"I guess he really was able to do it..." Elizabeth mumbled, looking at the peaceful aftermath. Unable to comprehend what had happened.
The fight had happened at a pace that had been difficult—near impossible, actually—to follow.
It hadn't been a total blur. Players had been able to make out Eldrian and the dungeon boss's figures.
Their movements, however, had been difficult to follow. Their attacks had been a blur. Their magics but flashes of light. And at times, their attacks but visible shockwaves.
The end of the fight had been more of the same. Eldrian had the Death Knight pinned to the ground. He had been attacking it. And then, suddenly, everything went white.
No one knew what was the cause. But given the notification that the dungeon boss was defeated, it was clear that Eldrian had won. And now, he was embedded into the walls. The cracks in the wall told the tale of how Eldrian had nearly been blown right through it.
"How are we alive? How is he alive?" Zyviss asked. A question that no one had thought of. Now that it was voiced they all wondered the same thing.
After all, the entire inside of the fort was flattened. No, there was a crater. But the important part was that all the buildings were gone.
Whatever had happened—be it an implosion, or an explosion, or both... It should have had some effect on them. They were too close to have come out as unscathed as they were.
Sure, there had been some strong gusts caused by shockwaves. A few players had been thrown from the walls. But no one had died in the aftermath.
"We'll have to ask him," Therdul said, pointing towards Eldrian. He was truly embedded into the wall. In fact, he had almost flown right through the wall.
At some point, Eldrian had found the time to throw on his dark slime armor. As such, he wasn't improper. Though his armor had seen better days. The dark slime was struggling to keep everything together.
Truly, it was a resilient material. Considering the fact that even the Mithril parts had been reduced to scrap.
—
"Play that back. And slow it as much as our hardware here allows." The command came from Zaphreal. Joren had contacted him as soon as he heard of what had happened in the dungeon.
Ever since the last tournament, Joren, Constantin, and a few others had been working directly under his command. Qiren was normally the one to make contact. But for this, Joren was forced to be the one bearing the weight of explaining what had happened.
To the players, this was just something interesting, weird, exciting, and fun.
It was the first Epic Dungeon clear. Videos of it were being shared all over the forums and even over the internet.
Due to limitations placed into the recording services, players couldn't slow the videos enough to see what had happened at the end. Even if they made the fight go one frame at a time, they still couldn't see the ending.
It had simply happened at too fast a pace for the technology they had access to keep up.
The limitation on their frames was by design. A purposeful limitation placed on the recording and streaming function players had access to.
Its purpose wasn't to hide information, it just so happened that the limitation was doing so now. Normally this wouldn't happen. Players weren't supposed to be interacting with people or creatures too past their abilities.
If they did, then it was only right that they couldn't cheat their way through player functions.
If something happened too fast for their eyes to follow and their minds to comprehend, then that was just how it was supposed to be.
This wasn't the real reason behind the limitation. Though it was the excuse Miracle had ready.
They were already confident that plenty of questions on the FPS (frames per second) limits would come due to Eldrian's battle.
Generally, the streaming and recording functions were linked to the streamer's agility and intelligence points. At about a rate of 0.9 FPS per Agility point and 0.3 FPS per Intelligence point.
It wasn't quite as simple, since affinity also played a role. And temporary stat buffs causing frame spikes or debuffs causing frame drops would be awkward.
But it generally came down to 1 AGI to 0.9 FPS and 1 INT to 0.3 FPS.
A typical newby would thus be able to record at 120 FPS (more or less). A frame rate that should give a 'normal' person a pleasant viewing experience.
This design choice came from the fact that Miracle didn't have infinite resources to allocate to streaming and recording.
Specialized servers had been needed to handle the stress that these functions had placed on the original servers. Leaving it all to the AI or their monitoring servers (meant for researching magic, not storing random videos) hadn't been an option.
Naturally, they had limited these recording and streaming functions to lower the stress on their existing servers.
They had even added paywalls to pay for the creation of the new servers. An entire department had been created dedicated to just this part of ANW.
This entire process was still developing. So the FPS limitation was still hardcoded and hidden from the players.
Video quality, on the other hand, was one of the paywall options. HD was free for a few terabytes, but beyond that, you had to pay if you wanted to save more videos. 4k was especially expensive to unlock.
Streamers got a few benefits depending on their audience. After all, Miracle got cut from the tips streamers got from their videos.
But you couldn't just claim to be a streamer to save money. The process to become verified was rather time-consuming and demanding.
Naturally, players could download videos to their personal computers. But most didn't want the hassle. They could dedicate their own PCs as the place to store all their videos.
Only players who recorded for themselves and only themselves really used this option. Most preferred to keep everything online. Downloading only their favorite moments for safekeeping.
All this to say, most of the player recordings were limited to anywhere between 120 and around 600 FPS.
The latter videos were able of showing most of Eldrian's fight. Right up to where he tapped into Chronos.
In the few frames after that, they just saw Eldrian's flames dying out. Him attacking the Death Knight once or twice (with a clear indication that there was plenty of missing information). And then the aftermath.
This was a problem, sure. How Eldrian could attack several times in those fractions of a second was something players were going to want answers to. Especially since it differed greatly from the rest of the fight.
But Miracle was already ready for that.
Hidden Classes weren't a secret. They were known to exist, but be extremely difficult to find and claim.
That was not why Zapreahl had been called in. "Did he actually manage to control it?" Zaphreal mumbled. Watching the frames with a frown.
He had gotten some troubling information from Ziraili through Joren. He had hoped it wasn't true. Recently, she had been acting strange. Very strange.
And the news he got from his friends doing some digging was most concerning.
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