Chapter 338: Good Reviews
Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Pranav
“What are you busy doing? The battle’s already begun, so why aren’t you going outside?”
The liches gathered their mana and summoned a thick blanket of dark clouds that blotted out the sun, while skeleton mages summoned a never-ending sea of skeletons. With a fierce intent to do battle, the infinite amount of cannon fodder arrived on the battlefield. The fighting had reached its peak.... Just joking!
Although the first part of all that was true, it wasn’t important.
The undead indeed began their battle against Oak Town. But strangely, they seed to be highly unmotivated. The battling wasn’t fierce at all. High-level undead troop types like Abominations weren’t even sent out.
Even though it was quite a common tactic for undead mages to summon a sea of skeletons to overwhelm their enemy with the force of numbers, the sea of skeletons still needed a sufficient amount of supporting, powerful troops to be at its most effective. Only summoning weak skeletons and having them attack by themselves would be no different from giving their enemy free practice targets and experience.
The defending adventurers felt that it would be a waste to even use arrows against this pure sea of skeletons. It was enough to simply have the treants toss large boulders. A single boulder rolling downhill would act just like a bowling ball, sending shattered bones flying everywhere.
“How boring. That’s just nothing but testing our defenses. There’s nothing worth watching at all.”
There would be no possible result because both sides were still testing each other right now. All they were doing was wasting a minor amount of ammunition and losing a very low amount of lives.
“What are you doing? [The Adventurer Review System]? What is this?”
“I’m just adding a new patch to the ‘Contract Heroes’ system.”
“A patch? What kind of hellish idea have you co up with now?”
“Well, sothing that’s obtained too easily won’t be valued. And, if everyone is treated equally in the Contract Heroes System, it’s actually unfair to those who work the hardest and have the most accomplishnts. So, I created this VIP level system, where the best ’employees’ will obtain even greater honors and levels in the system.”
I even started laughing out loud as I said this. It was precisely of that spy’s appearance, as well as the large rcenary groups and adventurers remaining on guard against each other, that helped discover many insufficiencies about my Contract Heroes system.
“Why are you laughing so evilly? Honor? Are you such a nice person? Why do I feel like you’re going to make others suffer again?”
“No, I just recalled sothing funny. So what do you think of this level system I ca up with?”
“One heart, two hearts, three hearts, one diamond, two diamonds... One crown, two crowns? What’s with all these designs? Hearts, diamonds, and crowns? Is there a connection between them?”
“It is sothing you wouldn’t understand, a representation of the greatest honor! It’s a label that represents how much money you’ve spent. Although in the end, many people started grinding and making fake accounts, in addition to those professional counterfeiters, rendering it completely unreliable... at the very least, it was quite reliable when it first appeared.”
Actually, what pictures were used for the designs was unimportant. Although I evilly plagiarized the designs used in a certain Chinese application [1] 1 , Contract Heroes indeed needed a clear level system that indicated their level of reliability.
In this world, rcenaries and adventurers didn’t have a clear level system. How rcenaries and adventurers got hired relied completely on their past reputations and personal connections. This was precisely why that empty shell of a rcenary group from before that lost all but a few of its mbers still had people fighting over succeeding its na. The reputation that it established over the past hundred years was the greatest wealth of all.
Establishing a credibility rating system for adventurers and rcenaries would require a neutral accreditation party that the public and all the countries trusted in. Previously, this would obviously be impossible in this generation where so many countries existed in opposition to each other.
The rcenary Guild? Many rcenaries would treat the rcenary Guild as a neutral interdiary which provided services for them. In fact, the rcenary Guild would often help retired and injured rcenaries find new jobs, provide water and food for rcenaries, fix and maintain their weapons, enchant their equipnt, provide job opportunities for current rcenaries, and other such services. But most of the ti, the rcenary Guild relied on the rcenaries themselves to support it. They lacked any forceful asures against the rcenaries themselves.
This was what the royalty of every country wished to see. Not a single country wanted to see the neutral rcenary Guild have its own power and independence. Otherwise, the power the rcenary Guild possessed would beco dangerous to their interests.
“Absolutely neutral, and we focus on providing services to all rcenaries.” This could basically be the catchphrase of the rcenary Guild.
The end result was that all rcenary Guilds and rcenary alliances lacked credibility in the minds of most adventurers and rcenaries. There was also no way for countries to recognize the validity of rcenary Guilds from other countries. If you ntioned a particular rcenary group or adventurer, the most you could describe them with was “Oh, they seem to be quite famous” or “He sounds like he’s pretty powerful.” Vague words like these, but they were obviously unconvincing and unreliable.
The lack of a very clear review system wasn’t good for either the employers or the employed. After all, potential employers would also be afraid that the bodyguards they spent so much money on hiring turned out to be bandits that attacked their own employer or a group of weaklings posing as the strong. The rcenary groups would also worry whether their employer would treat themselves as nothing more than expendable cannon fodder. This was why the hardest missions with the highest requirents could only be found through personal connections or privately notifying a rcenary Guild. The oldest and most veteran rcenary groups would only beco stronger and stronger, and newly-established rcenary groups would find it impossible to receive high-level jobs.
Without a doubt, this limited the ability of the average rcenary and adventurer to improve themselves. But if there was a completely reliable and trustworthy neutral party that assessed all the rcenaries and adventurers, the situation would be greatly improved. At the very least, a rcenary group with over ninety percent excellent reviews would definitely look a lot better than a rcenary group that had more than fifty percent negative reviews... why did I feel like I was turning my Contract Hero into Amazon?
Reviewing a rcenary’s personal strength as well as paying the rcenary would be connected to the level system I had in mind. For instance, a rcenary who had a level of double crowns, the highest level in my system, would an that he had perford lots of tasks for his employers and had a large number of excellent reviews. Naturally, this rcenary would be able to charge higher prices for his services and could be considered a very trustworthy individual.
“And this isn’t only for rcenaries and adventurers. Just take a look at the battlefield. Don’t you feel that sothing’s wrong about the situation?”
“Nah, I’m not interested in children’s gas like this battle.”
Fine then. Although I was just saying so, I had indeed noticed that sothing seed off about the situation since I really did feel that these small-scale battles, which were only ant to test the enemy, were quite boring.
“In the past, for the most difficult of missions, multiple rcenary groups would team up together. Naturally, they didn’t particularly trust each other or know how each other worked. So either soone everyone agreed on would be voted as a temporary leader or all the leaders would work together in a temporary alliance. Perhaps this is sufficient for small-scale battles, but there are also obvious limitations to this. If this continues for the Contract Heroes, there will be quite a number of disadvantages.”
Indeed, as the Contract Heroes system expanded and the “Heroes” beca stronger and more nurous, the individual Contract Heroes not tied to any organization would beco more and more important. For example, this defensive battle at Oak Town was basically the first ti the Contract Heroes acted as the main forces, but in the future, Contract Heroes would be appearing at much larger-scale battles, perhaps even at a national level. It seed far too outdated and inefficient to continue using the sa old leadership system from before. This current battle was exposing quite a number of problems.
“Just take a look at the warriors standing on the frontlines. While they’re accepting orders on the frontlines, they’re still turning around to look at people on the castle walls. They’re probably looking for their real bosses’ orders, instead. Also, all the archers are actually ‘kill stealing’ to try and obtain more Justice Points, which ans that they’re focusing far too much to fire at targets worth a large amount of Justice Points. This is far too much of a waste of important ammunition. As long as ‘Contract Heroes’ remain like this, no matter how powerful they are, they’re still nothing more than a loose pile of sand.”
Not even ntioning the fact that the Heroes had spies amongst each other working for rival organizations, they lacked trust in each other. They were all proud individuals who weren’t willing to be others’ subordinates apart from those they recognized. How could they possibly trust in others’ commands? The mont they t a dangerous task, pushing responsibility onto others and blaming each other for failure was the most natural thing to do. On the battlefield, lacking an “absolute authority” was definitely damaging.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be that noticeable if the battle was going well, but the mont a battle started going poorly it would be easy for internal conflicts to arise and people to resist orders. Maybe even the entire battle would be lost or traitors would appear, all because the leaders lacked absolute authority or were filled with selfish intentions.
At the very least, currently, the most obvious problem was that there were far too many commanders. There were quite a few adventurers and rcenaries giving orders. But all these people wanted to be leaders, not to win the battle, but to have their own subordinates safely and reliably earn as many Justice Points as possible.
So, apart from personal honor in my planned level system, apart from being able to give reviews to ordinary warriors, certain special individuals could also receive titles such as “Top-level Commander” or “Professional Commander” and so on. This would make it more convenient for them to take charge, and it would even help us create so classic examples and heroes, giving us more control over people’s opinions of us.
But when I explained all this to Harloys, she had a different opinion from .
“Why not just use a military title system, with sergeant, lieutenant, colonel, and other such titles? Wouldn’t that be a better and more direct system?”
I could only smile wryly at this. Although Harloys was incredibly talented in magic, she didn’t know much about politics. For so things, I just couldn’t rely on her.
“That would be far too sensitive of a topic. It would sound like we created a personal army. What would each country’s royalty and church think of that?”
Yep, I was certain that the mont we used military titles for our system, our Justice Points system would imdiately be targeted as a threat by every single country.
“Tsk, humans are so troubleso. I’m going to go out and take a look.”
“Let know if there are any changes in the situation. Have a few people keep a good eye on those high-level undead, especially the two living individuals in their camp.”
Harloys turned around and left, leaving alone with my frustrations.
Creating a review system would directly relate to the credibility and future of our Justice Points system. I needed it to have an obvious level system in order to make it more convenient to establish leaders that everyone would follow, yet I also couldn’t make it too rigid of a system that would make the various countries in this world sense danger. The more I thought about it, the more troubleso I felt it would be.
“Hmm, should I add in a ‘Thumbs-up’ system? A person can increase in level with thirty-two thumbs-ups. Or, after receiving so set amount of thumbs-ups, they’ll receive an official title... Wait a mont, there will always be things I can’t predict—I need to also think of a way to preemptively prevent career negative reviewer trolls from appearing!”
Note:
[1] TL/N: Taobao, China’s version of Amazon.
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