God's Imitator-Chapter 347: Shrinking Returns

He Xiaojun also didn't quite understand what use this room's rules actually had.

It seemed that this room's design philosophy had certain similarities with 'Equipment Forging'. Both seemed to be making articles out of 'Death Immunity Cards', and both had some functional overlap with the auction terminal in the lobby.

But the question was, would players really choose not to use the auction terminal in the game lobby to trade cards, and instead choose to use these two rooms as substitutes?

He looked at the goods and items in the auction. There were about 10 in total, and the quantities and bidding prices of similar goods were also different.

He Xiaojun didn't dare exchange too many chips. He only exchanged 1500 first, spending 500 chips to buy an 'Auction Ticket: Calligraphy' and 1000 chips to buy an 'Auction Ticket: Calligraphy and Paintings'.

These two were relatively cheap, and the 'Auction Ticket: Calligraphy and Paintings' was the only one in the list, with no other items of the same name.

After paying the chips, an item quickly popped out from below the game station. It was just a very thin card with simple words written on it.

Clearly, it should also be similar to the 'Training Card' in 'Equipment Forging', not possessing any special functions itself, just a symbolic item used to coordinate with the gameplay.

He Xiaojun relisted both of these goods on the 'Auction Tycoon' auction house. After considering it, he listed them both at double the price.

He Xiaojun didn't know if they could actually be sold, but if there really was some hidden earnings mechanism in the game, he'd only know by trying.

After that, He Xiaojun looked at that prompt again.

[Continuously following auction goods can earn additional chip rewards.]

"This sentence looks a bit like a trap. Should I try it?"

From the literal meaning, as long as one kept following the goods list on the game station, one could continuously obtain chip rewards. This seemed to be a stable way to obtain output.

But the problem was, exactly how long did "continuously following" need to last? And exactly how much were the "additional rewards"?

If one stared at the game station for half an hour and only got a few hundred chips in the end, that would be too absurd. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

This place very much looked like a language trap to trick players, so up until now, very few players had actually lingered in this room.

He Xiaojun thought about it and still decided to give it a try.

He stared at the goods list on the game station continuously refreshing, wanting to see exactly how many additional chip rewards there could be.

...

Soon, the second dividend cycle ended. The total game duration had already passed one hour.

Players holding chips once again gathered at the chip exchange counters at the entrances of various rooms, preparing to collect dividend earnings.

But unlike the last time, this time there were noticeably fewer players collecting dividends.

Because some players had already realized that just burying their heads earning chips in a single room wouldn't work, so they started researching those game rooms that previously had no one interested.

Since they didn't have many chips in their hands, there was no need to waste time waiting for dividends.

He Xiaojun had originally been waiting in the 'Auction Tycoon' room for the goods he listed to be auctioned off, but after hearing the dividend news, he decided to temporarily leave and came to the entrance of the 'Compare Sizes' room.

But he didn't push forward, because he had no chips to exchange.

He just wanted to see the specific dividend amount for this room and confirm his speculation.

[Current room's dividend amount for this period: 33,000 minutes of visa time.]

[Current room's chip exchange ratio: 'Chips:Visa Time = 100:27']

The players queuing to exchange chips all had furrowed brows on their faces, showing very unhappy expressions.

Clearly, compared to the first exchange, this exchange ratio was nearly cut in half.

And this was obviously due to changes in the dividend amount.

The last dividend amount was 67,000 minutes of visa time, which included the most basic 30,000 dividend, as well as the visa time spent by players paying out of pocket to purchase chips.

But this dividend amount was 33,000 minutes of visa time.

During these two dividend cycles, the number of games played by players and the amount of chips earned should be about the same. In single-player mode, the chips earned were still around 15,000 points, while in two-player mode, the chips earned were still around 7,500 points.

That is to say, in this dividend cycle, their earnings respectively became around 4,050 minutes of visa time and 2,025 minutes of visa time.

This was already a quite unacceptable number.

Previously, some players were a bit short of accumulating ten thousand minutes of visa time. Now they had finally accumulated enough and could just obtain a Death Immunity Card.

But obtaining only one card in a full hour, this kind of efficiency was obviously too low.

This was because there were too many players in the 'Compare Sizes' room.

He Xiaojun quickly thought, "As expected, my previous speculation was correct.

"This game most likely has an unexplained hidden rule that has had an extremely strong misleading effect on the players...

"Which is the rule that 'the more times players play in a room, the higher the dividend amount unlocked for the room'.

"It's precisely because this rule exists that most players would directly enter the room that looked most cost-effective to earn chips.

"They subconsciously believed that although in such rooms there were many players collecting dividends, with more players came more game rounds, which could unlock more dividend amounts.

"And those rooms with fewer people, which don't have stable earnings rules themselves and are riskier, although there are fewer players and fewer people splitting the money, insufficient game rounds meant they couldn't unlock too much dividend amount.

"So the difference between the two types of rooms wasn't that big.

"But looking at it now, this rule obviously has problems. The number of times players play and the dividend amount unlocked are not linearly related, but rather follow a specific growth function.

"That is, there's a 'diminishing marginal returns' problem.

"Compared to the last dividend cycle, the number of players and game rounds in the 'Compare Sizes' room have both obviously decreased, but the dividend amount activated through game rounds hasn't decreased very much."

After deducting the basic 30,000 dividend and the visa time spent by players paying out of pocket to purchase chips, the additional dividends activated through game rounds in both cycles were just over 30,000 minutes of visa time.

"This shows that the dividend amount unlocked through game rounds within a single dividend cycle very likely has something like a 'soft cap'. After exceeding this soft cap, although the dividend amount will continue to increase, it won't increase very obviously.

"Moreover, different game rooms require different amounts of time to complete one game, so the amount unlocked per game is also different.

"It looks like I still need to go check out other rooms as much as possible. Relying on just this one room is completely insufficient."

As expected, it wasn't just He Xiaojun who thought of this problem. Other players also began to obviously spread out to other game rooms.

But in the 'Compare Sizes' and 'Simple Poker' rooms, eight players still remained.

They were still occupying the best single-player mode positions, having apparently just managed to grab them.

And for these eight players, they could actually accept the current situation.

Because with the withdrawal of other players, the four of them could evenly split the next stage's dividends in this room. If it was still around 30,000, each player could get around 8,000 minutes of visa time, which was considered pretty good earnings.