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

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Peng Chuwei

Where is the wind going when people are in the wind?

Anxious liar. "you can't reach the real boss." The rabbit sat cross-legged on the floor covered with baby crawling pads, looked at his son playing beside him, and told me as if he were talking to a child, "you're going to meet a lot of liars."

The rabbit graduated from Henan University of Technology in 2019 and served as a conscript for two years. That period of time in the army honed her will not to give up without success, but also let her find her own advantage. Rabbit said that her advantage is that she "can deal with people." she first found that she had a gift for language when she submitted a manuscript: at first, the manuscript was returned, and she was not as frustrated as the others. Instead, she found out the contact information of the reviewer and asked him about the problems with the manuscript. After a few words, she attracted the attention of the reviewer, who was willing to answer her question, and she quickly wrote it again in accordance with the revision, and then successfully issued her first press release.

There are many similarities between this contribution and the rabbit's subsequent contact with the studio of Warcraft.

The rabbit's first understanding of Warcraft studio came from Douyin. Her boyfriend saw the advertisement that "Warcraft Studio can make a lot of money" in a short video and introduced it to her. Following the address on Douyin, they went to a local studio to talk about "cooperation", which was actually spending money to learn from each other how to efficiently get and sell gold coins from World of Warcraft.

According to the encyclopedia definition, "Warcraft Studio" is "in the online game" World of Warcraft "in the production of virtual game coins, game equipment or other games in the status, benefits to sell to players to make a profit." Since the launch of World of Warcraft, a gray industrial chain from gold coin farmers, studios to platforms and players has continued to exist, but today's routines are different.

The trading platform for buying and selling gold coins paid a tuition fee of 1600 yuan, and after several days of "face-to-face opportunities", the rabbit mastered the whole process. The other party assured them that, according to the process, each account could earn 8000 yuan a month. So they went home and began to build machines and make money by playing coins. But after trying for a period of time, they found that the actual income was much lower than that of 8000. When they went back to the person who taught them, the studio had already "disappeared", and even the last sentence left by each other seemed to clear the relationship: "you can't make money." it's your unskilled operation, not my fault. "

"now when you search the Warcraft studio, you basically meet these people." The rabbit said to me.

I searched for terms related to "Warcraft Studio" in Baidu Tieba and Weibo and Douyin, and most of the users I met had a very strong desire to voice. From "suspension" to "transition", they are active in recent hot topics related to World of Warcraft, claiming to be very experienced in moving bricks in the game for many years, and according to their experience, December 2022 is the best time to join the studio.

I try to add them as friends, which is usually no problem, the friend application will be quickly approved. Questions always appear in the first few sentences of conversation, and before I explain why I'm here, they will tell me, "I can pay for my apprenticeship and answer all your questions."

The rabbit told me that those people were liars. With the news that "Blizzard NetEase terminated the cooperation" in November, there have been more and more such people. The closer to the end of the cooperation in January next year, the louder their voices on major online platforms, chasing the last group of young people who did not know that the service was about to be shut down. rely on the art of words to get these few sources, just want to earn some hard money to pay their tuition fees. In fact, because the national service is about to be out of service, players and studios are thinking about it, and the gold coins in the game are depreciating. At this time, admission is only to pay tuition fees for swindlers, and it is impossible to make any money. For months, these swindlers have followed the migration of World of Warcraft studios to foreign servers and other games, hovering high above the crowd and out of the game, inducing and robbing single retail investors who don't know what to do with the status quo.

After dealing with them several times, I was dragged into a group chat called "World of Warcraft Brick Exchange Group". The group was crowded, each text message ended with a question mark or exclamation mark, and the Q group housekeeper kept sending messages that "private chats are liars" to every new entrant. At the same time, the group administrator is promoting that the latest trend of moving bricks is the "blockchain contract tracking project", which is "a new direction for the transformation of small game studios."

Group chat screenshot before disbanding after I joined the group, the administrator quickly talked to me privately and asked me if I had any intention to join his project. I refused, and before blocking me, he left a message: "people like you can't make money, and so is Warcraft." it's the same with society. "

At the same time as he blocked me, an account brushed the screen in the group and sent a lot of messages, "Warcraft is going to stop service, liars are in a hurry, don't do their project." soon, the account was banned and removed from the group. The episode caused a little confusion, and many people dropped out of the group together.

Cold-eyed intermediary in this chaos, I noticed that one person kept shouting that she could help people identify liars and answer questions related to entry for free, so I added her, and she was a rabbit.

In April 2022, the rabbit and her boyfriend were cut leeks by a group of swindlers who claimed that "Warcraft Studios can make money". She felt unreconciled that her boyfriend was going to give up. At that time, her boyfriend was on the verge of losing his sense of value because of family troubles, and she was worried that giving up would be another blow. Driven by the desire to restore her boyfriend's self-confidence and the indomitable nature of her personality, she told herself that she must break into the circle of real studio bosses.

She installed a Momo on her mobile phone. She chose Momo because she felt that "the vast majority of small businessmen who use Warcraft to make money are people who are uneducated and work in front of computers every day, and such people tend to be lonely." In Momo, she posted a picture of herself and posted the news that "World of Warcraft is so difficult, which brother can teach me". As a result, she was very satisfied that her cell phone "rang continuously for three days".

The rabbit added the one with the most experience in gold mining. Over the next few days, they chatted a lot on Wechat. "they are veterans, each staring at 40 computers, and can also browse Douyin by the way." The rabbit told me, "there are also manual ones, playing games on the 1/4 screen and online dramas on the 1/4 screen. At the same time, they can also read novels and chat with me."

Their topic basically has nothing to do with the game, talking most about where to travel, the rabbit lives in Xiamen, vividly depicting Xiamen's seafood and beaches to each other, while the other party pulls the rabbit into a "Warcraft" brick group on the fourth day. In that group, the rabbit met people who really belonged to the "circle". They were the owners, script agents and investors of the major studios. After a few days of observation, the rabbit and several of them added friends.

During the chat, the rabbit sent to the sea in Xiamen to communicate with them at the beginning, the rabbit encountered a lot of setbacks, and the messages were often lost in the sea. "for a long time in front of the computer or mobile phone, they seldom communicate with people, irregular work and rest, and irregular diet, all of which can lead to their grumpy temper." The rabbit said to me, "unless you're going to kill you, they won't give you a good face." With that, the rabbit took a long breath and seemed a little aggrieved.

I asked, "then how did they accept you?"

"they accept me only because my people are supposed to be young, simple and single."

"is that it?"

"of course, you still have to be obsessed with it."

When Rabbit said this, I remembered that she added my Wechat ID called "grind rabbit essence". In order to arouse their interest, the rabbit not only spent a lot of energy to "grind people", but also determined a "human setting" for herself in the group. She wanted to play the role of a simple little sister next door. For this reason, she went to the studio to study, and then picked up everyone in the group. "I'll chase them and call my brother." After shouting for a few days, the rabbit finally chatted with one of his eldest brothers who had several studios. The eldest brother was willing to pour out his troubles to her, and she happened to be good at listening and giving appropriate answers, just like she had communicated with the reviewers. She successfully won the trust of her eldest brother, and then they established a cooperative relationship.

The rabbit told me how to get close to the boss. From then on, the rabbit worked as an intermediary with information from the eldest brother, introducing people to work-- not like a liar, but actually helping people find a job in a game studio. Some of the people introduced by her move bricks by themselves and transfer money alone in the game; some have the money to invest and have the ability to manage, so they open their own studios as bosses.

Once someone finds her through various network platforms, the rabbit goes to the eldest brother who opens the studio, and because the eldest brother has taught a lot of apprentices, in most cases only a phone call is needed to know the investment and income information of various modes from the apprentice. The eldest brother told her that she would convey it to the counselor in need, and when she encountered the part involving the actual operation, she directly asked the eldest brother to send an apprentice to teach him by hand. She doesn't have to do it all by herself, and she hasn't even logged in to World of Warcraft yet.

When the rabbit told me this, her eyes kept going back and forth between the phone and the child. In this business, you have to keep an eye on chat groups 24 hours a day to learn about the latest developments in the industry and what bosses are doing in private. She needs to maintain this relationship. "I feel tired." After typing a long string of words, the rabbit raised his head from the front of the phone screen and said to me helplessly, "this job belongs to a gray area. There are no laws, no rules to speak of, and women have no advantage under the complete law of the jungle." Recently, quite a lot of people have come to her for advice, and she spends a lot of time every day to help them distinguish the words of liars.

"most of the people who move bricks are not good at words, maverick and have few friends. People who want to learn to move bricks are very difficult to get in touch with them, but can only meet liars." The rabbit said to me, and then pointed to himself: "I am an intermediary between beginners and veterans who learn to move bricks. I am patient and can tell them how to make money." Compared with the liar in her mouth, the rabbit thinks he won't at least cut other people's leeks. "during this period of time, I will tell those who want to join the profession not to come for the time being."

I asked if this sincerity would have an impact on her income, and she nodded and shook her head. She told me that on the one hand, World of Warcraft is only one of her projects, and she has already studied the operation mode of other game studios with her eldest brother, so if World of Warcraft is out of service, she can introduce people to other games; on the other hand, she thinks things have taken a turn for the better.

When the news came out that Blizzard and NetEase had not reached an agreement, the rabbit immediately went to the bosses in her circle. The big bosses told the rabbit, "Don't panic, it will continue to drive in two months' time." Most of the new studio owners introduced by Rabbit hold the same attitude. They are not familiar with the situation of foreign service, and they are not willing to empty their resources and accounts and leave the field sadly. Most people still unremittingly hoard gold coins in National Service.

The rabbit said that this is called "gambling", betting on the rise in the price of gold when the national service is reopened in a short period of time. When I asked the rabbit if he was worried about these people's choices, the rabbit shrugged and said that there was a boss who had a close relationship with her. Recently, the conversation between them has been replaced by gambling. For some people, their daily routine is full of bets-- whether the World of Warcraft national server can renew the contract, or whether the Japanese team can beat Croatia-- in this sense. The storm of World of Warcraft will not affect them because they themselves live in uncertainty.

Frustrated ordinary brick bearers, Rabbit spoke more sympathetically about ordinary brick bearers introduced by her than his boss. Such people usually work on their own, driving their trumpets in obscurity for a long time and using inefficient scripts to earn some gold coins from the game to subsidize their families.

"this is the kind of person who is most frustrated." The rabbit said to me, "they won't make a sound. You can't get in touch." After a while, she suggested that I go to an Internet bar in Xiamen, where there was a man who had been introduced by her but had no news recently. After squatting in the Internet bar for a period of time, I still didn't see the man. When I was at my wit's end, a young man playing Dungeon & Fighter suddenly looked up and told me that there was a man who had hired people in the Internet bar to do the World of Warcraft project. He didn't go, but he still remembered the man's contact information.

When I got in touch with the explosion bear, he was studying wonton in a breakfast shop. After I introduced myself to him, he hesitated for a long time and asked me, "what is game media?"

I told him that I would write his thoughts and stories and post them online for more people to see. The voice fell, and the other end of the phone became silent. after about a wonton took shape, he replied, "Ah, don't mess with that thing."

Was thinking about how to ask him out to meet, the explosion bear suddenly asked me if I would like to go to his place to eat wonton, I agreed to come down. We met in a pyrotechnic shop, and the tiles on the wall were stained with traces of burning for many years. Facing the rising heat, the explosion bear began to talk endlessly. He first quoted to me the words of teacher Wang Defeng: "people still don't believe in fate when they are 40 years old. This person is too poor in understanding." This sentence used to be very popular on Douyin.

The explosion bear does not look like a 40-year-old, but he told me very seriously: "in the past, I could not earn a lot of money and looked down on small money. I was such a person, but those who earned a lot of money had the ability and luck, and I didn't have it." I can only earn 100 breakfast money every day. "

Before the explosion, the bear moved bricks in the national service "World of Warcraft". The imminent outage of the national service led to a drop in the price of gold, so it had to withdraw. He attributed the change to his lack of luck to make money. However, he is not always unlucky. Explosion Bear used to be a full-time "chop man" who was online for 12 hours a day in nostalgic clothes, and his income was considerable at that time. His luck began to disappear in September, and his income dropped a lot as the Ministry of Public Security launched "Operation break", "crack down on the black industrial chain of online accounts", and Blizzard updated the "group capital mechanism". But at that time, he did not give up, but was considering expanding the scale and looking for more people to start a business and open a studio. He believes that with the arrival of the new expansion "the Age of Dragons" in November, he can make a comeback.

Finally, the explosive bear waited until Blizzard announced that he would no longer renew his contract with NetEase. Helplessly watching the gold price get lower and lower day by day, at the end of November, he chose to empty all the materials, sold his account, learned to pack wonton, and planned to open his own breakfast shop. "the real choice is that there is no choice." The exploding bear said to me as if he were staring at a shot that didn't exist.

Two days after the explosion bear sold the account, the explosion bear sent me a message. Because of the epidemic, he gave up the plan to open a shop and chose to distribute fresh food at home. He said he had been watching Journey to the West recently. "when I didn't leave Warcraft, I felt that my daily life was like a Journey to the West." "with Wukong's pressure, Bajie's figure, Sha Wujing's hairstyle and the nagging of the Tang monk, every day is getting closer and closer to the western sky," he said. " When I asked him how he felt now, he replied, "the life I live now is very real. I accept my fate."

The explosion bear chose to be resigned to fate, and he thought he was incompetent. When the national service announced the shutdown, he hated that he did not foresee that day in advance; when the gold price fell, he blamed himself for not being decisive enough to sell his resources earlier. In the end, he did the only thing he could decide-to leave the powerless place of World of Warcraft and master the bowl of wonton in front of him, or a takeout.

Compared with the unwilling studio owner, the great saint's reaction is much stronger. He doesn't want his career to come to an abrupt end, even if he can't change the ending.

For example, an intermediary like rabbit is like a group of scavengers outside the studio. They may be very close to Warcraft Studios, but they are not really studios after all.

Rabbit told me that the owners of the studio she knew would not be willing to give me an interview, on the one hand, because they were too lazy to look at their phones, too lazy to answer phones, and too lazy to go out; on the other hand, they tended to treat World of Warcraft as a natural disaster like a storm. anyway, they had already made plans and did not rely solely on this game to make money.

The rabbit's words suddenly reminded me that for people who were not completely involved in the storm, the change in World of Warcraft was just a bit of bad luck, and they didn't have too many ideas.

After sending a lot of private messages, I got in touch with the Great Sage. On the personal page of Big Saint Douyin, the self-introduction section reads "World of Warcraft 10 years of heavy players", "obsessed with sports" and "more than a dozen studios across the country." his head is of a great saint waving a golden hoop. Hongling all over the sky occupies most of the background frame. The Great Sage was very busy. On Wechat, he repeatedly postponed his appointment with me. A few times later, when I was no longer hopeful, at 10:00 on Sunday night, the message box suddenly lit up. He asked me if I had time to talk.

I called him and soon got through. Dasheng is from Shandong, and the voice on the other end of the phone is very full, with the unique righteousness of the Shandong people. Like the explosive bear, he was also affected by the outage of the national service. "No impact is fake, it must have an impact on a large studio like ours." The Great Sage told me, "well, so I'm going to work in Taiwan for a while."

Although the tone of the Great Sage is somewhat understated, the impact is obvious. At present, hundreds of accounts in the National Service of the Great Sage's studio have been completely shut down. When he received the news that the national service was out of service, the Great Sage was briefly stunned for a moment, and then began to deal with it. The way to deal with it is to transform the studio to the Taiwan server and to the "Dream Journey to the West." On the one hand, he asked his employees to go to Taiwan to train their new accounts so that they could move in on a large scale; on the other hand, he personally went to inspect the "Dream Journey to the West."because we have to keep working at this stage. Well, it doesn't matter whether it's a month or two." The Great Sage said to me bravely that he was already trying to get through the transition period. In spite of the crisis, he wanted me to know that he was taking his time instead of bragging. He kept emphasizing to me, "We must be telling the truth."

The Great Sage is one of the few large studio owners who have only focused on World of Warcraft and, as he wrote in his self-introduction, has been a World of Warcraft player for many years. Ten years ago, the Great Sage just graduated and worked as a salesman with only the lowest basic salary, and his free time was spent by games. Like many other early studios, Dasheng inadvertently heard from friends who played together that they could sell gold to make money. After trying to work for a month, he found that his income was all right, so he quit his job and began to build his own studio. He hired the first batch of people in his own factory. "at that time, my family sometimes opened a factory, and then I posted an advertisement in the factory." The Great Sage told me, "or talk to their boss at the door of the supermarket and post advertisements."

At that time, the national service script was not yet rampant, and the price of gold coins had not fallen to the point where people could hardly make any money by moving bricks. They worked reluctantly for two months, and there was a constant loss of personnel, and then one day, the tuyere came. The great saint recalled that that day, a boss asked him to "look at the number", that is, to help train the number. After a month of training, the big holy number was returned to the boss, and the boss thought the great saint was good, so he pulled him into a group of more than 20 bosses. Later, everyone in the group became a regular client of Dasheng Studio.

It was this experience that inspired Dasheng's studio. Shortly after the opening of nostalgic clothes, he made a big transformation to his studio, bringing in a colonel and some highly skilled and professional players to earn gold coins. When it comes to this, the voice of the Great Sage is much louder. "at that time, I felt that Tuan Ben made more money, because Tuan Ben belongs to a high-end thing, and you will have a lot of contact with bosses." He said, "for such a long time as my studio, I certainly don't want to do something here all the time. I'm sure I have to challenge something at a higher level." Listening to what he said, I thought to myself, this is probably the origin of his "obsession with sports" in his self-introduction.

The Great Sage told me that it was precisely because of the early transition that on the eve of the shutdown of national service, his studio did not rush to more risky foreign services or simply exit like other gold or script studios. He analyzed the risk of turntable service to me. "the risk of Taiwan service mainly comes from the closure of the name." "the first is the use of scripts, the second is excessive collection of resources, and the third is the frequent trading of gold coins," he told me. " None of this is a problem for their studio, they just play Ben like ordinary players.

When doing these analyses, the Great Sage did not pause, as if he had thought about it many times. But when I asked if the transfer would last too long and what his plans were for the future, his tone became a little panicked, and every "um" in his words had a longer pause. Just a moment ago, he was rationally showing me his plans, but now he's getting a little uneasy. The Great Sage told me that after all these years, he had made enough money in World of Warcraft, and he was ready to slowly get out of the business of Warcraft Studios. What he didn't want to see was a sudden end. Just as the news of the outage of the national service just came, and at that moment of amazement, he felt not entirely unwilling, but also panic.

He dared not accept that everything suddenly disappeared, and years of hard work and years of game experience went up in smoke with the news falling from the sky in a moment.

But on the whole, the Great Sage is luckier than the explosion Bear, and his studio still has room for transformation, and the accumulated money allows him to stay longer and start from scratch in Taiwan server or other games.

Shortly after chatting with Da Sheng, the rabbit suddenly came to me and asked me if I had contacted the real Warcraft studio boss. I told her about the Great Sage.

After a while, I sent the last message and asked her, "do you think life will be better in the future?"

The other end replied quickly: "at least it can't be worse."

(at the request of the interviewees, rabbits, explosive bears and great saints are aliases. )

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.