Hand Over Proper Compensation, You Bastards (3)
In the beginning, the indiscriminate mass deletions had produced a fair amount of friendly fire, and somewhere deep down, users had been quietly filling up with resentment toward Icarus's methods.
But once the area-of-effect purge actually delivered a return to normalcy, the gallery became so blissfully clean that users started heaping praise on the judgment of the mods — Icarus included.
And of course, the same thing was playing out in chat.
Thanks to all of that, Icarus himself was, without even trying, steadily climbing the ranks as a beloved community figure.
Of course, whether that was happening or not, the man in question had no idea — and even if he had, he currently had zero bandwidth to care about it.
At the same time.
My fellow solo rankers and I, who had been diligently reducing the gallery to scorched earth, found ourselves…
"…"
Unable to watch us carry on any longer, the operations staff had collectively kidnapped us from our bases into yet another bizarre space.
But no matter how you sliced it, saying something like that to people who had spent the last few days living as unpaid eraser laborers — how exactly did they expect us to react?
"Have you seen the absolute shit we've been looking at these past few days? Have you?!"
"I had to watch a grandpa doing it with another grandpa…"
"…"
"Watching some guy slam into a shit-leaking asshole and shake it around five times in a row made my brain feel like it was collapsing."
Hearing the rage-soaked howls of the solo rankers — myself included — the shiny-headed operations staffer agreed with us and pressed on.
"Compensation?"
"What kind of compensation are we talking about?"
"However?"
"Oh."
"Ooooh."
"Oh."
Roughly summarized, it amounted to: you clanless loners get extra compensation, so take it and calm down — but the important part was that this unpaid labor of ours was finally getting real compensation attached to it.
The solo rankers, myself included, looked thoroughly interested in what the operator had to say.
Of course, thanks to the ops team's charming habit of never actually telling you the whole story, we never did get to hear what the compensation actually was.
The next day.
What followed wasn't particularly exciting or surprising.
Since we had, in fact, gone on a rampage in the gallery, the ops team — having assessed the situation — slapped every mod who had been running the mass-delete campaign, myself included, with a seven-day gallery ban. However…
As everyone already knew, our side had already gotten everything we wanted.
And as another ranker put it, if we pushed for anything more from here, we'd just be poking at the ops team's patience.
So our side quietly pocketed the real compensation, used the gallery access restriction as an excuse to enjoy a vacation that wasn't quite a vacation, and the ops team got to post announcements about suppressing the mods' meltdown — a golden opportunity to scrub away the "incompetence" that had been piling up with the player base for so long.
Somehow, the two sides had struck a reasonable deal, and a so-called win-win relationship took shape.
Of course, as a result of that, the vast majority of users we'd banned were released under the ops team's "pardon order."
And thanks to that…
Thanks to that, the people who'd been banned and then pardoned started popping back up all over the gallery like a resistance movement, enthusiastically cussing out me and the other rankers who'd caused this whole mess. However…