Chapter 326: The Lord Forum

There weren’t any dedicated life-profession or secondary-profession players producing these goods yet, so they simply couldn’t be bought there.

Buying them through the forum, on the other hand, would be a very poor deal.

Only now did Joo Joowon learn that the transmission fees in the Age of Apocalypse weren’t calculated according to distance. Instead, they were based on the levels of the two worlds. The greater the difference between the levels of the two game worlds, the more expensive the transmission fee would be. At the highest level, the fee could even reach several gold bricks.

In other words, when Seong Seungmin came over this time, the cost of building the Lord’s Manor had only been a small part of the total expense. The transmission fee had been the real big expense.

Therefore, apart from making posts, Joo Joowon currently couldn’t buy anything on the forum. After all, none of the sellers there offered free shipping!

Although he still had no way to purchase anything useful from the Lord Forum for the time being, the information provided there was quite helpful. It gave Joo Joowon a general idea of what to expect from his upcoming Lord quests.

Generally speaking, the assessments only focused on three aspects: territory construction, military capabilities, and the ability to withstand risks. They wouldn’t deliberately demand that Lords achieve certain levels of population, public support, or prosperity during the assessment.

Because each Lord filled out a different questionnaire, the assessment quests they received would also vary. Therefore, the guide only used several of the most typical quests as examples and briefly explained the logic behind how quests were issued.

Lord quests were usually issued according to the circumstances of the world they were in. For example, depending on a Lord’s relationships with other people, the game might issue quests related to forming alliances or waging wars. Sometimes, a Lord’s territory location might also cause certain special quests to appear.

Then there were [Crystallus] and [Player Qualification Token].

Because the monsters spawned by the game differed from one world to another, each game world had its own name for crystallus. However, due to their appearance, they were all collectively referred to as crystallus.

Crystallus were a versatile, universal resource. They could be used in the production of equipment, potions, buildings, troops, and many other things. They were a fundamental part of the game’s underlying mechanics and were universally used in every world.

Therefore, the guide recommended that players save as many crystallus as they could. During special periods, their prices could even become higher than those of Apocalypse Coins.

As for Player Qualification Token, Joo Joowon hadn’t learned about them from the Lord Forum. Lords generally weren’t very welcoming toward players, whom they regarded as "freemen."

As leaders, Lords wished they could know everything about every person under their command. However, the uncertainty surrounding players made it difficult for them to place their complete trust in them. As a result, the Lord Forum rarely mentioned the player population. Most discussions there focused on territory development instead.

Besides, unlike the situation where someone who tried to seize an NPC’s territory would be attacked by everyone, there was no such unspoken rule among players.

If a Lord player had their territory seized by someone else, other players would simply see it as a case of being outmatched. No one would step forward to seek justice for a player who had lost everything.

Because of this, Lord players often wouldn’t include other players in the core of their own factions. They also had little interest in discussing such matters on the forum.

Compared to the Lord Forum, the Player Forum had a much larger user base. Almost every second, new posts were being published.

However, although the forum was lively, it was also filled with advertisements. Furthermore, because every world had different circumstances, there was no single beginner’s guide marked as an excellent post that was suitable for all players.

The only advice repeatedly given to new players was to keep leveling up. The posts constantly emphasized that players must never become complacent just because the game was temporarily peaceful. They had to work hard to level up and keep pace with the game’s progress. Apart from this, there weren’t any other announcements on the Player Forum.

Joo Joowon had learned about Player Qualification Token from the trading posts.

It was practically impossible to overlook them.

Compared to advertisements for other things, such as equipment and career paths, Player Qualification Token were the hottest items in the trading posts. Whenever one appeared, the number of replies would immediately exceed a hundred. They were clearly in extremely high demand.

Moreover, sellers of Player Qualification Token usually chose to sell them through auctions. The highest bidder would win, and the final price often reached an astonishingly high amount.

And if it was a fixed-price sale, it would usually come with additional requirements as well.

Even so, no one left sarcastic or mocking comments under the post. Instead, everyone quickly started bidding, as if they were afraid that if they were even a little too slow, the seller would find another player to trade with.

This situation left Joo Joowon completely confused.

In his eyes, Player Qualification Token wasn’t something particularly precious. As long as a player was killed, there was a chance for one to be drawn from the Dead Man Treasure Chest. No matter how he thought about it, the total supply shouldn’t be that small.

As for its function, he assumed it was simply something that allowed an NPC to change their identity into that of a player. Even if its market price wasn’t cheap, it shouldn’t be expensive enough to reach an astronomical price, right?

However, after carefully searching for the information, Joo Joowon finally understood the reason.

The Player Qualification Token that he considered unimportant was only unimportant when a game world had just opened.

Because the number of Player Qualification Tokens in a world was actually fixed!