Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Liu Wengyi

"my class money is not as good as that of others, so why don't I?"

"Brother hanging, Brother Science and Technology, come and add me. I don't believe the authorities can find me."

This passage comes from a funny video posted on bilibili. The video was released on September 10 and reached 112000 views in a few days. The video describes the plug-in chaos of the card game "indefinitely lost" during the Ash Tide: players who carefully plan their tactics and strategy Boss find that some players can easily kill Boss with plug-ins and get all the rewards in the first few days of the event.

"lost forever" is a mobile game with neither player rivalry nor ranking system. Different from the widespread criticism of open-hanging behavior in many other games, in "indefinitely lost", the plug-in seems to appear in the players' field of vision in the most harmless manner, and has been understood, welcomed and even sought after to a certain extent.

Some players call the "hanging elder brother" and define the latter's behavior as "knight-errant righteousness"; other players join the open-hang camp: buy plug-ins on the e-commerce platform, join the "secret alliance" where plug-in players are located, and share the progress of activities with them. Reap profits.

Before we got in touch with several players who chose to hang up, we also wondered why this happened. In front of several interviewees, we talked about something else besides the plug-in.

Difficulty "I think the difficulty of this activity is very unreasonable." The player "under Sergeant" told me. According to him, he encountered many difficulties in the public war before he embarked on the road of opening and hanging.

The sergeant doesn't think he's a "class guy", but he also spent thousands of yuan on the game, which has been in service for just over a month. He showed me a screenshot of his account, saying that his account was not poor and spent a lot of money on all kinds of gift bags. But even so, the Ash Tide was a real headache for him.

The Ash Tide is a battle that requires the participation of all members of the Secret Alliance (that is, the player community). Players need to play a large copy of the game together with players of the same secret league. The 30 players in the Secret League need to challenge the Boss level alone for a certain period of time, the system will record the damage caused by each player, and when the damage accumulates to a certain value, you can defeat Boss. However, each player can only participate in three active battles a day, and if you want to get all the rewards, you need to be actively involved by most of the players in the secret league and do enough damage in the battle.

For most players, this is not an easy task. It has only been a month since the start of the game, and the character level of most players is not high. According to the player's experience, the training cycle of a character is basically in a week or so. If the player does not have the course money, he can cultivate about four or five high-level characters from the start of the service to the present. These characters can basically meet the combat needs of ordinary levels, but a new rule has been added to Ashtide-players cannot use the same characters at the same level on the same day. This means that if you focus on only four or five characters, there will be almost no one available in the second and third battles of the day.

Players need to have a strong lineup, but also need to carry out meticulous and complex operations to play more damage.

In this regard, some players sorted out strategies to teach how to use other characters to play high damage, "civilian players skip class one knife 1 million damage" video is not uncommon. But in fact, Ashtide's unreasonable difficulty and team design still cause conflicts among players: some players are racking their brains to do more damage, while others are reluctant to participate in the activity-after defeating Boss, all members of a secret alliance receive the same reward no matter how much they contribute to the team. Therefore, people who take part in the activities diligently naturally have a problem with those who enjoy the success, but even the "leader" who manages the secret alliance cannot kick the unpleasant people out of the secret alliance after the beginning of the activity.

Players' dissatisfaction with the event is not limited to this. Even if diligent people withdraw from a secret league and bid farewell to "bad players", they will still face the problem of insufficient active people, unable to clear Boss within the limited time of the event, and will not be able to get a higher level of reward.

Some players reformed their secret league on the day of the event, but not all of them were able to find 30 active players like them.

In this case, some people thought of opening up.

Sacrifice sergeant played a little depressed in the event, happened to see bilibili's funny video, know that there is a plug-in, and open hang "cost-effective" excellent. Someone in the video comment area said: "Brother hang 30 yuan for selling activities, I am still on the first floor after class 648."

Plug-ins are not hard to find: as long as you search for game names and some special keywords on the e-commerce platform, you can find a wide variety of results. Player Xiao Liu introduced me to several more popular ones: some are second kill, some are invincible to increase damage, and some are unlimited skills, increased attack speed and critical attacks. The price of the plug-in is determined by the function and duration, generally speaking, the monthly package is about 30 to 50 yuan. The three plug-ins purchased by Xiao Liu, one with "permanent qualification" and priced at 88 yuan, the other with a time limit of 60 yuan for a week, and the cheapest one is only 6 yuan for one day.

▲ is a promotional picture with plug-in.

The price of the plug-in will also change. With the development of a new activity of a game, the "market" that sells and hangs goes up. According to the sergeant, the plug-in he bought originally cost only 25 yuan a month, but the price has doubled in the week after the event began.

Xiao Liu knew for a long time that someone was hanging up in the game. There is a copy of "lost forever" called "broken Line of Defense", which is refreshed once a week. At the beginning of the service, the players who are the fastest to pass through here can enter the full-service ranking list, but the earliest players on the list are obviously not normal: they all have a level of about 20, no different from the novice. Xiao Liu said that he spent more than 8000 yuan before and after the class and invested a lot in the game, but when he was still struggling in the intermediate area, many players with much lower levels reached the advanced zone ahead of him. At that time, he realized that there was a group of players lurking in the shadows and could do more damage than him with only a few dozen yuan.

It wasn't long before the operator shut down the ranking function. However, at that time, Xiao Liu did not have any idea of hanging up. He stressed to me: "I am not the group of people who start to play the 'broken defense line'. I just hang up for this event."

The reason why Xiao Liu later opened and hung up was also that the design of the event was quite unreasonable. He said that in the "Ash Tide", Boss one has a total of 25 ranks, from 1 to 25 levels of combat is becoming more and more difficult, and the total health of Boss has increased from 800,000 to 30 million. It is not easy for most players to deal millions of damage in an active battle. Even for the top players in the game, seven or eight million damage in a single battle is close to the limit. The event lasts a total of 10 days, and for a player's active secret league, 30 players need to be able to challenge online every day, and it takes six or seven days to play all 25 levels. The sergeant said that he had never heard of any secret alliance around him who really finished the event without a plug-in.

In this way, shortly after the event began, some videos and screenshots began to circulate in the circle: a player used a level 1 character to kill Boss, which had 3000 million health. According to a rough calculation, such an open-hanging player can kill level 6 Boss in one day, that is, only 4 people can get the highest level of reward in two days.

▲ "guys, this is the best I can do."

The game operator responded to the plug-in. From September 10 to 14, officials released three batches of banned accounts one after another. But after the first banned lists were announced, players soon discovered that even if someone in the secret alliance was opened and blocked, the rewards received by others would not disappear. After asking about customer service, players are more certain that officials will not punish "continuous sitting". Many players began to "praise" these open-hanging players, saying that they "sacrificed" themselves in exchange for rewards for others in the secret alliance.

Such "sacrifice" quickly became a reality of the industry chain: some players began to provide "paid hit" services. They buy plug-in and bulk registered game accounts online, join secret alliances, quickly pass through Boss, and then quickly exit. As long as other "normal" players in the secret league are rewarded, it doesn't matter if these trumpets are blocked immediately.

The charge for each order is usually 25 to 30 yuan, and the cost of the secondary account is 2 to 5 yuan each. This means that as long as you complete two paid calls, you can earn about 50 yuan and recover the cost of purchasing the account and plug-in (30 yuan per month).

In order to allow their allies to get rewards successfully, many "responsible leaders" have chosen to turn to Kaihang Daiba. These leaders will have a private chat with the members of the alliance: "excuse me, I'll let Brother hang in."

A "responsible leader" of ▲

Tech car sergeant and Xiao Liu also do substitutes, but they don't charge other players. Why not charge? The sergeant said that the more people open and hang up, the less likely it is that officials will be banned. Xiao Liu said that he "can't see it": some players charge high fees and directly sell secret league places for profit, and he doesn't want to let these people make money, so he decides to help players in need to play activities for free.

People like Xiao Liu and Sergeant are not alone. On Xianyu's platform, I met a seller with the words "science and technology play on his behalf". The commodity is priced at 10 yuan, but the details page says "No need to film". If you contact him directly, you can call him for free. I asked the seller why he did this, and the answer was that he had lost his enthusiasm for the game, but could not stand the official and plug-in practices and decided to give a hand.

However, more people decide to use plug-ins to make a second profit. Most players are not willing to start hanging by themselves, it is too troublesome, and the secret alliance may not be able to leave a place for the hanging brother. So a new business arises at the historic moment-- "technology car".

The principle of "technology car" is very simple: players as "car owners" first buy plug-ins and several accounts, and after establishing a secret alliance, first let the purchased accounts join, clear the obstacles before Boss, and then withdraw them one by one to sell the quota of secret alliance, that is, "parking space". After other players buy a "parking space", they only need to join the secret alliance and wait for the "car owner" to complete the whole activity with an open account, and then they can receive all the activity rewards.

A "parking space" can be sold for 30 to 50 yuan. Even if the price has exceeded the price of the plug-in itself, "parking spaces" are still in short supply. Two days before the end of the event, Xianyu had far more information about "asking for a car" than "starting", and the highest price soared to more than 100th. One seller said that she drove at least two "technology cars" with 30 people in three days, which brought her a profit of about 4000 yuan according to a quota of 68 yuan.

The parking space of "sacrifice trumpet stream" which is hard to get for ▲.

After paying the monthly fee, I joined a plug-in group called "× Technology", which often talked about "technology cars". The core of the discussion is interest. Some people say that the price on Xianyu is actually not high. The price of parking spaces in all kinds of "technology vehicles" has risen to about 150 yuan. A full "technology car" can easily earn more than 3000 yuan, and "a monthly income of tens of thousands is not a problem." The plug-in producer revealed in the group: although he can't earn so much, he still earns 10,000 yuan a month. If you are willing to work with him, it will not be a problem to make a "minimum living standard". However, he also said that it was not once or twice that he was invited to "tea" by the police.

For most games and players, the use of plug-ins is by no means honorable and needs to be criticized. However, the story in "indefinitely lost" shows that the reason for the proliferation of plug-ins is not so simple.

The flaw in the design of the "Ash Tide" activity is one of the reasons. The reward setting of the big pot and the unreasonable difficulty layering provide the motivation for the players' open behavior. The sergeant told me that most players like him think that the main problem is the progress of development. For many people, the service time of the game is only one month, and the progress of their development is not equal to the difficulty of the activities. the requirements of the game for activity and unreasonable member management mechanism have deepened the anxiety of these players.

There is no competition between players in "indefinitely lost", which makes the attitude of players from antagonism to ambiguity: from the players' point of view, the plug-in does not seem to substantially harm their interests. It is precisely because of this, just like the publicity effect brought by many funny videos, the players' ridicule and praise provide a lot of help for the spread of the plug-in.

In fact, however, the harm of plug-ins to players may be hidden: plug-ins greatly shorten the distance between ordinary players and course money players, and many people realize that their hard-working accounts that invest a lot of time and money are not as good as the plug-ins bought on Taobao for 20 yuan, so it is difficult to keep excited and committed to the game.

The sergeant said that after this incident, he was very disappointed with the way he played the game, and did not retreat just because "there is no room for art and plot." After that, he does not intend to continue to use plug-ins. He thinks he is strong enough to deal with games other than the tide of ashes.

Xiao Liu said that after the event, he may continue to use methods such as opening and hanging "broken defense lines" because they are too complicated and time-consuming. "my class money is not as good as that of others, so why don't I open and hang up?" Xiao Liu said.

At the same time, the operator of the game "lost forever" is also updating the plug-in detection technology. On the morning of September 20, two days after the end of the "Ash Tide" activity, many players in the "× Technology" group were blocked one after another. According to the reflection of these open-hanging players, even the relatively safe "unlimited attack speed hanging" began to be banned.

However, there are still "technology cars" open to the public from now on, and many car owners have prepared enough accounts for "sacrifice" to wait for the next event to begin.

Online games and plug-ins seem to be in a never-ending battle of "as virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten". It is indeed impossible to put an end to plug-ins in the short term. In addition to improving the technical ability and blocking speed, the game itself may also need to make more tradeoffs between the content of the activity and the design of play. If the unreasonable difficulty and the mechanism of bundling with "allies" become the threshold for ordinary players to get rewards for activities, it will only aggravate the proliferation of plug-ins.

The only foreseeable thing is that in the coming period of time, the delicate game between players, plug-ins and operators will not stop.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.