Who would still start a business seriously after being reborn?

Chapter 204 Free Trial for 50 Days (Happy New Year's Eve!)
Cheng Yi wrote until eight in the morning and felt like he couldn't hold on any longer.

He changed the startup password of the tea room computer, then went back to his room drowsily to catch up on his sleep.

At 12 noon, he got up, washed his face, replaced the Pentium 1 computer in the tea room with a Celeron 4 computer, and moved it to his own room.

He didn't intend to let Yu Sen and others interfere in the online gaming sector.

Firstly, Yu Sen and his colleagues have a natural aversion to online games. Secondly, Handong University does not allow online game operation teams to appear on campus.

Moreover, this so-called channel server is nothing more than a private server for him.

It’s just a private server, he can handle it independently in the early stages.

Cheng Yi spent the entire day adjusting the map, setting the drop rate, and solving problems that were not solved in the early morning.

He chose Bichi City as the novice map and carefully designed and tested the drop rates of maps such as Bichi Mine, especially Bichi Mine, which became his top priority.

Cheng Yi modified the levels of these maps, setting the first layer to level 10-15 maps, the second layer to level 15-20 maps, and the third layer to level 20-25 maps. Each layer of the map added 5-10 elite monsters with a high explosion rate. As long as you kill them, you can experience the thrill of treasure hunting with items all over the ground.

Except for the Corpse King Palace, there will be roaming wild Corpse Kings on each floor, which will refresh every 8 hours.

In addition, he reduced the number of monk zombies and increased their attack power, explosion rate, and terror.

The only things Shengda gave him were maps of Bichi City and its surrounding areas, so he had to improve these maps to the limit.

The monster refresh rate is increased, so that more players can be accommodated.

The gameplay of Biqi Forest has also been expanded. Five safe areas where PK is not allowed are set up, and five PK areas where killing is free are set up. In the safe areas, players can fight monsters with peace of mind without worrying about being attacked by other players, but at the same time, the explosion rate in the safe areas is also very low.

In the PK area, you can kill people without getting a name, and only the fittest can survive, giving you a thrilling feeling.

In terms of skills, Cheng Yi added an aura BUFF on the original basis. As long as the warrior, mage and Taoist team up together, the three of them will get an aura effect of +2 to all attributes, encouraging players to travel together.

Only by traveling together can the charm of online games be reflected and retention be higher.

After finishing these, Cheng Yi started to kill monsters in each map one by one.

He also divided the monsters into different levels according to their strength. The same monster was divided into four levels of strength.

This can bring a more thrilling feeling to the players. Imagine that you easily kill a Piranha Plant and go to challenge another one with great pride. Before you can even swing your sword, it is eaten by the enhanced Piranha Plant. Isn’t it exciting? Isn’t it surprising?
The popularity of Legend is definitely due to its low configuration requirements, but there is another more important reason, which is the pleasure of exploring the contingency.

The pleasure of exploring the unknown and the sense of honor of fighting side by side and bravely traveling the world are the most important factors driving the rapid growth of Legend Online players.

Cheng Yi, on the other hand, has pushed this pleasure of exploring the unknown to the extreme.

He turned off his cell phone, declined all invitations, and entered a state of complete ecstasy.

After completing all these modifications, Cheng Yi connected to the remote server, uploaded the server, and began to officially set up the game.

There are no DDOS attacks in this era, and the servers are relatively safe. To set up the game, you just need to ensure the stability of the server.

In order to save the server's hard disk capacity, Cheng Yi set the archive time to six hours. If the program encounters an unexpected problem, the archive will only be rolled back to six hours at most.

The only drawback is that the database information must be disclosed to Shengda.

This means that Shengda has control of all his account information for this game.

"I must make a new game based on this game." Cheng Yi thought to himself.

In 2001, it was extremely difficult to produce online games. Cheng Yi clearly remembered that at this time in his previous life, Mr. Lei of Xiaomi Group was also leading the team to develop online games.

Kingsoft, where Mr. Lei works, is known as the Huangpu Military Academy of China's IT industry and is the most powerful software development company among private enterprises.

Despite such unique conditions, Mr. Lei spent more than 30 million yuan and more than two years to complete the pinnacle of domestic martial arts games.

"Swordsman Online".

In this era, when making games, everything has to start from scratch. There is no art subcontracting, and there are not even professional game programmers.

At present, China is still in the midst of a wave of producing stand-alone games, and the production process of stand-alone games and online games is completely different, so we can only cross the river by feeling the stones.

However, the main reason why Mr. Lei put so much effort into this is that he insisted on producing original domestic martial arts games and adhered to the duties and qualities of an entrepreneur.

But Cheng Yi is different. He is a gangster in the IT industry and he can be shameless.

Wouldn't this source code allow him to save a year's worth of detours?
Recruit an artist to change the skin, turn the blurry picture quality into an HD version, then rewrite all the source code, change the name of the map, and a gorgeous new game is born.

As for conscience and reputation...

Who the hell would be stupid enough to discuss these two things with someone who makes online games?

Shengda had used this method several times in his previous life, such as Legend 2, Legend 3, Legend World, and Legend Returns. The main point was to save effort wherever possible.

Shengda is the agent of Korean Legend and has produced a series of original new games.

He is the agent of Shengda Legend, so it’s not too much to make an original new game, right?

After Cheng Yi finished writing the program, he stood up and stretched, then walked to the computer running the Momo Internet Cafe system.

He opened the backend of the campus computer room and sent a scrolling advertisement to all the computers in the campus computer room: Momo Group is recruiting senior interns majoring in software and animation, with a monthly salary of 500+ commission. Those who are interested can bring their resumes to the Momo Internet Cafe in Handong University Town for an interview.

After posting the advertisement, Cheng Yi started the game GS.

He installed the client from another CD into the legendary programming computer and opened the game with some excitement.

Considering the database account sharing, Cheng Yi did not implant the account system of Momo Internet Cafe. He simply created an account registration page and registered an account at random to enter the game.

A 30M server is already very fast for hosting online games, and it can at least ensure that there are no lags for people online.

Even in 2024, a typical private server with thousands of players online would only need 5MB of Alibaba Cloud to ensure smooth gameplay. Cheng Yi entered the game and walked through each map one by one. When he found any shortcomings, he immediately modified them on the remote server, uploaded them, restarted the server, and created a patch.

This process lasted for more than ten hours.

It's almost to the point of being meticulous.

After all, this is something only he can do. Even if Yu Sen and Huang Ganping come over, they can only stare blankly because they have never played the legend of their previous life.

Just as Cheng Yi was working hard, the day of the Legend public beta finally arrived.

Internet cafes in many cities, including Jingzhou City, are all filled with posters about the legend.

It has to be said that Shengda's ground promotion method is very successful, which is more than a hundred times better than other online games' method of finding bookstores and newsstands to sell point cards.

In his previous life, Shengda took only ten days to increase the number of online users of Legend to 10,000!
That's 2000 people online. To reach that number, the minimum number of registered users must be over . But if these people are evenly distributed among more than districts and counties, it would not be enough.

Legend has been in public beta for three days, and there are only a few people playing it in Momo Internet Cafe.

After all, this is a new game that is unfamiliar to players. It is not easy to promote it in a short time. Most players who play online games these days already have their favorite games. Coupled with the strong Stone Age, the development of new games has become much slower.

Cheng Yi vaguely remembers that Legend has been operating for free for 50 days since its public beta. At the beginning, the user growth rate was not fast, but gradually, the user growth rate showed fission.

By the end of November, when it officially started charging, it finally unleashed its full power, crushing a number of popular online games.

During these three days, Li Xiang also began to gradually replace the computers in Momo Internet Cafe and the computer room.

There are so many second-hand Pentium MMX computers. If the purchase price is raised from 300 to 500, it is estimated that more than units can be purchased in a day.

In order to improve the efficiency of collecting computers, Li Xiang specially sent a dozen people to distribute flyers in surrounding provinces and cities, with the main targets being government departments and enterprises and institutions.

During this period, Cheng Yi stayed in his room to test the explosion rate modification loophole. In just one week, he modified the version to a testable level. For him, there is not much difference between Legend and Snake, it is really too familiar.

It was already past ten o'clock in the evening. He walked to the mirror and looked at his haggard appearance, and couldn't help laughing.

He hadn't experienced this feeling of working day and night to write programs for many years, which reminded him of the time when he developed rogue software in his previous life.

He casually scratched his hair with his hands and installed the client in the switchboard of the Moc-os computer.

Walking out of the room, he shouted to the customers on the third and fourth floors, "Everyone, sorry, we need to restart the server. All overnight stays on the third and fourth floors are free tonight!"

Cheng Yi's voice was so loud that it could be heard directly on the first and second floors. When they heard that the computers on the third and fourth floors would be free again, many customers who liked to play single-player games ran up happily.

Cheng Yi restarted the switchboard, main unit, and all the extensions, and said with a smile, "Everyone, we now have our first online game on the third and fourth floors. If you're interested, come and try it out. This game doesn't require any game cards for the time being, and you can try it for free for 50 days!"

"Free trial for 50 days?" Everyone became happy.

Offering free trials upon release of new games is an old tradition passed down from the time when King of Kings was first introduced. This was done to attract customers and secondly to buy time for game companies to set up point-of-sale service for game cards.

Before 2003, setting up point card sales points was very cumbersome. Many games were very popular when they were free, but once they started charging for point cards, they immediately became deserted. The main reason was that point cards were not available. Hongyue was one of them.

Generally speaking, new games are given a one-month trial period upon launch, but Legend is an exception. The interval between Legend's agency and public beta was only two months, which did not give Legend much time for ground promotion.

These 50 days are also the time for Legend to conduct nationwide promotion.

A 50-day free trial is a hard rule in the contract, and Cheng Yi cannot change it. However, he hopes that the game can remain free forever.

After all, his main source of revenue is not point cards, but transactions of props and game coins.

Looking at the customers on the third and fourth floors registering accounts and entering the game, Cheng Yi couldn't help but smile.

I wonder if Shengda would be furious if he knew that I had made a profit in advance.

"Fuck, the kills in this game are pretty good."

"Kill chickens, kill chickens, team up to kill chickens."

"Who wants to go on this adventure with me?"

Suddenly, the third and fourth floors became lively.

"Anyone who finds a bug in the game will be rewarded with 100 yuan!" Cheng Yi's next words once again made the entire Internet cafe boil.

At this time, the Internet cafes in Jingzhou City were going crazy. They didn't bother to care about whether it was legendary or not. Now they were just desperately lowering prices.

"These Internet cafes must be crazy." At eleven o'clock in the evening, Chen Zhi and three business managers of Tianqin Group were looking at the map in front of them and feeling worried.

According to their estimation, it would only take half a month for them to force several leading Internet cafes in the northern part of Jingzhou City to surrender. After all, for a company like Dingsheng Internet Cafe and Tianyu Group, the loss in half a month would be nearly 200,000 yuan.

Two hundred thousand is not a small number. It means you can sell a car in half a month.

"Mr. Chen, they're desperately trying! I really don't understand the point of doing this." A business manager frowned. "Logically, we've already left them some space in the southern counties. They can easily relocate there. Why would they have to fight us? Internet cafe licenses are universal as long as they don't cross municipalities."

Chen Zhi also looked at the Internet cafes in the four northern districts and counties. There were more than 80 Internet cafes on the densely packed signs, of which 37 were crossed out, meaning they had been eliminated.

These 37 black Internet cafes were all those with dozens of computers, and they had not joined the Jingzhou Internet Cafe Alliance. When Chen Zhi, Qi Yong and others lowered the price to 1 yuan, these black Internet cafes all moved to towns and villages in disgrace, with the main strategy of avoiding the enemy if they couldn't beat them.

Now both Chen Zhi and Qi Yong have lowered the price to 5 cents, a price that has already caused many Internet cafes to lose money.

"Looks like we're going to have to drop it to 4 cents," sighed a business manager. "That's outrageous! This is the first time I've ever been involved in a price war like this. Isn't this just a waste of money?"

　Happy New Year's Eve!

Thanks to Tianlang Juezhi Dream Chaser and Liu Chiting for the tips! Thank you!

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(End of this chapter)