people down to their level and get into a tongue fight. By fighting with such people, you would arrive at the battlefield confidently armed with ’big logic’, ’big story’, and ’big explanation’, but when you realized that your opponent had nothing but ’blind accusation’, ’yelling’, and ’ignore’, you would realize how futile it was.
Of course, there were many silent accounts on the forum, waiting and watching. Some of them shouldered the risk of being swamped and posted support for Dream Inc. They were not members of Dream Inc. but mostly employees from various studios. These people supported the company’s decision to launch the open beta. From their perspective, it would mean that they could pour more resources into the game since it proved that the company had confidence in their product.
Other than that, there were other pot-stirrers and peace-makers, negotiating between the many parties. Their posts were mostly about ’Suggesting Dream Inc. to pay more focus to the benefit of normal players, changing ten percent players to ten percent non-professional players’. They did not wish for fairness; they also wanted benefit but refused to align with the unreasonable crowd so used these seemingly reasonable points to make similar points.
The chaos on the forum pushed the threads asking for help and guides to about ten pages behind, like rocks falling into the ocean. The already busy forum became even more crowded, and ’explosive’ was too light a description for it. The forum fell under great traffic like it was being hacked or something.
However, facing this situation, Dream Inc. adopted a ’stable as a mountain even when the fire is right at the front door’ type of philosophy. Since they had posted the announcement and the server was closed, they would continue with the update, and if the players were that angry, they could just abandon the game right there and then.
For most of the players who said "Let’s all return our gaming hub" or "I’m leaving this cr*ppy game, scam company", the employees at Dream Inc. adopted a light-hearted view of it. It was like they were laughing at these people’s expense because they knew that it was definitely these people who would stay until the end. In fact, they did not even delete these threads because, one week later, these threads would become these people’s shame.
One could say that... as a new company on the scene, Dream Inc’s reaction was no different from the leader of the field. They never admitted any mistakes and they never changed their decision. The users’ choice was either to accept the situation or stop playing. It was like the government with the hike of oil price—there was no room for discussion.
These days, many companies closed when their game was still in alpha. In fact, they would wish that their game could stay in alpha forever since the game was merely a tool to earn money, and the tag of ’alpha’ provided the convenient excuse to explain away the bugs.
Dream Inc. went against the grain. The act of finishing the closed beta in two days not only did not hurt the game’s popularity but instead provided it with more promotion.
Just that Sunday morning, Dream Inc. announced the basic equipment needed for the open beta of the game. Other than the players who purchased the gaming hub released for the closed beta, players who used other companies’ gaming hubs or gaming headsets would need to purchase the additional connectivity device released by Dream Inc. before they could log into the game.
This news did settle the fire on the forums somewhat. At least not everyone could get into the open beta just like that. It was like the closed beta players had bought a PS4 and had about fifty hours to play the game prerelease while open beta players needed to buy an additional PS4 controller before they could play the game.
At 11 am, Dream Inc. opened the registration for open beta accounts and listed several models of the device on their website. They could be purchased online and would be delivered the next day.
In just one hour, the orders shot over 200,000, and they were still rising. The majority of people who purchased the open beta accounts rushed into the forum, and their threads washed over the complaining threads from before. However, that was quickly followed by a shouting war between the two parties. Two group of people who did not know each other spilled every known curse word in the universe at each other on the virtual net. In half an hour, the forum had refreshed who knows how many times.
In any case, Feng Bujue’s morning nap felt like he had been sleeping for a month. He sat down with his noodles and observed this drastic change.
The event was momentous, and the people involved might think they were experiencing something that would leave a mark on history, but for an outsider, it was just a normal morning.
For Feng Bujue, it did not matter when the OB started; he was not in the run to chase after the throne of first place and did not think that dragging out the closed beta would lead to any more benefits. The strong players would still be strong, and even if someone started one month earlier than he did, the difference was only about one month. He would eventually catch up, and when they were both at the same level, he would still be stronger than them.
Since the open beta was starting soon, it was undeniably good news for Feng Bujue. During the closed beta, he had felt that there were too many locked sections in the game: the currency exchange, public lobby, in-game store, card system, and many features that he could not imagine.
In less than forty-eight hours, a new Thriller Paradise would be ready to meet the world.
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