Chapter 111: Cheers and Bills
Chapter 111: Cheers and Bills
This escort work was less of a professional occupation and more something adventurer players did along the way when traveling to other regions. Of course, there were also people who got hooked on it and, after maxing out their character levels, continued working exclusively as escorts.
But since these kinds of jobs weren’t supported by the system, they relied entirely on trust. Because of that, there were naturally cases where people ran off with the money or stabbed others in the back.
That was why another role appeared: bounty contractors.
[We’ll kill anyone you want dead!]
[Friendly consultation!]
[100% customer satisfaction!]
TLF Online had fairly severe PK penalties, but no matter where you went, there were always outlaws or free spirits who didn’t care if their reputation dropped. Victims like merchants, who lacked combat power, would pay these people to take revenge on their behalf.
Of course, since they were outlaws, there were also cases where they took the money and disappeared, or even turned into bandits themselves. You could think of that as a kind of realism.
And so another thing emerged: communities both inside and outside the game.
They existed to supplement reliability.
These days, if you looked through PC communication networks or the internet, there were already plenty of posts and sites titled things like “Reliable Assassins” or “Reliable Transporters.”
All of this had appeared in barely a week since MMORPGs first entered the world.
That was possible because TLF Online offered that level of immersion and freedom, and because the players themselves were real people capable of creativity for their own benefit.
Jamie wandered through the city deep in thought before recalling a game system closely tied to merchants.
Should I look for a guild first?
Besides parties, TLF Online supported various forms of community interaction. There were parties, friends, and also something called circles.
Circles and guilds were similar in that many people could belong to them and chat together, but in detail they were completely different.
Guilds were exclusive interest groups. A player could only join one guild, there were ranks within them, higher ranks possessed administrative authority, and there was even a system for distributing profits. Circles, on the other hand, were basically just chatrooms.
Players could join multiple circles simultaneously, and aside from the circle leader there were no ranks. Their unique feature was the voting system. Through it, members could choose a circle leader with membership approval authority and even vote to expel circle members.
Merchants often joined guilds, and the primary purpose was information sharing.
Trading alone was not impossible, but because market prices in this game changed in real time across every region, simply traveling around and recording prices was not enough to determine where to buy and where to sell.
Furthermore, because prices fluctuated whenever goods were bought and sold, if one merchant dumped a massive quantity of goods onto the market, prices could crash. Guild members could regulate this or warn each other in advance to protect their collective profits.
Merchants also moved in groups to defend against bandits, or shared information about trustworthy escorts. The benefits gained from belonging to a guild were substantial.
However, getting in was not easy, and even after joining, members had to pay considerable dues. In order to avoid harming one another’s interests, their freedom was restricted to a certain extent.
And lately there have been unsettling rumors too.
It might have just been gossip, but rumors were spreading throughout in-game and external communities that merchant guilds were preparing for war.
Because prices changed in real time, it was impossible to earn unlimited profits from a single trade route. Thanks to the enormous number of gamers, prices did not fluctuate too drastically unless trades happened on a huge scale, so profits were still considerable. But the true appeal of commerce had always been monopoly.
That naturally made competing merchants and merchant guilds thorns in each other’s eyes.
Of course, merchants themselves had low combat power, and killing other players recklessly came with severe penalties, such as reduced reputation, restrictions on using towns, or even bounties being placed on them.
But TLF Online already had people known as bounty contractors. And because character lifespans were not especially long, there were plenty of people willing to accept penalties for one big score. Or they could simply flee to a hostile nation afterward.
Rumors spread through the community that merchants were hiring such people as mercenaries to wipe out rival organizations. Whether it was true or not, the story sounded fairly convincing.
But I just want to travel around comfortably and try doing business here and there.
It seemed he needed to think about it more.
As time passed after TLF Online’s open beta began, a unique society started forming through interactions between the players themselves.
“Is this for real?”
James, a reporter for GameFront LA, had been browsing PC communication message boards to investigate the increasingly talked-about TLF Online when he came across stories about this in-game world and was left astonished.
He too had thought playing RPGs online sounded quite interesting, but his imagination had been limited to players forming teams to hunt monsters and clear dungeons together.
Yet when he quietly read through the community posts, it felt as though some kind of virtual world straight out of science fiction had opened up.
Fascinated, James installed the game himself and began playing.
After spending roughly two weeks investigating inside the game, he realized the community stories were almost entirely true, and that there was something even greater beyond what those posts could express.
He did his best to put it into words and published it as an article.
[TLF Online Creates Not Just a Game, But Another Reality. A Virtual World Formed Through the Fusion of Digital Signals and Human Communities.]
Articles like that caught gamers’ attention, which in turn brought even more players into TLF Online.
As a result, Insu received a report that by the third week, the game had surpassed 100,000 registered users, with peak concurrent users exceeding 12,000.
“Are the servers holding up?”
“Yes. There was a moment when things got dangerous, but we managed to get through it by connecting additional standby servers.”
Clayton, head of TLF’s network operations, answered while recalling how the servers had nearly crashed three days earlier during the 8 PM peak-time rush when players suddenly flooded in. He had genuinely broken out in a cold sweat back then.
Thankfully, thanks to the queue system Insu had suggested, instead of the servers crashing outright, players had merely been temporarily blocked from logging in.
However, the queue system itself did not respond smoothly enough in real conditions and occasionally stuttered, so they were planning to refine it.
In truth, that was unavoidable because computer performance was still lacking in this era, and technologies like Redis or Kafka did not yet exist.
(Translator’s Note: Redis — An in-memory data structure store first released in 2009, commonly used for caching, session management, and high-speed data access.)
(Translator’s Note: Kafka — Apache Kafka, a distributed event-streaming platform originally developed by LinkedIn and released in 2011.)
For reference, Redis was like an ultra-high-speed hard disk created by linking together multiple memory systems, while Kafka was a large-scale data streaming platform that could prevent game server overload by distributing and temporarily storing login requests from gamers before processing them sequentially.
“Good. Subscriber numbers and concurrent users will continue increasing, so don’t let your guard down.”
Managing not just the LA headquarters but also remote server centers in other regions was by no means easy, but Clayton was equally inspired by TLF Online’s astonishing success, and his eyes shone without the slightest sign of reluctance.
Back when he developed MUDs, he had imagined something similar. But even those dreams had not been this dramatic.
A large subscriber base alone would have been impressive enough, but seeing over ten thousand people simultaneously connected to a single game and forming an active society after only three weeks was something he had thought would only become possible in the distant future.
And beyond that, many members of the development team were throwing themselves into this test as though they were writing mythology itself.
While the world and the development team were all caught up in excitement, there were some people who could not simply float along with the hype.
This was not about TLF Online’s competitors. It was about Insu and his parents.
“Is this really okay?”
Hyein asked with a worried expression. In her hands was a document listing the newly added server expansion expenses.
They had already spent over four million dollars. That was by no means a small amount. The bigger issue was that the game still had not officially launched and had only just entered the fourth week of open beta.
“...We still have to keep investing.”
Even Insu honestly felt his mouth drying up. He possessed considerable capital after owning three globally successful games and continuously succeeding without outside investment.
Altogether, it was probably around ninety million dollars. Of course, that was an enormous amount of money—roughly seventy-two billion won—but it still was not infinite.
And based on what Insu knew from his previous life, TLF Online’s scale would grow exponentially worldwide, and the investment costs would grow alongside it.
“By the time official service starts, we’ll probably need to increase server capacity by at least ten times.”
“Ten times?! Then that’s over forty million dollars! No, even that’s just simple calculation. Didn’t you say the larger the scale gets, the more complicated the management systems become, which drives the costs even higher?”
Hyein was horrified by Insu’s words.
“And it’ll continue growing even after official service begins.”
Just looking at Kingdom of the Winds in Korea, it had reached over one hundred thousand concurrent users the year after release. But this was America. Even ignoring economic conditions and only considering internet and computer penetration rates, the scale would be at least three times larger, perhaps even five times.
That meant five hundred thousand concurrent users. By current standards, that would generate traffic on the scale of an entire nation. And Parallel Soft was also operating the massive internet service WET at the same time.
“Then wouldn’t ninety million dollars still not be enough?”
“By then we’ll already be in official service, so the game will be generating revenue.”
Besides, if they signed contracts for servers on that scale, there was no way they would pay the entire cost upfront. Even the servers they were bringing in now were being paid through installment plans. As long as continuous income came in, even larger investments could be sustained.
“But things don’t always go according to plan. If this goes wrong, the company could go bankrupt!”
Perhaps because the numbers were so massive, Hyein even voiced pessimistic concerns she normally never expressed. After some thought, Seongcheol also spoke up.
“Your mother’s right. If this were moderate scale, maybe. But if an investment this huge goes wrong, we won’t be able to handle it. Let’s only expand the servers to a reasonable level, and rent the rest from hosting companies.”
Even in this era, there were already companies that rented out servers for fees. If they wanted to save on initial costs, using such companies was not a bad option.
“No. We need our own servers. It’d be better to raise capital through an IPO instead.”
(Translator’s Notes: IPO — Initial Public Offering. The process by which a private company becomes publicly traded on the stock market.)
Part of the reason was that he wanted to keep all the profits for themselves instead of sharing them with hosting companies, but beyond that, there was a genuine need to operate their own server infrastructure.
They planned to continue expanding into MMORPGs, portal sites, and various internet businesses in the future, and were even considering cloud services. Running their own systems was necessary to build technological expertise and operational know-how.
And to properly operate TLF Online, proprietary servers were essential.
Calling it the world’s first MMORPG sounded impressive, but it also meant there was no precedent. There was nothing to reference and nothing to prepare against.
They would do everything possible to prevent problems, but if issues did arise, it would be far easier to respond quickly if they directly controlled the servers.
And above all else, to achieve the target of five hundred thousand concurrent users, they somehow had to handle that enormous amount of traffic. But America’s network infrastructure at this time was not particularly good.