Far away in Votradnoi, Chris soon received the battle reports from Hegrande.
Don't misunderstand. No one had galloped back on a fast horse. Chris had been following the Expeditionary Army's movements all along. On the game forums, players acting as war correspondents had spared no effort or trouble in posting real-time updates on the battle.
These battle reports included not only text and images, but also video clips from spectator and first-person perspectives at crucial turning points: the Heavy Infantry storming the enemy camp, rocket artillery bombarding friend and foe alike, the powder magazine exploding. Anyone reading the battle threads found it all tremendously exciting.
Thanks to this battle report thread, the number of players applying for the game's open beta had skyrocketed. The queue had jumped from roughly a thousand people to over ten thousand, an increase of more than tenfold.
Yet Chris wasn't remotely happy about any of this.
Was money from the twenty-fifth century useful?
Of course it was. Player spending was the reason Chris could wage war while developing Bagnia at the same time. Monthly subscription fees were a minor sum by comparison, and Chris had already put plans to abolish them on his schedule.
But that didn't mean Chris wanted more players flooding into the game.
The reason was simple: Chris's game didn't have enough content to accommodate more players.
Different games offered players different kinds of content.
The Dungeon series offered adventure and treasure hunting, League of Legends offered PvP combat, and Mount & Blade was even simpler: exactly what it said on the tin.
The game Chris ran offered war and construction.
Unfortunately, although plenty of players enjoyed building and farming, they made up only one-fifth of the open-beta players. The remaining four-fifths were fanatics for combat and war.
The problem Chris now