God's Imitator

Cai Zhiyuan paused slightly before continuing, ”The logic behind ’Spider Solitaire’ and ’Jump Platforms’ is somewhat similar.

”’Spider Solitaire’ is divided into several different difficulty levels. At low difficulty it’s very simple, but the returns are minimal.

”After practicing at low difficulty, players will naturally develop the idea of trying the higher difficulty challenge.

”But high difficulty itself has a high probability of failure, and at this point players might attribute this failure to bad luck.

”Under these circumstances of constantly paying trial-and-error costs, the God’s Imitator can easily earn the time they need.

”’Jump Platforms’ follows roughly the same logic. Its key point is that the early stages are relatively easy, while the mid to late stages are very difficult.

”This game is divided into many different chapters, and the difficulty of the chapters increases slowly, so players won’t feel that the difficulty of any particular chapter suddenly spikes.

”Continuing to the next chapter will double the reward upon completion, and players easily can’t resist the temptation. After failing, the original reward is halved, which also restricts chip output.

”After players fail, they will most likely still believe the rules are fair and that it was just their own bad luck.

”As for ’Pinball,’ it’s even more insidious. Looking at single-player mode alone, it’s mostly a luck-based game with a small positive return.”Although only a few pinballs can directly fall into specific holes to earn chips, with large numbers of pinballs falling into the chip pile, it still ultimately has positive returns.

”The biggest problem is that as pinballs continuously accumulate, the chip pile will appear increasingly precarious, which will stimulate more players to play and continuously throw chips into it.

”In the end, whether this chip pile falls or not doesn’t make much difference to the God’s Imitator.

”Because they will most likely be able to earn sufficient returns.

”But for the players, only one lucky person can claim all these chips, and they still have to face the situation of massive chip devaluation. All other players can only helplessly become also-rans.

”So these three games, as ’trap games,’ all share similar characteristics:

”They do include some positive-sum game content, but these returns are very low, insufficient to trigger serious inflation, able to maintain the relative stability of the room’s chip value.

”But unlike games like ‘Compare Sizes’ and ’Simple Poker,’ they dangle an illusory expected return to hook players and deceive them into playing multiple rounds in the room.

”By the time players actually realize this, it’s often too late.”

Everyone fell into silence. Obviously, Xu Tong had fallen into exactly this kind of trap.

She had attempted all three of these games. ’Spider Solitaire’ took the shortest time, ’Jump Platforms’ took slightly longer, and ’Pinball’ took the longest time.

Clearly, in the final stages of the game, a large number of players in this hall had gathered in the ’Pinball’ room, all wanting to win that final enormous chip pile.

Yang Yuting felt very sad, ”Xu Tong... I really don’t know what to say. To still have this kind of wishful thinking in a life-and-death game...”

Wang Yongxin silently shook his head, ”There’s no helping it. After all, she was inside the situation, not like us analyzing from a god’s perspective.

”In that kind of frenzied environment, it’s actually very easy to be influenced by others. Wanting to maintain complete rationality is very difficult.

”Moreover, there was actually some coincidence involved.

”When returns are lower than expected at the start, players will have great survival pressure, because they know that even if they gather enough cards, they will most likely still die if their returns are at the bottom.

”At that time, they’ll hope even more to make a big score to turn things around.

”Many players in this hall probably thought the same way.

”The worse situation is that someone in this room most likely used ’Equipment Forging’ to cut off the entire room’s survival card trading, and even further extracted other players’ profits.

”With multiple factors stacking up, although Xu Tong barely managed to gather the survival cards, she ultimately still died because her returns were at the bottom.

”The mortality rate in this room must be very high.”

Actually, when they saw the profit numbers on the big screen, everyone had already realized that the safety line for returns in this game was probably above 65,000.

If it fell below this number, it would be very dangerous.

Although players who earn 50,000 minutes of visa time in the game can produce five survival cards, wanting to turn them into non-duplicate cards can still result in some accidents and losses.

For example, if there are too many duplicates of a certain card on the market, causing one’s own card to be unsellable, or if a certain card is too scarce and one has to spend extra high prices to purchase it, both could cause significant fluctuations in returns.

Those players who spent large sums buying survival cards, although they escaped the first instant death penalty, couldn’t escape the second instant death penalty.

Xu Tong’s death had a large element of luck.

The optimal solution in her hall was clearly ’Equipment Forging,’ but not seeing the optimal solution doesn’t necessarily mean certain death.

Other weaker players in Community 17, such as Qin Yao, Zheng Jie, Dai Yifan and others, also failed to find the optimal solution in their halls, but either because the game rooms in their halls were relatively friendly, or due to some other reasons, they still obtained decent returns.

Dai Yifan knew very clearly that he had no special talents, and if he entered those games requiring brainpower, he would most likely not be able to outplay other players. So he simply played in a room like ’Endure Pain’ that purely tested physical qualities, and also obtained quite decent returns.

Yang Yuting’s expression was very dim, ”Thinking about it now, the longer you stay in this godforsaken place, the more you can understand Aunt Su’s decision back then.

”Even if you luckily survive one life-and-death game, there will always be the next one, and the one after that.

”The Gallery will continuously pull players in and kill them in various ways.

”For the weak like Aunt Su, leaving earlier might also be a kind of relief.”

Unlike previous death cases, Xu Tong had originally safely passed the judgment game. Whether it was because of the God’s Imitator’s mercy or luck, in any case, she had passed.

But even so, it didn’t mean she was safe.

In this place, everyone had a deeper understanding of the phrase ”you never know which will come first, tomorrow or an accident.”

Wang Yongxin was silent for a moment before asking, ”Do you want to check the archives and game processes of other players in this hall?

”I’m guessing that there are most likely players from other communities in this game hall who seized a large amount of other players’ profits through the ’Equipment Forging’ room, thus causing mass deaths of players in this room.

”If we’re willing to spend visa time, we can find out.”