- Theo POV -
After spending all my Mana doing a part of the friend invitation system yesterday, I ran out of things to do and logged back into the game as a Player to have some fun.
Although this world has an interesting entertainment industry, with good movies, good music and good TV dramas, this kind of content has never been my focus.
Even more so after discovering that when an invasion of monsters broke out in Japan and the Supernatural population couldn't defend themselves because they were so short of people, the country was so devastated that it hasn't been able to recover to this day.
This meant that anime wasn't a thing in this world, leaving me without games and anime, the two things I enjoyed most in the other world, so the only thing I could do to entertain myself at home was play my game.
For a while I was playing against newcomers in Casual Matches and giving them tips on how the game worked, what they should do to be more successful in battles and things like that.
Fortunately, the influx of new players into the game was surprisingly constant, but after a while I got bored and went to have fun in Ranked Matches, playing for real for the first time.
The level of the Players in Rank Bronze 4, which was the lowest Rank, was only slightly higher than that of the Players in Casual Matches, so the games lasted no more than 5 minutes.
Within an hour I was already at Bronze 1, getting closer to the Silver Rank.
Even though the Rank was very low, I knew that at this point I was probably in the top 0.5% of Players, since the queues to play were taking longer than before.
This gave me the idea of making a Top 500 Rank in the game, as was very popular in several games in my past life, but thinking that the game didn't even have 500 Players, if I did that all the Players in the game would already be in the Top 500...
'Maybe I should wait a few days and do something like a Top 50? Maybe Top 100 at most? When the game has thousands of Players I'll be able to increase this to Top 500... not a bad idea to stimulate the Players. I thought excitedly.
Seeing that the queues were getting longer and longer, I just gave up playing for the time being and went to sleep.
One advantage of being a Game Admin was that I could configure the Game Core to continue providing me with the False Neurological Feedback buff even if I didn't have my consciousness in the game, I just needed to be in contact with the Game Core at all times.
As the Game Core was as small as a USB stick, I decided to tie a string to it and turn the little device into a necklace.
With the Game Core turned into a necklace and kept under my blouse while I slept, it would always be in contact with me.
As long as I injected Mana into it, the game would continue to provide me with the stat boost, and since I had more than enough Mana for this as a Game Creator, I just injected 10 MP before bed and left the game running at night.
When I woke up the next day, the first thing I felt was that it wasn't so comfortable to sleep with the Game Core running around in my head.
Several hours during the night I woke up scared thinking that something was carrying heavy objects while I slept, or that I was in danger and urgently needed to use magic to protect myself, only to get out of bed and realize that this was just the effect of Neurological False Feedback...
Even though it sucked, I still tried to ignore it and go back to sleep, but after waking up for the fourth time in one night I just gave up, turned it off and went back to sleep, having the most pleasant sleep in weeks.
Because of these sleep problems I needed to sleep late to really get some rest, so when I picked up my cell phone to see how the game was going I was surprised!
[Runestone - 161 Players Online]
Just overnight and this morning the game had doubled the number of players from yesterday!
I hadn't even launched the friend invitation system yet and the game was already growing by leaps and bounds, climbing from the penultimate page to the bottom of the third page!
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Brushing my teeth quickly, I went into the kitchen and made myself some toast as quickly as possible before returning to the PC and starting to analyze the sales data and Players' reaction to the game.
I was excited to see how the players were feeling about the game.
The way the program displayed the game's data was a mess with a lot of useless data for my current self, so I just extracted the most relevant data for me and made my own table with the most relevant ones for me now.
|-----------------------------------------
| Game Status: Runestone
|-----------------------------------------
| Total Players: 215
| Players Online: 161
| Game Rank: Rank F
| Mana per Hour (Players): 1 unit
| Average Time per Session: 3.2 hours
| Mana Stored in Game Core: 4.7 units
| Estimated Daily Mana Yield: 8 units
| Conversion Rate: 80% (New players who become regulars)
|------------------------
| Available Cards: 104 (Common, Rare, Epic)
| Cards Used per Match (Average): 17
|-----------------------------------------
Of all the data, what caught my attention the most was the average time per session.
At first I was confused about this: 'Is the game so boring that the average player plays for only 3 hours and then quits?
Digging deeper I found a section with a graph of Players' activity in the game and there was the reason for such a low average.
When I saw the reason, I started laughing. 'It's impossible to have a high average playing time if the Players haven't even had enough time to play, right?
The reason the average is so low is because part of the Players got to know the game late last night, so they had to stop playing to go to sleep, while another part of the Players got to know the game this morning, so they were just starting to play, not giving enough time for the average playing time to go up.
'Whew, for a moment I thought I'd done something wrong...'
I wiped a non-existent bead of sweat from my forehead as I began to look at another set of game data.
|-----------------------------------------
| Casual Matches (Average per Player): 15
| Percentage of Players with access to Ranked: 88% (189 Players)
| Total Ranked Matches Played: 545
| Average Ranked Matches per Player: 2.9
| Average Ranked Points Earned per Win: 25
| Average Ranked Points Lost per Loss: 22
|-----------------------------------------
| Current Player Rank:
| Bronze 4: 40% (86 players)
| Bronze 3: 25% (54 players)
| Bronze 2: 15% (32 players)
| Bronze 1: 12% (26 players)
| Silver 4: 8% (10 players)
| Silver 3: 3% (6 players)
| Silver 2: 2% (4 players)
| Silver 1: 0% (0 players)
|-----------------------------------------
Looking at this data, it's clear to see how interested players are in climbing the ranks, and this came as no surprise to me - after all, how effective a person's training is is based on how high their rank is in the game.
Even Players who don't have competitive personalities would try to play Ranked Matches to improve the effectiveness of their training.
Unfortunately the total number of Players is still very low, so no one has reached Silver 1, let alone Gold 4, where the Boost really increases.
For these Players, reaching the Gold Rank will be a great achievement, but little do they know that the game has been programmed to keep 60% of Players between Gold and Platinum, 20% between Bronze and Silver and 20% between Diamond and Master.
The way I decided to control this is that in the Bronze and Silver Ranks Players receive more Ranked Points per win and lose less in defeat, in Gold and Platinum this value is equal in defeat and victory, while in Diamond and Master Players lose more points than they gain, forcing these Players to have a high winrate to stay in those ranks.
As only Ranked Matches give Players the improved boost, there is no risk of Players reaching Diamond and playing only Casual Matches for fear of dropping in Rank.
Another important fact I noticed was that Players who were lucky enough to get legendary cards and used these cards in their decks had higher winrates than Players who didn't have these cards.
All Players had at least 3 epic cards, but only half of the Players had a legendary card.
This was very interesting, as it showed that luck was also an important factor in deciding who had the highest Rank.
What's more, since the game didn't accept outside investment, there were no conditions for a Player to become Pay To Win. The best way for a Player to get more cards was to play the game for longer, which would earn me more money and keep the game fair.
After looking at this data, I sent my conscience to Game Core and went back to developing the feature of inviting friends to the game.
I think I'll still need around 80 to 90 MP to finish this, so my plan was to spend all my MP developing what I could now, rest for a few hours before returning to the game and spend the remaining MP to finish it today.
The sooner I finished this function, the more popular the game would become in less time, so I had no time to waste.
With only 6 days left until the end of the test, I had to make the most of every minute to climb as high as possible in the test rankings.
Even if I didn't want to join a Guild or a big company after graduating, the publicity that the college test site gave me was too valuable to waste, not to mention the fact that being able to put a high test Rank on the game page in the future would help my credibility to win over more Players.