Chapter 21. U9, Ferocious

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 二十一 U9，凶猛

First published in the author's Zhihu column on December 11, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19635193

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

This is a ferocious story. To understand how uuu9.com grew, you first have to understand its boss, Liu Liang.

Liu Liang, now CEO of 360 Youjiu, was born in 1980 in Xi'an, Shaanxi. He has the look of a classic Guanzhong lengwa, the name Shaanxi gives to the tough young men of the Guanzhong plain: round face, upturned phoenix eyes, medium build, solid and unassuming. Does he not look like a terracotta warrior? The Guanzhong lengwa character is just as distinctive, stubborn and single-minded, cold on the outside and warm underneath, and Liu Liang seems to fit all of it. Yet something rather different shows through in those protruding ears and in the small eyes that seem to gather light.

Liu Liang loved games from an early age and had a quick mind with it. He could clear most of the arcade machines in the games hall on a single coin, so much so that when people saw him sit down, the queue behind him would quietly melt away. If an older local tough insisted on playing, though, he would give up the machine. That small detail tells you a great deal. He was a lengwa, yes, but also a shrewd operator with his feet on the ground who never took a beating he did not have to.

And so Liu Liang, who disliked studying but had a lively mind, ended up at a police academy. Let me make a bold assumption here. If Liu Liang had been born in Hong Kong, the plot would have carried him into undercover work, because judging by what came later, his quick wits, his nerve and his refusal to play by the book made him perfect for the job.

Unfortunately he was born in the relatively quiet city of Xi'an. School life presumably bored him, so he sank into PC games instead, and he was still at it during the half year he spent as a police officer after graduating. His family finally packed him off to the army by force. The army was being used as an internet addiction training camp in those days.

Naturally, someone as quick and adaptable as Liu Liang got on well there. He even won the chance to learn to drive a truck. In a large group army, being picked out to learn to drive was a very, very rare opportunity.

He had already picked up the habit of fighting ferociously for what he wanted, and he was still this young. It was only the beginning.

Liu Liang was discharged in 2000. Hearing that Shenzhen was paved with gold, he set off without another word. Only on reaching Guangzhou did he discover that there was no direct train to Shenzhen, and that getting into Shenzhen was not a matter of showing an identity card the way it is now. You needed a special zone permit, and there was a barbed wire cordon between Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

None of that counted for much against the ferocious Liu Liang. He took a bus to the boundary between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, avoided the sentry posts, walked along the high barbed wire wall until he reached a stretch with few people around, and climbed straight over. You may ask how he climbed it. I genuinely do not know. The sources do not say, and I will ask him properly next time I see him.

One look at the other side almost brought tears to his eyes. In front of him was wasteland stretching further than he could see. Luckily he had been a soldier and was in condition, and he ran ten kilometres or so before he saw another human being. Things really are better now. A high speed rail ticket takes you from Guangzhou to Shenzhen in a little over half an hour.

Once in Shenzhen he needed work to eat, and he found that the skills he had were awkwardly matched to anything on offer. Nothing suitable turned up, so in the end he handed out flyers for a computer school. Even at that he applied himself more than the rest. Other people handed out 800 flyers a day; he handed out more than 2,000. The pay was 900 yuan a month, which struck him as a lot of money, given that his army allowance had been 70 yuan a month.

An aside here. Why do so many people who move away from home work so solidly? Because however hard life in a big city is, it is still far better than the life they had before, so they are willing to do anything and learn anything.

After handing out flyers for a while, Liu Liang asked the principal for a promotion. The principal thought he worked harder than the others, so he promoted him to cleaner. Liu Liang had no idea what the job was and happily phoned home to say he had been promoted. He found out later that it meant sweeping the classrooms after school. Still better than running around outside, he decided, so every day he lay across the back row of the classroom and slept until the teacher finished. I am sure he was listening as well, though, because when one of the computer teachers suddenly resigned, Liu Liang went straight to the principal and said he could teach the class. He had the teacher's lessons off by heart, he said, and he recited a passage to prove it. The principal listened, decided it sounded about right, and agreed. That was his second promotion, and his pay went from a little over 900 yuan to more than 3,000 a month.

After six months teaching computing in Shenzhen, the ferocious Liu Liang went home to Xi'an, reckoning he was now capable of running a computer school of his own. That is the confidence of a young man who does not yet know what he should be afraid of. He went straight out and found a school, offering to train its teachers in computer skills free of charge. Then he noticed that the computer room often stood empty, and proposed running a computer class for students when no lessons were scheduled, at 50 yuan a head. The school thought it a fine idea and agreed. Liu Liang went to the teachers next and told them he would pay 5 yuan for every student they brought in. That summer, Liu Liang made 300,000 yuan at two schools.

In Xi'an in 2001, 300,000 yuan would buy a flat inside the city, in a decent location too. That was Liu Liang's first pot of gold. Over the next two years he turned his hand to a great many things: running a personal website, selling website traffic, selling user referrals. He caught essentially the whole madness and chaos of the second spring of the Chinese internet around 2003. Call it fate.

Liu Liang and Youjiu

By 2004, when Liu Liang formally went into private servers for Legend, he was already worth more than ten million yuan. However busy he was, games remained his great love. Warcraft III RPG was one of those loves, and he even used the Warcraft III world editor to make RPG maps himself. That is when he came across the U9 site.

The founding of U9

The founder of U9 was called Huilin, and user number 1 on the U9 forum still belongs to him. He is an extremely low profile person, so much so that many U9 veterans hardly know him. In 2004, U9 was still sitting on free hosting, but the number of visitors kept climbing, and every part of U9's development ran into a bottleneck.

Youjiu Warcraft RPG

Liu Liang's business was going smoothly at that point and he had money to spare, so he took U9 over and renamed it Youjiu Warcraft RPG. (The first character of Youjiu was written differently then. It only changed to the character the site uses today in 2008.) He set up a company specifically for it, Xuejun Technology, renamed Shaanxi Youjiu Digital Technology in 2009, hired a few people to look after it, and after that paid it little attention. Buying U9 was a personal hobby for him at the time, a way of supporting esports, and it did not cost much.

Liu Liang had no idea that U9, a stray piece played almost absent-mindedly on the board, would become the thing that saved him.

Huilin stepped back into the shadows after the sale. He did not leave. He stayed in the management QQ group and still replied to the occasional thread on the forum. To this day, when the U9 company draws up its monthly payroll, it still includes a part-time salary for Huilin. Several generations of managers have simply taken that as given.

Warcraft III RPG takes shape

By around 2005, the mainstream esports title was already the competitive mode of Warcraft III. YollinY had just been sponsored by IGE and become WE, and WE's Su Hao and Sky had become the very best players in Chinese esports. Competitive Warcraft III was hard to pick up and complex to control, though. Plenty of people watched it, but the circle playing it was not large. Warcraft III RPG maps were far more casual by comparison, and there was much more choice, so the player base kept expanding.

Many people will find this next part moving. The hottest RPG maps of 2005 included Huanxiang Qunxiazhuan, Shengcun Dakaoyan, Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang and Shouhu Yadianna. Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang was the first dedicated forum section U9 opened, and it was applied for by the map's creator, Wuhou Xianglong, who was probably better known by another name to the people who spent their days posting on the U9 forum: BYB82. At the end of 2005, U9 opened a Dota forum, which I will come to in detail later.

U9 had many supporters by this point but essentially no revenue. In fact, vertical esports websites spending more than they earn is still a general problem eight years on, as I write this.

U9's biggest source of income at the time was a Google ad banner, and it did not amount to much. Liu Liang had money, but he had no intention of raising U9 in comfort. He held to a wolf pack principle, covering only U9's basic costs, and he told the U9 team: if you want to run, you have to stand up on your own first.

In order to stand up, the U9 team really went all out in 2005.

The first move was to get U9 off free hosting. Liu Liang ran private servers himself and had plenty of servers and bandwidth to hand, so the problem was solved quickly. It looks like a small thing, barely worth the effort, but for players it was an enormous benefit. Most of them might never read games news, but they always needed to download the newest RPG maps. That was a hard requirement, and it was how a great many people first came to know U9.

Next, U9 adopted the slogan "China's original Warcraft RPG map site". From then on it stuck to a rule: promote original maps only, never IMBA maps, meaning unbalanced ones. That nurtured a great many original map makers and at the same time prolonged the life of the game. Red Alert before it had been ruined by a flood of IMBA maps.

Under this plan, in 2005 U9 brought in the authors of Tiandijie and Jiuzhong Bingqi from Haofang, added several of its own authors and absorbed the GA Goblin Research Institute, forming the Tongmo Workshop. The doors of U9's technical departments still carry the nameplates Tongmo Workshop and Goblin Research Institute today, and the door of the boss's office reads Valley of the Kings, which shows how deep a cultural mark the years of original Warcraft III RPG maps left on U9.

With the map library enriched and downloads sorted out, the next task was to grow the number of new users. How do you do that? The most effective way is to lower the barrier to entry.

So U9 built an idiot-proof map installer that could locate Warcraft III on a player's machine by itself and complete the installation, which brought in large numbers of newcomers who did not know much about computers. U9 then pushed map making tutorials and guides to the tools, and in particular released a patch that broke the map size limit. Blizzard had set a limit in the world editor so that a finished map could not exceed 3MB, and the patch broke through it, allowing people to put far more of their ideas into a map. It fired up the map makers, and 200MB maps soon appeared, which is very nearly a full game in itself.

These measures brought real returns quickly, taking U9 from a personal website to a vertical Warcraft III RPG portal with over ten million page views. Technical staff calculated that each player generated an average of 15 clicks, which shows how sticky the site was, and the returns from ad clicks began to rise as well.

The little society inside U9

Because the people playing RPG maps skewed young, the early U9 forum regularly produced incidents you did not know whether to laugh or cry at.

Chenghai 3C had two separate authors, Sishen and JJJ8. At first U9 helped promote the work of both, but Sishen then built a site of his own and declared it the only official one, which was not really the done thing, so U9 switched to supporting JJJ8 alone. History took a fork in the road there. That story is harmless enough. The next one is rather more alarming.

In the Zhen San years, U9 had two large organisations, one called Huanqing and one called Numbers. Both contained map makers as well as a lot of players, and the two were utterly irreconcilable, arguing all day long. In 2005 the forum ran a Zhen San mid lane mage solo tournament, and one player made a bet with another that he would cut off his little finger if he lost. He lost, and he really did cut it off, photographed it and posted the picture on the forum. U9 decided this had gone far too far and banned bets of that kind on the forum from then on.

It is worth saying that finger cutting bets, father and son bets in which the loser has to address the winner as his father, and habits like them still weigh heavily on esports culture today. It shows that the esports crowd as a whole is still too young and needs time to mature and grow up.

U9's Dota

The competition only really began at the end of 2005, once U9 opened its Dota section. U9 had inherited a large share of the MOBA market from its RPG days, but several up and coming sites and organisations were already circling.

The ferocious U9 did not give up, and the battle over Dota's Chinese localisation began.

In 2005, HTJ released his Chinese localisation of Dota on U9 first. It was downloaded like mad, and the fight over localisation was on.

Why fight over a translation? Because every time a new version came out, everyone wanted to play the newest Dota as soon as possible. Whichever site put out the Chinese patch first would see several times the downloads of its rivals, or more, and market share decided a great deal of commercial return. This really was a case of time is money, my friend.

U9's biggest competitor then was DCN, the Dota Chinese site, which had two localisation groups working at once. That put U9 under heavy pressure. Every time a new version landed, Liu Liang would call on everybody to work through the night. It was a pure race on speed. U9 got faster, but mistakes crept in too. On one occasion U9's localisation gave Shadow Fiend 100 more movement speed than it should have had, and plenty of people came to shout about it. So this was not a simple job.

DCN then made a mistake of principle. It put advertisements for other Dota-like games on the loading screen players saw when entering Dota. IceFrog was furious about it and stopped working with DCN, and that brought the competition to a close.

By 2006, making RPG maps at U9 could earn you money.

U9 introduced a system of signing map makers, much like the contract author systems on web fiction sites. A good map maker doing it part time could earn a few thousand yuan a month. That drew in a lot of talented people straight away, and a batch of very good maps appeared, such as Xian Zhi Xiadao and the Naruto maps.

At the same time, years of accumulated technical experience had given U9's map making team a thorough command of the Warcraft III world editor, and they broke through many of the earlier technical limits. Not only did they build a King of Fighters game with combo chains and a first person shooter inside the editor, someone even recreated an epic scale game like Xianjian Qixia Zhuan, The Legend of Sword and Fairy. There was no stopping that kind of creativity.

Players could keep learning map making techniques on the U9 forum and build a world of their own, and U9 would promote it to a lot of people as well. Imagine how it feels to have everyone enjoying a world you created.

Something else worth mentioning: many of the RPG map makers of that period are now lead designers at major games companies, which is a source of real pride at U9.

Between 2006 and 2007, U9 pressed its advantage and launched a series of products around Dota.

The first was the Dota hero simulator, the first of its kind. From 2006 to 2007 the simulator was the only thing at the top of the U9 site. It made things much easier for players looking information up and brought in a great deal of traffic. Launched alongside it were a replay analyser and the U9 Super League (USL), a competition with seeded teams and grassroots teams that ran every month and is still running today. Many of the Dota greats of the present day came out of it.

One thing deserves particular mention. U9 ran China's first official Dota league, the Youjiu League, and DC, now a well known caster and presenter, was one of the people managing the event. More people played Dota on Haofang at the time, but for various reasons U9 and Haofang could not agree on working together, so U9 turned instead to the VS platform, which did not have many users then. It was that relationship that gave the VS platform its chance to grow after 2006. In 2011, U9 and the 11 platform worked together again, and both sides gained a great deal from it. That is also mentioned in the earlier chapter of this history on the development of gaming platforms.

By this stage U9 had extended from original maps into every layer of esports: game operations, tournaments, packaging stars, media. If they had been able to buy the GodLike team in 2007, when GL was at its lowest ebb, the whole system would have been complete. Unfortunately, U9's own revenue still had no stable model behind it, so they were willing but unable, and GL slipped away. U9 felt that keenly, and the regret has not left them.

U9 grew bigger and bigger between 2006 and 2007, and yet Liu Liang was having a wretched time of it.

After leaving the private server world in 2005, Liu Liang tried a great many things. The one that cost him most was a product called QQ Ye Fengkuang, QQ Goes Crazy. Put simply, it kept users logged into QQ on their behalf so that their QQ level would rise, at 10 yuan a head. There was a real market for it, but before the paid version launched properly, Tencent noticed and changed the algorithm behind the levels. The product had already been rolled out by then, and Liu Liang ended up refunding more than ten million yuan to agents around the country, while the 200-odd servers left sitting idle had to be sold off cheaply. That threw away essentially everything he had earned before.

Liu Liang's ferocity meant that his life was never going to be a quiet one, though. This was simply another beginning.

U9's unexpected rise, and the flourishing of online game portals such as 17173, seemed to show Liu Liang a way forward. He drew up a plan to turn U9 into a general games portal. At that point, however, most RPG players were students at school. To put it bluntly, they played RPG maps because the game cost nothing, and the users of online games were a rather different group of people.

So from 2007 to 2008 Liu Liang worked hard and worried hard. He sold his car and sold his flat to keep the thing going. U9's traffic did grow large, but turning attention into money remained very difficult. Joint operation of browser games, Taobao shops and models of that kind had not yet taken shape, and Liu Liang searched in the dark.

The truth is that the whole Chinese esports environment was as lost as Liu Liang. Everyone held an enormous amount of attention and had no idea how to turn it into money, and without money even survival was a problem, let alone the development of esports. Dreams and reality have to find a balance somewhere.

In 2009, Liu Liang found an opportunity to work with Xunlei. U9 supplied Xunlei with games news content and Xunlei sent user traffic to U9. That complementary partnership benefited both sides. The traffic Xunlei sent eventually exceeded the traffic from the RPG side, and the bundled advertising sales model raised the site's revenue considerably. U9 set up the same kind of partnership with Ku6 and Renren, which took U9's annual revenue from two or three million yuan a year to twenty or thirty million.

In 2010, U9 redesigned the whole site and formally set out to become a games portal.

U9 arrived very late as a games portal, and, absurdly enough, its greatest advantage over its various competitors turned out to be that its face was new and it had no manufacturer standing behind it. By then 178 had Perfect World behind it and 17173 had Sohu. U9 had nothing, which meant it could work with anyone. So U9 was Shanda's official partner media outlet on the Aion project, and the installation discs Shanda sent out all carried U9's web address. The U9 Super Assistant, built specifically for the North American servers of League of Legends, had such a high market share that Tencent helped promote it during the Chinese server's test period.

The thing that excited Liu Liang most in 2010 was the launch of StarCraft II.

Liu Liang was a devoted fan of Blizzard's games, and he had watched with his own eyes everything the Warcraft III world editor made possible, which was the reason U9 had grown as far as it had. He believed the map editor packaged with StarCraft II would take U9 to a new level, and the thought thrilled him. He not only mobilised the entire company to build a StarCraft II section, he hung an enormous banner in the office reading: what does Youjiu have left apart from StarCraft II?

Liu Liang was as ferocious as ever. If he was going to do something, he would give everything to it and not count the return. Today U9 has passion, it has glory, and it can make money. Looking back over the road it took, growing from an esports website into what it is now is a remarkable thing.

At the end of 2011, Youjiu merged with 360 Safe Box to form 360 Youjiu Beijing Technology. Liu Liang led 360 Youjiu's joint operation of Zhengtu 2, and Qianjun's monthly revenue soon passed 20 million yuan, breaking new ground for the joint operation of major client based PC games in China and bringing out 360's potential in games.

Youjiu is still a games portal as well, and how to integrate that with the resources it already has, in order to raise attention and turn it into money, has become the new problem for Liu Liang and the people at 360 Youjiu. Their direction this year is said to be esports. They plan to restart the tournament coverage team and the U9 Super League, and they have even launched a dedicated MOBA forum. I look forward to a bigger push and a bigger contribution from them to the esports industry.

Uuu9, ferocious.

(Note: some of the material in this piece draws on the Liu Liang feature in the Jingjie column of Chuangyebang magazine, for which I am grateful. August 19, 2013 was also the ninth birthday of 360 Youjiu, and I thank them for the enormous contribution they have made to Chinese esports.)