Building a Gaming Empire From Scratch

The matchmaking feature for the National War Mode in “Battlefield” was officially frozen.

After another 40 minutes, all ongoing matches ended, and the final changes to the leaderboard were made.

This signified that the ranking results have been set in stone.

The T1 War Zone only had the top 3 countries on the National Warfare Rankings—Daxia, Russia, and Germany.

This outcome surprised many people.

Daxia in first place was not a surprise for the players.

After all, Daxia is Yunmeng’s hometown, with the longest development time, the largest number of players, and experience in many virtual reality games.

With many advantages combined, coupled with the impression that Daxia has left on countries around the world in the recent Hundred Years War, taking first place was not too shocking.

What was truly surprising were the German players.

They managed to defeat countries like France, Izumo, Baekje, and others that had local servers and better internet conditions, despite their own unfavorable network environment.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t a result achieved by one or two small teams or a few elite players—those situations could still be influenced by factors such as talent, ability, and luck.

This was a large-scale National Warfare!

The overall performance of all the players in a country in this mode would reflect on the scores and winning rates.

This outcome could even provide a glimpse, to some extend, of the comprehensive combat power of a country— or at least the comprehensive combat power of the players in that country!

The T2 War Zone contained the 4th to 9th countries on the National Warfare Rankings—a total of six countries—

Izumo, France, Ottoman Republic, Baekje, Australia, and Annan.

Izumo and Baekje continued to slug it out.

France was rarely elated and could even mock the United Kingdom in return.

Upon seeing the result, many French people started mocking the British in posts.

The T3 War Zone had no limit—the countries ranked 9th and below on the leaderboard were all included in this War Zone.

Despite this, the discussion section on Yunmeng’s “Battlefield” still erupted with fierce debates.

All Southeast Asian countries, aside from Annan squeezing into T2, were placed at the very bottom, and were currently discontented.

This was especially true for Java, which still didn’t have a stable server due to Suharto’s marketing schemes.

Already having poor performance and needing to connect to servers across the sea, their defeat was unbearably pitiful, even worse than the UK’s situation!

*

Daniel was once again crushed.

This time it wasn’t because France moved up to T2, nor because Annan moved into T2, but because he saw a post made by an Indian in the discussion section—

[We’re only 10 points away from the UK! Brothers, let’s work a little harder, we can exceed them next time!]

Daniel couldn’t resist, and curiosity led him to click in.

Then, he saw many Indian players in the post seriously discussing their experience playing against the UK, and they reached a consensus: “The British have poor shooting skills and are bad at games.”

“Surpassing the UK is too easy! Our eyes should not be on the simple target of the UK, but on surpassing Daxia. We should be the world’s first!”

“Yes, it’s just that Yunmeng hasn’t come to India yet, and we have too few players. Otherwise, we could definitely be in T1!”

…

“This is humiliation!!”

Daniel felt that his dignity had been severely damaged.

“No way! We have to protest!”

“The sooner, the better!”

*

Meanwhile, the German players breathed a sigh of relief.

In the last half-hour, their scores were neck and neck with Izumo’s.

Ultimately, they barely squeezed into the top three with a lead of only 5 points.

But their relief didn’t last long, tensions rose again. Now there were fewer German players than players from Izumo — this was a disadvantage, but also an advantage.

Because there were fewer players, those who could enter the virtual world at this time were often heavy-duty players, and their skills were usually not bad.

On the contrary, since the virtual reality games in Izumo have been developed for some time, the number of players has long exceeded ten million. All in all, the proportion of heavy-duty players has decreased greatly.

In this way, in terms of average strength, Germany has an advantage. This advantage even makes up for the disadvantage in network speed.

The problem is, with the development of Cloud Dream’s overseas strategy, the number of German players is expanding rapidly, the average combat power is undoubtedly going to slide down.

Once a certain critical point is passed, the disadvantage of network speed will emerge.

At that time, they might get kicked out of the first tier by Izumo!

So, solving the server issue is imperative!

During the two days of protests in the UK, there has been plenty of speculation about why Cloud Dream hasn’t entered Germany yet, and German players have generally started to believe that the government has restrictions on Cloud Dream, just not as strict as in the UK.

And this limitation directly led to the server project being put on hold.

So…

It’s time to step out of the house, wave the flag, and defend our honor and rights!

*

Meanwhile, the Daxia players are jubilant.

They’re even starting to look forward to the Peak War in mid-December.

Participating in the Peak War isn’t easy, at that time the advantage of having more players will be wiped out.

Whether it’s T1 War Zone countries or T3 War Zone countries, each can only bring 1000 players, and they will fight each other on the same map.

According to this rule, Europe actually has a huge advantage.

After all, there are so many scattered countries in Europe, and each country is counted as a unit, which is equivalent to each country having 1000 players to compete.

If Europe can unite, given their size, they might be able to sweep the battlefield!

“The good news is: They can’t unite.”

After the classification, Super Tomato didn’t celebrate and continue fighting like other anchors, instead, he started directly envisioning the Peak War happening two weeks later.

“We’ll leave the other matters aside for now. If we really enter the Peak War map, Britain and France are sure to fight! It’s very likely that Germany and Poland will do one, Spain and Portugal’s relationship isn’t great either. They have deep hatred in history, and it might just appear that they get along fine now.”

“So, compared to the European countries uniting and sweeping the battlefield, I’m more inclined to believe: Many European countries will begin to mess themselves up first, knocking each other’s heads around.”

“Even if they really unite, as long as we choose a good position to hold on for a wave, they will get chaos — there’s no damage-free mechanism between different countries, a few backstabbers can easily disrupt their alliance.”

“I just don’t know, how the 1000 players from each country will be chosen at that time. If it’s individual players, then we don’t even need to defend, they can’t unite at all.”

Super Tomato was talking with full confidence in front of a world map.

“Of course, we can’t slack off even like this. We’re now ranking first, but the strongest power will likely be surrounded when the war starts.”

“If 1000 people have to face an onslaught of ten times the number of people, no matter how good the skills are, it won’t hold. So…should we let things slide a bit and control the score next week? Or should we form some alliances?”

…

…

The division of the war zone afffected gamers from dozens of countries worldwide.

This lively and chaotic atmosphere continues to spread in the Internet world globally (except North America).

Until the arrival of the next day.

*

December 2nd, Monday.

The customary big meeting time.

Two meetings were held almost simultaneously, one was in Cloud Dream, mainly for:

Arranging work for the next week to a month.

The other one was in NetDragon, where the main contents were:

Reminiscing about the glorious past of NetDragon over the past ten years or so.

Then, notified the employees: You can start looking for your next job.