You were supposed to have a fake marriage with the diva, so how did you become her father?

The area outside of China is just as lively.

Players in Tokyo started discussing in the territory channel why the mob spawn rate in my area is lower than next door. The discussion eventually revealed that the activity level of users in that area was not high enough, so some people started urging their neighbors to go out and walk around more in the channel.

In Osaka, a player shouted in the chat channel, "Anyone who hasn't turned on location services yet, hurry up and do it! Kobe is going to overtake us in resources!" Someone immediately replied, "Already on their way."

Players in Los Angeles formed a night running team in their territory. Every night at 8 p.m., they would set off from a designated location and run a lap along a fixed route, with the goal of ensuring that the territory's resources were not surpassed by those in the neighboring area.

They posted a route map in the territory channel, marking the distribution of all known creature spawn points along the way. Different colored lines marked the locations where different creatures would appear.

The picture was repeatedly saved and shared by local players, with one commenting, "I followed this picture around and caught five species I'd never seen before."

After the territory system went online in Germany, someone created a data statistics tool that quantified the resource accumulation rate, species distribution, and user activity times of each territory into tables and updated them in real time.

The tool spread quickly among European players because they discovered they could see the activity in neighboring territories without logging into the game, and then decided whether to go out and explore more to maintain their local ranking.

What truly made the goal of "covering all age groups" a reality was the unexpected player groups that emerged after the territory system was launched.

In the fourth week's operations report, Lu Ran saw a note from the operations department saying that the backend data showed that many users only had activity records during fixed time periods each day—from 7 to 8 in the morning and from 5 to 6 in the evening. They frequently requested location but did not stay for long each time, and most of the time they moved along a fixed route.

The operations team found it strange and checked the activity patterns of these accounts. They discovered that they followed a roughly shaped route, with a path width between several hundred meters and one kilometer, moving at a moderate speed, and stopping at roughly the same location each time.

"Probably walking their dog," the operations staff wrote in the notes. "Twice a day, morning and evening, on the same route, stopping near the trash cans and next to the park benches." Lu Ran couldn't help but chuckle when he saw that note.

Then he began to notice some younger accounts appearing in the background.

The accounts were active around 3 or 4 pm and during the day on weekends. Their location points were not widely distributed, but their movement patterns were chaotic, moving back and forth within a small area.

After tracking several tracks, the operations team concluded that "it's probably elementary school students playing in the neighborhood after school."

Those accounts didn't capture many items, but their contribution frequency to territory resources was very stable, with a fixed amount of resources coming in every day.

Another group has even more unique data characteristics—their active periods are all concentrated between 9:00 and 11:00 AM, their movement speed is much slower than that of ordinary users, the distance between their location points is very short, and they often stay in one location for a long time.

The operations team added a note to the report: "This user group is likely older, primarily engaged in leisurely strolls, with capturing activities being a secondary activity."

Lu Ran paused when he reached that note, then closed the report.

Two weeks after the territory system went live, the game's global user age distribution chart changed significantly.

The proportion of users under the age of 18 is gradually increasing, and the proportion of users over the age of 35 has also shown some growth.

Someone posted on a forum, saying, "My grandma now takes her phone with her and turns on location every afternoon when she goes out for a walk. She says she wants to help our community accumulate resources." The post received hundreds of replies, with some saying, "My mom does too," "My maternal grandma does too," and "My wife is pregnant and can't walk much, but she still turns on location every day when she sits on the balcony, saying it counts towards her community activity level."

What truly propelled this game toward "universal participation" was the effort of regional distributors in resolving login issues.

In the early stages of the game's release, some regions did indeed experience issues with location services, such as policy restrictions or infrastructure problems, preventing players from logging in normally.

The situation varies from region to region. In some places, privacy regulations require additional confirmation for each location check. In other places, insufficient map data accuracy causes location deviations. In still other places, incomplete base station coverage causes users to frequently lose connection when outdoors.

The methods used by agents in Europe are more mature.

Before the game was released, they communicated with the local data protection authorities to confirm that the frequency of location permission requests and data processing specifications fully complied with local privacy regulations.

At the same time, they reached pre-installation agreements with local channels of several major mobile phone manufacturers, allowing the game to come with a location optimization plugin on some new mobile phones, thus solving the problem caused by unstable location signals.

At an industry conference in Luxembourg, three European distributors simultaneously compiled their respective solutions and then issued a detailed compliance guideline to distributors in other regions for reference.

The distributors in North America are more direct.

After discovering that some players in certain regions were unable to log in because their location service requests were being blocked by the carrier's network, they contacted the technical departments of several local telecom operators and optimized TUTU's location request protocol so that the carrier's network would no longer filter such requests.

The problem was solved in less than five days.

The response strategies in Southeast Asia are more flexible.

After discovering that there were indeed gaps in base station coverage in some rural areas, agents in the Philippines and Indonesia did not wait for operators to upgrade their equipment. Instead, they took the initiative to cooperate with local community centers and small supermarkets to set up "game supply stations" in those places. These stations were simply places with posters and power bank rental machines. When players arrived at the location, they would stay for a while due to charging needs, and their location requests would have a chance to be recorded.

As time went on, more and more players marked the locations of those supply stations, and the originally blank areas were gradually lit up.

What truly impressed Lu Ran was the situation in Australia. Australia is vast and sparsely populated, with large swathes of desert in the central region having almost no GPS signal coverage.

The Australian distributor was initially worried, since there were no base stations or WiFi in those areas, so players couldn't turn on location services even if they wanted to.

But they later changed their approach, collaborating with several national park and nature reserve management agencies to install signal boosters at park entrances and major viewpoints, as well as placing a number of physical signs with QR codes for the game's map and information on the distribution of local wildlife.

Visitors who scan the QR code will receive a notification saying "Locally-exclusive creatures may appear 300 meters ahead," and many people will actually follow the notification to go and take a look.

After that, there was a slight increase in visitor numbers to several national parks in central Australia, with park management saying, "This game has actually made our previously less popular trails more popular."

Thanks to the efforts of regional agents, the login difficulties in those regions that were initially difficult to access have been resolved one by one.

Every week, new areas on the backend map change from gray to color. In those newly lit areas, records of user location requests begin to appear. At first, there are only a few scattered dots, but later they become densely packed areas.

In some places, the activation speed was much faster than Lu Ran expected. For example, an agent in a small southeastern European country contacted the head of the country's telecommunications regulatory department directly through his personal connections and resolved the compliance issue of location services in an informal meeting, which took no more than two days.

At the end of the fourth week, Lu Ran opened the global heat map in the backend and took a look.

The location points around the "key area" on the map are still densely packed, and players are still repeatedly moving around that area.

Various daily routes, school paths, dog-walking tracks, senior citizen walking routes, and national park tourist trails—all the location records left by users from different age groups, regions, and cultural backgrounds are all integrated into the same backend system.

He looked at it for a few seconds, then closed the page, leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, and thought about something else for a while.

Footsteps echoed in the hallway outside the door, and someone shouted, "The territory battle matchmaking algorithm is working! Come and see!" Then the sound of a group of people rushing over drifted in through the crack in the door.

Lu Ran heard this but didn't stand up. He remained seated, flipping through the report again. He noticed a new line of red text next to the last note: "The proportion of users aged 35 and above has increased compared to last week, while the proportion of users under 18 has also increased. The trend of covering all age groups continues."

Lu Ran also noticed that some areas in certain cities were indeed shown as blank areas on the map.

This situation is rather contrary to common sense.

Generally, the spawn rate is higher in cities, where there are also more players, so they will eventually be spread throughout the entire region.

Lu Ran decided to observe for two more weeks. If the area was still blank, then there was definitely something fishy going on.

...