Aina didn’t open her mouth, but the color of her eyes conveyed the message, “Read the mood.”
Still, Kai couldn’t change the fact that he had gotten lucky. He had gotten the character in question off of his first single-pull, and had an inkling that he was on a wave of good fortune, so he’d kept going and picked up enough dupes to completely limit break her. But he felt like saying that would cause the innocent mask to crumble off of Aina’s face, so he used his better judgment and left that bit out.
As Aya and Aina engaged in verbal warfare between the haves and have-nots, Nanaka came over to ask Kai a question. “This kind of thing is hard to balance... right?”
He nodded and answered, “It’s one of the biggest headaches you’ll encounter while managing a game.”
On the surface, ‘limit breaking’ was a system designed to mitigate the issue of pulling duplicate items or characters. If there wasn’t any value in getting a character you already had, then the users’ desire to roll would drop dramatically—obviously, since the odds would necessarily worsen with every pull.
The need to alleviate this issue led to limit breaking. (Every game had its own term for it, but the concept was generally the same.) It was a form of insurance that a second copy of a character would make them stronger or give them a new costume, and it guaranteed a duplicate’s worth. Naturally, the users would also be happier to see that there was some kind of silver lining than not.
...However, this was the surface level explanation, and Kongouin Academy was being burnt at the stake because the darker side of limit breaking had crept up into the spotlight. Depending on its implementation, limit breaking was also a system that could make its players collect multiple copies of the same unit. Kongouin’s new character, who was ‘only strong if you max limit break her,’ was a blatant example.
By forcing the user to collect duplicates, a development team was effectively increasing the odds of there being in-game purchases. If one copy of a character were enough, then a user could get lucky and land them in one try, like Kai. But if they needed two or three, the odds skewed toward spending becoming a requirement due to simple statistics. As a result, the system could be abused by the developers to hike up their profit per spender, while the users were forced to walk into a hell of endless gacha pulls.
“But of course,” Kai concluded, “it still gives duplicates purpose, so...”
“...As long as you implement it well, it’ll be good for the user?” Nanaka filled in.
“Yeah. But... if you mess up, people will boil over and it’ll end up like this,” he told her. The chat window of the livestream was an endless flood of hate and anger.
Developer and user—to balance the merits and demerits for each was a talent that planners prized highly. Looking at the chat messages, it seemed that Kongouin’s planners had made a terrible mistake, regardless of what their intentions had been. When the player base had this much bottled-up frustration, it could even affect the management staff; this was not a desirable outcome.
“L-Let us take a step back and move on to our top-secret development team!” Mirei announced. While Kai had been looking away, she had moved to another location.
“M-Mirei-sama, what are you—”
“Move aside!” She kicked the tall boy who had tried to block her path—his name was Kinoyama, if Kai recalled—out of the way, and his mushroom hair swayed as a shudder-inducing “Nfough!” escaped his lips.
However, the comments in chat read:
“Mushroom’s here!”
“What a reward.”
“He’s gross, but I’m so jealous.”
They were somewhat more amicable than before. It looked like this wasn’t the first stream Kongouin’s team had hosted, and that Mirei and Kinoyama’s interactions were viewed as a running joke.
“Welcome to the place where we are currently focusing most of our efforts: the VR development team!” said Mirei. “Of course, I would never allow this to appear before our live audience had we not achieved verifiable results! That is what I plan to—”
“It will not do to show our work, Mirei-sama,” said the mushroom boy.
“Kinoyama,” she pressed.
“...As your attendant, there is a line that I cannot—hfough! Crooough!—cross...” Another kick from Mirei sent raw footage of the mushroom, shuddering in the space between pain and pleasure, across the feed for the whole world to see. The spectacle bordered on apocalypse.
“These people really are idiots,” Aya moaned.
“Well...” Kai couldn’t deny that. “But hey,” he said, “it’s incredible that they’re trying their hand at VR.”
“That’s where you put those giant goggles on, right?” Nanaka asked.
“Nanaka-chan, are you talking about head mounted displays?” Aina suggested.
“Oh, that! That’s it!” Nanaka exclaimed. “You get to play in a virtual world, right? I haven’t tried it, though...”
“You can experience a simplified version by combining your smartphone with some cardboard,” Aina explained. “Some companies even distribute cardboard do-it-yourself kits so you can play their social games.”
“Wow! Do you think Kongouin-san’s team is going to do that, too?”
“Ahh, they look rich enough to go for it,” Aya groaned. “I’m sure she’d say, ‘To distribute cardboard is but a single step of our marketing, ohohoho~’ or something like that. In the first place, I’d rather them figure out their gameplay before they get into this and that about VR and graphics.”
“Me too, ♪” Aina hummed in agreement. “I wish they made the game itself more fun.”
Kai couldn’t not hear the underlying ‘It’s boring as hell’ in her remark. In a sense, it was the honest opinion of a user—and that opinion didn’t need Aina’s voice to become visible in the stream’s chat box. The comments read: