People often used "spending money like water" to describe how quickly money was being spent.
Chen Hao was now experiencing the terrifying spending power of the players firsthand!
Chen Hao and Pang Ban each had a computer and a QQ account, handling recharge payments. A laptop sat between them, its screen displaying the bank account page!
Their only action was constantly refreshing the webpage.
6 yuan, 6 yuan, 198 yuan, 6 yuan, 98 yuan, 648 yuan.
After half an hour, several big spenders suddenly appeared. Their recharge amounts were calculated in the tens of thousands, as if money had become nothing more than a string of cheap numbers in their eyes, thrown in without a second thought.
The balance in Chen Hao's account rose rapidly from 233 yuan.
It broke ten thousand yuan in three minutes.
It broke fifty thousand yuan in half an hour.
Two hours later, the revenue broke one hundred thousand yuan!
Chen Hao's adrenaline surged. Squatting on his chair, he kept moving his hands without pause, his expression intensely excited. We did it~
He turned his head and glanced over. Chen Hao and Pang Ban were expressionless, their fingers flying as they worked with astonishing efficiency.
Damn, that's ruthless!
Look at them. I need to stay calm!!!
His heart pounded with excitement, his hands trembled, and he cursed inwardly. Damn it! Why can't I control myself?!
Since he couldn't control it, he might as well go with the flow. Chen Hao changed his mind. Damn, I'm only twenty-two. If a young man isn't reckless, can he even be called young?
What he earned in one hour now was more than several months of his salary at its peak in his previous life.
Who wouldn't be excited?
Chen Hao closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair, enjoying this rare sensation.
Less than a minute later, Pang Ban slapped him awake. "Hurry up and process them. The orders are piling up."
Unlike the previous internet café recharge campaign, which had relied mostly on his family's internet café foundation, this time he had started entirely from scratch, building everything from nothing. The sense of achievement was overwhelming!
All the effort he had put in these days had been worth it!
After calming down, Chen Hao opened his eyes and quickly processed the recharge requests.
The first battle had ended in victory. They couldn't stop now. They had to press the advantage and expand their gains.
The plan was simple: expand on the foundation they already had.
The steps were equally straightforward: continue promoting the game, increase bandwidth, and expand the servers.
First, he prepaid another 20,000 yuan for Baidu's paid ranking advertisements. That would be enough to keep things going for a while.
Most of the main players of Legend were students, especially university students. The rest were young people who had entered society within the past few years.
Chen Hao transferred 30,000 yuan to Xu Pengkun. He told him not to limit his sights to the capital, but to mobilize people to recruit students at major universities across the country for promotion. He especially wanted them to focus on the internal BBS forums of those schools and place advertisements there.
Then he gave Old Ban 10,000 yuan and told him to pull more network cables. As long as anyone in the building unit didn't have internet access, he was to bring over the network cables from the other households. They would choose the highest bandwidth available. Money was no issue!
After hearing the arrangements, Old Ban slipped his phone into his pocket and went straight out to handle the matter.
The money they had just earned was spent almost immediately, but Chen Hao didn't feel the slightest bit of pain. The wool came from the sheep, after all.
The remaining task was the most important one:
Server expansion.
He had originally thought this server could hold out for a few days, and that they could expand after the new servers arrived. But now it seemed that plans could never keep up with changes.
Chen Hao pulled up the statistics for the online player counts and queue situations of the three servers—Slightly Modified, Moderately Modified, and Super Modified.
The player count on the Super Modified server was equal to the combined numbers of the other two. It was clear that the players had suffered under Shanda for far too long.
He temporarily adjusted the player thresholds for all three servers.
He raised the online player limit of the Slightly Modified and Moderately Modified servers to 300 each, and expanded the Super Modified server to 1,000.
Keeping things as they were for the first few days and creating artificial scarcity would make people even more eager to rush in. It would do more good than harm.
But if they kept doing that for too long, it would easily provoke player resentment and end up benefiting their competitors.
That was what would happen later, when Lei Hou emerged~
Chen Hao took out his phone and dialed a number.
"Bro, the private server is up and running. The plan has changed. I urgently need servers."
"Money isn't a problem. The sooner, the better! Tomorrow at the latest. No, I need them tonight!"
"Not two." Chen Hao paused and silently calculated.
"I need five!"
At the same time,
Lin Lang looked at the brand-new servers that had been prepared as redundant backups for the China Netcom network renovation project.
There were exactly five of them.
He asked suspiciously, "Are you a fortune-teller or something? How did you get the number exactly right?"
"Fine, got it. Transfer the money to my account. I'll have someone haul them over to you tonight."
He hung up.
The China Netcom project would easily take half a year, and no one knew when these five servers would actually be needed. They might even remain sealed away here forever as backup equipment.
Since that was the case, good steel had to be used where it mattered. He would send these machines over first.
He immediately contacted the supplier and paid a deposit. The supplier sent over another five servers, and Lin Lang paid an additional expedited shipping fee.
There might be a few days of delay.
The operation violated procedure, but he didn't care.
At IBM's Ice City office, Lin Lang not only had the technical skills to complete his daily work, but also handled welcoming guests and arranging entertainment.
He had given the leaders above him so many benefits—private clubs, massages, and gifts. If he couldn't even handle something this simple, what use was he?
Starting the next day, the recharge amounts began to decline. Pang Ban became a dedicated customer-service representative, using two QQ accounts at once to handle the recharge requests.
Five days later.
The house Chen Hao rented had completely turned into a small server room.
Eleven servers—ten new and one old—were arranged in neat rows, filling the living room to the brim.
Three ordinary desktop computers and one second-hand laptop had been squeezed into the bedroom.
They all had independent, top-tier bandwidth.
This was the best configuration they could obtain while working alone.
Fortunately, temperatures in Northeast China were still low in March, and the heating had already been turned off. Even so, following his brother's advice, Chen Hao installed a two-horsepower floor-standing air conditioner in the living room to cool the servers around the clock. He also bought a voltage regulator.
After the three of them worked together for the past two days,
the Legend private server Greedy Blue Moon could now accommodate a maximum of 20,000 players online simultaneously.
Even after the expansion, the Greedy Blue Moon private server remained packed every day.
However, the player queues were greatly reduced.
What did 20,000 simultaneous players mean? One had to know that Shanda's Legend had only reached a little over 200,000 simultaneous players at the beginning of 2002.
In just a few days, they had reached one-tenth of the official game's scale.
Chen Hao looked at the balance in his account.
All the money he had earned these past few days had been poured into the servers.
Even so, there were still several hundred thousand yuan left in the balance. The private server was absurdly overpowered, but its profitability was even more absurd.
I've finally gone from being a millionaire in debt in my previous life to being a millionaire now. I could cry!
The number of registered members had now broken through the 100,000 mark.
Chen Hao had already begun having his brother set up a dedicated server room.
After all, this makeshift operation was not a long-term solution!
The Super Modified version had both advantages and disadvantages. It was similar to the simplistic wish-fulfillment novels online: it came loaded with satisfying moments from the very beginning, instantly grabbing readers' attention. But after seeing too much of it, people would find it bland and lose interest. It lacked staying power.
The Moderately Modified and Slightly Modified versions, however, were not as outrageously profitable as the Super Modified version, but they had much longer lifespans.
Starting on the sixth day, revenue from the Super Modified version began to decline. Chen Hao had prepared for this long ago, and he began carrying out Plan B.
He released another update for the Greedy Blue Moon Legend private server, adding a brand-new member map. The BOSSes inside dropped the top-tier sets displayed on the statues, but their difficulty was also outrageously high.
They were BOSSes that required several top players to form a party, or more than a dozen people to take turns fighting, before they could be defeated.
He also added a seven-day Ranking Event. Players would be ranked according to their character's combat power. The top three would receive a tier of top-grade equipment all their own, places four through ten would receive a second tier, and places ten through one hundred would belong to another tier. The pattern continued from there—the higher the ranking, the better the equipment reward.
Aside from receiving the best weapon available, the player ranked first would also obtain the only title on the entire server.
Unrivaled Under Heaven
Before you continue