Soon, Zheng Chunhua and Zhou Wanlin separately recounted the entire course of the game from the Actor side and the Audience side.
It was obvious that neither of them was very practiced at this, and there were inevitably omissions and mistakes in the middle, but with reminders from Huang Shengjie and Qin Cheng, they still managed to complete it quite well.
After that, Qin Cheng gave a brief supplement.
The players who hadn’t participated in the game were a bit surprised. They had also seen the basic rules of the game in the lobby and had some guesses about the possible final plot, but most of them guessed wrong.
Of course, that was normal, since they couldn’t see the specific performances of the Actors.
But aside from that, there was one more thing that concerned them: in this game, the situation of Community 2 and Community 10 was much worse than imagined. Under such circumstances, to still win smoothly, Qin Cheng’s first time leading a team really did showcase very solid strength.
After thinking seriously for a moment, Ye Lin began analyzing the content of the game.
As one of the game cores of the Community, she hadn’t participated in this round, so she was the most suitable person now to act as an observer and lead the discussion.
"From a God’s-eye view, the six Actors in this game actually had three different initial identities.
"First are the two ’Special Players,’ the ’Mother’ from Community 5 and the ’Mediator’ from Community 12.
"They count as the strongest identities, because their Setting Books explicitly provide special information from the start. If they’re smart enough, they could even directly guess the truth right at the beginning.
"Next are the ’Lovers’ from Community 11 and the ’Supervisor’ from Community 17. They hold information about ’Gong Zheng after the college entrance exam (the older brother),’ and in the first act they perform in the back half of the sequence.
"This means that although those Communities can’t guess the truth immediately, they can better judge the authenticity of the information.
"The information about ’Gong Zheng after the college entrance exam (the older brother)’ appears clearly and accurately in their Setting Books. And their Setting Books also contain a lot of additional derivative information.
"As for ’Gong Zheng before the college entrance exam (the younger brother),’ most of that is written in our Setting Book, but in the first act Uncle Zheng performed first, so there was almost no possibility of lying or faking it, which let them judge things more reliably.
"In this way, those two Communities actually had an easier time than we did in guessing the truth.
"The weakest identities were us and Community 10. We only held one-sided information about ’Gong Zheng before the college entrance exam (the younger brother),’ and it was very hard to determine the veracity of other Communities’ performances, making it the hardest for us to find the truth.
"Community 10 was in the same boat. The information they held was only linked to the older brother’s time in school, so they also struggled to judge the truth of the other Communities’ information and to connect it with the true answer.
"So the actual gameplay here is a special kind of ’unfair confrontation.’ How the advantage Communities use their edge to steer the course of the game is the core strategic issue.
"Disadvantaged Communities can only try their best to infer the true strategy of the advantage Communities and attempt to counter it.
"From how things actually played out, Community 17 made very good use of their advantage identity. They adopted a proactive strategy, and regardless of whether we successfully countered them or not, they’d end up with a pretty good result.
"They really are enemies we can’t take lightly."
At this point, Fu Yujun subconsciously glanced in Lin Sizhi’s direction.
Obviously, his expression carried some concern, and also some doubt.
Because in Fu Yujun’s mind, his impression of Community 17 was still stuck on those two games, the Lifting Game and Hermit Judgment.
He knew that Fu Chen had participated in the Lifting Game and came out safe; he knew that Cai Zhiyuan had participated in Hermit Judgment and died.
And in terms of overall strength, Community 17 had undoubtedly been the strongest Community in the entire first stage.
But the problem was that, after they entered the second stage, the original Community 17 seemed unable to maintain its core structure.
Lin Sizhi was no longer in Community 17 and had instead come to Community 2. The Community 17 they were seeing now was full of unfamiliar faces. Although still very strong, they seemed to have nothing to do with the original Community 17.
So why did the original Community 17 disappear?
Where did Fu Chen go?
These were questions that Fu Yujun was also extremely eager to have answered.
—Although the Lifting Game had a clearly stated special-permission mechanic, it never explicitly stated at the end who was sent away; and in Hermit Judgment, Cai Zhiyuan had never clearly said that he was the Imitator from the Lifting Game who sent Fu Chen back to reality.
So even though Fu Yujun vaguely had some guesses, he had no way to confirm them.
He obviously wanted to verify these things with Lin Sizhi right away, but it wasn’t appropriate to ask directly in public, so he could only swallow those questions for now.
Looking to Qin Cheng, Ye Lin continued, "Even from a hindsight perspective, your performance in this game can be called flawless.
"As expected of an Imitator who once earned an S rating in a role-playing game."
Hearing this, Fu Yujun couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows again.
He hadn’t known before that Qin Cheng was an openly acknowledged Imitator in their Community.
Qin Cheng corrected her: "Strictly speaking, the two Special Player Communities weren’t actually the strongest advantage identities.
"They were only a normal advantage identity.
"Although judging from the contents of their Setting Books they could access the most information, the game’s mechanics hard-capped their ceiling.
"Because for the Communities with Special Players to make it into the top two, the conditions are actually extremely harsh.
"It’s only relatively easy to achieve in low-rank ’fishpond’ lobbies when you’re stomping weak opponents; once the matched opponents are strong, that condition is almost impossible to satisfy.
"And that’s exactly what the final results show.
"Community 5 was weaker in overall strength and their game strategy was flawed, so them coming in last makes perfect sense. But Community 12 didn’t really make any fatal mistakes. It’s obvious that Chen Guangming had made quite a thorough plan during the initial prep stage.
"Yet in the end they still only got fifth place, second from the bottom.
"That’s the problem with the game mechanics."
Everyone nodded. This wasn’t hard to understand.
The rules of this game weren’t actually friendly to the Special Players, because they had to ensure that none of the four ordinary Communities discovered the truth in order to get the extra reward.
As long as even one ordinary Community found the truth, their overall ranking would inevitably drop by one place.
And how many ordinary Communities ultimately discovered the truth largely wasn’t up to them but depended on the strength of the ordinary Communities themselves.
Even if the Special Players did everything they could to conceal and mislead, top-tier players could still piece together the answer from the tiniest clues. Completely covering up the truth was nearly impossible.
After all, performance itself also has scoring requirements—you can’t just mess around however you like.