The Panda Arcade Store? Yong De and He Rong, the two co owners for the Arcade store never saw it coming at all. They had been informed about Jin hosting his mini games through their store, but both had vastly underestimated the massive appeal and thus the giant fan base it would bring them.
This was even more accurate after Jin had tweaked the paying models for his mini games. The first significant change that all the mini games were free to enter. For those who had paid previously were given additional points for the amount they had spent on the game. (And it could have amounted to a crapload of points since there was no cap to the amount they paid.)
Jin also gave the people who paid those the entry fees such as the Supa Robot Warz and Spinning Tops a special achievement badge which could never be received in the future.
The second change was that Jin created a basic gamer model pack where the customers could choose which mini games they wanted to subscribe to, which was generally cheaper than buying individual parts.
The Basic Gamer Model Pack cost 9 Yuan and would provide five Bronze Panda Medals worth of game currency each month as well as two ‘supply packs’ depending on the chosen mini game. The Pet Card Arena subscribers received 500 Card Points and two Basic Card Packs.
For Spinning Tops, it was 500 Spinning Points respectively as well as two temporary inscription effects (useable for up to three times), whereas Supa Robot Warz got 500 Star Cross Points and two basic parts for their core model.
Jin also offered a Moderate Gamer Model Pack, Hardcore Gamer Model Pack and the most expensive of them all, the Extreme Gamer God Model Pack, costing 29 Yuan, 59 Yuan and 149 Yuan respectively. The amount of goodies rewarded were exponentially higher with the higher priced model. The Hardcore and Extreme Gamer God Model packs had the chance of getting rare inscriptions, cards or robot parts for each of the games.
Additionally, the Extreme Gamer God Model Pack included priority queues and an extra 0.5% chance for getting Legendary parts or cards in their packs.
Some might complain that this would turn it into a pay-to-win model, but Jin had ensured that the System would pair all of them up equally based on their technical scores. Jin was even considering adding gamer levels to the Pandamonium App in the future, but at the moment he lacked the time to properly conceptualise it.
The only thing that he added as of now was the achievement badges for subscribing to his Model Packs.
His limited time had, however, been spent on improving the Pet Card Arena. Jin finally created a few additional cards that would spice up the current card scene, and placed them into the basic card packs, indicating that they were rare cards and also making them even more unique, they were holographic in nature.
When one thought of holographic cards, they would think that the card merely shines under light. As for Jin’s kind of holographic cards, it was the literal meaning.
For example, the Great Poison Energy Arrows rare card depicted a half masked Rabbitwoman silhouette shooting arrows filled with purplish green energy. When a cultivator inserted their chi into the card’s artwork, the arrows appeared to be jumping out of the cards and what followed was an animation of the female silhouette reloading before shooting them again.
Basically, he was handing out holographic gif inserted into cards and the Jin plans to do that for all subsequent rares ones. If possible, he wished to update the old rare cards to this holographic design as well for consistency sake.
He Rong and Yong De both agreed that this had to be the first time a physical card game managed to produce such beautiful effects and claimed that if the card game ever got popular, it would revolutionise the way how card games would work in the future. Jin could only laugh at such a possibility.
First, the panda cultivator had to concentrate on improving the basic card packs to the point he was satisfied with the amount of variety before he concluded that the base game was sufficient and challenging.
Thankfully he had received the help of Yong De who unsurprisingly was a Gaming Card Fanatic. Jin tasked him to come up with more card ideas to improve the gameplay, which they could later release in the form of expansions. (He told Yong De to not be shy and copy the game designs from other card games and modify them accordingly.)
Only time could tell if there was something flawed with the current game cards and Jin was looking forward to designing future cards to change up the ‘meta’ of the gaming card scene so that they had a more concrete set of rules in case of holding tournaments.
Speaking of which, Yong De was also responsible for drawing out a plan concerning a Pet Card Tournament as well as propose the possible prizes. He Rong couldn’t help himself but teasingly remind Jin that it could backfire on him if he were serious about his partner not having to worry about a budget.
“Go all out!” was all Jin replied to He Rong’s teasing and told Yong De to be daring with the tournament. “Ask Kiyu if you need promotion on those cards. You can find her details in the Pandamonium Forum. I will inform her to keep an eye for your message. Else, you can shoot me an email to remind me too.”
Separately, with the inscription effect packs, the Spinning Top game had begun to enter a brand new level of gameplay. Performance of the tops would eventually be insufficient, and the inscriptions push the game to be even more challenging and exciting for the fans. (As well as the gamblers)
Octofussy was delighted to put out various inscriptions in the packs as this gave him the perfect opportunity to test out his ideas for weapon and armour inscriptions while ensuring that they worked as intended so he could release them for dungeon use as well.
Whenever he realised the inscription was too powerful or took too much chi for activation, Octofussy would tweak the inscriptions accordingly. Hence, Spinning Tops became his new favourite past time to watch the people use his products.
As for the Supa Robot Warz, He Rong continued to source for various robot models to send to Niu Lang to tinker with thereby increasing the number of parts the game would have.
Copying was not the issue per se. Instead, tweaking it a little to ensure that the parts were not copyrighted was what Niu Lang had to focus on. With the aid of the System, the simplest way to circumvent it was to combine two models, merge them together and see what kind of abomination he would receive from it and modify from there.
That way, the designs of every model part was ensured to be different, and only the most astute would have the ability to differentiate what they had been initially. Still, it was sufficient to fool the majority.
Niu Lang naturally created his very own model parts as well, and recently he had made the Zodiac Series, where the full robot models featured the various zodiac animals. However, he had yet to finalise some of the items and only teased it as a ‘coming soon’ event for those who played the mini game.
Despite Jin’s mini games, the main attraction of the Arcade was the actual arcade machine games right? Jin also placed his hand in that issue and purposely made them very cheap to the point that the experienced Arcade Store Owner felt the need to intervene.
Listening to his arguments, Jin merely asked the following questions. “Who usually frequents the arcades? Adults? Young Adults? Working Adults? Or is more teenagers? Students?”
“The latter…” Yong De admitted that his place was where a number of students hung out after school too though lately there were not many students since their pocket money had all been spent on presents for the upcoming Christmas. (Which Jin felt it was a mere excuse.)
“Yeap, there you have it. Previously, you had to put it at a high cost to ensure the games were properly utilised for their price. Now all you have to worry about is that customers are always around and not the operating costs. So we are keeping it at 1 Yuan for two tries no matter the arcade machine.” Jin decided, and He Rong agreed that such a price should be extremely attractive for the kids to play and relax. Yong De shrugged his shoulders and told the boss that this was his playground, and they were simply their ‘caretakers’.
Still, there was one component which drew the attention of all the working adults in the arcade, which He Rong and Yong De up to this point could not understand why.
The Giant Plushie UFO machine.
