novelODS Chapter 268 Emergency Meeting
Chapter 268 Emergency Meeting
Currently, the Firestorm mode accounts for 70% of Delta's daily active users and 90% of its revenue.
Taking the position of head of the beacon fire is equivalent to controlling the entire delta.
Business collaborations with top streamers and annual donations from major gaming guilds—just the visible benefits alone are enough to keep him busy on the battlefield for ten years.
Not to mention the enormous profits hidden beneath the surface—holding the power of life and death over the anti-cheat system is tantamount to squeezing the throat of the entire cheating industry.
The DMA hardware team would have to pay him an exorbitant protection fee to avoid being blocked.
To get the latest updates and gain the approval of cheaters, you have to buy their code as soon as possible.
For a top-tier escort studio to secure orders steadily, it has to pay him a monthly tribute.
The money from these shady businesses comes hundreds or thousands of times faster than wages.
But only those in charge of the "Beacon Fire" model can access such immense wealth.
With daily active users on the battlefield plummeting, even cheat teams are too lazy to bother with compatibility testing. He's stuck with this mediocre business, barely getting a taste of its benefits.
This suppressed greed eventually led him to hit it off with Su Ming.
This inescapable trap was set: Su Ming was responsible for transferring Yi Feng away from his post and cutting off all contact.
He was in charge of technology implementation, and he had already planted timed "mines" in today's hot patch.
Three days ago, he took the pretext of the large battlefield being connected to the new anti-cheating system and approached Yifeng with the adaptation plan.
Delta's dual-mode gameplay and anti-cheating system are public achievements of the project. Since the main battlefield needs to be integrated, Yifeng has no reason to refuse.
As expected, Yi Feng, who had been working non-stop for more than ten days, didn't have time to pay attention to the code update of the large battlefield and approved this adaptation patch that included his own agenda.
On the surface, it appears to be regular code adapted to the gameplay, but deep within the file, two encrypted, timed malicious programs are buried, scheduled to erupt at 9 PM tonight.
Of the three people in the project team who had the authority to perform emergency hot patch updates and shut down the system, Yi Feng and Su Ming were locked up in a karaoke bar and completely out of contact.
He himself then lost contact...
The perfect 8-hour vacuum period was enough for this incident to fully escalate and cause catastrophic damage.
He had all the advantages of timing, location, and people.
The hour hand points to 9 o'clock.
The anti-cheating system, which was originally running smoothly, quietly underwent a fatal deviation.
The multiple complex judgment rules have been overridden and replaced with a single feature strong judgment. As long as any of the flag items is triggered, the system will automatically issue a ten-year ban order without cross-verification.
Countless normal player actions, regular software on computers, and original peripheral drivers have been included in the cheat signature database in batches.
The bundled malicious full-disk scanning program starts simultaneously. As soon as the account is marked as abnormal, the anti-cheat driver will immediately obtain system kernel-level privileges and perform loop read and write operations on all hard drives of the player's computer. Mechanical hard drives will have bad sectors, and solid-state drives will fail in an instant.
Since it was nighttime, there was no possibility of human review or customer service.
This black pot, which he meticulously tailored specifically for Yifeng, was enough to completely ruin the other party's career.
Once the matter is accomplished, he can naturally take the position of head of the beacon fire, and those enormous fortunes will be within his grasp!
When the time came, Ziying turned off her work phone without hesitation, removed the SIM card, and tossed it deep into a drawer.
This step was a well-thought-out plan he had long ago.
He was at home that night, and with his phone off, he was completely unaware of the situation and no one could be held responsible for anything.
After doing all this, he lit another cigarette, picked up another spare phone, nestled into the sofa, and opened the most active forums and online communities for Delta Force players, as well as Douyin and Weibo.
At first, there were only a few scattered posts, with players complaining that they had been inexplicably banned for ten years. Some people in the comments section even joked, "If you're banned, you're banned," or "It's a misunderstanding."
Then a huge wave of public opinion surged up.
Posts on related topics flooded Weibo, transforming from sporadic complaints into a collective outcry from millions of players.
On Douyin, countless people are posting screenshots of their account bans. There are whales with all the brick skins and their accounts worth over 10,000 yuan, there are newbies who only play the basic version, and there are players with a KD of 0.3 and a whole page of failed escape attempts. But without exception, they all received a cold, hard ten-year ban.
Immediately afterwards, even more terrifying feedback came flooding in, with countless players posting screenshots of their damaged hard drives, and the outcry grew louder and louder.
On Weibo, the hashtags #DeltaControlBanForTenYears# and #DeltaControlAntiCheatBreaksPlayerHardDisk# shot up to the top of the trending list like rockets, with their popularity skyrocketing at a visible speed.
Upon entering Douyin, he randomly clicked into the live streams of several Delta streamers and witnessed one of them being kicked offline on the spot, with a ten-year ban notification popping up on the screen. The chat room exploded instantly.
In just one hour, at 10 p.m., hashtags such as #DeltaMassWrongfulBan#, #DeltaMaliciouslyDamagingPlayers'Hardware#, and #WhatIsDeltaCleanUpOperationCleaningUp# quickly and decisively topped the trending search lists on major platforms.
Each entry is followed by a glaring "explosive" character.
Seven of the top ten trending topics were related to this topic.
The situation is completely out of control.
The person who started all of this is currently curled up on the sofa, like an outsider watching a play, coldly observing the fermentation of this media tsunami.
He didn't sleep; he just leaned back on the sofa, smoking one cigarette after another, watching the public opinion gradually explode across the entire internet.
The protests spread from the gaming community to the digital product community, and then to social news sections. Countless players angrily demanded their rights, and related topics repeatedly topped the trending search lists. The hashtag #YifengApologizes# was also flooded by angry players.
As the sky began to lighten with the first hint of dawn, the clock struck five in the morning.
He slowly took out his work phone, reinserted the SIM card, and pressed the power button.
Sure enough, as soon as the phone regained signal, countless missed call notifications and urgent messages flooded in.
"What?! How could such a big thing happen?! I'm at the company right away!"
Ziying stubbed out her last cigarette, stood up, changed into a smart black suit, washed her face, and used cold water to smooth the bloodshot eyes from staying up all night. Looking at herself in the mirror, she smiled.
"The savior has arrived..."
…………
7:00 AM, conference room in a building in Shenzhen.
An emergency meeting was convened, and the atmosphere in the meeting room was extremely tense.
This time, the person sitting in the main seat was not Su Ming, but Ma Ruizhe, the head of Tencent's game business line and Su Ming's boss's boss.
His face was ashen, his fingers pounding heavily on the projection screen, which was filled with angry comments from players and trending topics that had gone viral online. His icy voice boomed through the conference room:
"Take a good look! See what the players are saying!"
I've figured it out, Delta Force is the real battle royale game.
[It's clearly a roulette game...it all depends on luck to avoid being mistakenly killed by the system.]
[Search, attack, and withdraw refers to searching your data, attacking your computer, and finally withdrawing.]
Luckily, I had something to do last night and didn't go online...
[I just wanted to play a game, and you're trying to break my computer? Damn it, give me my money back!]
"Can anyone tell me what exactly happened last night?!"
"Why did such a huge blunder happen?! Tens of millions of players' accounts were mistakenly banned, countless players' hardware was damaged, and now the whole internet is laughing at Tencent!"
"What were you three in charge doing last night?!"
Su Ming sat to the side, his face pale, looking ashamed and utterly humiliated.
"I was wrong. I shouldn't have taken my colleagues out to celebrate at such a crucial time last night, which led to..."
Ma Ruizhe's face turned ugly as he looked at Ziying and Yifeng.
At this moment, Ziying suddenly stood up, her face full of self-reproach and anxiety:
"Mr. Ma, this is my fault! My phone died last night and I was sleeping at home, so I didn't receive the emergency call and failed to detect the problem and mitigate the damage immediately. I'm willing to accept any punishment from the company!"
Ma Ruizhe's expression softened slightly.
Ziying had a perfect alibi, and she even arrived at the company at 5 a.m. and pushed out the fix patch immediately, which stopped the situation from getting worse. It's not fair to criticize her too much.
"This isn't your fault," he said in a deep voice. "All I want to know now is why the anti-cheating system made such a fatal mistake!"
As soon as he finished speaking, everyone's eyes in the conference room instantly focused on Yi Feng, who was ice-cold all over.