Restart life

Chapter 494 0484 [Why is Chen Guiliang everywhere?]

The problem of account data loss caused by server migration is difficult to handle regardless of the country or company where the server is located.

Especially when it comes to game assets, such as gold coins and skins, it's impossible for players to simply say how much they've lost.

How did the fist solve it?
They asked players to submit customer service tickets, which customer service staff would manually check and verify before fixing the issue.

Of the three to four million European users, at least several hundred thousand have had account errors.

How can customer service possibly handle all the workload?

The process has been ongoing from April to June, and many players are still waiting in line for their requests to be processed.

That's not even the most outrageous part. After some players' data was restored, their points, skins, and runes were reset or corrupted again just a few days later.

This indicates that there is a fundamental systemic problem with Riot Games' backend system and data synchronization!

Yuke (European headquarters) had previously tried to cause trouble by having its employees post on the LOL community, but all the posts were deleted by the administrator.

Some League of Legends players saw the post but didn't take it seriously. While they may be dissatisfied with League of Legends, it doesn't mean they'll switch to playing Oracle Era.

This incident occurred naturally.

A high-ranking British player had his data restored, but his account malfunctioned again the next day. He was so angry that he posted a rant online, and then he saw an ad for Dota 2 and, out of boredom, decided to play Oracle.

He found the game to be quite good after playing it, and being familiar with League of Legends, he picked it up very quickly. So he went back to the LOL community and posted that Oracle Era could be a good alternative.

As a result, his post was deleted.

The British player was furious and went to the Dota community to explain the matter in detail, which aroused the indignation of many League of Legends players. They deliberately went to the League of Legends community and repeatedly mentioned the keyword "OE" (Oracle Era).

As expected, the administrators of the LOL community went on a killing spree of deleting posts, which quickly angered more LOL players: Damn it, your crappy game is always buggy, you're not proactive in fixing bugs, but you're quick to delete posts.

As a result, more and more LOL players are spamming "OE is so much fun" in the LOL community.

The administrator simply can't delete them all...

Yuke (European headquarters) sent someone to monitor the matter. Seeing that everyone's anger had reached its peak, the person pretended to be a League of Legends player and posted: "This game is hopeless. The official attitude is arrogant, and they don't care about the players at all. To get revenge on Riot, I've decided to play OE!"

Then a few shills commented: "Yes, get revenge on Riot Games, go play OE."

"Get revenge on Riot Games, go play OE!"

"Get revenge on Riot Games, go play OE!"

"..."

Shen Lin, Vice President of Youke Europe, laughed during a phone call with Chen Guiliang: "Haha, I was the one who orchestrated the follow-up actions. After we got a unified response, netizens became like parrots. This kind of thing is commonplace on the Chinese internet. European players couldn't escape the parrot mode either. To express their anger, even if they don't play our game, they copied and pasted that sentence."

Throughout the League of Legends community, people are spamming "Get revenge on Riot, go play OE."

At first, most people just spammed it to vent their anger. But as more and more League of Legends players spammed it, more and more actually started playing Oracle Era.

Although Youke Europe had prepared servers in advance, they still didn't expect so many people to flood in, which overwhelmed the newly opened servers.

Shen Lin laughed more and more as he spoke: "The less Riot Games treats its players like human beings, the more we show that we value them. We even released an official statement saying that we didn't expect the players to be so enthusiastic, so the servers were not prepared. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to the players, and all players can receive a thank-you gift pack within a week."

This approach made players who had been wronged in League of Legends feel that Youke was taking them too seriously!
“Well done,” Chen Guiliang said with a smile.

……

United States, Riot Games headquarters.

The company's top management is having an emergency meeting, and everyone's expressions are not good.

Brandon Baker stated, "In just three days, the number of daily active players in Europe decreased by 11.2%. The players' anger had been building up for over a month, and when it suddenly erupted, it was terrifying. And then, a competitor appeared, leading to players retaliating by abandoning us..."

Everyone fell silent and looked at Mark Merrill.

Mark Merrill, the real-life inspiration for the Barbarian King, was the one who made the decision to split the servers in Europe. He is primarily responsible for this crisis!

"My fault."

Mark Merrill first admitted his mistake, then couldn't help but defend himself: "I underestimated the technical complexity of migrating accounts and overestimated the execution capabilities and system stability of the company team." It can only be said that Western game companies still lack experience in large-scale online games.

Their games are considered exceptionally successful if they have a peak concurrent user count of 100,000, but they severely lack experience in operating games with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users.

And what about Chinese companies?

Four games have already reached a peak of over 200 million concurrent users, and countless others have hundreds of thousands online simultaneously. Everyone's already jumped on the bandwagon.

Riot Games initially partnered with multiple distributors in Europe. After regaining full control of the operations, the management of game accounts became chaotic. Coupled with a surge in European players, the servers were under increasing pressure, leading to the decision to split the servers.

The team responsible for the technical architecture was completely unprepared. The migration plan had fatal flaws, stress testing wasn't done in time, and even a reliable rollback contingency plan wasn't developed. The customer service system was also inadequately prepared, and it was unable to function properly throughout March in the face of a flood of inquiries from players.

But Mark Merrill insisted on splitting the service, believing that even if some problems arose, they could be gradually resolved later.

The problem is, there's a competing game in this timeline!
Brandon Baker said, "The main problem is that we expanded too quickly and lacked experience as a large multinational corporation. The issue now isn't about assigning blame, but about how to retain players. Zhu, is the technology still unsolvable?"

Michael Zhu shook his head and said, "It can't be fixed; we can only manually review and repair it. No matter how hard my team tries, we can only prevent the bug where the data is reset after it's recovered."

Christina Norman, who is in charge of user experience, said, "It's no longer a technical or bug issue, but a crisis of trust among players. Players don't believe we can solve problems, and even think we don't value them. This poor player experience has been going on for a long time because European servers have always been unstable and version updates have always lagged behind North America."

Other executives also began to speak, but they couldn't come up with a solution to the problem.

Finally, they offered only a perfunctory solution: restore the data and reset the bug as soon as possible, continue manual review and data repair, and give all players a gift pack as compensation. They also recruited an art team to create exquisite character skins.

But once players are lost, it's very difficult to win them back.

Once your reputation is ruined, it's not something you can fix overnight!
When Youke established its European headquarters, it sent a mature team that had come from the Chinese market, and they had extensive experience in handling large-scale online game issues.

After being caught off guard initially, Yostar quickly expanded its European servers, happily accepting League of Legends refugees. They also launched a series of promotional campaigns to continue luring League of Legends players over.

They also informed European gaming media, who were very happy to report on the news, attracting many players who don't play LOL to come and watch the drama unfold.

PC Gamer UK commented: "Riot Games, a company founded only a few years ago, has spent most of its time on game development. They lack experience in game operation in North America, and without any operational foundation in Europe, they forcibly reclaimed European operating rights and rashly remodeled the servers..."

"It is reported that in just two weeks, the peak concurrent players of LOL dropped by 27%. Meanwhile, their competitor OE has announced that it has exceeded 110 million registered players and peak concurrent players of over 20... It is clear that Riot Games has mistakenly migrated players to its competitor's servers when migrating player accounts."

……

Tencent headquarters.

Liu Zhiping arrived at Pony Ma's office: "League of Legends is about to lose the European market."

"What's going on?" Little Ma frowned.

When Tencent first invested in Riot Games, its stake was less than 10%. But over the years, it has made several moves to buy shares from other shareholders, and now its stake exceeds 30%.

Tencent is Riot Games' largest shareholder, but according to the investment agreement, it cannot interfere with Riot Games' management and operations!
Liu Zhiping briefly recounted the events, then summarized, "Riot Games lacks both operational and technical expertise. They painstakingly expanded into the European market, only to hand over players and market share to Youke. According to my sources, European League of Legends players are rapidly switching to Oracle Era."

This phenomenon is not only due to a desire for revenge, but also because "Oracle Era" is of higher quality.

The quality referred to here encompasses a range of factors, from character skins and gameplay to server stability.

The European servers for League of Legends have always been terrible, from the time when the game was distributed by Riot Games to when it was operated by Riot, until Tencent completely acquired Riot Games and the situation improved.

Tencent provided Riot Games with the technology and experience!

The problem is that Tencent hasn't fully acquired Riot Games yet, and Riot's top management doesn't accept the support of the Tencent team. They don't even use skins made by Tencent.

After much deliberation, Pony Ma said, "The subsequent acquisition plan is suspended."

Little Ma was very frustrated. Why was Chen Guiliang everywhere?
Back in the country, he also had a fierce battle with Chen Guiliang.

Tencent Weibo is battling ByteDance's Weibo, and Tencent's Zhangxun is battling ByteDance's WeChat. And they can't beat either of them!
Just last week, Tencent Weibo surpassed 1 million registered accounts, but ByteDance Weibo announced yesterday that it has surpassed 2 million registered accounts.

ByteDance's Weibo has a real 2 million accounts, while Tencent Weibo has a large number of "dormant accounts" that were brought in from QQ.

ByteDance's WeChat has also outpaced competitors such as Tencent, Shanda, and Xiaomi with its shake feature.

Just as Pony Ma was feeling down, ByteDance announced that it owned 5% of NavInfo's shares. At the same time, it announced that WeChat would soon launch features such as "send location" and "automatic route finding."

(End of this chapter)