Chapter 895: A Night of Observation
Translator: Nomyummi Editor: Nomyummi
The event announcement was released less than two days before the event officially started. Old players understood the importance of the Christmas event and responded immediately upon hearing the news. Those who wanted to form a party began looking for their friends. Those who wanted to challenge the event alone used these two days worth of time to improve their equipment.
The club guilds obviously wouldn’t miss this event. For them, apart from partic.i.p.ating in the event, they would be competing for spots on the leaderboard. The rewards from the rankings were vividly promoted.
But when they thought about how Lord Grim existed in the game, the guild leaders couldn’t let out a smile. For this event, players would be teleported to random maps and only small parties could enter. As a result, their advantage of having more players could only be displayed in the guild rankings. In the individual or team rankings, no matter how many guild members they had, they wouldn’t be able to gather all of them together into a single arena!
This compet.i.tion would be a test of skill for elite players and teams. The top guilds would have been confident if not for the existence of Happy.... The new dungeon records dominated by Happy was the clearest indicator. That was also a compet.i.tion between elite players and teams, but the result?
Only pro teams could contest against Team Happy. The Christmas event did not interfere with the Pro League though. The event lasted for three days starting from Wednesday and ending on Friday. After the event ended, Sat.u.r.day would be the sixteenth round of the season. Pro players wouldn’t be running to the game to have fun instead of preparing for their upcoming match though. Even if they were interested in playing, they might play around once or twice, but no hopes could be placed on them appearing on the actual rankings.
The club guild leaders were worried! These two days pa.s.sed by in a flash. The Christmas event officially began. Because of the limited number of quests each day, there weren’t that many players impatiently waiting for midnight to come. As for the club guilds? For now, they didn’t immediately dispatch their elite teams. With the rankings as their goal, they would first have to observe the true circ.u.mstances of this event before shooting their arrows at the target.
Tonight, the club guilds studied this event, while actively taking note of the rankings.
Lord Grim? Happy? Would they appear on the rankings soon?
They did not. When the sun came up, no one from Happy had appeared on the rankings yet. Although the club guilds hadn’t sent out their elites yet, their foundation was already reflected in the results. In this free-for-all situation, those on the individual or team rankings were held by the club guilds. The guild rankings didn’t need to be mentioned. The first twenty placings were swept up by the club guilds. Some people compared these rankings with the Alliance rankings to see if there were any differences.
There were definitely quite a few differences.
For example, on the rankings, Guild Samsara was in first place. After their team became the champions last season, the guild had grown ferociously. The guild members were also extremely diligent. The traditional powerhouses Blue Brook Guild, Herb Garden, and Tyrannical Ambition followed Guild Samsara. Team Tyranny had a firm grasp on their first place spot in the Alliance, but their Guild Tyrannical Ambition didn’t seem to be any different from the other powerhouses. Their tyranny over the Alliance wasn’t reflected by their guild standing.
There was also Excellent Dynasty. Although Team Excellent Era had been relegated to the Challenger League, their guild wasn’t going to collapse just because of that. At this moment, those who held the most hope for Excellent Era were their most loyal fans. Guild Excellent Dynasty’s performance in this event was extraordinary. Quite a few mid to low tier club guilds lost out to them.
The other large discrepancy was Guild Heavenly Justice. Their Team Heavenly Swords was teetering on the brink of danger. Their placing kept on pacing back and forth between the relegation and non-relegation zone. However, in this event, Heavenly Justice had an impressive placing: 7th. There were rumors that Heavenly Justice had put out rewards for this event in order to spark the enthusiasm of their guild members. Whether that was true or not would require further investigation.
These club guilds attracted countless eyes, but the guilds themselves were strenuously searching the rankings to see Guild Happy’s placing and check if they were a threat or not. After looking up Guild Happy, everyone felt relieved. Guild Happy’s strength was still too weak. For the guild rankings, only relying on a few elite experts was useless. It was a test of the entire guild’s strength. Happy’s Lord Grim and his team were mighty, but they would not be a deciding factor in these guild rankings.
After a night of careful studying, the various guilds discovered another problem.
Just like last year’s event, the player rankings were divided by their levels. Usually, it was split for every five levels. In the normal servers, the separations were very detailed. Starting from Level 20 after the beginner village, there was a separate ranking every five levels up until Level 75.
But in the Heavenly Domain because players were all max leveled, there usually wasn’t a separate ranking. However, this time, because of the new level cap, there were now two separate rankings in the Heavenly Domain.
One was the Level 70-74 rankings, while the other was the Level 75 rankings. These two rankings were further split into individual and team rankings. The team rankings were based on the highest level player in the party.
It had always been done this way. It was mainly to separate between those with Level 70 and those with Level 75 equipment. After studying these rankings for a night, the guilds discovered the problem: there were a lot fewer Level 75 players than Level 70 players.
The level cap had been raised on 12/3. Right now, it was only 12/25. Only twenty or so days had pa.s.sed since the update had been dropped. The higher the level, the more experience was required to level up. The club’s core characters trained non-stop as fast as possible and reached Level 75 in eleven days. Ye Xiu and co weren’t as diligent, but their efficiency wasn’t low either. A few days after these core characters, their characters also hit Level 75 and began sweeping the record rankings, but for the vast majority of players, how could they have so much free time? Players who only had a few hours each day to play were still struggling to grind levels! And this group const.i.tuted the vast majority of the playerbase.
Most club guild members were loyal fans of the respective guild’s team. These loyal fans were also very pa.s.sionate about Glory and were naturally more willing to spend more time on the game. As a result, there were quite a few players from the club guilds that managed to reach Level 75 during these 20 days. Consequently, among the current Level 75 playerbase, those from the club guilds took up a good portion. As a result, in random distribution, it was highly likely that players or teams from the same guild would meet on the map. The distribution was clearly random. It didn’t try and avoid having members from the same guild meet.
With this, players from the same guild could help each other, naturally giving them an advantage over others. This hidden phenomenon was finally grasped by the top guilds after a night of observation and understanding.
But if their guild had this advantage, so did every other guilds. This advantage needed to be used and guarded against. However, while some guilds had the advantage, others didn’t, such as Guild Happy…...
The big guilds had placed spies in Happy a long time ago. Even if they couldn’t get information from core players, they could still check the guild member list and check their levels, no?
Guild Happy clearly didn’t have too many Level 75 players. During their early development stage, they couldn’t be too picky, so they had good and bad players mixed into the bunch. There were always active players online every day, but there were also many that stayed offline for many many days. Guild Happy was still in the process of transitioning from a player guild to a professional guild, after all.
Facing Guild Happy, the big guilds held this advantage. Under this situation, if they happened to have a numbers advantage, might they have a chance at giving trouble to Lord Grim and Happy’s other experts?
Even though Lord Grim had G.o.d-level might, the guilds could think of a way to deal with it. Apart from having more members, what other advantage did they have? It wasn’t like they could find someone to compete with a G.o.d.
This event would originally have prevented having a numbers advantage, but because of this special occasion, this scene occurred. The club guilds would naturally think up a solution, but after thinking over it, even if two teams from the same guild, if they met Lord Grim’s team, it would be a 10 versus 5... but could that be considered as having an advantage?
Thinking of this point, the guild leaders felt depressed at this 10 versus 5 conclusion. With the strength of Happy’s experts, two or three times their still numbers wouldn’t be enough. Even more would be needed. However, any more and it would be unlikely for the situation to happen. After this entire night, three teams appearing in the same map had only taken place a few times.
"Then, if one guild isn’t enough….. What about multiple guilds allying together?" Someone couldn’t help but bring it up.
In their guild leader chat group, people gradually began speaking up and discussing this topic.
"Samsara’s doing quite well. They’ve gotten so many stockings tonight."
"Haha, your guild’s doing well too!"
"Heavenly Justice isn’t in this chat group yet? Their performance this event is quite impressive!"
"What’s going on, Blossom Valley? You guys seem a bit depressed!"
The guild leaders spoke one after the other, discussing each other’s results. At the bottom of their hearts, they all hoped that everyone else’s achievements were negative numbers, so their own guild could come out on top. Everyone seemed friendly to each other on the surface though.
"Wow, Excellent Dynasty is fearsome too!" Someone seemed to have found a topic and spoke out.
"We’re just trying our best!" Chen Yehui put on a fake smile like everyone else.
"Compared to you guys, Happy is so much worse. Where are they on the guild rankings? We can’t even find them!" Someone began cutting into the main subject.
"Their guild has no hope of making it onto the guild rankings, but what about the individual and team rankings?" The main subject had finally been touched upon.
"If we don’t put up some countermeasures, we’ll probably lose to them, no?"
"How about we join hands and suppress them?" The guild leader speaking didn’t seem to be very happy. In reality, for these guilds, more brain cells died from working together than fighting against one another.