Who Are These Two New Top-Ten Rankers?
[‘Ancient Empire's Legacy’ Event Ranking Table.jpg]
1st through 8th are all the usual suspects, but I've never seen 9th and 10th before.
Anyone know them?
First time seeing this guy.
Well, looking at when 3rd place fought the All-Stars, he was on the All-Star team, so he's got the skills — but does anyone actually know what kind of player he is?
And since that particular bit of bait turned out to be a write-up on the new ranker players, I figured I might as well do some intel-gathering on rankers I'd never seen before — so I settled in and calmly started reading through the info posts that kept rolling in about the two of them.
Of course, even in the middle of all that…
"Um, Commander?"
"What is it?"
"Pirates have shown up this time. They bolted all sorts of junk onto monster ships, turned them into slaves, and are dragging them along."
"Oh…"
Among the pirates that randomly wandered into the base, there were actually some who'd enslaved monster ships. So I beat the hell out of them — and got in a little reputation farming with the monster faction while I was at it.
New rankers were always welcome.
Of course, with Koenig I already knew the situation well enough that there wasn't much left to dig into.
[Image of a toad resting its chin on its hand]
But honestly — if you grab a guy trying to desert by the collar and throw him straight into a penal battalion, if that's not a Political Officer, then what is he?
A Comxissar?
Just the usual nonsense — them cracking weird jokes among themselves and ribbing him over the nickname.
Koenig as a ranker had already been talked to death among the community ages ago, so there was hardly any new material left to dig up even if they wanted to.
But Monalisa in 10th place was a different story. This was essentially his first real appearance, and through the users who'd actually run into him, all kinds of stories kept surfacing.
[Image of a toad winding up a punch]
You know, that guy from way back who was running all kinds of schemes with faction reputation. The one who bragged about surviving on his looks alone and got marked by 2nd place for it?
Somehow the guy's still alive.
[Distant verification shot showing Monalisa's fleet including battlecruisers], [Additional fleet image]
Took this ages ago.
Even back then he was already running battlecruisers and carriers?
At the time I didn't know any better, so I just thought "damn, that's sick" — but looking at it now, this guy gets more ship power than even 3rd place.
And the main thread running through all those stories was none other than this: Monalisa's ship acquisition rate was absurdly high.
The supply rate on every kind of capital ship and high-tier vessel was so fast that suspicion started exploding. Accusations of bug-exploiting play mixed in heavily — and it escalated all the way to people frothing that even the Anomalocaris-class Battle Carrier he'd dominated with during the event had to have been obtained through a bug.
The mods, myself included, genuinely couldn't tell whether it was real or not, so we just sat there watching, unable to do a thing either way.
And because of that, talk kept bubbling up about whether or not to report him to the admins… which meant the gallery bait stayed lit, burning in every direction imaginable — the whole thing reminded me of the viral marketing campaigns you used to see everywhere in Korea, back before I got possessed into this world.
But that only lasted so long.
[Ship trade log image — MurimShipwright selecting transfer of an Anomalocaris-class in exchange for resources and small ships.jpg]
Because I gave it to him.
After my first base got wrecked and I lost half my fleet, I figured I was done for — so I handed it off to the guy who happened to be nearby. Saw he was affiliated with the space elves, thought that worked out perfectly, took some resources off him and transferred it over.
So the pursuit on me stopped, and that guy got a massive ship out of it. Absolute win-win.