"How is this possible? Our Triumph was hardly getting any attention!" Zeng Qing was momentarily stunned, then quickly checked the official forums. As expected, the discussion threads about Triumph were still minimal, insignificant compared to the vast number of World of Warcraft posts.
So, Zeng Qing hurried to the company's server room to check. Sure enough, all the servers were overloaded. He then entered the game and found it teeming with people, all wearing beginner outfits, killing chickens.
"What on earth is going on?" Zeng Qing couldn't help but strike up a conversation with some players in the game, then casually asked, "Brother, how did you find out about this game?"
"I saw it in the oo game platform lobby!" the other party replied.
"But today's focus is all on World of Warcraft, I thought no one would be paying attention to this game!" Zeng Qing said.
"Indeed, not many people are paying attention. I just happened to see a new game added to the platform's list, and it's an online game, so I came to check it out!" the other party replied.
"Don't you guys do any research on the game beforehand?" Zeng Qing asked again.
"What's there to research? Playing Warcraft 3 on the platform every day gets a bit tedious. It's rare to get a new online game, so I wanted to try something new. If it's not fun, I'll just stop playing!"
"Why don't you post on the forums?"
"Are you crazy? You have to post on the forums to play a simple game? Do you think this is Warcraft 3?"
After communicating with several players, Zeng Qing finally found his answer.
The reason Triumph, with zero publicity, managed to fill all 12 servers was because the oo game platform had always only featured single-player games or competitive games. There wasn't a single pure online game.
Therefore, when Triumph, a pure MMORPG in the style of Legend, appeared on the oo game platform, even with World of Warcraft dominating the trend, it immediately attracted a large influx of players.
Without any advertisements or promotion, Triumph's mere presence was enough to drive massive traffic.
"As expected, it was the right decision to launch on the oo game platform. The traffic here is astonishing. For online games, this is an undeveloped virgin land!" Zeng Qing said excitedly. He then exited the game and asked the head of the technical department, "Add 20 more servers. How long will that take?"
"Boss, I understand your excitement, but we can only add another 10 servers at most, because we've run out of servers!" the technical head said helplessly.
"Then open ten sets first!" Zeng Qing lamented his own oversight, regretting not preparing more servers despite having three months to prepare. He watched as the queue of players continued to grow.
In fact, these extra 10 servers were already prepared and only needed to be connected to the network. So, less than 20 minutes after the official announcement, the 10 new servers were all opened.
Within just three minutes, these 10 brand new servers were all filled to capacity, with another 40,000 players pouring into the game.
However, even so, all the servers were still in a queue.
The number of people waiting in line was about 50,000, making Zeng Qing's eyes turn green with envy.
"Do we have any more servers?" Zeng Qing shook his technical department head. But no matter how hard Zeng Qing shook, he couldn't conjure new servers.
"Boss, even if we order servers immediately, it will take at least a week from delivery to debugging. You could kill me, but I can't open any new servers!" the head replied helplessly.
"...Where can I get servers immediately?" Zeng Qing's mind raced. Then he noticed a larger area in the server room.
Among all the servers in the server room, only about one-third had red lights indicating overloaded operation. The remaining two-thirds of the servers were actually operating normally with green lights.
These servers were the ones previously used by Tengda for its own operation of Triumph. Because they had been operating for more than half a year, and in order to maintain player enthusiasm, they had continuously opened new servers. As a result, the official version of Triumph had as many as 50 servers, twice the number currently on the oo game platform.
"How many players does the old Triumph have now?" Zeng Qing suddenly asked.
"The total active players across all 50-plus servers are less than 6,000!" the technical head said with a wry smile.
"Less than 6,000 people? All 50 servers combined have fewer players than two servers of the new Triumph!" Zeng Qing snorted, then said without hesitation, "You immediately post an official announcement on the old Triumph, telling them the game will be down for maintenance in 10 minutes, and then the 50 servers will be merged! Finally, they will be merged into two servers, and all player data will be transferred to these two servers!"
"Boss, this doesn't seem appropriate!" the head of the regional operations department quickly interjected, before the technical head could speak.
"What's not appropriate? Is it technically impossible?" Zeng Qing questioned.
"It's not that, but merging servers usually requires notifying players a few days in advance, allowing them to prepare, and also offering them some benefits, otherwise I'm afraid players will protest!" the operations manager said.
"I don't have days to prepare! Don't you see how many players are waiting outside? Every minute we delay, dozens of new players might get tired of waiting and leave. We can't waste a single minute!" Zeng Qing declared forcefully, slapping the table. "Listen to me, send out the system notification now, shut down the servers in 10 minutes, then transfer player data to two servers, and finally, take all the freed-up 52 servers to the oo game platform!"
"Alright boss, even if we can shut down the servers in 10 minutes, merging 25 servers into one means a lot of player data will be combined. The issue of duplicate player names alone will be a major problem. And we also have the guild system, the resources occupied by guilds, and their names, etc. Blindly merging servers will cause major issues and requires careful handling, you know!" the operations manager said.
"It's fine, for the relevant servers. As for how to merge them, you have three days to sort this out! Is that acceptable?" Zeng Qing asked.
"Three days? If the servers aren't open for three days, all the old players will probably leave by then!" the manager said.
"Let them go. It's just less than 6,000 people. We have the oo game platform now, so those old players are nothing!" Zeng Qing said unceremoniously. The operations department could only sigh helplessly. With their boss holding this attitude, what else could they do but obediently write the system notification.
Meanwhile, the players in the game suddenly received the notification that the servers would be shut down in 10 minutes, naturally causing them to curse vehemently, insulting Tengda and all their ancestors.
Especially those who were in the middle of fighting a boss, which would take at least twenty to thirty minutes to defeat, only to be told the servers would shut down in 10 minutes – it infuriated them.
But it was all useless. Ten minutes later, those servers were uniformly shut down. Players who exited the game, bored, decided to browse the forums and then saw a pinned post.
It stated that due to the sparse player population on most servers, many servers couldn't even form a 5-player party, severely impacting the player experience.
Therefore, Triumph official decided to merge the game servers, merging Official Servers 1 to 27 into the Kai Ge server, and Official Servers 28 to 54 into the Xuan Feng server.
All server system resources would be completely reset, all guilds would be disbanded, and all players would receive compensation of 100,000 game currency, a name change card, and a free guild token.
Good heavens, when countless old players saw this announcement, they all exclaimed. More than half of the old players immediately declared they were quitting.
Then they saw a sentence at the very bottom of the announcement: Triumph oo game platform version has officially launched. Log in to receive exclusive gift packs for the oo game platform. All old players are welcome to experience it.
Oh, and a new platform version?
Many old players, bored with their current games, had their eyes light up. After all, Triumph's optimizations had greatly improved its playability. Perhaps moving to a brand new platform would be a good thing.
At least they could play the game now!
On the other side, Zeng Qing, in one go, opened another 15 new servers. He thought this time they could divert the queuing players to the new servers.
However, five minutes later, although the queuing numbers on the previous 22 servers had indeed decreased significantly, the 15 new servers were all full again, and these servers also began to show queues.
"Open another 10 new servers!" Zeng Qing, with over 50 servers at his disposal, was not panicked. Another 10 new servers were deployed, and this time, it finally absorbed the majority of the queuing players, reducing the queue count on each server to around two to three hundred people.
These were probably the eternal players who hadn't discovered the new server openings and were still stubbornly waiting in line. But even these 10 were full, and a continuous stream of players were still attempting to enter the game.
"Another ten!" Zeng Qing said with red eyes.
By 10 PM, most players had to go to bed, and the game servers' feverish state finally began to subside. By this time, all 52 new servers in Zeng Qing's possession had been opened. That night, a total of 350,000 players registered, and the total number of concurrent players reached 220,000.
In just one night, the oo game platform version of Triumph surpassed the peak data that the previous Triumph had taken half a month to achieve, and it did so by more than double.
More importantly, Triumph was still in a growth phase, and more players were bound to flock to the game in the future. The game's potential was still much further ahead.
"Damn it, I'm truly the biggest fool in the world. With the promise of Jiangnan Group in my hands, how could I dare to generate traffic for the game myself!" Zeng Qing blamed himself deeply.