But Do You Know What’s Scary?
[Image of a frog thinking hard.jpg]
Up to this point, it wasn’t as if it had been particularly profitable to roast the veteran players.
Everyone seemed to be misunderstanding the situation, but this was reality. There was no retry button, and there sure as hell wasn’t a return-to-main-screen button.
If you died, that was it: [User has been withdrawn.] End of story. Yep.
But if you looked at why people were trying to wipe out the veterans now, wasn’t it basically just, "I’m struggling, but those guys are doing fine, and that pisses me off"? <-- Wasn’t that the whole thing?
Well, sure, maybe that was part of it. But with the one-year all-out assault less than three months away, the people who truly weren’t ready were probably already beyond the point of even hanging around the gallery.
Just look at the people whining right now that they can’t survive. Their script is always the same.
They’re eating nothing but combat rations, or the residential blocks are packed to the rafters, or a plague is spreading.
But do you know what that actually means?
If you’ve got food in the first place, housing blocks already prepared, and the administrative manpower to monitor plague patients, then you’re already in a pretty decent state.
Everyone knew that the reason the refugees weren’t rioting right now was because life here was so much better than it had been in the coastal cities.
So what’s the point?
[Image of an office worker staring straight into the camera.jpg]
You whiners were trying to fool us again, weren’t you?
-Holy shit?
-Did we get played by the whiners again?
-The guys who are really fucked don’t even have time to browse the gallery in the first place;;;
-No, seriously, are these whiners some kind of Illuminati? How the hell have they only been possessed for this long and already got enough firepower to burn the gallery down twice???
October 12, 2053.
A hot post appeared and splashed cold water over the gallery, which had been basking for a while in the thrill of watching the old-timers get publicly taken down.
This long post, which could be summed up as "This is all a scam by the whiners," was pretty convincing. In particular, it exposed the fact that the whiny posts and hot posts flooding the gallery all day weren’t just because there were a lot of people; the truth was more absurd than that. People were simply spending all day writing posts and leaving comments in the gallery.
"So there was a background like that?"
Hwi-hyeon thought it over carefully. How much time did an ordinary player actually have to freely mess around in the gallery?
First, breakfast, then a little lurking or a survival check-in post, lunch spent reading hot posts in full, and after 6 p.m., once work ended, gallery time again. In fact, it wasn’t that much in a day.
At best, maybe eight hours a day. If you squeezed out every scrap of break time, maybe ten.
But what if you just didn’t work? What if you trusted only the Quarantine City System’s automatic construction and spent all day in the control tower browsing the gallery? The whiners’ share of the gallery would balloon in no time.
[Image showing most hot posts being uploaded around the clock without any pattern.jpg]
After running it through AI, it turned out there were thousands of hot posts being uploaded even during the hours when people were obviously supposed to be working, y’know.
From 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., which is basically after work and before sleep, AI predicted that more than 56% of the day’s posts should be coming in — but in reality, it only reached 23%, y’know.
In other words, whether it was day or night, there were a ridiculous number of layabouts who did nothing but browse the gallery, y’know.
That’s fucking terrifying, y’know.
-So this is what they mean by a solid support base?
-Only 23% of posts during the busiest hours??? Does that even make sense? Are they just posting dozens of times a day and leaving hundreds of comments instead???
-AI? How do you use it?
↳(Author) I set the gallery window to refresh every 0.1 seconds, then laid a control tower optical sensor on top and crawled it, y’know.
↳↳ Damn, pro gamer;;;
"Holy moly..."
And once the analysis by the AI using actual big data made it into hot posts, the gallery started burning again.
*
"Graaah! Deploy the fire brigade and seal off the block!"
That said, only after today’s work was completely done.
Unlike the whiners, the decent old-timers and the other players basically had to carry out their duties as Command-Ministers, which meant they couldn’t spend all their time on the gallery.
"I need to browse the gallery... but I’m running out of steam..."
And that was precisely why the whiners had been able to take over the gallery.
Because the total amount of usable time was so limited, no matter what they did, their posting frequency couldn’t help but lose out to the whiners.
To give up serious play, though, would be to retreat into the same kind of existence as the whiners, so that had been off the table from the start.
"Ah... if only we had mods..."
That was the thing they regretted most.
They needed moderators with the authority to kick out people who didn’t even understand the game, but in the gallery of the world they’d been possessed into, such beings simply didn’t exist.
Still, now that nearly a year had passed since the possession, the players had a vague understanding of why there was no moderator system.
Even now, without mods, they’re being dragged around by people who don’t understand the game, so imagine if mods existed lol. The game-not-understanders would just take the mod seats and start firing off infinite ban beams, right?
The correct answer is just not to introduce systems that can be abused. Yep.
-Damn right, lol.
-You tell ’em! You can call me La.
-Damn, Anonymous, you genius. Kiss me right now.
-For real, the thing game-not-understanders are best at is doing mod shit like it’s breathing.
Internet dictatorship. Privatizing a community. Mod abuse. Clique culture...
Words that anyone who’d heard the ghost stories of the internet at least once would know. Didn’t they sound familiar?
It couldn’t be confirmed now, but the gallery was a closed world with no human exchange with the outside. If certain classes made up more than half the population and no traitors emerged, then a permanent regime and dictatorship were entirely possible.
Originally, moderator positions in the gallery were passed along through appointment and retirement, so there was every chance this could turn into a league of their own, one that ignored the opinions of ordinary players and old-timers alike. It would be an appalling mess.
So as the post above said, the right answer was to scrap any system that could be abused in the first place.
And above all...
[Image of a frog wearing a sneaky grin.jpg]
Just remember the rush of [User has been withdrawn.] that happened about a month into the incident lol.
You idiots think automatic construction and automatic orders are some kind of miracle spring water, right? What do you think happens to the SimCity and troop status of fools who keep issuing only the stuff that’s needed right now and only the orders that have to be done right now, while relying on features nobody actually uses?
It’s going to be a total fucking mess, obviously. You don’t even need to look to know that lol. Anyone who actually tried it at the start would, after a few hours, start funneling specific facilities into each zone, factoring in the residents’ movement routes, and setting production queues in advance — but those dumbasses wouldn’t even do that, would they?
Why? Because the moment they did, they’d stop being game-not-understanders. Hell, they’d stop being game-illiterates too, and become nothing but pure incompetence lol.
The one-year all-out assault isn’t far off, guys lol. Better prepare yourselves, lol.
-This is right, lol. Use AI only as a support tool, lol.
-To think BTs would end up becoming guardians of nature lol.
-???: Farewell... I won’t be far away...
-Those guys probably don’t even know how to trade with the refined ones lol, fucking idiots lol.
That was right.
Quarantine City was full of veteran players holding every kind of key post, yes. But it was still, without question, a post-apocalyptic survival-management game.
For the incompetent Command-Ministers who did neither surviving nor managing, it was not a particularly kind game.
Depending on how the one-year all-out assault defense turns out, there’s also the chance your seat gets blown away lol.
Well, unless the walls get breached, the superwave communicator gets wrecked, and half the residents die, you won’t get an F-Rank. And if you do get F-Rank, that’s the bad ending where, with a cutscene, your successor rides in on a rocket, executes the player, and becomes Command-Minister lol.
If you’re weirdly feeling ridiculously good for reasons you can’t talk about, upvote lol. I’ll go first lol.
-Ah, right lol. Now that I think about it, it showed up at the very end of the launch trailer too, didn’t it?
-Trying to bait upvotes is annoying, you know?
-As long as it’s not meeeeeeee!!!!
-Seriously, would there even be idiots who get that F-Rank? Uh. I don’t really know about the bastards who haven’t been playing the game until now lol.
Natural selection.
There’s a saying that the strong survive, but the truth was that survival itself was what made you strong. And nature did not hand the privilege of survival to those who had done nothing at all.
Bloom Spores weren’t native to Earth either, but they were still, in the end, natural organisms. So the players were craning their necks, waiting for whatever would happen in the approaching one-year all-out assault.
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