The Gallery's Kill List Frenzy
Oh man, fuck, maybe I shouldn't have posted that
What if they actually come after me for real?
My heart's going thump-thump pit-a-pat so hard I'm about to seize up
If you want me to delete this right now and find the light, hit that upvote lmaooo
The moment the Mods started posting their "Kill List" certification threads, gallery users flooded in with praise posts of their own — a sight to behold, if you could call it that.
It had the distinct flavor of those comment-farming operations you used to see all the time in a past life, the kind run by coordinated factions spinning up sockpuppet armies.
Of course, it was only natural that in a gallery with this much traffic, a nonstop stream of brainless praise posts would rub some "regular" users the wrong way.
[Image 1: partially mosaicked screenshots of Mod-praise post nicknames and titles]
[Image 2: partially mosaicked screenshots of Mod-praise post nicknames and titles]
Aren't these just guys trying to name-drop their way into a clique so they can control gallery opinion,
or people latching onto the Mods for personal gain?
As those "regulars" sized up the situation and started posting scolding threads one after another, the brainless praise aimed at us lost its bait value almost instantly and sank.
The atmosphere of mandatory Mod-worship evaporated in a flash — but the problem was that the same people who couldn't stop at one round of brainrot praise had their counterparts on the opposition side, too.
And since the quality of that opposition was roughly the same caliber, even the silent majority of neutrals started calling the whole thing brainrot and declaring it dead on arrival.
Despite Raksha leading the charge with other Mods posting Kill List certifications thinly veiled as warning threads, the trolls who'd already gotten their engines running — along with a handful of aggro-seekers — launched into purposeless marathons of gore and NSFW image spam.
What started as event-induced seizures and a gore-NSFW marathon quickly threatened to turn the gallery into Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.
But given the structure of this particular event, users didn't have much they needed to do themselves. Player-Mods like me had already shifted into real-time surveillance mode, and even the actual admins — whose presence had been fading lately — jumped back into the fray.
The result: those few hundred to maybe a thousand aggro-posters were all suppressed in under ten minutes.
Of course, banning users and deleting their posts were two separate problems. For a while, the gallery's state of affairs was pure chaos — rankers reduced to erasers of shitposts, gore, and NSFW images, wailing as they worked, while the "eye-catching" NSFW collectors lurking among the filth kept snatching up saves, slowing down the Mods' deletion rush even further.
"Commander, if you hadn't kept delaying post deletions just so you could pick up the weird stuff in between, wouldn't this already be finished?"
"Jessica, Jessica. NSFW images are a matter of grave importance."
"...Excuse me?"
"And think about it — do you really believe I'm the only one collecting these?"
"...!"
Naturally, neither I nor anyone else in the gallery would ever know the real reason the deletion rush was running late.
At any rate, once we'd strung up the aggro-addicts nice and clean like that, the users who'd kept quiet while the trolls got culled brought the gallery back to normal operation.
And as that normalization progressed, talk of the event started creeping back in, little by little...
Not saying it's bad or anything
But wouldn't it be better to just slug it out with other players instead of dungeon crawling?
Let's be real — they designed regular PVP to be pure loss, so shouldn't an event at least let us do some PVP for once?
Outside of actual war, PVP in this game is straight-up insanity.
Faced with that whining post from a PVP enjoyer, I shook my head and moved on to other threads. Before long, a proper analysis post about the event showed up.
No complicated reason — it's about fairness and balance between users
If they ran events as PVP, the mega-clans and hardcore veterans would lock down the rankings and the game would be dead boring, yeah
Or what about players who got hit with some bullshit event right before a major one and had their forces gutted?
That's the deal
But if it's PVE?
You don't have to worry about any of that — just drop an AI dungeon scaled to each player's size and call it a day
Admins happy, users happy, win-win. Why the hell would they make a PVP event and give themselves a headache lmao
This shows the users hit by the recent Central District invasion,
plus the ones caught up in the clashes along what players call the Southern Zone — the Pirate-Earth border
As you can see, tens of thousands of users in those areas had their forces literally shredded,
and the problem is that the users who launched the preemptive invasions got shredded too
Even if it wasn't quite the 1:5 battle that Rank 3 certified last time, the top-ranked players all took gang-beatings and still tore the enemy fleets apart even as they went down themselves, yeah
On top of that, mega-clans like Humanity and Loki lost chunks of their main forces, so player power levels took a nosedive overnight
Like it or not, a ton of people were sitting one step from being completely unable to recover
And this is something I pulled with help from a contact — there's a tip that Humanity alone spent a minimum of ten million units of minerals just repairing the damage from this campaign, so you can imagine how everyone else is doing
So my take is that the admins deliberately set rankings by PVE score,
and that's why they're handing out personal instance dungeons to each individual user
Oh, so that's what it was.
I could only nod at an analysis sharp enough that I hadn't even considered it myself.
A Bright and Wholesome Tentacle Dungeon Exploration Log. (1)
Meanwhile, as Icarus was coming to these fresh realizations amid gallery bait, Mod duties, and unexpected truths...