God's Imitator

Yao Yuan remained subconsciously focused on the movements of all players on the field, especially closely observing the trends of Communities 15, 17, and 18.

However, as he temporarily found no anomalies, he didn’t mind simply answering these questions.

"The gameplay of mutual benefit is clearly unfeasible.

"Overall optimization does not equal local optimization; players who truly control the situation in this game do not want to see such a scenario.

"Let’s do a simple calculation:

"In this game, what is the theoretical maximum profit for a single player?

"The answer is over 500,000 minutes of visa time."

Shen Qingyun was stunned for a moment; clearly, this figure was indeed exaggerated, somewhat beyond her original expectations.

Yao Yuan continued to explain: "The key is in that settlement rule: When the game ends, if a community does not have a spokesperson, then all players will be deducted 30,000 minutes of visa time, to be evenly shared by communities with a spokesperson.

"In other words, the fewer communities with a spokesperson, the more communities without one, the more substantial this profit becomes.

"Therefore, the theoretical upper limit of profit in this game is: in the most ideal situation, only the spokesperson from one’s community remains on stage.

"In this scenario, the other 15 communities, totaling 105 players, will have 3.15 million minutes of visa time deducted, evenly divided among the 7 players from the winning community.

"Each person can get 450,000 minutes of visa time.

"Considering the spokesperson’s popularity income, settlement income, and the audience’s additional income, personal total profit has the potential to exceed 500,000.

"Of course, this is an idealized situation; realistically, it’s unlikely to have only one’s community’s spokesperson left on stage.

"But this principle remains unchanged:

"For players who can control the game progress, minimizing the number of spokespersons on stage is the choice for maximizing profits.

"This is also precisely what the smarter communities have been doing until now."

Shen Qingyun pondered: "So... does this mean the election of spokespersons on stage is essentially meaningless?

"Regardless of what they say or do, it’s merely a facade to confuse the average player, isn’t it?

"No wonder Jiang Chenyan and Hu Yingxu once had brief and arrogant speeches.

"That’s because they believe the grand scheme off-stage is already settled."

Yao Yuan shook his head slightly: "Not really.

"Both on-stage and off-stage are crucial, functioning as interdependent pivots.

"The premise for successful operation and alliance-building off-stage is that one’s community must demonstrate some strength, that is, occupy certain positions in ’spokesperson,’ ’Reflection Room,’ and ’Media Representative.’

"If there’s no one in these three positions, no matter how much one talks, other communities won’t be willing to cooperate.

"Conversely, spokespersons on-stage must also obtain additional support through off-stage operations.

"Not only contribute more popularity, but also negotiate as much as possible to ensure safety.

"If a spokesperson assumes that being the top in popularity for a certain commodity means carefree security, they would be gravely mistaken.

"Because players off-stage will use the ’Inquiry Session’ to constantly target and eliminate these ungrounded spokespersons.

"Just like those spokespersons for ’coffee-related commodities’: As long as certain audiences off-stage are willing, one routine elimination and one inquiry elimination can clear out the spokespersons for the entire category."

Shen Qingyun pondered for a moment: "According to previous deductions, it’s players in the Reflection Room who control the vague aspects of the game.

"When they want to eliminate a player, those in the Reflection Room can easily achieve this by adjusting the elimination rules and cooperating with the audience on stage.

"But specifically, who makes the decisions?"

Yao Yuan explained: "This point actually, I’m not sure either, because so far, the rules of the entire Reflection Room are hidden, and players who haven’t entered can only guess.

"But I can roughly guess; probably only the first few players who entered the Reflection Room can truly make decisions, maybe 5-7 people, but probably not fewer or more.

"They likely have equal decision-making power, deciding important matters by ’majority vote.’

Shen Qingyun was somewhat unclear: "But there are no indications of this in the game; how do you guess?"

Yao Yuan was silent for a moment: "This isn’t easy to explain; simply put, it’s the result of thinking from the Imitator’s perspective."

Shen Qingyun further asked: "Even if it’s majority vote, there are still issues.

"From the previous game process... the first 5 people entering the Reflection Room came from Community 28, Community 9, your community, Community 15, and Community 18? Later, it seemed like Community 5 and Community 6 were also involved.

"The Reflection Room shouldn’t have methods for communication with the outside world.

"Even if players from Community 15 and Community 18 in the Reflection Room want to coordinate with the outside world to execute a plan, they are the minority; why would players from other communities agree?

"Also, I don’t understand how you can see the alliance of Communities 15, 17, and 18.

"I completely did not realize that Community 18 would be the key organizer of this alliance."

Yao Yuan continued observing the dynamics within the venue, then explained calmly and leisurely: "This matter is somewhat lengthy to discuss.

"Firstly, within the 10-minute preparation time after seeing the game rules, smarter players in this game should have thought of the general strategy.

"For example, Jiang Chenyan, Hu Yingxu, Tang Qing, and so on.

"Although we ultimately decided to adopt different strategies, some actively, some passively, we basically saw the game’s final framework, not much difference.

"I decided to adopt a defensive strategy, so I focused more on observing the dynamics within the venue.

"Especially closely monitoring the auction status of these large screens.

"Although our display screens do not specifically show which community bought each large screen, ’Media Representatives’ must go through the entrance passage below to enter the ’Media Room,’ so if you pay attention, you can see the numbers on their masks.

"I noticed that initially, Community 17 was most enthusiastic about auctioning large screens.

"But at the end of the first round of games, Jiang Chenyan obtained the spokesperson’s identity, and a player from Community 15, most likely their agent, actively went to find players from Community 17 and Community 18.

"The distances between these three communities were already close, so such personnel movement didn’t attract much attention; if I weren’t specifically watching, it would be hard to discover.

"And after that, Community 18 also began to show a high enthusiasm for auctioning large screens.

"So, at that point, I confirmed that they were likely to be the core players controlling the progress of this game."