23,981st Place
And after looking at that objective, I decided to pull up my status window again…
No — the fleet status window. Time to check exactly where I ranked.
The moment that status window popped up, a soft, fuzzy thought began to bloom in my mind.
Maybe I should just cleanly abandon the main quest.
How the hell was I supposed to climb from 23,981st all the way to 3rd? What kind of insane eeeeffort would that even take?
Sure, my accidental first PVP match had ended in an easy win, vaulting me clean past thousands of people who'd never fought a single match — and my ranking had rocketed up by several thousand places in a blink.
But jumps like that were common enough in gacha game rankings anyway.
The vast majority of users and accounts were living as literal bonsai — just sitting there, never touching PVP. The fact that only 4,553 people sat above me was the real surprise.
With that thought settled, I leaned back into the commander's chair and started turning the problem over in my head.
— Creeeak.
Alright. What options do I actually have for climbing the ranks right now?
And at the end of that line of thinking, there was only one real answer.
Mass-clearing pirates through the pirate event that every user in the game — myself included — was currently running.
The problem was whether the "points" you earned from that event actually moved the needle on ranking in any meaningful way.
Because the pirate assaults hit every single user at once, all together, as a shared event. Wiping out every pirate that came at you didn't produce some dramatic ranking swing — and I already knew that.
The logic was a little twisted, but boiled down simply: even if I slaughtered every pirate that showed up, that would only maintain my ranking.
For a real climb, I needed something more.
And the real problem was that this game's ranking formula was extremely, extremely, extremely stupid.
In the end, rankings boiled down to two things: how many enemies you killed in events, and how fast you killed them — plus how many PVP "wins" you racked up.
The issue? Barely a month ago, the company that had kidnapped and locked us all inside this game had already proven — without even realizing it — that they still ran the place like absolute garbage.
Pirates ran out, so they early-terminated Phase One of the event? Was that even a real sentence?
At least since then…
"Commander, more pirates are attacking!"
"…Perfect timing. Throw the newly built cruiser into the mix and get some leveling done."
"Yes, Commander!"
As Jessica's report made clear, the whole "not enough pirates" mid-event shutdown nonsense had stopped. The so-called unreliable nonsense had cleaned itself up somewhat.
But suspicion, once rooted, doesn't vanish that easily.
And given the event's structure, pure kill count alone couldn't separate the rankings cleanly. As I'd already said — within a fixed number of spawns, it came down to how fast you cleared them. Without extreme efficiency and a healthy dose of luck from the very start, cracking the top ranks was nearly impossible.
As for PVP — the one path that actually looked like it could vault you up the ladder in big chunks…
This damn game had made PVP wins weigh so heavily on ranking that the pressure was crushing enough to make you understand exactly why.
And it wasn't just me. Other players felt the same way.
Even in the chat window I'd left open off to the side, a newbie had just started whining about how hard PVP was — and the veterans had immediately piled on with the classic "yeah, it's dangerous, don't" routine.
And then there was the guy I'd recently demolished — Melon, or whatever his name was. A game that could strip you of everything and shatter your mental state in one match.
The pressure was so extreme that most players would rather form alliances, grow safely, and aim for a late-game power spike than risk PVP at all. That was the standard meta.
Of course, if you got lucky on the gacha…
Among the SSS-grade supers, for instance, there were ones with pathetic personal combat power who instead accelerated tech research and development. Or ones who expanded fleet capacity based on level. Or totem-type characters who slapped a blanket buff across your entire fleet and supers.
If you pulled even one of those — at absurdly low odds — you could break the meta entirely. Creative plays. No alliance required.
Back when I'd been whale-spending hard in the past, a support-type super like that had carried me as high as 5th in the rankings, once upon a time.
But setting pure luck aside, the only real lever a player had for climbing ranks was PVP — a mode that, at best, was break-even, and at worst delivered nothing but Pyrrhic victories.
So of course the majority of players preferred to gather with trustworthy people early, form an alliance, and grow safely — even if it was slower — rather than risk losing their fleets and supers and watching their mental state implode.
And unfortunately, I was a returned player. Unlike everyone else, I had no real network, which left me stuck in forced lone-wolf mode.
On top of that, the way I'd octopus-armed every resource zone in the area made it obvious: there were almost no players nearby. Even if I wanted an alliance, there was nobody to recruit.
I'm so lonely…
Anyway. I sorted my thoughts, watching through the command center's observation window as the pirates assaulting the base got obliterated into scrap, and felt the realization settle in fresh and heavy:
Reaching "top 3" like the main quest demanded was, for me, basically impossible.
And I wasn't the only one thinking it.
[Quest screenshot attached]
There's a hard cap on how many pirates come at you, so is the whole point just to force players into PVP with each other or what?
They already designed PVP like complete garbage so nobody wants to fight, and now they're pushing PVP anyway? Absolute clown behavior.
Either do high-risk high-reward or low-risk low-return. Pick one.
These assholes made PVP pure high-risk low-return and then shove players into it thinking that'll make it active? Fucking ridiculous.
The very first post that greeted me the moment I opened the community gallery was already roasting the company's brain-dead policy. Of course it was.
I nodded along vigorously in pure solidarity as I read.
But the moment I dropped my eyes to the comments—
—a question so pure it could only have come from a genuine newbie landed in the thread.
And I could only stare in genuine awe as the veterans, rabid for newbie-dunking, seized the gallery in an instant and swarmed the clueless newbie like they were in heat, desperate to cram every scrap of information into him.
In this shitty game, you don't fight other players.
The moment a newbie dropped a question that naive, it raised the real question — even trapped in a world that was a PVP game, one that handed out rewards based on ranking — of why the old-timers shouted about newbie-dunking and sang the alliance-and-clan gospel day in and day out.