Event Afterparty (2)

The moment a victory screenshot dropped out of nowhere the second the match started, users piled on with a chorus of "no idea what this is but it's definitely a bug" and spammed reports to every moderator with a badge.

That didn't last long, though. Soon enough, the original poster dropped a clarification and laid out the truth.

Users who'd been turned into forest-dwelling conspiracy theorists overnight launched a counteroffensive, insisting something this absurd couldn't possibly be real. And that was only the start — a whole parade of equally snort-worthy victory screenshots followed in short order.

Maybe it was because the matchmaking was completely random. One minute you got screenshots of clanmates duking it out with each other. The next, someone claimed they'd rammed a friendly ship — and the entire comment section fixated on the unfertilized-egg Argonian maid tucked in the corner of the screenshot. And then, to top it all off, a post from someone who'd been thoroughly manhandled by a beast-faction ship, radiating the kind of deep post-nut clarity that made you want to look away.

People were dumping half-deranged posts left and right, force-feeding everyone else's brains with pure garbage. It was almost enough to make the fact that the event was over hit me whether I wanted it to or not — and the feeling was strangely bittersweet.

So after skimming about that far, with more and more operational work piling up, I figured it was time to close the gallery window and get back to my actual job.

But right then—

That completely random post snagged my attention out of nowhere.

What the hell is that.

Curiosity got the better of me. I clicked through to check the contents.

Event Afterparty. (2)

And what I found, to my genuine surprise, was a post about the tenth match — the one where my All-Star team had gone head-to-head.

Haha. You have got to be kidding me.

Someone who'd been on that same team at the time had probably uploaded the screenshot. And with seven of the current rankers — everyone except me and two others — stacked on the enemy side, the gallery's entire discourse took a hard pivot toward the so-called "Ranker All-Stars" (they weren't).

I'd figured the buzz was mostly about the sheer concentrated dogpile. But the actual conversation drifted somewhere else entirely.

Because, of all things, someone who was almost certainly on my team had gone and uploaded combat footage from their own scout craft.

For a second I thought we were about to get another full uncensored dump of someone else's tactics and fighting style — just like that 1-vs-5 match someone had posted before. But thankfully, this person was apparently top 0.1% material. They didn't just dump the raw footage uncut the way the last guy had.

Instead, they'd put in some actual editing work, and the result was…