An Unexpected Point Windfall
What the hell? Seriously, what the hell?
Lately, so many absurd things had been piling up one after another that I'd started to pride myself on building up a decent tolerance for sheer bewilderment. Even so, having eighty-two thousand points drop into my lap out of nowhere was something I had absolutely no way of explaining.
My brain stared at the ranking board floating right in front of me and simply refused to process the information.
Fortunately, someone must have figured I'd be just as confused as they expected—because a new notification message came sailing straight into my field of view.
> Notice for Commander Icarus.
> We have confirmed that point distribution from your PVP battle against Commander Betelgeuse was not processed correctly.
> As this may have been an error, the operations team conducted a detailed review of the matter.
> We confirmed that the points in question were not awarded to you, but instead given to the Pirate Empress, Marianne.
> A portion of the excessively deducted points has been returned to Commander Betelgeuse, and the remaining points have been added in full to your score.
"Wow."
"Wow."
The moment that message arrived, Jessica and I both understood exactly how this had gone down.
"So you're saying… Marianne was sitting on Betelgeuse's— the Loki Clan leader's—points this whole time?"
"Marianne wouldn't have been able to use any kind of point-transfer function for you, Commander. She probably didn't even know the points existed in the first place."
"Wow."
Having an absurd amount of points ripped away in a single gulp from a completely unexpected direction left me with a complicated mix of feelings. Under normal circumstances, I might have cracked the top fifty percent—but the top ten? Not a chance. Hell, as I scrolled down the list, I discovered I hadn't even had enough points to crack the top hundred.
And yet, thanks to slurping up a cool eight hundred twenty thousand points from the Loki Clan leader in one go, I'd once again held onto third place through pure dumb luck. The realization left me with a thoroughly mixed bag of emotions.
Still, holding third place two events in a row was no small matter. So I offered a silent bow of gratitude toward Betelgeuse—the Loki Clan leader who had, for all practical purposes, been a giving tree, freely handing over ship experience, proficiency gains, and more than a third of her own points—then decided to check the gallery's reaction to the ranking reveal and opened the community window.
At that same moment, deep in the heart of the Loki Clan's base command center…
"Son of a BIIIIIIIIITCH!!!!"
"Commander, please calm down first…"
Despite having suffered every humiliation Marianne could throw at her, Betelgeuse had managed to return safely with the system's help—only to discover that instead of the comfortable second place she'd expected, she'd merely climbed to sixth. She thrashed wildly in her command seat, wailing without restraint.
And then, mid-sob, her stomach happened to slam into the armrest of her command chair.
"Hngh…♡"
"C-Commander?!"
A thoroughly strange sound escaped her, and her whole body shuddered. Watching the commander who had always been so composed—and so wickedly clever—reduced to such a pathetic state, the adjutant who had served her for a lifetime could feel nothing but pure bewilderment.
And while Betelgeuse was still crying out from Marianne's belly-slap "training"…
[Thumbs-up toad image]
Last ranking, top 10:
1. MetaologyLover
2. Raksha
3. Icarus
4. Arcadia
5. Tteokbokki
6. MurimDried
7. Betelgeuse
8. Arto
9. KillThatMosquitoKillIt
10. RemoveBosnia
This ranking:
1. Antares
2. Raksha
3. Icarus
4. Arcadia
5. Laura
6. Betelgeuse
7. Indefatigable
8. Sorimseung
9. Arto
10. Menaldo
Looking at it, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th held steady. 7th climbed to 6th. 8th dropped to 9th but still hung on inside the top 10.
Everyone else? Not even top 100, let alone top 10. Yeah.
Seeing the same 2nd, 3rd, and 4th who kicked this whole thing off still sitting pretty makes me highly, divinely suspicious they planned the whole operation and just held from the start. Yeah.
Okay, that is literally just a rank-kill.
The moment I opened the gallery, the top-rank scoreboard flex hit me square in the face, and I found myself wondering if this was that infamous rage-bait rank-kill thing people talked about. That thought, however, evaporated the instant I scrolled into a different post—an explanatory write-up on the ranking points.
[Screenshot of fleets trading fire]
There's a bunch of reasons, but boiled down as simply as possible:
Fleet loss rates during quest clears ran higher than expected.
Event shop prices were way more expensive than anyone imagined—buying even a single cruiser-class ship burns close to 200k points. But given the loss rates, you had no choice but to buy ships from the shop and use them.
What if you just hold and refuse to buy? The locations of the top-1000 rankers were more or less public knowledge, so some other ranker who full-bought the shop would roll up and wipe your base clean. Game over.
So everyone did the same thing, which meant fleet battles broke out constantly. And every time those shop-bought ships got blown up, you had to restock them with more points, pull gacha for superhuman pools, and so on—so point burn rates skyrocketed whether you liked it or not.
Take me, for example. Over the two months of the event I earned about 5.5 million points total. Over 4 million of that went straight into the shop.
Anyway, that's the deal. Yeah.
3-line summary:
1. Under this event's structure, anyone who just hoards points gets shredded by people who spent those points upgrading their fleets.
2. If you don't want to get wrecked, you have to burn a ton of points keeping your fleet strong.
3. Between fleet battles and everything else, the burn rate was so brutal that everyone's final scores are absurdly low. Yeah.