Chapter 141: The Game is Lost

In fact, Bao Yueqiao still had one reason in his heart that he had not voiced: although these small accounts were here to poach users, they had actually spent money to do so. A one-yuan super megaphone required burning through about 100,000 of them a day. Good grief, that was all hard cash! Over a month, that amounted to three million in megaphone fees alone. No matter how one looked at it, this was a massive profit.

Therefore, Bao Yueqiao could not bear to cancel these super megaphones. He was dying for these people to keep spamming endlessly. That way, without lifting a finger, the company would rake in 36 million a year. Where on earth could one ever find such a lucrative business?

As for the steady loss of regular users—please, right now Bao Yueqiao was no longer working for himself, he was working for Tenda. Since the company did not belong to him anyway, why should he care about such matters? As long as the annual operating profit looked good on paper, that was quite enough!

Meanwhile, the users of Lianzhong Game World, who were constantly bombarded by these advertisements, naturally began to develop some alternative thoughts of their own.

Ma Xiangyang was a veteran player of Lianzhong World, having played cards there ever since 1999, right up to the present day. However, Ma Xiangyang did not have much money because all the household expenses were controlled by his wife. Even the landline phone bill was checked by his wife every month, leaving Ma Xiangyang zero opportunity to top up his account. This made Ma Xiangyang, an avid fan of Fight the Landlord, extremely miserable, especially when he was constantly tormented by various membership tier systems. Deep down, Ma Xiangyang yearned to leave Lianzhong World.

Yet Ma Xiangyang had no idea where else to find software similar to Lianzhong World. After all, in this day and age, search engines did not even exist. The only places to discover new websites and software were portal websites, but Ma Xiangyang did not surf the web—he only played cards.

Previously, Lianzhong World had been downloaded for him by a friend; he himself had no clue how to do it.

So quite naturally, when he saw the advertisement for the OO Game Center, which promised no membership system and claimed to be much more convenient and fun than Lianzhong World, Ma Xiangyang felt tempted instantly.

The problem troubling Ma Xiangyang, however, had not yet been solved: he had no idea how to find the OO Game Center mentioned in the world channel. After all, the extent of Ma Xiangyang's computer mastery was limited to turning the machine on and off, searching for icons on the desktop, and double-clicking to open them. Anything beyond that was completely beyond him.

"OO... wait, I seem to remember there being an OO icon on my computer!" Ma Xiangyang suddenly recalled that his computer desktop indeed seemed to feature something called OO.

This was a software icon that had appeared automatically on his desktop after his computer system had crashed previously and he had hired someone to come over and reinstall the system. However, Ma Xiangyang had never had any interest in touching it. Goodness knows what kind of software that was; who knew if clicking it would cause the computer to crash instantly?

Well, that was simply too terrifying!

Still, since this thing was called the OO Game Center platform, it surely had something to do with OO, right?

"Right, this OO wouldn't happen to be the same thing as QQ, would it?" Ma Xiangyang worried a little. Previously, a friend had asked him to download QQ for chatting and had even installed it for him. But when Ma Xiangyang opened it, a prompt had popped up demanding that he input his account number first.

Heaven forbid, where on earth would Ma Xiangyang know any account number? He had no concept of registering an account either. His previous Lianzhong account had also been registered by his friend, and with his friend absent, he dared not do anything at all.

Thus, he had given up very decisively. Now, looking at this OO, it seemed quite similar to QQ. Would it turn out to be the exact same thing?

At this thought, Ma Xiangyang clicked on OO with some trepidation. Fortunately, upon clicking, it entered the software directly. Although it initiated an automatic update at first, the user interface opened up swiftly enough.

There was no demand to input any account number whatsoever; it merely asked for an account name and a birthday, which Ma Xiangyang was capable of handling. Afterward, he clicked to enter OO directly, and right there on the main interface of OO, he spotted the prominent characters of the OO Game Center. He let out a long sigh of relief and clicked to enter without a second thought.

Subsequent steps involved some downloading work, but OO was indeed extremely considerate. Every single pop-up dialog box came with the prompt: (If you do not understand how to operate this, please click Yes). Ma Xiangyang happily clicked Yes all the way through, and finally sailed smoothly into the OO Game Center.

"It really is laid out similarly to Lianzhong World!" Although OO's aesthetic appeal far surpassed that of Lianzhong World, the basic layout and operations were identical, and even the positions of every button matched. Therefore, Ma Xiangyang was able to enter the game with great ease and naturalness, locate his beloved Fight the Landlord, and begin playing cards immediately.

He played continuously for four or five hours, only putting down his mouse with lingering reluctance when his wife began urging him to come eat dinner.

"What on earth have you been playing all day long? You're only coming over to eat now—do you even want your life? I've never seen you go this crazy before!" Seeing Ma Xiangyang arrive belatedly, his wife said with considerable displeasure.

"Oh, today's situation was relatively special. I was using a new software called the OO Game Center. In order to figure out its working principles and master the objective laws governing this thing, I had to spend a bit more time on it. This is all for the sake of the masses, you see!" Ma Xiangyang declared.

"Oh, and is this center thing any good?"

"Good, this OO Game Center is exceptionally good!" At the dining table, Ma Xiangyang sat upright, holding his chopsticks, and offered his evaluation in a very serious tone.

"Cut it out. This isn't your office; stop playing the leader at home. You're already retired!" his wife retorted ungraciously.

"Hey, Comrade Li Qin, I must criticize you for this. Aren't people allowed to praise others just because they're retired?" Ma Xiangyang shook his head and said.

"Fine then, my dear Director Ma, why don't you tell me just what makes this OO Game Center so good?" his wife asked.

"Well, first of all, in terms of operation, the OO Game Center has made numerous improvements. It is much more convenient than that previous Lianzhong game, and it even pops up hint cards automatically. After all, since I've retired, my brain and eyesight aren't always so reliable. Sometimes I can't see the cards clearly and don't know what to play.

"Well, as it turned out, today when I clicked to play three sixes, it automatically popped up a pair of threes for me. That is wonderful!" Ma Xiangyang said.

"Oh, is there anything else?"

"Mhm, although the operational refinements are already fantastic, I believe their greatest improvement lies in the humanization of this software.

"You know, the thing I hate the most when playing cards is encountering opponents who take forever to make a move.

"Some of them probably can't figure out what to play and keep stalling, but more often than not, they get distracted by something in real life and are unable to play, or they simply get disconnected. Oh, how that used to exasperate me! I wanted nothing more than to immediately lecture and discipline them.

"Sometimes, because of a single person getting disconnected, a single round of cards would drag on for ten or twenty minutes before finishing. You have no idea how agonizing that is!

"Furthermore, you couldn't exit the card game yourself, because doing so would cause the system to automatically declare you the loser, and all the points deducted would come out of your own tally. That disconnected or offline fellow would instead get a free score bonus. To avoid letting such a shameless wretch profit, I never initiated a quit!

"However, today's OO Game Center is different. They actually introduced a robot system! This system is truly magical; it can actually help players play cards. As soon as the system detects that someone has gone over 20 seconds without manual operation, it automatically places the match under robot custody, letting the robot take over the card playing.

"These robots react very quickly, throwing down their cards in a single second," Ma Xiangyang said.

"Won't you end up being defeated by the robots instead? What's there to be happy about?" his wife asked in confusion.

"Look at you, how could a robot be smarter than a person? Even if robots develop for another hundred years and can manage certain human tasks, when it comes to activities requiring profound human wisdom like playing cards and chess, robots are utterly hopeless!

"Take the robots in this software, for example. They're quite foolish, only capable of mechanically playing cards by using higher cards to suppress lower ones. For instance, today, at the very start of a round with single cards, I led with a King. The fellow opposite me was put under robot custody due to disconnection, and he didn't have any single cards higher than my King.

"And you guess what he did? He actually threw out four threes to bomb me! Goodness gracious, it cracked me up on the spot. Anyway, we had a hearty feast off the Landlord that round!"

"Also, every game here has different rank titles. Take Fight the Landlord, for instance. When I first went in, I was a commoner, and now I've become a middle peasant. Back in the day when our family was just liberated, our household was classified as middle peasants. Remembering that brings back such fond memories!"

Ma Xiangyang said blissfully, and subsequently talked at length about many more of the OO Game Center's improved features, looking thoroughly radiant.

"Then will you still use that Lianzhong World to play cards in the future?" his wife asked curiously.

"Never again, absolutely not. That junk won't do; it is bound to be eliminated by the wheels of history!" Ma Xiangyang waved his hand and spoke with absolute conviction.

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"President Bao, it has been three days now. Have you finished developing the blocking feature?" Little Ma, who had spent three sleepless nights, demanded impatiently of Bao Yueqiao.

"Don't be so anxious. The code left behind by this programmer is rather complex; it might still take another week to clear out, Little Ma—" Before Bao Yueqiao could finish his sentence, Little Ma on the other end hung up the phone.

"What kind of nonsense is this!" Bao Yueqiao tossed the phone aside, cursing under his breath, completely unaware that at this moment, Little Ma's patience had reached its absolute limit. Turning to his secretary, Little Ma ordered, "Pull ten people from the technical department, bring along everyone from the legal department, and oh—everyone from the security department too. Follow me, we're going to Beijing!"