Chapter 319: Game Pool

"How on earth did that happen?!" Mu Sicheng was thoroughly confused.

Bai Liu says calmly, "Intelligence and targeted skills screening."

"I'm inclined to that answer as well." Wang Shun nodded his head and echoed Bai Liu's statement, "Russell Cemetery collects a large number of new players with low skills, and then sends out teams of new players with skills that suppress the other side depending on the different skills of each Guild Warrior team member they're playing against."

Wang Shun continued, "This tactic has been demonstrated in Russell Cemetery against multiple Guild Wars teams, where the skills of their players have consciously targeted the enemy's ace player."

"The most obvious is still the one at Russell Cemetery against the Killer Sequence Challenge."

Wang Shun taps on the panel, and a short video appears.

The characters in the short video are obviously Spades trapped in a mud puddle , Wang Shun illustrates:

"In this match, the Russell Cemetery Tactician's skill is able to swallow an enemy player into a mud puddle, restricting the speed of movement and lowering the damage of attacks, but correspondingly, it takes one of your own team members to actively sacrifice in order to activate this skill."

"This skill is not very useful in everyday games or normal leagues."

"In the game, no player would sacrifice themselves just to trap a monster, and in the league, no guild would sacrifice their hard-earned players just to jam the shift of an opposing player."

Wang Shun turned his head to look at the trapped Spades in the panel, "But this seemingly trivial skill works wonders against Spades, who is used to acting on his own without a team, and who uses speed movement and speed attack as his main killer."

"After trapping Spades, the rhythm of the Killer Sequence's ferocious offense was momentarily interrupted, and a day later, the Killer Sequence was drained of one of its members."

Wang Shun turns to Mu Sicheng: "If Spades hadn't forced his way through at the end, last year's first place wouldn't have been a killer sequence."

Mu Sicheng couldn't believe it: "In this way, you can have a 93% win rate?!"

"It is precisely because of this approach that the win rate is so high." Bai Liu looks down at the paper, "Gathering a large number of new players, then sifting through the mass to find just the right kind of skills to restrain the enemy, switching teams as the enemy rotates, each time the team is a carefully selected expendable item, and replacing it when it dies."

"Very good tactics." Bai Liu commented in a calm tone.

Wang Shun lets out a long sigh, "That's a brutal tactic, but often brutal tactics are the ones that work in this game, and I don't have a good solution in mind at the moment."

"How can there be no solution?!" Mu Sicheng was unconvinced, "If they make tactics against us, we can make tactics against them too!"

Liu Jiayi, who had been silent, suddenly spoke up, "It can't be done."

Mu Sicheng squinted over, "Why can't you do it? They're all ordinary newcomers and ordinary skills, as long as you know the information about them ......"

"The problem is that it's hard to know." Liu Jiayi looked directly at Mu Sicheng, "Russell Cemetery has between five hundred and a thousand reserve players, and in order to depress the exposure of those players, Russell Cemetery has given up on developing star players, given up on singles and pairs, and basically has no way for each player to find their way into the small TV library of gameplay videos."

"In this case, it's difficult to get information about the skills of so many ordinary newcomers."

Mu Sicheng looked sideways at Wang Shun : "You can let Wang Shun blend in, then use your skills to get the opponent's information ......"

Liu Jiayi coldly interrupted Mu Sicheng, "You think the King's Guild hasn't tried?"

"First of all, even if Wang Shun was able to blend into Russell Cemetery and obtain information on these hundreds of people and still remain undetected, it would be very difficult to determine from the information obtained by Wang Shun alone which of these hundreds of people's newcomer's skills are the ones that are targeting our battle team."

"Secondly, Mu Sicheng, do you know how many permutations of five there will be when hundreds or thousands of people come to make them?"

"Tens of thousands." Before Mu Sicheng answered, Liu Jiayi gave a direct answer, "These hundreds of people can form tens of thousands of group race combinations, and there are tens of thousands of possibilities for what they look like after their skills are assembled and combined."

Liu Jiayi looks directly at Mu Sicheng: "We're in the light, they're in the dark, we've only got five people, they've got hundreds of new people who haven't been exposed much at all."

"And because of our excellent skills, none of us are getting much exposure, except for Tang Er playing almost everyone has several gameplay videos that have made it into the small TV library."

"We can't play their path of completely abandoning our star players because we need viewer support to get a get-out-of-jail-free card, so we'll be getting more and more exposure later in the season, and it's going to be simple to get intel on us."

"The amount of intelligence information is completely unequal." Liu Jiayi made a cold judgment, "Developing targeted tactics is impossible."

"Last year in the midseason, even the King's Guild didn't know which players Russell Cemetery would send out to answer the call until moments before they took the field."

Mu Sicheng listened and slowly slumped on the table, both eyes glazed over, "...... How else is this going to play? This is also too rogue, right?"

Suddenly, Mu Sicheng straightened his body up again as he slammed the table, "That's not right! Russell Cemetery is massively depleting these reservists like this and sending them to their deaths, these reservists are definitely not willing to do so!"

"We can start from this!" Mu Sicheng spoke up, his eyes glowing as he looked towards Bai Liu, "Bai Liu, the time has come for you to play your part, with your eloquence you can surely successfully turn this group of preppers around and get them to come and join our Wandering Circus Guild!"

For a moment, Bai Liu, Wang Shun, and Liu Jiayi all looked at Mu Sicheng with a friendly expression.

"Actually." Wang Shun said euphemistically, "I think God Mu you could do without being so active in tactical discussions."

Mu Sicheng reacted for a while, and after realizing what Wang Shun meant, he depressedly plopped down on the table again, "...... Did I say it wrong again?"

"It's not possible that this group of reservists knew they were going to be used as cannon fodder and still willingly went to play in the league for this what's-her-name Russell Cemetery, right?" Mu Sicheng rested his head on the table, his eyes looking at Wang Shun.

Wang Shun sighed with mixed feelings, "Indeed."

Mu Sicheng was now really confused, "Why?"

Liu Jiayi rolled her eyes and said breathlessly, "Idiot, do you know why the guild Russell Cemetery is called Russell Cemetery?"

Mu Sicheng paused for a moment, then said incredulously, "Grass, no? Cemetery? Is that what I think it means?"

"BINGO, that's right, it means what you think it means." Liu Jiayi snapped his fingers, "New players joining this guild know what kind of guild they're entering, and know that they're likely to be sacrificed by the guild."

"They knew they were walking into a public graveyard and were prepared to become one."

Mu Sicheng leaned back in his chair, his eyes out of focus, "...... I can't figure out why they did it."

"God Mu you pay little attention to this news because you don't like the guild." Wang Shun explains, "Russell's Cemetery is essentially an escapist guild that accepts a large number of new players to the Fear Games."

"There were some new players who were very repulsed by the game and were eager to escape it, so the president of Russell Cemetery stepped up and started this collective cemetery sex society."

"He promised these players that you could deposit your deaths here in the Russell Cemetery, and on the day of the Russell Cemetery's victory, I would make a wish to resurrect you from the cemetery and divide the points among you, fulfilling your desires so that you could get out of the game."

Mu Sicheng thought it was ridiculous: "How can anyone believe this?"

Wang Shun nods, "A lot of players believe that, excluding the high level skill new players that were screened away by the Grand Guilds, a significant portion of the remaining good and bad skill players went to Russell Cemetery."

Mu Sicheng was speechless, "What if this Russell Cemetery can't win the championship at all? Won't they die in vain then?"

Liu Jiayi kicked Mu Sicheng and lifted his chin to signal him to take a look at the winning percentage on the PPT.

Mu Sicheng was speechless again, but he still felt something was wrong, "Even if this Russell can win, can these people make sure that this Guildmaster can fulfill his promise?"

Liu Jiayi couldn't help but show another [You can be such a fool] expression to Mu Sicheng: "Do you know what the slogan of Russell Cemetery is?"

Mu Sicheng looked at Liu Jiayi: "What is it?"

Liu Jiayi said, "[May we die in hope]."

"These new players who chose to defect to Russell Cemetery are the ones left over from being screened by the big guilds, and there's a process of collapsing their self-worth system, from the beginning when they had expectations for their skills and thought they could survive on them, to the later ones when they realized that their skills weren't even worth mentioning, and no one was looking at them."

Liu Jiayi quieted down and added, "In the later stages, these newcomers simply don't believe that they can survive in the game on their own anymore, they live with fear and trembling, thinking that they will die sooner or later, and it's better to choose a death with hope than to be tortured to death in a horror game."

"In fact, many people don't even expect the president of Russell Cemetery to honor his promise, they just want to die in peace."

Wang Shun, who was on the side, sighed as he listened, "God Mu, you and Bai Liu probably don't pay much attention to this kind of guild because you're both high-level skill players, and this kind of guild is the last way out for low-level skill players."

"I've always found it amazing that such a guild formed by low-skilled players escaping ended up being so lethal." Liu Jiayi rested her cheeks as she recalled, "Last year Heart won, but it wasn't a good fight."

Bai Liu sidled up to Liu Jiayi: "How did Heart win Russell Cemetery last year?"

Liu Jiayi thought for a moment and then replied, "The people in Russell Cemetery can't do anything about Heart, her skills involve Appearance Change and Charm, it's hard to find players who can resist her skills."

"But the rest of the team was clamped down pretty hard."

"Heart fought a war of attrition, a slow grind, and fought hard, but the other team was new, the panel was still not as good as Heart's side, and in the end they won."

Bai Liu turned to Wang Shun: "How did Against the Gods win against this team last year?"

Wang Shun and Liu Jiayi were silent at the same time.

After a while, Wang Shun spoke, "I didn't see it clearly."

Bai Liu raised an eyebrow, "Didn't get a good look?"

"One dimensional minute after the game started." Wang Shun said bitterly, "The tactician of Russell Cemetery then voluntarily surrendered to the Adversary God."