Chapter 919: Distance

Translator: Nomyummi Editor: Nomyummi

On the 27th, the Christmas event came to a close. The stockings they collected could finally be exchanged for rewards, and many players were awaiting midnight on this day.

Though the members of Happy tried to maintain a good schedule, special moments like this needed special attention. With all these stockings, how could they sleep well without getting their rewards as soon as possible?

Teams, main accounts, side accounts, all with a whole stack of stockings; not even they bothered to count how many they had in total. It didn’t matter, because as soon as midnight arrived, everyone brought at least two accounts and began to squeeze over to login and claim their rewards.

Nothing could compare to the traffic at a peak time like this, when the rewards would all be given out from a specified time onwards. Since there were so many people, it was inconvenient to have an NPC just for collecting rewards, so this time, the method of exchanging rewards was very simple: open the inventory, click on the stockings to use and immediately Santa Claus would whistle by on his sleigh, dropping the rewards directly into your inventory.

So, at exactly midnight, the world of Glory was full of stocking redeeming players, and the sky was filled with Santa Clauses flying across the sky or hovering there. It was a miracle that no accidents occured. Then all sorts of sparkling rewards fell from heavens. Many players subconsciously ran to catch them and snatch them, but this was just something like a cutscene. The falling items would fall directly into the inventories of the players, so no one could steal them.

In that instant, the system messages began to flash like crazy.

In this event, 50 people would share 20 pairs of stockings, so that made it, at most, a 40% chance to win a reward, not very high, so the rewards given were pretty generous. From the TV, it could be seen that purple equipment weren’t worthy of getting a TV announcement. Purple Equipment seemed to be rather common among these rewards. The only rewards that would get on TV were Orange Equipment, skill books, or very precious materials.

If even purple equipment weren’t worthy of getting on TV, then it was obvious that things like experience books, money bags, blue equipment, food, and potions would meet the same fate. Even an event with generous rewards would still mostly give out trashy rewards. With only 40% of people getting rewards*, most players were already eliminated. So, those who were able to obtain stockings wouldn’t receive rewards that were too trashy. People who got these trashy rewards were probably loathed by lady luck.

For Happy’s members, they had so many stockings, that, as they clicked on them one by one, the Santa Clauses above their heads lined up like a train, an impressive sight.

Ye Xiu and co couldn’t help but count the items that popped up in their inventories. With so many rewards, they also had many more higher-grade rewards.

They didn’t notice it much, but the other players were burning with jealousy at seeing the words flash across the system messages channel.

However, from the list of their rewards, skill books seemed especially rare, and this item couldn’t be traded away, so only people who obtained it could use it. What was quite the tragedy was, even with all these stockings Happy had, they only managed to obtain four skill books, three with 20 points, and one with 10. Two were even on their side accounts, which was even more heartbreaking.

As for the things like materials, it was given to Ye Xiu to keep for now. Currently only him and Wei Chen had the ability to research materials. As for Orange equipment, those gained using stockings didn’t care what class you were, giving them out at random; the quality of the items also varied greatly. However, equipment could always be traded or sold, and everyone was all a part of the same team, the family, so a Battle Mage getting a Brawler’s equipment wasn’t a problem. They just had to trade. What was disappointing is when they obtained equipment for classes that their team didn’t have, but were still beautiful and high grade. It was depressing.

The Orange equipment Happy had gained from the stockings reinforced their strength further. However, what was more exciting was the rewards from the leaderboard placings.

These rewards weren’t random at all, just like the grand slam rewards, and high quality Orange equipment was given out according to each character’s class.

Every person who obtained equipment practically shivered with excitement. This equipment was crucial to upgrading the level of their equipment, but what was unfortunate, was that these rewards would be announced on TV, causing jealousy among players as well as revealing the equipment to their adversaries. It couldn’t be used as a hidden ace like silver weapons could on the battlefield.

With this event, Happy’s equipment had all seen great improvement. Before level 75 Silver equipment completely replaced level 70 Silver equipment, level 75 Orange equipment would bring a strange period of balance to the pro circle.

During this period of time, the gap between the characters of strong and weak teams would shrink greatly. This was because character strength was largely dependent on equipment and the difference between strong and weak teams relied primarily on the difference in the number of level 70 silver weaponry they had equipped. Level 75 Orange equipment was about the same level as level 70 Silver equipment. So, for many teams with level 70 Silver equipment, level 75 Orange equipment wouldn’t bring much improvement to them. Instead, it was the teams with less level 70 Silver weapons that would see huge improvements from the level 75 equipment. This was how the gap between them would be closed.

It was yet unknown if any weak teams would be able to rise up during this special period of time. However, the situation in the alliance would be affected for sure, if history had anything to say about it. How would the teams fare this time? Starting from January, everything would become clear.

The competition in the Alliance still wasn’t any of Happy’s business. However, they certainly benefited from this special period of time. The gap between them and Excellent Era had been closed by this. As for how things would be when they met on the field, that would depend on how many pieces of level 75 Silver equipment Excellent Era would be able to create before they fought!

Ye Xiu had an in-depth understanding of Excellent Era’s strength in all categories. For Silver equipment development, Excellent Era had never been weak. The account that was currently considered the strongest character, Battle God One Autumn Leaf, was the best proof.

"Who knows, maybe facing off against Excellent Era now would be best…" Ye Xiu mumbled to himself, "Now, the earliest we can face them would be in over a month’s time, and by then that guy would have probably already come up with several pieces of equipment. It’s been so many years, he had always been prepared. Speaking of, I do kind of want to see how One Autumn Leaf will end up after this update…"

As Excellent Era’s ace, Battle God One Autumn Leaf’s equipment would definitely be the most important for Excellent Era’s level 75 Silver equipment upgrades. Yet, the people behind this went unseen. What players saw was the players behind the accounts, the soul they gave to those characters. As for the heroes that provided the stats, they were rarely noticed.

The person Ye Xiu thought of then was like that.

Guan Rongfei.

He was a core member of Excellent Era’s tech team, a crazy Glory fan, a genius that stayed behind the scenes. Who knew how many of Excellent Era’s Silver equipment had been his workmanship? With him at Excellent Era, they didn’t need to worry about level 75 Silver equipment at all. He had made designs on improving the current equipment long before this update. For people like this, their current focus was probably just on researching and going through the new materials. And, with his years of experience, that wouldn’t be hard. So long as he had enough materials. After all, new updates, new materials, it would all be added in accordance with the current structure of Glory; it wouldn’t be completely new. A lot of things could be figured out through experience with similar things. For them, getting a hang of new additions wasn’t hard.

The existence of this person limited Ye Xiu’s optimism about using the update to close the gap between Happy and Excellent Era, but he wouldn’t talk about this with the others for now. Everyone had amazing morale right now, so there was no need to rain on their parade so soon!

Today was the day for the players to happily collect rewards for their stockings, and also the start of a new round of matches in the pro circle.

After the three event days, the equipment of the pro teams had gone through a complete makeover, especially the weak teams.

The stockings from Ye Xiu’s side had all been acquired through their own efforts, but these teams? They relied on the players in their guilds to gain more stockings.

However, players had to get used to new equipment. The pro teams had only gotten their new equipment on the day of the match. Whether they should use the equipment immediately or not was a question of much debate. Most teams chose stability, picking new equipment carefully. However, there were also many teams that had been poor for so long that suddenly obtained equipment that could be better than the strong teams, and impatiently switched their equipment out.

For example, Team Heavenly Swords.

Loulan Slash and the others were now proper pro players, very rarely coming to the game to play. In the Christmas event, their characters didn’t appear at all, also relying on their guilds to accumulate rewards. Their spoils weren’t bad in the end. They swapped their equipment as soon as possible, having worried about equipment for a long time coming.

Speaking of, Heavenly Swords regretted buying out Team Everlasting a little with this new update. Level 70 equipment and materials were a little outdated now, but back then Heavenly Swords had bought this, treating it like the ultimate equipment and materials treasure chest. However, this problem was an inevitable and natural occurence in the pro circle. The members of Heavenly Sword didn’t really have anything they could complain about except to think themselves unfortunate. It was a good thing that even outdated equipment was an important part of development. Without this old equipment, how would they get to the ultimate upgrade?

In this round, Team Heavenly Swords switched their equipment like someone who had just won the lottery, and their mood had influenced their performance, causing them to perform at their peak in that round. They even managed to win a flawless victory against their opponent, taking all 10 points!

For Team Heavenly Swords, this was a historical victory and their entire team was celebrating. Of course, they would also go and share this with all of their friends.

"Did you see our match!?" It was then that Lou Guanning messaged Ye Xiu excitedly.

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