Game Dev: 22 - You can Laugh for Now

Mana Stones was one of the ways that Players found to profit even more while doing missions.

The monsters that Players encountered in quests were classified as common monsters and Elite monsters.

While ordinary monsters were just a waste of effort and ammo, Elite monsters had a small Mana Stone on their head, which was responsible for making those monsters more powerful than ordinary monsters.

When Players killed Elite monsters, these Players could take the Mana Stone that was on the head of the monster and sell it in the city to get more money.

Another use for the Mana Stone was that Players could absorb the extra Mana they had in these stones in order to spend more time training.

While a Rank F Player had an average of 1 Mana Units, which could go up to 2 Mana Units in total, a Rank F Mana Stone had 10 Mana Units, which was equivalent to letting a Rank F Player train for 5 to 10x longer than he could with his body's Mana.

The Players' idea of ​​using a Mana Stone to get a Residual Devil weapon for real life was not unfounded.

This was knowledge that humanity discovered in recent decades. As long as a Player intends to extract an item from the game for real life, he can do so as long as he provides enough Mana within 10 minutes.

But the price for that was too high, a simple sword extracted from a Rank F game needed 50 Units of Mana. Such a high amount of Mana, probably at Rank F only Developers could do that with their body's Mana, and among Players, only Rank D Players could do that.

But for Rank D Players, this type of Rank F weapon was completely useless, and considering the amount of money they received per mission, it was just a waste of time and waste of Mana to extract this type of weapon from Rank F games.

Considering that a Rank F Mana Stone cost $2,000 and a Rank F mission yielded $200, for Rank F Players it was more profitable to sell these treasures than to use it to train more, since with a lot of training time the income from it would decrease, and considering that there weren't good enough weapons in Rank F games, it made the Rank F Mana Stone even more useless.

But seeing now that in Residual Devil they could extract weapons that would be stronger than ordinary weapons, maybe even weapons that could damage Rank E monsters, as long as the price they spend on Rank F Mana Stones is not higher than the price of a magic weapon, they would be in profit!

When this kind of news spreads in Sandstone Bay, the price of Rank F Mana Stones which was only $2,000, will likely rise to at least $3,000 in a short time, possibly even going higher in the future!

Among the Players who thought about this possibility, Amoura was the one who felt the most urgency, as she was itching to try it out. So, without thinking twice, still live, she paused the game, took out her cell phone and ordered 10 F Rank Mana Stones.

She didn't have that money available right now, but she had a credit card. As long as she continued to do Rank E quests, she would be able to pay off these stones quickly.

But she knew that if she took a few days to do this, instead of spending $20,000 on these 10 F-Rank Mana Stones, it's very likely that she would spend more than $30,000 on it, greatly reducing how much she would save to not buy a Rank Magic Weapon. AND.

As someone who has been living on her own for over a year now, the previous Amoura was unlikely to do something as risky as this, like taking on $20,000 in debt without a second thought, but seeing how much Residual Devil was changing her life, she understood that she needed to take advantage of it. this opportunity as soon as possible.

While other players would still have a bit of doubt in the early days, she had a bit of confidence in EA, the genius Developer who is making this miracle game, and she felt that she would not regret this choice.

Not only was Amoura quick to do this, but other Players and Streamers were quite decisive when they saw this and did the same thing.

Residual Devil had greatly increased their firearm shooting skill, it would be a shame to waste that skill once they reached Rank E, so the safest choice would be to invest now and take advantage of the profit boost they would have with a better weapon .

Gabe, who was watching Amoura buying the Mana Stones so decisively, just smiled at her attitude.

Honestly this was something he already expected to happen. Despite being a Developer, he understood the suffering of Players when it came to using firearms in Rank E, so much so that this was the biggest factor for Players to avoid using firearms to grow in Rank F, since in Rank F And they could take very little advantage of this ability.

And as a Rank F Game Developer where the focus was firearms training, Gabe knew he had to do something to help these Players, since they were the audience that consumed his game, if these people got stronger, the better would be for him, since these people could play even more.

So he had this idea.

Duke in the game he played in his previous life already had the ability to enhance the Players' weapons, but this ability was never exploited as it would not be as interesting for the style of play that it had in his other life.

But here it was different, being able to have a more powerful weapon was very tempting, as it meant that your chance of dying in a mission was much lower!

So, Gabe spent around 400 Mana Units to develop Duke, which was much higher than the amount he spent to make a Lycan, but still much cheaper than to make the strongest monsters in the game, and it was enough for Duke the ability to truly upgrade the player's weapon in a logical way.

If he was going to do something like this normally, Gabe would first need to have the knowledge of how to do it, and then add that to the character he developed for the game.

But Gabe didn't have to do that normally. He had the System that allowed him to simulate a character the way he imagined it, that is, as long as he imagined a character with a skill, the system would do all the calculations for that character to be the way Gabe imagined.

So he didn't need to discover this knowledge on his own, and he could still learn it from the character he made!

In Residual Devil, the player could watch Duke enhancing the weapon in front of them, and just like the training knowledge the player absorbs with Mana, Duke's weapon enhancement knowledge can also be learned.

But of course, this is not an easy thing, by Gabe's calculations, an average player with low talent would need dozens of hours of observation to learn how to do this as Duke would.

So seeing players like Amoura draw Mana Stones so decisively made Gabe nod his head in agreement.

"It's easier to buy the finished product and make it more money than trying to learn something you don't have the talent to waste time on." Gabe said with a smile as he looked at Amoura very interested in the game.

Unfortunately, she didn't have enough money to pay Duke to upgrade one of her weapons, but she was determined to do her best to accumulate in-game money and try it out.

If she got a rifle in the game, she had no doubt that it would be this weapon that she would use the Mana Stones to extract from the game, after the weapon was fully upgraded.

This possibility that Gabe added to the game not only surprised the Residual Devil Players, but also Wilson, who was still watching Amoura's livestream while watching this game.

As a C Rank Developer, Wilson's thoughts ran even deeper than these Players' thoughts.

He could see that with this Rank F game, Gabe Howards could influence not only the development of Sandstone Bay's Rank F Players, but also the development of Rank E Players!

For a city like Sandstone Bay that had at least 8,000 Rank E Players, a single Developer being able to influence such a large amount of Players was amazing!

Even he wasn't very confident of making an E Rank game that could influence Players so much in such a simple way, but a young F Rank Developer boy was managing to do it!

"This is only his first game and he's already wreaking so much havoc… I'm scared to even imagine this kid's future." Wilson sighed with a smile as he watched Amoura's livestream.

Thinking of something, Wilson pressed a button to call Ashley.

When she arrived at the office, he spoke. "Ashley, cancel all sales of F-Rank Mana Stones, for the next few weeks we will not be supplying F-Rank Mana Stones to any other cities. If possible, even pay attention to the price other cities are selling these stones at and if price is low, place a buy order."

Ashley was surprised by this news. Until a few weeks ago, Wilson was desperately wanting to sell the city's F-Rank Mana Stones, but no other city was willing to buy this as it was practically useless, but now all of a sudden Wilson wanted to stop selling these stones, and even buy from others. cities?

Looking at the television screen Wilson was watching, Ashley tried to imagine what had happened at this game for her boss to have such a big change, but she didn't ask any more questions and started to perform the task.

When the other cities heard that Sandstone Bay was buying Mana Rank F stones, many managers of these cities ridiculed Wilson for being an idiot and wasting money on something useless, some, to mock Wilson, even gave him a discount if he bought in large quantities. , which to their surprise, Wilson accepted without a second thought.

'Let's see if you guys will keep laughing when this game arrives in your town… haha.' Wilson chuckled as he looked at the messages from the other city managers on his desk.

As a C Rank Developer, Wilson was proud of it. Because of the problem where the city lost the talented Developer in the past, even if it didn't happen in his tenure, he was still quite ridiculed by these managers from other cities.

But Wilson didn't care about that, the time when he could take revenge was very close.

Especially when he saw the other revenue opportunities that Residual Devil could generate for the city, with how interesting this game was, he became more and more interested in the reaction these other managers would have in the future.