Chapter 159-4: This Isn’t Dark Land! (4) |
The post Iron Hammer published was pinned to No. 1 on the forum’s hot list in a short time, attracting more players to join the discussion.
During this period, an analysis post by the research-party player ‘Darkness Approaches’ received a large number of likes.
Darkness Approaches:
After reading everyone’s comments I can basically confirm that all of us downloaded the cracked version.
There are simply no players on this forum who purchased through official channels.
So is there a possibility that what we are playing is the officially made Dark Land secretly issued by the Lunar Eclipse race, while the one promoted publicly, which requires paying on the official to grab, is actually an outdated version abandoned by the Lunar Eclipse race?
Old players can recall something that happened, specifically four months ago.
At that time Game Gold-Farmer found on the Humanity Rising forum that some players were smearing Dark Land, and what they said did not match the facts at all. He then took the Grind Kings brothers to flame them, but was flamed back by even more players on the other side, and then came to the forum to ask us for help.
I also took part in that battle back then.
I summarized the suspicious issues that appeared in the forum exchange at the time:
First suspicious point. When you clicked the avatar of the player who posted, you could see the purchase certification bill he showed in his profile. Why would he fabricate rumors?
What we thought at the time was that although the guy had bought it, he was definitely smearing on purpose. After all, there are quite a few netizens in reality who hate the Lunar Eclipse race.
Second suspicious point. Where did so many paid posters come from to cooperate.
Thinking about it now, those who fought then were all players who purchased the official version. They all discovered problems in the game, and we were the only ones who did not realize it. So mutual flaming appeared, and we all thought the other side was paid posters, when in fact we were not playing the same game.
Third suspicious point. When both sides were flaming on the forum, the game content they talked about simply did not match.
This was also the core reason why we thought the other side were paid posters.
The series of issues they mentioned, such as game modeling and physical presentation, were things we never encountered in the game, which is why we were furious and thought they were making things up.
Looking at it now, what they said were exactly the problems encountered in the official-channel Dark Land. We were the ‘paid posters.’
But I do not think the cracked Dark Land we downloaded is fake.
What is certain is that the quality of the cracked version is far higher than the official-channel Dark Land purchased through official channels.
This clearly does not fit normal logic. Why would the Lunar Eclipse race hide the cracked version with perfect quality, and then sell a cheap, eliminated version of Dark Land?
In fact, you can see clues to this problem from the distribution speed of the official channel.
It is possible that the game server resources are mainly used on the cracked version we are using. Settings such as perfect physical presentation require too much information to process and occupy a large amount of server resources.
Therefore the official channel, which occupies only a small part of the processing resources, needs to distribute slots slowly.
You can understand it this way. The brothers on the forum are all internal test players of the official Dark Land, and they are playing the core version developed by the Lunar Eclipse race.
As for the version distributed through official channels, you can understand it as an old version that was eliminated early in development.
I even suspect that the one who published the mysterious link is actually Starnet.
Otherwise there is no way to explain why we have not been banned to this day. The entire networked world runs under Starnet’s monitoring. Human energy is limited and cannot monitor everything, but nothing that happens on the internet can escape the observation of the AI Starnet.
A pirated link should have been known to Starnet the moment it appeared.
Everyone is playing the game with a fluke mentality.
Is there then such a possibility that we are Starnet-selected internal-test players, making account bans impossible?
If there really were to be bans, it would not wait until now. It has already been months.
With so much online communication, how could Starnet have no reaction at all?
In summary: Starnet knows about the existence of the cracked link, and the cracked link was even distributed by Starnet. We are all Starnet-selected internal-test Destined Ones.
—
Darkness Approaches’ post mentioned the forum war event that only old players knew about.
It also made many old players suddenly realize that the forum war back then was completely a farce.
There were no paid posters at all. It was just that incorrect information made them all mistake the other side for paid posters. In fact, everyone was telling the truth, but they were not talking about the same game.
The reason lay in the fact that neither of the two games could show content to the outside.
If at the time players had been able to provide in-game videos or screenshots, the farce would not have happened.
In response to this issue, more and more players joined the discussion in the thread.
—
Meanwhile, the Humanity Rising forum also received a post.
[Help. The official purchase of Dark Land has a problem. It is simply not the same game as the one my friend plays.]
This post was precisely posted by Tong Xin.
But the netizens under the post were furiously flaming Tong Xin.
Some netizens thought Tong Xin was flaunting that he had grabbed a slot this round. It looked like a question, but was actually showing off. They said if he did not like it he should hurry and get a refund and give the extra slot to other players who wanted it. Showing off is shameful.
Other netizens said the thread owner had definitely been fooled by his friend. A game that perfectly simulates real world physical presentation? Since when did the Lunar Eclipse race have that technology?
Still others said the thread owner was purely making up a story to attract replies. A cracked version simply could not exist. Even if it did, the next second Starnet would make the cracked version disappear and collectively ban all the players. Do you really think Starnet is doing charity? It is a ruthlessly efficient AI.
Although there were also players who expressed agreement with what Tong Xin said, this agreement was mostly agreement with ‘idiotic’ remarks.
They used ‘yes yes yes’ to respond to the thread owner’s viewpoint, teasing that everything the thread owner said was right and that they all believed it, and even gave a bunch of self-fabricated reasons as answers.
In reality, none of the netizens who replied believed what Tong Xin said.
After all, the content described in the post was too outrageous and did not fit reality.
Seeing the replies, Tong Xin felt despair. He found that netizens simply did not believe what he said.
It even made him feel as if the whole world had gone mad and only he remained sober. He simply could not converse with a group of netizens who did not believe the truth.
“So… is there a possibility that I am the one who has gone mad?”
Thinking of this, Tong Xin began to seriously doubt his own mental state.
Just as Tong Xin was doubting himself, quite a few players from Monster World logged off and replied to Tong Xin’s post.
They stated that everything the thread owner said was true and that what they were playing was the cracked version.
But because they could not provide evidence, these replies were also mistaken as teasing the thread owner.
Therefore, when it violates real world logic and there is no way to provide screenshots, videos, and other evidence, the truth of the facts simply cannot be proven by words alone.
Even voices supporting Tong Xin would be interpreted by the onlookers as taking their own side.
In order to prove that he was telling the truth, Tong Xin chose to edit the post and published the chat screenshots from that time as well as the e-billing record for the official Dark Land.
This time, voices finally appeared that suspected whether two Dark Land games existed.
As the discussion heat of the post climbed higher and higher, it even attracted onlookers and comments from netizens of other races.
This matter was quickly reported, alarming the upper echelons of the Human Federation.
Whether two games existed, they knew better than anyone, and naturally knew that the posting player was not lying.
Players from the Gene Research Division and the Weapons Development Division could both testify.
They had also already laid out plans in the cracked game in advance.
Now, two options were before the Human upper echelons.
One, delete the post, suppress the heat, prevent public opinion from spreading, and avoid a series of uncertain events.
Two, let the matter continue to be discussed and ferment, drawing in more people and even netizens of other alien races to participate, making the existence of two games completely public.
To decide how to choose, the Human Federation high level convened a meeting.
This meeting was likewise an offline meeting, to prevent discovery by Starnet monitoring.
The meeting lasted 2 hours.
The Human high level leaders, already puzzled as to why there were two games, ultimately decided to let the matter continue to ferment and then watch the reaction from the Lunar Eclipse race.
This question could only be truly answered by the Lunar Eclipse race.
As the post’s heat continued to climb, the content was even carried over to alien Starnet forums, likewise sparking heated discussions.
But no one could prove one thing: whether two different games really existed, or whether this post was simply a conspiracy theory.
Like the former flat earth theory, lizard people, and other conspiracy-theory viewpoints.
After all, bored netizens can always come up with all sorts of bizarre, attention-grabbing topics.
Just as the discussion of whether two Dark Land games existed was gradually becoming a hot topic across all of Starnet, the Lunar Eclipse race issued a public announcement.
They stated that in one day, Governor No. 1 would come forward to explain the hotly discussed online incident and give a detailed explanation of whether two Dark Land games really existed.
The Lunar Eclipse race’s response once again ignited a frenzy across the net.
Even the previous onlookers were left baffled.
In their eyes, this incident was purely a ridiculous bid for attention, yet they did not expect to get an official response from the aloof Lunar Eclipse race, and it was even Governor No. 1 coming forward to explain.
This made netizens around the world realize that this incident was far more complicated than they had imagined.
