New online policy

Tencent Company in China recently adjusts its upgrading rule for its QQ on line chatting costumers. Originally, the rule specifies three levels of grades. That is a star, a moon and a sun. Each costumer must stay on line, including invisible status for 100 hours in order to get a star and to upgrade to a moon, they need to spend 140 hours on line, and for a sun they need about 1500 hours. Those who get the sun could be treated as membership of QQ and could receive lots of online benefits. However, last month, Tencent Company modified its upgrading measurement, instead of using hours to calculate people cumulative on line time, they changed to day measurement. That is, no matter how long you stay on line in a day, even one minute, your upgrade hours will be taken into account. I suspect the reason for this change is because Tencent Company notices that most QQ fans stay on line night and day only for gaining a higher grade. Therefore this situation causes a huge waste of electric energy. Let’s have a simple calculation. Normally, it takes three hours for an ordinary computer to consume one degree of electricity. It is reported that Tencent QQ costumers at the moment already excesses 0.4 billion, and the active user also excesses 0.15 billion. Earning a sun would waste 500 degree of electricity. So, even if only 1% of the costumers stay on line, they would still cause a huge loss. Therefore, by changing the measurement, Tencent Company could change the situation that people stay on for nothing but just to gain grade, and they would save lots of human resources as well.