So the paywall prophecy came true and we all were fools to believe otherwise. But moving on with our day, lets talk about the completely unnecessary and evil 'word count=SS' formula.
Some backstory first, like all good educational presentations have.
As most of you already know, this vile concoction stems from the original Qidian website. There they incentivize authors to cram more words into a chapter, or even whole chapters full of pointless crap to get a higher word count. Then the value of the chapter is higher and the author gets more money. This means that to make more money, the authors go out of their way to write more than their imagination would allow, and add more words to make as much money as possible. How does it affect us, the readers? I hear you saying over the internet. This hits us in our deepest place! Our wallets! and hearts. Since we love these webnovels, we want them to be interesting and fun to read, but not all authors are talented enough to be long winded, so we get all of these boring and pointless filler chapters. Imagine this! a new chapter was released from your favorite author and you pay to read it, but then you read it and you realize you were duped! The whole chapter the author was describing the jade toes of some girl that is probably won't be mentioned again.
OK..
Now lets move back from that hellhole and back to our own developing little hellish dimension. They are trying to implement the same system again, but now their intentions are a bit more malicious. Now they are targeting translators and editors. We already getting an inferior story because the authors can't write what they want, now we will suffer from the translators and editors dancing to the same tune. You think paying money reading about jade toes was bad? Now you will read about green ornamental mineral-like feet fingers. But i already hear you saying, "There is no way its going to get as bad as it did there" But that's just a n.aive excuse! We are all humans and we all follow incentives, especially monetary ones.
Then lets talk about the malicious part of this whole fiasco. Oh you think the above was bad, then whats coming next is much worse! So sit tight and read on.
They have put a fixed price for the spirit stones, which will probably go on sale a few times a year like any good business would do, so it means that the only way they can maximize their profits, they need to change the amount of spirit stones we are given for free, the amount of spirit stones each chapter costs and the amount of chapters that are locked. Their solution for the first problem of free spirit stones is the casino favorite, RNG. RNG stands for Random Number Generator, if you are a gamer you are probably very familiar with this term. Whenever you Check-in you get a random number spirit stones, more often than not, you will get the minimum amount. The beauty of this system and why it is so successful, is because you attribute your bad luck to this magical system, while the people who made the system walk to the bank smiling. Their solution to the amount of premium chapters is pretty vile too. Nothing is stopping the translator to just keep releasing extra premium chapters, so as a Free User you will be farther and farther behind and the premium users will be milked ad infinitum. And lastly, the most sickening solution is the word count=SS formula. If you have read till now, you probably already know how devastating this system is to our wallets. Not only we don't know exactly how they calculate it, we are at the mercy of the translators and editors. They want to make more money like anyone is, so they will use this system to make full use of this. And since no one is checking the translators and their translations, maybe they will start adding new original lines and paragraphs to make even more buck. And i already hear you sa... OK this is long enough lets keep the ending short :D
So what do you guys think about this all? Do you trust Qidian after all the lies and shifty things they did, Do you trust the nameless translators who are just here to make some side money, so they don't even care about the quality of their translation. Do you really trust the translators and editors to manage your wallet, so many of these translators are not even real translators. So many frauds are being caught left and right for using a machine translator, like the recent ban of the translator of martial arts master. Would you trust that man who doesn't even know the language he is translating, not to abuse this system to make more money from you.
Just remember.. this is just the beginning.
tldr version> wake up, they will suck your wallet dry! they are manipulating the numbers and making you pay for an inferior translation!