Experienced Newbie
Truth be told, I hadn't expected much.
I'd streamed before—not for long, but long enough. I knew full well that a flood of viewers from the very first broadcast was pure fantasy.
Well… come to think of it, I hadn't even changed accounts. So was this really my first stream? Technically the first one had been ages ago.
Let's just call myself an experienced newbie.
And as that experienced newbie, I understood that premature hope or overconfidence could poison everything. I'd promoted on the gallery, filmed with Taker, even lucked into a face-cam cameo on Nikang's stream—yet I'd still thrown away any expectation that people would actually show up.
No expectations, no disappointment. Internet streaming wasn't the kind of thing that rewarded hard work alone. Dedication, entertainment value, original content, charm—none of it mattered until your face and name got out there somehow. And those breakthroughs were almost always tiny, ridiculous things.
In short: luck. When luck arrived, turning it into opportunity took skill.
I couldn't deny that luck had an easier path to me than most… yet I was still anxious. When had life ever gone the way I planned? Living had already taught me, bone-deep, that nothing unfolded as easily as you imagined. Even turning into Camilla had happened without my consent. How could I not feel uneasy?
Easy come, easy go. That was why, even with a free ride through life suddenly dangling in front of me, I couldn't feel certain. Streaming was the same. The quiet dread that I might stream for a month, a year, and still have zero viewers had burrowed into my subconscious.
So I forced myself not to hope. Just a little more than before. Back when Abyss was a dead game and I streamed with no cam and no mic, if I could get even a few more people than that… yeah. Around fifty. That would be enough for chat to trickle in so I wouldn't be talking to myself. I'd set a first goal of fifty regulars and planned to stream steadily toward it.
Today, even if nobody came, I wouldn't be disappointed. Even if the chat stayed empty until the end, I wouldn't let it hurt. That was the vow I made.
And then this happened.
It took longer than I expected to figure out what was going on. While I was deep in a match, the empty chat window had suddenly filled to the brim, and I couldn't hide my panic. I hadn't even realized the mic was off. People begged in chat for me to turn it on; some even spammed donations one after another—and I still didn't notice anything wrong.
I'd muted the donation alerts too. No wonder I couldn't hear a thing. Calling myself an "experienced newbie" was embarrassing at this point. I was just a complete beginner streamer.
"Chat's flying too fast to read. Could you guys slow down a little… Ah, I didn't know the mic was off. Sorry about that."
My short streaming career was clearly useless in this situation. Back then I'd never faced chaos like this. An average of eighteen viewers simply couldn't generate this kind of firepower. I'd never experienced it, so I had no idea. A chat racing this fast, everyone talking over each other—it wasn't in any of my manuals.
Asking them to type slower was never going to work. The slower you typed, the more your message got buried. I knew the psychology, but I still felt a little resentful. Occasional requests for slow mode, follower-only, or sub-only chat popped up too… but those were features I didn't even know how to use. More surprising was that I had subscribers at all. My stream had subscribers?
I could learn the extras later. Right now I had to get a handle on the situation itself.
Dizzy. So dizzy. Did big-name streamers deal with this every single day? Looking at the chat, most of them seemed to be gallery refugees. Had gallery traffic always been this heavy? The gallery had grown so much since the old days that I couldn't gauge how many people might pour in. Maybe the actual viewer count was the same as before and just a handful were spamming chat. The nicknames were too varied for that, but it was still a possible theory.
No—why theorize when I could just check the number? How many people had shown up to create this much heat? Looking would settle it.
Let's see… current viewers…
Live — 183
"One hundred eighty-three…?"
My eyes went wide at the unexpected number. Not even double digits—triple? And it wasn't stopping. Viewers kept trickling in until the count broke two hundred. I looked away.
Yeah… maybe I shouldn't have checked. Seeing the number only made the pressure worse. I'd daydreamed about a suspiciously huge first-stream crowd before bed sometimes. Living it was pure panic. I couldn't keep my cool.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Keep it simple. Whether there were a hundred viewers, two hundred, or twenty thousand, my job was the same.
Just… play the game. That was what I did best, and what the viewers wanted too.
"Thanks for coming to watch, everyone. I'll queue up now. You all came because you wanted to see a master Camilla player, right?"
Just as I'd predicted, the reactions were fiery. Abyss really had become a god-tier game—people poured in just to watch someone play. Of course curiosity about the off-meta hero Camilla played a part too. Players who wanted to try her but were scared of the difficulty, people curious about her playstyle, people hunting for item trees and builds… all of them would watch me. There were almost no decent guides on VTube, and the only known Camilla master was me.
That was how off-meta heroes worked. No established theory, so you had to research every single detail from scratch. Naturally players drifted to easier heroes with ready-made builds. A vicious cycle.
Today I was going to break that cycle—through my stream. Time to present the results of all my research.
"Just playing games gets boring, so I'll take questions too. Anything you've always wondered about Camilla—playstyle, item trees, whatever. Ask and I'll answer right away."
I skimmed the racing chat and smiled in satisfaction. They say you can judge a stream's rise or fall just by chat speed. Successful streams have chat flying so fast your eyes can't keep up—viewers so hyped they can't help but type. A stream people want to chat in. A stream people want to talk with the streamer. That had been one of my goals from the start.
By that standard, the chat was moving at a very solid pace right now. Hard to believe this was a first stream.
Dance with me.
Even as I locked in Camilla and headed onto the battlefield, the chat never lost its original speed.
Yeah. My first stream was going pretty smoothly.