Chapter 3: Teacher

In one year, I sort of became a pro player.

You know this Chinese farmer you buy stuff from when you don't have time to farm yourself?

Well, I sort of became it.

I sell items, skills, and information against money.

Even if right now it's not stable, I expect it to become stable soon.

In the game, there is a premium currency, crystals. This currency can be bought by players to conduct transactions in-game.

Some top guilds became sort-of companies, backed by sponsors to make their name well-known. The fact they have sponsors makes them even more reputed, to the point of almost being a household name. Some of them sell some positions in the guild against crystals.

For every revenue source the game company has, they keep 40% of it for the currency pool.

Basically, the value of the crystals depends on how much of it is in the players' wallets compared to how much is in the pool.

For example, if there are 10 crystals in the world and 100 bucks in the pool, then each crystal is worth 10 bucks.

As the game company principally gets money from people buying crystals, the value of crystals naturally tends to go down, so you might think that this kind of revenue wouldn't be stable for guilds and players.

Except that the value fluctuates instead of going down.

So either the game company has a stable revenue source other than the people buying crystals, either they are artificially keeping the balance in the pool.

They might actually be ready to lose money to advertise the success story of some players of the game.

But that isn't sustainable.

Because they're almost in a monopoly over this kind of game, they don't need to take high percentages. Actually, it's even better for them if they position themselves as middlemen instead of sellers. Crystals would be only a way to make transactions.

As the company is pretty mysterious, even with proof that someone is using the game to do money laundering, it would be hard to attack them as long as they do not represent a majority in the money laundering happening.

I think at some point they're going to reduce from 60% to around 2% the percentage they take on crystal sales. It might seem like a bad strategy, but it's actually sustainable.

Just like credit card companies like VISA or Mastercard taking 2 to 3% on transactions does not affect the market as a whole, it's expected that these 2% will be compensated by the regular sponsoring.

They might also take the same percentage of crystals over in-game transactions.

With that, the 2% the company takes from its own economy would be compensated by mirroring it on crystals without the company losing any money.

Let's take a world with only a seller and a buyer.

If they take a single buck from someone buying 50 bucks of crystals, they can later take a crystal when this person buys something with these crystals.

Then, the seller got 49 crystals, and the value of these crystals is 49 bucks. It's balanced. And if this seller then buys something with these 49 crystals, the value of the crystals increases instead of lowering. This means that the company does not need to inject any money to get a stable economy.

Even better, the value of crystals is increased by multiple transactions then lowered by the price people buy crystals at. It's a healthy fluctuating economy that brings constant returns to the company.

Each crystal they take as a fee is money that won't leave the pool, and so is still in the company's hands.

After that, they just need to periodically harvest money from the pool to get additional revenue.

A week later they did exactly what I predicted.

[...]

-Teacher!

You know how I told you about my business? Well, maybe I didn't tell you about all of it.

I also teach.

At least, to one student.

It's not any ordinary tuition, or any ordinary subject too.

That guy has a bank account I can't refuse. Just imagine someone proposing to you millions to teach them how to become a top player in the game.

Of course I'd accept.

To ensure I get paid, I used the judge.

I don't know the specifics, but it's a system that ensures contracts are respected.

You write contracts in-game, the AI reads it and makes sure it's respected.

As such, he already paid these millions in crystals to the judge.

If I show signs of breaking the contract, which here is refusing to teach something related to his character becoming stronger, he gets his money back and the contract is void.

If I complete the contract, I get the money and everyone is happy.

The leaderboard of the game is based on levels, which means farming, so it's not a reliable way to estimate someone's strength.

And so, his goal will be to have a page on him in the Paradise Monthly. An online publication focused on the game. They have a recurring tendency of making their top 100 PVP and PVE players, and dedicate pages to talking about the new entries in these tops each month. Their jury is composed of actual players of the game who know their topic and are able to select the right criteria.

They are said to be "experts", but I'd rather say that they are people who know their subject. After all, if they really were experts, they would be in one of these top 100.

However, as this is a good way to measure his progress, the success was defined as his entering one of these top 100.

The game servers are of course isolated from the rest of the internet, so The Paradise Monthly isn't available to the system, so I had a neutral third party being the judge of whether the condition was met.

Sadly for me, I'm confident this third party will really be neutral.

This third party is Soul. OneStrokeOneSoul.

Anyway, leaving this subject, this is all for the sum of everything I set up recently.

Overall, it has been now over a year since I started playing the games, and many things changed.

One of them is that I am now much closer to the majority.

As someone isolated from his family, it is very important to me. The majority means independence. Who knows if I'm suddenly going to get my guardian actually starting to interfere in my life.