The Gallery Goes Nuclear
On top of that, after seeing Icarus's gacha blowout proof post, a flood of certification posts from people who'd gained a completely unnecessary dose of courage(?) kept pouring in one after another.
Public opinion inside the gallery was sinking hard into a whirlpool of chaos so absolute that no words could properly describe it.
The event was still ongoing. (3)
And once those untimely proof posts laid bare the actual point totals the rankers were sitting on, the gallery catching fire was, in many ways, only natural.
Even so, most of the gallery's users came to a simple conclusion about the whole affair…
That the existing top-tier rankers had simply abandoned the rankings for this event.
[Compilation of Rank 2, 3, and 4 Point Proofs]
On top of these, Rank 8 certified too this time — that guy only did one gacha pull and still had 400k left, so yeah, he actually had fewer points than the Rank 2, 3, and 4 people in the screenshots who each dumped two gacha pulls.
Granted, the old Rank 1 and the other rankers haven't gone public… but at this rate, aren't the rest of them probably in the same boat?
Of course, not every user in the gallery was on board with that take.
[Callout Image Targeting the 5 Million Point Meme Post]
Okay no, think about it for a second — something's off here.
That post went up when the event had only been running for a little over a month.
No matter how efficient you were, there's a hard ceiling on how many points one user could even earn by then.
3 million, fine, whatever — but 5 million points?
That's just not happening.
Isn't this just a scheme to keep people from buying from the shop so they can screw everyone over?
Takes like that started spreading — that the claims about needing 3 million or 5 million points for the top rankings were all just lies. That they'd bait clueless newbies into grinding points like their lives depended on it, then quietly give up on a few ranking spots themselves and loot the shop dry to get ahead.
Conspiracy theories began running wild.
[Callout Screenshot Targeting the Point Callout]
Bullshit, yeah.
You wanna talk like that, drop your own proof first, you fuck.
I'm already dying over here because nothing's stacking up — you trying to get yourself killed?
[Image of a Ship Going Up in Flames]
They just mindlessly blew points in the shop without thinking, and now that they're looking at it like oh shit I have fucking nothing left — isn't this just the classic salt-bug mentality of wanting everyone else to be as broke as they are?
[Partial Screenshot of a Point Ranking Estimate Post]
Points are fabricated this, fabricated that lmaoooooo
You either half-assed the event or cleaned out the entire shop with zero thought for later, and now you're broke as hell with that long of a mouth on you lmaooooooo
And now it's just "anyway it's fake yeah" "having no points is normal yeah"
Ugh, for fuck's sake.
[Image of a Toad Swinging a Fist]
Counter-opinion rose up against them too, and on top of the sudden total chaos, the gallery's entire public discourse had been split clean down the middle.
And into the cracks of that division, weirdos whose only goal was to stir the pot started slipping in, turning an already chaotic gallery into an even more complete five-minute dumpster fire.
Users who couldn't keep up with the sudden shift just kept their mouths shut, hoping this deranged nuclear fission reaction would die down already.
But the person who'd actually set off that nuclear fission reaction in the gallery in the first place…
"Ah. I never upgraded the base."
…was, belatedly, checking on the state of his own base.
With every gallery alarm and notification shut off completely at this point.
"By the way, have we even done a base upgrade recently?"
"No, sir. At least since the event started… you can basically say we haven't done one at all."
Following a thought that had suddenly occurred to me, I started running a status check on the base, and—