The Rankings Exploded Again
It exploded again! #142
The total number of participants was three. Their skills were all in the upper ranks within the academy. No, even calling them top-tier wouldn’t be an exaggeration. The various stats immediately backed that up.
How could I be so sure? Simple. Every student at the academy had an indicator that showed their rank. The academy ranking displayed in the additional information of the status window. The rankings that had never changed before were finally revealed not long ago.
Whoops. It wasn’t revealed. It had straight-up collapsed.
The rankings of tens of thousands of students that were supposed to be revealed went up in spectacular flames. All that remained in their place was the cold corpse of a potato server. That had happened just a few days ago.
Naturally, once the system reached this state, the only option left was a complete redesign. There was no point clinging to it any longer. The only thing that would increase was the students’ rage. What else could they do?
And so the academy announced they would listen to student feedback and shut down the ranking system entirely. No one had wanted that, yet they went ahead and closed it anyway. Nobody saw that coming.
They later revealed that the real reason the ranking system broke was because the head of the development team had… embezzled funds. Whether that was true or not, no one knew. What was certain was that someone’s head had rolled.
“Burn the embezzling dev team leader alive!”
“No, torture him first then kill him!”
“Then torture him, burn him, and take his youth!”
“““Hell yeah!”””
“Students! The recent incident at Palaestra Academy has severely damaged the long-built trust between the academy and its students! Therefore, the steering committee has decided to [punishment] the suspect in this case!”
“““Woooooo!!!”””
The purge was unleashed in a situation so shaky it was practically trembling. The students calmed down as if they’d been injected with a sedative, and the Chancellor, who had been facing the crisis of a lifetime, managed to avoid execution.
Still, there were a few suspicious points. Especially when a certain girl who knew more about Cao Cao than anyone else muttered that it was the kind of solution Cao Mengde would use, but no one in the world understood what she meant.
Anyway, a few days after things had quieted down, right around the time the Chancellor’s parents were being brought up by the students again, a new ranking system to replace the old one was finally revealed.
1. New ranking system development completed.
2. Update scheduled soon.
3. Each grade will be divided into groups of 250 students, with rankings determined only within each group.
4. There will be roughly 200 to 240 groups per grade.
5. The old overall ranking was too vague with such a massive number of students, which could cause them to lose motivation. That’s why we made this change.
6. This also reduces the load on the server, apparently.
7. Note that group composition has been assigned with diversity in mind, taking into account nationality, race, species, biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, skills, and so on.
8. The academy is confident this will increase student motivation.
In summary, the overall grade-wide ranking system had been scrapped, and now rankings could only be checked within groups of 250 students. People called it crazy, but once you actually read the details, it wasn’t completely incomprehensible. Moreover, the newly changed rankings weren’t strange at all.
Just looking at my own rank on the first day of the update proved that.
I proudly held first place within my group. I didn’t know what second place looked like, but if I kept putting in the same effort as now, maintaining first place felt entirely possible.
Naturally, just as my rank had changed, so had everyone else’s.
“Oh… Phoenix Group first place. Not bad at all.”
“I’m first place too! But… Gdansk Group? Wait, what does Gdansk even mean?”
For now, the psychological satisfaction was real. Plus, there was no room for friends to fight over who was number one, which made things mentally comfortable too. It was a definite improvement. Not bad at all.
Of course, it wasn’t a perfect improvement. As the saying goes, teams that are meant to fall will fall, and servers that are meant to explode will always explode. But for me, who continued to hold first place, whether the server crashed or not didn’t matter much. Worrying about that was a job for the people below who had to obsess over changing ranks.
That was why I was focusing on the present moment. Specifically, preparing with the others the day before the competition.
“I think we can just use the weapons we’ve always used… No need for extra auxiliary gear… Armor should be…”
“Go with light armor for that. Since it’s a long-distance march anyway, and we’ll need to match our pace, that seems right.”
“Really? Then I’ll switch to light armor like you said, Kangsi.”
“However, Miss Shannon will probably need to wear a bit more armor.”
Various discussions. The biggest portion of the conversation revolved around weight and mobility.
“By the way, how much food and water should we bring? I think twelve hours’ worth should be enough.”
“That’s too little. Even if we finish within twenty-four hours, things could go wrong, so we should bring two days’ worth.”
“Hmm… but there might not be enough space in the bag…”
“Here, these are compact combat rations. Try putting these in.”
Since each of us would be carrying our own luggage, I wondered if we really needed to discuss it, but we weren’t planning on carrying the heavy, cumbersome stuff ourselves. The plan was to hand all of it over to a third party.
“By the way, is the porter we hired trustworthy?”
“I gave him a generous down payment, so somewhat? Still, just in case, I looked into his past record and family background.”
“A background check and even a down payment… You really are thorough…”
Moreover, there was something I couldn’t tell them. I had unilaterally hired someone I already knew as our porter. To be precise, I had hired a porter who appeared in the game.
Of course, it wasn’t one of the good porters who appeared as main or supporting characters. He was just a mass-produced extra with a thin narrative. Still, out of all the countless extra porters, there was only one reason I chose this particular person.
He was the only extra porter listed on the academy’s porter recruitment site. The thought that someone with even a little more information would be safer. He had a compliant personality in the game, so I judged that would be enough. He even had decent survivability. That could be interpreted as a low chance of becoming the primary target of attack.
Finally, he had even written on the porter hiring site that he was fine with participating in competitions. Since he would already know the basics about the hunting competition, I figured a long explanation wouldn’t be necessary. It was more than enough reason to hire him.
And so, on a new day, I looked forward to the time when I would obtain the box.